News tagged ‘ebook’

According to Reuters, the Palo Alto, California-based Flipboard Inc wants to land deals with studios for obtaining rights to offer episodes of TV shows and movies through its social magazine app.

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As New York Post reports (via BGR), Amazon is preparing to release the rumored Android-based tablets that will cost “hundreds less” than $499 current base model of iPad 2. It is likely that “hundreds less” implies $299.

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Today analytics firm DisplaySearch published its estimations of mobile PC sales for the 2Q 2011. The research counts both tablets and notebooks, and Apple managed to outpace all its rivals with 21.1% of the market share. The company easily passed (by nearly 4 million units) second-place HP, which has 15% share with 9.7 million units shipped.

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Over the weekend, there had been a lot of interest in a 3G-capable MacBook Pro that has an external antenna. The notebook appeared on eBay and its price reached $ 70,000. The seller describes the antenna as "quite tiny" and attributes some of the initial reactions to the bad angle. Most notably, it's actually attached to the MacBook Pro with magnets, and can come off.

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In the The Wall Street Journal’s article about Intel investing $300 million on developing "Ultrabook" platform, an Intel executive revealed that Apple was threatening to drop Intel’s processors if they didn’t made their chips less power-consuming.

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According to Bloomberg’s report, Nintendo’s investors are urging the company to produce titles for iOS devices. Alternatively, Tokyo-based Stats Investment Management Co considers that Nintendo should try to either develop something absolutely new or buy its way into smartphone market. Bloomberg wrote:

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A class-action lawsuit has been filed against Apple and 5 of the 6 major book publishers: Hachette, HarperCollins, MacMillan, Penguin, and Simon & Shuster. The lawsuit claims that they "colluded to increase prices for popular e-book titles to boost profits and force e-book rival Amazon to abandon its pro-consumer discount pricing."

From the lawsuit:

In November 2007, Amazon revolutionized the book publishing industry by releasing the Kindle, a handheld digital reader for electronic books or “eBooks.” A major economic advantage to eBook technology is its potential to massively reduce distribution costs historically associated with brick-and-mortar publishing. But publishers quickly realized that if market forces were allowed to prevail too quickly, these efficiency enhancing characteristics would rapidly lead to lower consumer prices, improved consumer welfare, and threaten the current business model and available surplus (profit margins). So, faced with disruptive eBook technology that threatened their inefficient and antiquated business model, several major book publishers, working with Apple Inc. (“Apple”), decided free market competition should not be allowed to work – together they coordinated their activities to fight back in an effort to restrain trade and retard innovation. The largest book publishers and Apple were successful.

This lawsuit alleges that as a "direct result of this anticompetitive conduct as intended by the conspiracy, the price of eBooks has soared" and "bring claims under federal and state antitrust laws to enjoin the illegal conduct and to obtain damages."

Facebook has just launched Messenger app that extends its Messages service. This app will allow sending Facebook messages to your Facebook contacts and text messages to your phone’s contacts. In addition to messages the app will allow you to send pictures as well.
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According to MacRumors, Apple’s 15-inch notebook featuring an ultra-thin design is undergoing final testing. It is unknown yet whether this 15-inch notebook will be presented as an extension of MacBook Air line or a model of a redesigned MacBook Pro line. Even though the device is reportedly undergoing final testing, its release date is kept in secret.

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As DigiTimes reports, now Apple as well as other companies like Samsung, is exploring the possibility of using solar panels in its future products. Reportedly Apple is even considering adding Taiwan-based solar panel makers in its supply chain. This fact means that the company is not only exploring this technology but is already planning who exactly will manufacture these panels.

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This week Amazon updated its Kindle app for iOS in order to meet Apple’s in-app purchase terms and keep its place in the App Store. Apart from removing links to the Kindle Store, new update introduced about 100 newspaper and magazine subscriptions for iOS.

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The new MacBook may come with a return of the backlit keyboard. The backlit keyboard was omitted from the October 2010 redesign of the laptops line, as rumored, due to design issues and battery life constrains. The new MacBook Airs will feature the design of 2010 MacBook Airs. A backlit keyboard may be helpful in low-light conditions, and it’s currently implemented in all versions of Apple’s MacBook Pro line. Appleinsider’s sources, who are familiar with the matter, claim that the new laptops will be launched any time this month.

With the release of new models later this month, Apple is set to reinstate a feature to its MacBook Airs that went missing when the company overhauled the ultra-thin notebooks into more cost-affordable products late last year, AppleInsider has learned.

According to people familiar with the matter, backlit keyboards will join the string of hardware enhancements planned for the new 11.6- and 13.3-inch notebooks, which are also expected to adopt high-speed Thunderbolt ports, an upgrade to Intel’s Sandy Bridge architecture, and possibly high-speed 400MBps flash memory.

Is there a future development of notebooks with MacBook Air? One Wall Street analyst believes that notebooks stage a comeback with tablets losing its popularity.

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The Japanese website Macotakara claims that the new MacBook Air will include SSD drive with adopted a new Toggle DDR 2.0 type of NAND Flash Memory.

Current SSD device Blade X-gale supporting SATA 2.6 will be abolished and new 19nm flash memory will be packaged into smaller chip and will be soldered on base circuit directly.

The new Flash chips will be built directly in the MacBook Air's motherboard; they support speeds of 400Mb/s, and will allow future controllers to run faster than today’s SSDs with "half the number of channels, providing both a cost and space savings", and could improve battery life for an hour or more.

The resulting power throttling capability enables the drive’s high-performance levels without any increase in power consumption over a 40nm-class 16Gb NAND-based 256GB SSD. The controller also analyzes frequency of use and preferences of the user to automatically activate a low-power mode that can extend a notebook’s battery life for an hour or more.

Geohot is famous iPhone and Sony Playstation hacker, the creator of blackra1n and limerain jailbreak methods, as well as blacksn0w unlock. Now he works at Facebook.

Joshua Hill (P0sixninja) recently mentioned this fact in an interview.

Geohot started working at Facebook in May and actually announced it on his Facebook account on June 17th:

"Facebook is really an amazing place to work...first hackathon over."

This means that we should not expect any new iPhone jailbreak and unlock utils from him.