News tagged ‘design’

After the iPad announcement the pre-orders for the Joojoo went up, said Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan in an interview with SGEntrepreneurs. Though he did not reveal any actual numbers, Chandra did drop some interesting details. He hinted that his company will soon announce a partnership with a "major mobile phone player", which has a “significant” market share in Southeast Asia. This “player” will also probably take care of the Joojoo manufacturing cost. And yet there is no information about the shipment date for the Joojoo, which still stands 8-10 weeks.

The Joojoo is a Linux-based tablet PC designed for Web surfing by the TechCrunch resource. Some photos from the official site are listed below.

As it was announced on Wednesday presentation, the iPad has a 1 GHz A4 chip that was developed by Apple. And now there is one thing that interests a lot of people: when this chip will make it to the iPhone?

The iPhone 3GS has an 833 MHz Samsung chip, which is underlocked to 600 MHz to increase battery life. This is better than the iPhone 3G’s 620 MHz CPU (also underlocked to 412 MHz). But there is still plenty of room for improvement, and analysts expect the latter will come either from the A4 chip or its lower-powered variant, specially designed for the smaller battery and screen, to the iPhone.

People who have already handled iPad say the device is pretty much faster than any iPod Touch or iPhone released so far. So it seems pretty likely the A4 chip will trickle down to Apple’s smaller mobile devices.

Site gizmodo published the results of the photoshop contest, where they asked users to design some new concept interfaces for iPhone 4.0. The image above rated #1. Here are the others:

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IGF announced the finalists for their 2010 mobile games competition. Last year's winners were dominated by iPhone games. This year's finalists are:

Best Mobile Game Design

• MiniSquadron (iPhone)
• Glow Artisan (DSi)
• Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor (iPhone)

Achievement In Art

• Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (iPhone) – unreleased
• Guerrilla Bob (iPhone)
• Zombie Pizza (iPhone)

Technical Achievement

• Stair Dismount (iPhone)
• SCVNGR (iPhone)
• Tumbledrop (iPhone)

Audio Achievement

• Lilt Line (iPhone)
• MuBlip (iPhone) – unreleased
• Zombie Pizza (iPhone)

Best iPhone Game

• Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor (iPhone)
• Drop 7 (iPhone)
• Hook Champ (iPhone)

The finalists for IGF Mobile will compete for $5,000 in prizes. The results will be announced on February 8th and will be showcased at GDC 2010 in March.

As always before the release of a new device many designers and regular users make interesting concepts. Here is a new one for iPhone 4G:

The author also provided a probability percentage value for each functionality of seeing it actually implemented:

• Removable battery (30% probability)
• Flash LED (50%)
• Back (Case) touchscreen, like the surface of the Magic Mouse (75%)
• Front camera (70%)
• Contacts on the Home Screen, as shown by a recent patent (70%)
• 64GB flash memory (60%)
• Dual-core processor and more RAM (80%)
• OLED display (90%)

Mysterious designer with nickname Hdi has created a nice concept image of what the iPhone 4G would look like if Apple modeled it after the iMac. This concept mixes aluminum and glass just like an iMac.

Looks really great!

MacWorld has listed their 20 favorite apps of the year for the iPhone and iPod touch. With over 100,000 apps in the App Store, MacWorld focused on 20 categories and narrowed it down to the best performer in each category.

Here is the list:

Best Messaging App: BeeJive IM
Best Photo App: Best Camera
Best Notification App: Boxcar
Best News App: CNN Mobile
Best Book App: Eucalyptus
Best Social Networking App: Facebook 3
Best Casual Game: Flight Control
Best Search Tool: Google Mobile App
Best Reference App: iBird Explorer Plus
Best Reader: Instapaper Pro 2
Best Multimedia App: MLB.com At Bat 2009
Best Education App: Pocket Universe
Best E-Mail App: Postage
Best Designed Game: Ramp Champ
Best Sports Game: Real Soccer 2010
Best Shopping Tool: RedLaser
Best Platform Game: Rolando 2
Best Strategy Game: Strategery
Best Twitter Client: Tweetie 2

You can read a bit more about these apps MacWorld's site.

Magazine publishers seem to already be getting on board with the concept of a media tablet even based on just the possibility that Apple will enter the market in the near future. The latest concept design comes from Time Inc who developed this design prototype to show off their plans. They think that digital magazines will replicate the print version, including advertising, and will include add-ons like multimedia and links to the Web. The publisher imagines that it will port all its titles into the new format, which it says will be ready for primetime by the middle of next year or sooner.

The ultimate design is planned to run on "whatever tablet Apple or any[one] else has up their sleeves" according to All Things Digital:

Some time ago we have presented a concept of an alternative homescreen for the iPhone created by Geoff Teehan. The designer announced via his blog that this concept will be implemented in collaboration with Saurik, the creator of Cydia.

The new Sringboard will be characterized, following the old concept, browsable by a long list of applications that takes the place of icons, showing notifications, weather and stocks updates in real time. Here is the full screen:

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Several NASA scientists are working on a project called Cell-All - compact, low-cost, low-power, high-speed nanosensor-based chemical sensor for cell phones.

The device is about the size of a postage stamp and is designed to be plugged in to an iPhone to collect, process and transmit sensor data. The new device is able to detect and identify low concentrations of airborne ammonia, chlorine gas and methane. The device senses chemicals in the air using a "sample jet" and a multiple-channel silicon-based sensing chip, which consists of 16 nanosensors, and sends detection data to another phone or a computer via telephone communication network or Wi-Fi.

Update: Here are new cool photos:

via nasa

Apple VP of Industrial Design, Jonathan Ive discusses the philosophy behind everything from the iPhone to the iMac for the documentary "Objectified":

[via]

U.S. Patent & Trademark Office has published a new Apple patent on a removable module designed specifically to add new features to the iPod Touch.

The Apple device can read the circuit cards (ICCs), the chip cards, memory cards, and even the SIM card. The operation is not simple and is not quite clear. Maybe some day we will ba able to use SIM cards in iPod and SD in iPhone?

via ispazio

There was an Anti-iPhone advertising campaign from Verizon called "iDon't" and designed to publicize the new Motorola Droid listing all the shortcomings of the iPhone. Today a new video was published obviously in favor of the iPhone, called "iDon't Care".

Obviously it was not made by Apple, which usually responds with irony only to Microsoft. The author is Jon Anderson, a simple Apple fan as well as admirer of the iPhone.

He's the original video from Verizon:

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With internet tethering enabled you can use iPhone internet connection on you desktop or notebook. Here is a quick tutorial for experienced users. For everybody else - just wait for the new version of PwnageTool or some other utility.

Here it is:

A bsdiff patch to apply to CommCenter in 3.1.2 to re-enable tethering is available here for the 3GS and here for the 3G. It's just a 2-byte patch as shown below (and an appropriate readjusting of the mach-o's codesign hash):

USE THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK! Your carrier may end up charging you for unauthorized tethering access.

Update #1 It looks like a lot of people have been looking at CommCenter lately because IRC user CleanAir had a similar tethering patch. Meanwhile over in the 2G CommCenter, WhiteRat and geniusan have patched in native MMS support for that platform. Kudos to CleanAir, WhiteRat, and geniusan for digging into CommCenter and coming up with patches!

Update #2 A few tutorials have started to pop up. Eventually this will be made a part of the normal PwnageTool flow but for now this is best left for the adventurous users out there!

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Glyph, the founder of the Twisted project has accepted a job offer from Apple and posted some pictures of its impressive packaging.

When the real, physical offer letter and associated paperwork arrived, I was highly amused to see that it has the same graceful design, fit and finish that they devote to many of their products. So I thought it deserved the same sort of review that their other products might get.

The lack of anything but the logo on the outside of the envelope is understated. It simply says: "You know who we are. You know what this is."

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