News from category ‘Other’

According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple has added a “do-not-track” option in the latest developer build of OS X Lion to prevent advertisers and other web companies from tracking you online.

Apple Inc. has added a do-not-track privacy tool to a test version of its latest Web browser for keeping peoples’ online activities from being monitored by marketers. The tool is included within the latest test release of Lion, a new version of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system that’s currently available only to developers. The final version of the operating system is scheduled to be released to the public this summer. Mentions of the do-not-track feature in Apple’s Safari browser began to appear recently in online discussion forums and on Twitter.

This “do-not-track” option was originally offered by the FTC and was already built in Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4. The option may be enabled or disabled by a user at any time.

Bloomberg reports that Apple will finally deliver the long-awaited white iPhone 4 by the end of April. The publication mentions “three people familiar with the plans”, and claims the device will be available both on AT&T and Verizon in the United States.

The new version will be available from AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless by the end of April, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren't public. The release was stalled as Apple resolved manufacturing challenges, including paint that peeled under heat, one person said.

The exact reason why Apple delayed the initial June 2010 release date hasn’t been revealed by the company, but previous speculation suggested problems with the white paint caused the device to take bad photos due to light leaks. The new model obviously may help boost sales of the iPhone 4.

According to Reuters, Foxconn is considering investing up to $12 billion in manufacturing facilities to start producing monitors and displays for mobile devices, such as iPhone and iPad, in Brazil. At that moment, the Brazilian government is studying Foxconn's investment plan. Brazilian minister of Science and Technology Mercadante has been negotiating with Foxconn for more than three months to convince the company to invest $12 billion throughout the next 5 years. Не also reported that Foxconn is preparing to begin manufacturing the iPad in Brazil by the end of November. The project would involve the recruitment of 100,000 new employees (including 20,000 engineers) as Foxconn already has three factories in Brazil to assemble products for Sony, Dell, and HP.

Yesterday Apple previewed a new version of Final Cut Pro version X at the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas.  The upgrade will be available on the Mac App Store in June for $299. Apple promised that the new version of Final Cut Pro will be "as revolutionary as the first version of FCP."

Apple is promoting the new FCP X as a complete and total rebuild. As reported by Photography Bay, new features in Final Cut Pro X include:

Read the rest of this entry »

Research firm Avian Securities claims that Apple won’t start production of the iPhone 5 until September and that the next generation iPhone won't be released until the end of the year or even early next. Avian cites "key component suppliers" as the source of the information. They also revive the possibility of a cheaper or lower cost iPhone also in the works, but no new details.

Supporting out comments over the last month, conversations with yet another key component supplier indicates that production for iPhone-5 will begin in September. In addition, our conversations also indicate the existence of a lower-spec/lower-priced iPhone in Apple’s roadmap. However, while our contacts have seen the placeholder in the Apple roadmap, they do not yet have insight into specs or production timing. This leads us to believe that any launch is likely a very late 2011 or more likely a 2012 event.

CutYourSim, company that specialized in SIM cutters and adapters for the iPhone, offers a new service to provide permanent iPhone unlock. The company claims their method will carry on forever through any iOS or baseband update, so users don’t have to worry about updating to the latest version of iOS. Previously every iOS release and baseband update forced iPhone users to stay on an older iOS version until a new unlocking tool is released. CutYourSim also claims that it won’t influence warranty “because this is an official iPhone unlock.” The company seems to find way to add IMEI numbers of iPhones with permanent unlock to Apple’s database. So Apple will obviously find а way to block the service. It may involve accessing the IMEI database from a carrier’s online backend because the service doesn’t support the Verizon iPhone.  Moreover such “forever” unlock will cost you $169.

Apple has continued exploring the idea of smart bezel having filed a new patent related to use of a bezel as a secondary display built around a printed segmented electroluminescence technology (e-link technology). An electronic device could include a primary display (for example, LCD screen) and a secondary display (printed segmented electroluminescence display). The primary display could be used to convey visual content to a user, and the secondary display could be used to guide a user providing inputs to the device.

Apple intends to use the secondary display to introduce a set of new illuminated indicators that are able morph into various controls for work and play. Illuminated gaming and productivity controls could be built into the face-side of the bezel and/or selected back-side areas of iOS devices like the iPad.

Some FaceTime users have complained of strange glitch with Apple’s FaceTime platform. iPhone users report that they are seeing photos of themselves that they had never taken on FaceTime when they are trying to video call to another user.

"When one of us is calling the other via FaceTime, an old picture freezes on our screen, while the person receiving the call only sees a black screen," a person using the name "kar0786" wrote on Apple's discussion forums. "It's kind of creepy, because it brought up photos of both of us at work, where I have used FaceTime a few times but he never has."

Apple support advised these users to return factory settings but it didn’t work. One of the users continued experiencing the problem even when Apple had replaced the device with the new one.

CrunchGear reports that Apple may freeze sales of the iPad 2 through Best Buy.

A reader who works at Best Buy just told us that there's been a bit of a misunderstanding between the electronics retailer and Apple. Apparently, Best Buy was holding off on selling the iPad 2s it had in stock, telling customers there weren't any when in fact they had just reached their quota of sales for the day.

It's rumored that Apple's Tim Cook took a hand to this chicanery, and Apple isn't happy about it at all.

Microsoft released its first application for tablets, Bing for iPad that is now available on the US App Store. It looks really beautiful on the iPad large screen. The first thing you’ll notice in the application is the daily image. The application gives you information about Weather, News, Movies  and more. Like the iPhone app it features a Voice Search alongside with the search by text and Bing Maps that let you search for address or business. The iPad app is curiously only available in the US iTunes App Store which is certainly odd considering the web version does have international editions, that even have a different daily picture.

It seems that jailbreaking of iOS devices become a really profitable business, at least for Kevin Lee, a George Mason University senior, who managed to earn $50,000 a year by jailbreaking and unlocking iPhones. At first, it was a hobby for him that eventually grew into a real business with 30-40 clients per week asking for jailbreak, Cydia installations, graphical customizations and “unlocks” to use the iPhone on wireless carriers otherwise unsupported by Apple.  To achieve success, Kevin posted posting a “Get Your iPhone Jailbroken Today” ad on the popular online community. That helped him to get hundreds of requests. But his business goes against Apple’s rules and as far as we know, at that moment his ad was already removed from the site.

StorageNewsletter.com reports that Apple has placed a order for about 12 petabytes of storage from Isilon Systems. According to an inside source, the company will use this storage to support iTunes video downloaded by its customers. This order will make Apple the largest Isilon’s customer.

A petabyte of data is a huge amount of data; it's 1024 terabytes. Consumer hard drives nowadays top out at 3 TB. If you tried to store a petabyte of data on dual-layer Blu-ray discs (50 GB each), it would take almost 21,000 discs to fit it all... and Apple just bought 12 of those. It'll be interesting to see what they do with all of that storage

It seems that Apple is planning to open its first Apple Store in the Russian Federation late 2011 or early 2012. IfoAppleStore.com claims that Apple’s top retail brass flew to Moscow to negotiate a lease in the reconstructed Hotel Moskva (see pictures bellow) that locates close to  Red Square, the Kremlin and other landmarks in the city.

Senior vice president of retail Ron Johnson and vice president of real estate Bob Bridger visited Moscow at the end of March and toured the three-level retail space in the future Four Seasons Hotel. The two were seen examining a 16,000 square-foot, two-level space as a possible Apple store. At the time, no lease had been signed, but a decision could be made soon, sources say.

Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft is reportedly preparing to release Office for Mac 2011 Service Pack 1 in next week. This major update will bring a number of fixes, some stability and security improvements plus some feature additions. Performance is also receiving a boost in the update. But the most significant new features are said to come in Outlook, including support for syncing calendars to iOS devices via Sync Services.

The update will enable calendar syncing between Outlook for Mac and Apple's Sync Services. This means you can now sync your Outlook calendars, as well as your contacts, notes and tasks with any service or device that supports Sync Services.

Federal prosecutors in New Jersey have started investigation concerning the issue with illegal obtaining and transmitting data from users their consent or knowledge through various smartphone applications. The prosecutors are investigating whether various applications on smartphones such as the iPhone and various Android phones are not notifying users what data is being collected and why such data is required by the application. As far as we know, in the United States it’s prohibited for IT companies to collect any information about user without notice. The Wall Street Journal tested 101 applications and discovered that 56 of those transmitted the unique identification number for the device without letting users know, 47 transmitted the phones location and 5 sent a users age, gender and other personal information.