Archive for 2010

This week third-party warranty provider SquareTrade posted the results of the study of more than 50,000 smartphones, which include Apple's iPhone 3Gs and iPhone 4, Motorola's Cliq, Droid and Droid X, HTC's Nexus One, Droid Incredible and Evo, RIM's Blackberry Curve, Storm and Bold.

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MacStories’s source close with AT&T claims that new iOS 4.2 will be released on Friday at 10 a.m. Mac OS X 10.6.5 completed and waiting for launch.  iTunes 10.1 was ready 3 weeks ago - likely after the release of beta 2 to developers. Both updates should be released on Wednesday. iOS 4.2 will require iTunes 10.1 to be installed and  will bring AirPrint and AirPlay to the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. But Mac users need Mac OS X 10.6.5 to share a printer with an iOS device, while Windows users will access a printer through iTunes 10.1.

Yesterday, 9th November, the iPad was officially launched in Russia. Six models of the device are now available in three retail chains: M.Video, Bely Veter and re:Store. The iPad will be on sale only in five cities: Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Volgograd, Rostov-on-Don, and Kazan. There are only 3,000 to 4,000 iPads available in the country on launch. But by the end of the year Apple plans to ship forty to fifty thousand units to Russia. Prices range from 19,990 rubles (US$650) for the 16GB WiFi model to 32,990 rubles (US$1,075) for the 64GB WiFi+3G model. However, it seems that those Russians, who wanted to get the iPad in Russia, had already bought the one abroad or in the grey market, where price for the device reached 100,000 rubles, or US$3,256.

CNet published new Top5 video. They talk about Android vs iPhone, top 5 reasons why the first one is better. Let's watch:

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MobileTerminal is a terminal emulator application for the iPad and iPhone. The version of MobileTerminal that is available in Cydia doesn't work with iPhone iOS 4.x and iOS 5.x. However there are beta versions that do work, but aren't on Cydia because they are still in beta stages. This tutorial will show you step-by-step how to install MobileTerminal on iPhone with iOS 4.x and iOS 5.x (tutorial for iPad is here). If you have old version of MobileTerminal installed - uninstall it in Cydia (Search - MobileTerminal - Remove).

First of all you need to jailbreak your iPhone. After you successfully jailbreaked iPhone:

1. Run Cydia by tapping on Cydia icon



2. The Cydia will start:

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Three days after releasing Mac OS X 10.6.5 Build 10H571, Apple seeded Build 10H574 to developers. That just means that the company continues to work under Mac OS X 10.6.5 to prepare for a public release. The public release of Mac OS X 10.6.5 is expected to come nearly simultaneously with a release of iOS 4.2, because the 10.6.5 will enable AirPrint wireless printing compatibility between iOS devices and Macs. No details of the changes made in the latest build have yet been revealed.

Obviously, the iPad apps are more expensive than those for the iPhone/iPod touch. But you probably don’t know that their prices increased in the past six months. The average price for the iPad app increased from $4.34 in April 2010 to $4.97 in October 2010 (+14.5%). Prices for the iPhone apps increased only from $3.94 to $4.03 (+2.3%). Moreover, now developers prefer to create applications compatible only with the iPad. Although iPhone apps cost less than their iPad counterparts, the iPad only accounts for 13% of the total 300,000 apps available in the App Store, and just 7 percent of all apps are universal.

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Last week Ars Technica test found out that the MacBook Airs battery life was reduced by up to two hours when Flash was installed. But the Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch believes that it is impossible.  In his interview to Fast Company he claimed that reports of Adobe Flash causing reduced battery life are a “false argument.”

“When you're displaying content, any technology will use more power to display, versus not displaying content. If you used HTML5, for example, to display advertisements, that would use as much or more processing power than what Flash uses”, -  Lynch explained.

Moreover, he blamed Apple in inciting and condoning a negative campaign against Flash. Earlier this year, Jobs spoke out against Flash in an open letter, labeling it unfit for the modern era of low-power devices. And as a result, the MacBook Airs and Macs are shipped now without Flash pre-installed.

People close to Apple claims that iWork '11 productivity suite is finished and ready for launch but will be released alongside the Mac App Store in early 2011. Initially iWork '11 was planed to be launched alongside iLife '11 last month and its release was held back at the last moment for unknown reasons. Now Apple is planning to launch the new productivity suite alongside the forthcoming Mac App Store. The application will include Pages, Numbers and Keynote bundles, which may be available for purchase exclusively through the Mac App Store for $19.99 each, below Apple's current $79 price for the complete retail box suite.

The Mac App Store should debut on January 18th, 2011. Last week the company began accepting submissions from developers who would like to include their applications in the Mac App Store. Developers will take a 70 percent cut of sales, while Apple will retain 30 percent.

Some days ago Patently Apple published a new patent application from Apple under the name "Scrollable Menus and Toolbars." The document describes the use of a small selection window through which a variety of options could be scrolled and offers use of an entire toolbar with all options remaining visible at all times. The drawings above and below depict implementations on both Mac OS X and iOS. The application notes that toolbars and menus are for typical commands, such as opening a file or saving a document and etc.

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Today Toshiba started selling Blade X-gale Solid state drives for mass market, the same that are used in the new MacBook Airs. That was confirmed by MacRumors, which compared Toshiba's part numbers with the numbers of the components found in the latest Apple's notebooks.

Here are the short specs of the SSDs:

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Last week Cult of Mac reported that Microsoft wasn't the first company that was really interested in the Kinect technology.

The history actually begins with Israeli military engineers, who developed Kinect camera and infrared sensor. According to the report, after inventing the technology they hired PrimeSense CEO Inon Beracha so he could "shop it around Silicon Valley and find partners to commercialize it".

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After iOS 4 release in June, it was laggy and generally not a good experience for many iPhone 3G users. Nevertheless, the due to release iOS 4.2 is running pretty well on iPhone 3G. Here is a video of iPhone 3G running the iOS 4.2 GM version, which is usually identical to the final release. The video was shot by TIPB.com. There were not any significant lags, and the keyboard was responsive. But, as usual,  the real problems appeared after some usage time , when you bloat the system with all your email, calendar entries, and vast number of contacts.

With the arrival of iOS 4.2 on the iPad, Apple will give its users more control over the quality of images they share through email. The iPad will get the image quality setting feature. Now a new field will appear in the new message creation screen. This field should indicate the size of your email. If you tap it, you’ll be presented with a selection of sizes for your pictures, namely: “Small,” “Medium,” “Large” or “Actual Size.” The changes will be applied to all images in the same email. Unfortunately, it is impossible to change size of a separate image in the email.

Some new rumors about a possible release of final version of iOS 4.2 have appeared today. Apple recently provided developers with the golden master seed of iOS 4.2 and this means that the public release is imminent. According to Inside-Handy.de the launch may be this Tuesday, November 9. Apparently the German website made contact with some Deutsche Telekom representatives who informed them of the November 9th release date.

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