News tagged ‘screen’

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted Apple an original iPhone patent for editing lists by using touch gestures. Such technology gives an opportunity for inventions regarding use of the handset as a portable hard drive and a filing for the company's now defunct Bluetooth headset.

The original touchscreen patent, first filed for in June 2007, covers a method for displaying and managing lists on a portable multifunction device, and details a simple computer user interface controlled by finger gestures rather than a sequence of button presses and stylus touches. What the abstract describes is the basic list management system found on current iOS devices.

Included in the patent background is a look at the state of portable devices at the time, which Apple claimed "resorted to adding more pushbuttons, increasing the density of push buttons, overloading the functions of pushbuttons, or using complex menu systems to allow a user to access, store and manipulate data." A far cry from what the company eventually released in the original one-button iPhone.

The company explains that devices which rely on physical pushbuttons are inherently limited in their configurability, and that a conventional user may find it frustrating to operate such an inflexible interface.

Because such devices are designed to read the precise pinpoint contact of the stylus (when a user makes a selection on the touch screen with the stylus), making selections on the touch screen of the device without a stylus, for example, with a user's finger, can prove to be somewhat difficult.

All-in-one PCs have quietly become a booming market and Apple’s iMac now has a third of all sales. The all-in-one desktop market is expected to continue to grow and it could reach 23.3 million units by 2014.

All-in-one desktop computer sales grew 39 percent in 2010 to reach 14.5 million units, research firm DisplaySearch revealed to Bloomberg. Among those desktop sales, Apple accounted for 32.9 percent, making it the single largest all-in-one PC maker in the world. The iMac is Apple's all-in-one system and the company's strongest selling desktop, beating out the Mac mini and Mac Pro. In the company's previous quarter, portable Macs represented 74 percent of Mac sales, but desktop sales still hit a new record for Apple.

Apple with nearly 33 percent share of all-in-one desktops is  now leading the market, putting it ahead of the No. 2 company, Lenovo. Hewlett-Packard with 21.4 percent was in third place. Noteworthy, Hewlett-Packard plans to release a new pair of desktop PCs before next week's Consumer Electronics Show.

The HP Omni is an all-in-one desktop with a 27-inch screen meant for family use, and it will go on sale Jan. 8 starting at $1,200. It will be joined by a standard desktop geared at gamers, the Pavilion HPE h9 Phoenix, which starts at $1,150.

Citing an anonymous source who worked at Apple, USA Today revealed that 50-inch Apple television is said to be housed in the secure California studio of Jonathan Ive. The same source also said that Apple is looking to build an LCD television sized 42 inches or larger with built-in Wi-Fi functionality, because Apple is not interested in building an HDTV with a screen size of less than 42 inches.

Author Scott Martin notes that Apple's rumored TV set is going to receive "big buzz" at next week's Consumer Electronics Show, even though the Cupertino, Calif., company isn't attending the event.

The story also features a quote from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who said he expects Apple will make "an attempt" to build a TV. He believes the living room will "remain a center for family entertainment, and that touches on all areas of consumer products that Apple is already making."

The report offers little else that is new about Apple's anticipated television set. Some reports have indicated that Apple plans to use custom chips, like it does with the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, others suggested that Apple could include AirPlay and iCloud into its new product. Rumors also claim that Apple wants to be able to offer customers customized channel lineups with its anticipated television set to choose whichever channels or shows they want for a monthly subscription fee.

According to the Daily Mail report, Apple wants to bid for rigts to stream English Premier League (PM) games. English Premier League is the England’s top football league and one of the most popular football leagues worldwide and it is expected that bidding for the rights to stream its content will generate billions of dollars for the league and the teams. The league will consider bids for the next football season after the rights to stream games expire at the end of the current season.
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A Korean forum (via MacRumors) published on Friday an unverified photo of the much rumored iPad 3's high-resolution display, and reveals a subtle change from the iPad 2 that could suggest a higher resolution panel is being sourced for the upcoming tablet. An image shows a component that has three ribbon cable connectors instead of the two found on current iterations of the device.

Little to no information accompanied the photo. It is only believed that the image is a comparison shot of a current iPad 2 panel sitting above an alleged iPad 3 display.

As you can see there are 3 brown ribbon cables leading from the screen itself to the circuit board. The small brown cable to the far left is the power cable, while the other two wide cables are for display data. This configuration matches with the top display in the leaked photo (though the power cable is missing).

The claimed iPad 3 photo shows 3 wide ribbon cables that might be used for data. The iPad 3 is expected to carry a high resolution screen of 2048x1536 which is four times the number of pixels of the current iPad 2, so the need for additional data bandwidth would be understandable.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office published on Tuesday that Apple won a core multitouch patent that describes how touch events are recognized by a touchscreen device. The patent blog Patently Apple also noted that this patent was one of the "200+ Patents for new inventions" Jobs lauded when the iPhone first debuted in 2007.

The newly granted patent focuses on the oscillator signal and circuit of a touchscreen-equipped device, an integral invention directly related to how users interact with their multitouch products.

Apple states in the filing: "In general, multi-touch panels may be able to detect multiple touches (touch events or contact points) that occur at or about the same time, and identify and track their locations."

One way to record multiple touches is to generate an oscillating signal circuit that can power and clock inputs over a substrate as in a capacitive touchscreen display. But it is difficult to create a precise circuit-based oscillator. According to Apple's patent, the solution to capacitive touchscreen problem is to calibration logic circuitry which compares the signal oscillation against a reference signal and tunes the clock frequency accordingly. The invention provides for an accurate capacitive display that can not only sense multiple touches, but also detect hover or near touches which are also recognized as "touch events."

Recently Facebook introduced a new functionality for profiles called Timeline, which, as shown on the company’s promotional video above, places all you interactions, photos, status updates and more on a timeline starting from the opening of your Facebook account.

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You can quickly untether your tethered jailbreak with Corona package from Cydia. This works only is you have iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad 1, iPod Touch 3G or iPod Touch 4G with jailbroken iOS 5.0.1 firmware.

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9to5Mac has recently posted photo of the iPad 3 home buttons that was obtained from a Chinese source. Noteworthy, claimed iPad 3 parts have been circulating for some time already in China, but only now photos of the iPad 3’ home button have stated leaking out. No real surprises, though it should help kill already sketchy rumors that Apple might do away with a home button altogether.

The above image is a comparison of an iPad 2 home button and an iPad 3 home button. At the surface, not much as changed, but the prospects of some minor structural tweaks do hint at something greater. The iPad 3 home button, which has been handled in both black and white flavors, looks almost identical to the iPad 2 home button. However, the gray glyph representing the frame of a home screen application icon is slightly thicker.

Perhaps the most interesting part about the iPad 3 home button is that its internal structuring is smaller than the iPad 2′s connector. According to the rumors, Apple had to make home button size smaller to accommodate a more pixel-dense Retina Display.

Basing on this photo, we may suggest the following:

• The iPad 3 will likely to be launched in both black and white colors
• The buttons floating around right now-in large quantities-signal that the iPad 3 is either in production or close to the production stage
• The iPad 3 will have the home button in spite of the rumors claiming that the iOS devices could soon loose the home button

The recent rumors claim that Apple may launch a smaller 7.85" iPad sometime in 2012 to compete against the new 7" Kindle Fire tablet from Amazon. Though Apple has never tried to compete spec for spec against their competitors. For example, the iPhone has kept the same basic form factor across 5 different generations.

The supply chain has actually been very specific about the screen size of this rumored iPad. According to Chinese manufacturers, Apple is buying up 7.85" screens for this upcoming mini iPad. So, we asked our friends at CiccareseDesign to put together these mockups of what a 7.85" iPad would look like in comparison to the existing 9.7" iPad.

The 7.85" iPad is actually a lot smaller than the existing iPad. Icons are smaller than the 9.7" iPad, of course, but still bigger than the icons found on the iPhone. The on screen keyboard also seems quite usable at this size.

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Analyst Brian Blair with Wedge Partners said in a note to investors this week that though Apple is believed to have built prototypes for a 7-inch iPad, and rumors of such a device launching persist, he doesn't believe Apple will release a 7-inch tablet in 2012.

"Jobs was emphatic in his view that 7-inch tablets were dead on arrival," Blair wrote, "and we believe it would be unlikely to see the company test the waters in this category anytime soon."

Blair thinks it's more likely that after the launch of a third-generation iPad Apple will keep its current iPad 2 on the production to decrease its price and address demand at the mid-tier range.

"We believe iPad 2's price drop could drop to the $349 to $399 range with Apple offering a single 16GB model," he said.

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In mid-August Evernote acquired Skitch and released it as as a free program on the Mac App Store. Yesterday the company fulfilled its promise to launch a version of the program for iOS. Skitch for iPad is now available, allowing users to annotate, take notes, edit existing images and more on your Apple tablet.

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A couple of days ago Apple began replacing recalled first-generation iPod nanos with current-generation units. The users are beginning to report in that they are indeed receiving the current models.

Just received our replacement today - Fedex truck pulled up late in the evening. Inside was our replacement for our 1st gen ipod nano that was sent into Apple 1 month ago.

It's a 6th generation ipod nano, serial number shows that warranty has expired. Not sure if that means that it's a refurbished model or if it's a brand new model and they've deactivated the warranty. It's silver.

Initially Apple replaced the recalled first-generation units at risk of overheating with refurbished first-generation models. But the company seems to have run out of first-generation units soon and is now supplying users with current-generation units as replacements.

Apple’s oldest iPod was launched in September 2005. It utilized a click wheel for navigation and contained a 1.5-inch screen. Battery life was advertised at 14 hours of music playback and four hours of photo slideshows with music.

The Paradox iPod nano watch kit

Nick Bilton from The New York Times, who in October wrote that large parts of rumoured Apple’s television sets appeared in the company's supple chain, now reports that Apple may be researching and even prototyping new wearable devices.

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BGR reports that Samsung is preparing to launch its own high resolution tablet that will carry a 2560 x 1600 resolution screen that would beat the 2048x1536 display that the iPad 3 has been rumored to have.

Even though the tablet features a larger display than Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1, we’re told that the tablet is “barely larger” due to the fact the slate will have a thinner bezel with a whopping 2560 x 1600 resolution, 11.6-inch screen with a 16:10 aspect ratio.

Samsung introduced a similar 2560x1600 screen that uses the less conventional PenTile technology to achieve its high resolution back in May at SID Display Week 2011 International Symposium.

The PenTile display uses a series of local filter operations to convert the underlying image into display intensities, including convolution, thresholding, color curve adjustment, and postprocessing with locally-adaptive filters. In practice, this means the display blurs the red and blue channels by dispersing these color intensities to the nearest subpixel element of the right color, and then also implements subpixel positioning to increase the apparent resolution again. However, subpixel spacing is not constant across the display, making the real apparent resolution complicated to estimate.

Rumors that Apple has been working on the high resolution display have been circulating about a year. Apple's iPad 3 is expected to carry a resolution of 2048x1536 both vertical and horizontal ones. Rumors have suggested that there have been production constrains on creating these high resolution screens in quantities that are enough to satisfy Apple’s needs.