Archive for February 3rd, 2010

Yesterday Patrick Steward gave an interview to PBS in its new broadcast premiere.

Sir Patrick Stewart, widely known for his roles of Charles Xavier in the X-Men films and Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek says he loves complexity. So Twitter with its 140 characters long messages is too simplistic to use. But then in his interview to Frontline’s Digital Nation he suddenly starts to talk about iPhone and dramatically describes an obsessive man-love for it as “An extension of who I am”.

It really looks like Jean-Luc Picard by himself arrived from the future to tell us about modern technology and the new way to understand it. Let's watch:

Every Apple’s device has been embraced by pop culture sooner or later, and we have to admit the iPad is already one of the most popular devices.

Here is a Parry Gripp’s latest tune about the iPad, which represents an idea of how successful this device will likely be: we can argue about which kinds of nachos are ruling, but we can all agree nachos in general are awesome.

Here is an iPad papercraft for those, who want to have their own paper-based recreation of the last week’s event. Сlick on the plan and put it together by yourself. Enjoy!

A new photo of the iPhone 4G had been published by gadget blog Engadget just in a few hours before the iPad presentation, and because of the latter it has been lingering for nearly a week undetected.

Due to authorized sources the device on the photo is a prototype of the handset that will hit the market in about five months. As Engadget says, this fairly distorted shot is all that they have at the moment.

So it seems that iPhone appears without its iconic aluminum bezel. It looks like it is surrounded by a black plastic or maybe it's just rubberized somehow.  Also a whitish spot on the left of the earpiece grill points to a camera lens, but it may also be just a reflection from some other source.

As it was claimed by authorized sources from Apple, the new iPhone 4G will have a customized system-on-a-chip package (like an iPad has) and improved battery.

Enagdget reports that new facts about the 4th generation iPhone were discovered in iPad’s 3.2 SDK:

Buried way inside the platform simulator lies a set of folders dedicated to specific models of iPhone OS-ready devices, including the iPhone 3GS, second generation iPod touch, something called the "K48" (yep, the codename we were told was the internal name for the iPad), and... the "N89."

This "N89." is rumored to be the codename of the next iPhone. Previous versions of the iPhone were named the M68, N82 and N88.

They also have found a bit more than that:

Apple's just released firmware (3.1.3) also includes another new model, the "N80," which we're told will most likely be the next version of the iPod touch.

Rumors say that 4th generation iPod Touch is likely to ship this September, while the next iPhone is expected this June-July.

Along with a new firmware for iPhone and iPod Touch Apple released a new version of SDK - 3.1.3. It's a required update, otherwise Xcode will not recognize or work with your 3.1.3 device. You can download it at iPhone dev center.

As usual the iPhone SDK includes Xcode, the iPhone simulator, and other tools for developing applications for iPhone and iPod Touch. If you want to develop for the iPad, you'll need the SDK version 3.2 instead.

Apple has just released new firmware 3.1.3 (7E18) for iPhone 3GS, iPhone 3G, iPhone 2G, iPod touch, iPod touch 2G and iPod touch 3G.

The update includes:

• Improves accuracy of reported battery level on iPhone 3GS
• Resolves issue where third-party apps would not launch in some instances
• Fixes bug that may cause an app to crash when using the Japanese Kana keyboard
• Other security updates (more info)

So this is a minor update, which fixing only the accuracy of the 3GS battery meter and the stability of some third-party app launches. This update is avaliable via iTunes.

New firmware 3.1.3 also introduces a new version of the baseband, the 05.12.01. So if you need unlock do not update! DevTeam also warns us:

If you care about your jailbreak and unlock, don’t update your device - 3G and 3G(S) owners should pay particular attention to this warning.
PwnageTool and redsn0w are not yet compatible with 3.1.3

Experimenters show that the latest version of redsn0w 0.9.2 is able to jailbreak iPhone 2G, iPhone 3G and iPod touch 1G. Just point it at the 3.1.2 IPSW (download here) after doing update or restore to firmware 3.1.3. Sounds like DevTeam will release an updated version of redsn0w that will handle firmware 3.1.3 officially. They say iPod touch 2G with firmware 3.1.3 is also jailbreakable.

Users report that unlock software, blacksn0w and ultrasn0w, doesn;t work with the new baseband.