News tagged ‘Official’

As you remember, few weeks ago the police broke into Gizmodo journalist’s home and seized 4 computers, 2 servers and a number of different devices. But it was not allowed to search for information until yesterday because officials had been waiting to determine whether Jason Chen (the journalist) was protected as a journalist or not.

This Wednesday Cnet received information on the situation from Stephen Wagstaffe, who is a chief deputy district attorney for San Mateo County, California.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ballmer had been rumored by Wall Street analyst Trip Chowdhry to be making an appearance at WWDC. He was expected to announce Microsoft's Visual Studio 2010 with support for iPhone OS and Mac OS X development.

Here is an official tweet from Microsoft:

Read the rest of this entry »

After yesterday news report about tenth suicide among Foxconn employees Apple had officially commented on the situation. Here are the words from the company's public statement:

"We are saddened and upset by the recent suicides at Foxconn. Apple is deeply committed to ensuring that conditions throughout our supply chain are safe and workers are treated with respect and dignity. We are in direct contact with Foxconn senior management and we believe they are taking this matter very seriously."

Reuters also informed that Apple will investigate the case and had already involved its own investigation team to "address these tragic events".

Foxconn is known much not only as the manufacturer of iPhone 4G, it is also a company responsible for making a number of products created by HP, Dell, and Nokia. Analyst Andrew Deng from Taiwan International Securities told Reuters that these companies might  react accordingly in case Foxconn is not tackling the problem:

"It's a crucial issue that Hon Hai [registered trade name for Foxconn] has to deal with right away. If not, Nokia, HP and Apple might cut their orders as pressure against buying their products could be mounting."

According to information from the Wall Street Journal Foxconn chairman Terry Gou has already launched antisuicide measures. They include the construction of special nets around Foxconn's building (as most of the workers died because of a jump from the roof) and establishing the "Foxconn Employee Care Center". Moreover, the company invited counselors and academic experts to talk with its employees and asked a group of Buddhist monks to utter prayers for the factory.

This week Terry Gou also showed reporters a huge swimming pool, bakeries, dormitories and banks built for employees needs.

Yesterday Dell officially announced its first 5-inch Android tablet. The announcement was made on the company's official blog.

So the device is now called the Streak. Previously it was shown at Consumer Electronics Show 2010 as a concept and called the Mini 5. The tablet has a 800x480 pixel capacitive multitouch screen, 1GHz Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm, VGA front-facing camera for video chatting, 5MP autofocus camera with LED flash, removable battery, 3.5mm headphone jack, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and MicroSD-card support. The Streak runs a customized version of Android OS with multitouch support and "Dell UI enhancements".  The system allows accessing to 40,000  apps in the Android Market, navigation with Google Maps, support for Google Voice and Microsoft Exchange Connectivity.

Blogger from the Round Rock company in Texas Lionel Menchasa thinks the Streak may be very perspective:

"I've been at Dell for 16 years, and I don't think there's ever been more buzz around a single Dell product than this. In my view, that's for good reason. Hardware and design-wise, this thing impresses. Add the ever-increasing capability that Android brings to the equation, and you've got a mobile device that offers a ton of flexibility while looking cool in the process."

The device will be shipped to the UK on June 4 and will be exclusive to the O2 network. Still there is no information on prices, data plans and American partners, but Menсhasa said everything will be soon announced.

In a video above one of the device developers Kevin Andrew tells and shows how useful the Streak may be in the everyday use.

Yesterday Apple officially presented its new back-to-school promotion. This is an annual sale, when school faculty and students can purchase a Mac and get a 8GB iPod touch for free. Apple claims on its website:

"Take a free 8GB iPod touch to school. Along with tons of other great features, iPod touch has built-in Wi-Fi for downloading thousands of games, movies, songs, apps, and amazing, free educational content from iTunes U."

If you have an education discount, along with acquiring new iPod touch you can save $50 on a low-end MacBook, $100 on a MacBook Air and iMac desktop and $200 on a MacBook Pro. Such educational discounts are available to staff and faculty of K-12 schools, and to students, professors and staff of any college.

The deal applies between May 25 and Sept. 7, 2010. Those who doesn't want to get free iPod touch can receive a $199 discount for purchasing 160GB iPod classic or a higher-capacity iPod touch, a $179 discount for a 16GB iPod nano, $149 discount for a 8GB iPod nano, $99 discount for a stainless steel 4Gb iPod shuffle, and $79 discount for a regular 4GB iPod shuffle.

Customers can use their educational discounts in an Apple online store, retail stores, authorized campus stores or call 1-800-MY-APPLE.

Twitter, a wildly popular social networking service, now has its own official iPhone app that was released in AppStore.

The release of the Twitter app falls in line with the company’s announcement last month about its acquisition of Atebits’ Tweetie. Twitter had then stated that Tweetie would be re-branded to be the official Twitter app and would be offered for free.

Tweetie is now Twitter! We didn’t just do a name change, we’ve added a bunch of new stuff

• Search has been reorganized, now you can search all tweets and find users in the same spot, view
• Top Tweets and Browse Suggested users.
• Search results now include Top Tweets, try it with Trends…winner combo!
• You can now use Twitter without an account! Search, Browse uses, view trends and top tweets.
• Sign-up is now availabile within the application as well, complete with Suggested user list.
• More tab has been re-organized to accomplish all this. Users with one account can add a second account under the Accounts and Settings button here.
• Actions we’ve found people use most, like Retweet have been moved to the main actions bar.
• Minor tweaks were made to tweet rendering so they match Twitter.com tweets

Here are several screenshots of this app:

Read the rest of this entry »

This week's sensation was a Steve Jobs' letter published officially on Apple's site. If you didn't read it or want to remind it to yourself, here are its main tent poles:

Read the rest of this entry »

As you remember, recently we wrote about police investigating the deal about Gizmodo purchase of an iPhone 4G prototype. The company paid $5,000 to obtain it from an unknown person who found it at one of the California's bars.

Last Friday California's Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team visited Gizmodo editor Jason Chen's home and seized 2 servers and 4 computers for a felony investigation of an iPhone 4G prototype. If to be exact, here is a list:

• MacBook
• MacBook Pro
• 32 Gb iPad
• 16 Gb IPhone
• AirPort Extreme
• IBM ThinkPad
• Dell desktop
• External hard drives and some other devices and accessories

This information was revealed by Gizmodo. The author of the post placed copy of the warrant, which was issued by a superior court judge in San Mateo County, California. It is also stated in the article that warrant is invalid because of a section 1524(g) of the California Penal Code.

Read the rest of this entry »

Few days ago Tidbits made a test of Apple's iPad's Camera Connection Kit. It was  found that the kit works fine with almost any USB microphone, headset or headphone. That means you can listen to music or even make VoIP-calls. It is reported that the quality of such calls is "terrific".

The Unofficial Apple Weblog also tested the kit and found USB keyboards to work pretty good. Well, this was expected because of official iPad Keyboard Dock support. The only problem is that USB keyboards don't have a dock so it is inconvenient to use with iPad.

As you see from the video below the kit allows you to import photos from the memory card and delete it. iPad can import not only usual images, but also RAW files from high-end cameras. Moreover, photos will be copied at full resolution and with EXIF metadata. Video may be also imported and processed with a simple editor. But note that any video clip that is larger than 640x480 and 5 megabytes will be shrunk.

Read the rest of this entry »

As you remember, some time ago Gizmodo acquired an iPhone 4G prototype for $5,000. The story was pretty mystical - Gray Powell who is (or was?) an Apple employee decided to drink some beer and then lost his iPhone 4G in the pub. Another guy found it and then supposedly tried to bring it back to Apple, but nobody believed it's an iPhone 4G. So he sold it to Gizmodo.

Journalists at Gizmodo were very happy - they made a video of it, took dozens of pictures, disassembled it and again made photos and videos.  Then Apple officially asked Gizmodo to bring it back and they did it.

Well now we have information from the report made by Greg Sandoval at CNET where it is said the police are currenty investigating the circumstances of the story to find the evidence enough to support the criminal prosecution.

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook and Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer had a financial conference call with the press and analysts. Here are some interesting facts we gained from the conversation:

Read the rest of this entry »

A few hours ago iH8sn0w posted a tweet that he is able to run jailbreak on the new firmware 4.0 beta 1. DarkMalloc, another developer who worked on the project, has just released new video that shows firmware 4.0 jailbreak on iPhone 3G:

The interesting thing, besides the presence of Cydia and MobileTerminal, is the possibility to have multiple applications open at once. That means that multitasking on iPhone 3G can be enabled. Officially Apple doesn't want to activate this functionality on iPhone 3G, just iPhone 3GS and later devices.

Read the rest of this entry »

Apple today released the following statement:

Although we have delivered more than 500,000 iPads during its first week, demand is far higher than we predicted and will likely continue to exceed our supply over the next several weeks as more people see and touch an iPad™. We have also taken a large number of pre-orders for iPad 3G models for delivery by the end of April.

Faced with this surprisingly strong US demand, we have made the difficult decision to postpone the international launch of iPad by one month, until the end of May. We will announce international pricing and begin taking online pre-orders on Monday, May 10. We know that many international customers waiting to buy an iPad will be disappointed by this news, but we hope they will be pleased to learn the reason—the iPad is a runaway success in the US thus far.

iPad's are unofficially avaliable in many different countries. However the prices are very-very high (double and even triple of US ones).

Yesterday MuscleNerd uploaded a video of an iPhone 3GS that runs the iPhone OS 4 (beta version). Along with a new OS it also runs Veency, an unauthorized VNC-app for the iPhone (so it can be runned only on jailbroken devices).

That means that new OS can also be jailbroken by the methods that were used for the previous versions. We may only hope Apple won't make any security updates before its official release.

Apple has released the final version of iPhone SDK 3.2 for developers. It can be downloaded here. However this is for iPad only. iPhone OS 3.2 will not work with iPhone or iPod Touch right now. Here is an official note from Apple:

Hopefully Apple will release the new SDK and firmware for iPhone and iPod Touch soon.