Repairing company Mission Repair uncovered evidence of a forward-facing camera existence in the iPad after receiving a shipment of iPad replacement details yesterday.
The company confirmed that the camera from the Macbook does fit into place on the frame, with the LED, ambient light sensor and lens. As it also was reported before, the iPhone OS 3.2 SDK provided evidence that the shipping iPad could support a camera, and the native Contacts application on the iPad has an option of taking photos in addition to choosing an existing one.
A few days before iPad presentation the Wall Street Journal published an article about possibility of equipping iPad with a camera that could recognize the face of its user. At that moment it was unclear whether it is true or not, but now it seems to be more plausible than before.
Apple's finally announced the iPad (Apple Tablet). It is perfect for tasks like browsing, email, photos, e-books and videos. It's a half-inch thick and weighs just 1.5 pounds (680g), with a 9.7-inch capacitive touchscreen IPS LCD display and it's running a custom 1GHz Apple "A4" chip developed by the P.A. Semi team. The 10-hour battery life and a month of standby is quite exciting.
There will be devices with 16, 32 and 64GB. All iPads will get a 30-pin Dock connector, a speaker, a microphone, Bluetooth, 802.11n WiFi and optional 3G, as well as an accelerometer and a compass. There's also a keyboard dock, which connects underneath in the portrait orientation. iPad supports up to 1024x768 VGA out and 480p composite out through dock adapter cables. There is a camera attachment kit that lets you import photos from your camera over USB or directly through an SD reader.
The device is managed by iTunes, just like the iPhone and iPod Touch. iPad can run iPhone apps: either pixel-for-pixel in a window, or pixel-doubled fullscreen. Developers can also target the new screen size using the updated iPhone OS SDK, which is available today.
The 3G version runs on AT&T and comes with new data plans: 250MB for $14.99 and an unlimited plan for $29.99 a month contract-free. Activations are handled on the iPad, so you can activate and cancel whenever you want. Every iPad is unlocked (!) and comes with a GSM "micro-SIM".
The price starts at $499 for 16GB, 32GB for $599, and $699 64GB. Adding 3G costs a $130 per model, so the most expensive model (64GB / 3G) is $829. The WiFi-only model will ship in 60 days, and the 3G models will come in 90.
French site Mac4Ever (Google translation) claims that Apple's special media event now reportedly scheduled for January 27th will see both the introduction of the company's much-rumored tablet device and the launch of beta versions of iPhone OS 4.0 and the associated Software Development Kit for developers.
Rumors say SDK will include a "simulator" to assist developers in adapting their existing App Store applications to support the tablet's screen resolution. The deployment of tools for supporting multiple screen resolutions could also pave the way for a higher-resolution iPhone in the future.
More and more developers complain about the rejection of their applications in the AppStore. There's a good reason behind all this.
It seems that Apple has created a tool that can automatically review applications and APIs that are used. According to the rules of the SDK, the developers can not use private API. If this initial test is passed examiners begin to manually check the app.
So the advice is quite simple - follow the rules of the SDK.
Couple days ago the developers of MitAPP held a lecture at the University of Bologna on programming for the iPhone and using the SDK. The entire mini-course consists of 3 classes. Here are the first slides about the development environment (XCode and Interface Builder):
The idea to personalize the iPhone is now new. Here is a new concept from Geoff Teehan. He has published a concept which shows a new type of Springboard.
Applications uodate data in real time. Unfortunately Apple does not allow you to change the SpringBoard with the SDK. So the only hope is to find some person who can do it and publish it in Cydia. Here is the full screen:
Apple releases new iPod Touch / iPhone firmware - 3.1 beta 3, just couple weeks after firmware 3.1 beta 2. As usual it is only for and avaliable via developer.apple.com. iPhone 3.1 Beta 2 expires tomorrow, July 28 at 12am (device local time). The OS weighs is around 307MB.
You can now copy/paste videos into email like pictures. Previously you could only use the share option which would compress the video to a lower resolution. New functionality was tested with a 33 second video clip (14.7MB), sent via gmail. The recieved file was 640×480 / 30fps. Sending the same file via the share function resulted in a size of 3.21MB and 480×320 / 30fps. Here is a video demo:
Apple released new SDK and new firmware and 3.1 beta 2. Unless you have a developer account with Apple, don't plugging your iPhone into iTunes, you're not going to have access to it. However here is an unofficial changelist:
Minor release focused more to fix the bugs.
New APIs for video and images.It appears that there will be many applications in AppStore, suitable to apply effects on a video or create animated slideshow.
Xcode bug-fixes.
More items have been localized, such as "In Play", "Request access WiFi".
Developers will be able to use WiFi for debuging, etc.
Baseband is now version 05:10:01.This means that all those who use unlock - do not update yet.
The iPhone is heated much less.
Old method to turn tethering on does not work anymore.
UPDATE: Here are direct links to download firmware 3.1 b2:
Apple has just removed another application from AppStore called BeautyMeter. The aim was to collect the images taken directly from iPhone on some sort of virtual dashboard allowing other users to rate the faces and bodies that were displayed.
The application itself complied with all rules of Apple SDK so at that time was regularly approved for the Store. But following the growth of communities there were some who abused the service, uploading pornographic photos. That was the reason why the app was removed.
Some users of the forum MacTalk.com.au have examined the latest version of the iPhone SDK 3.0 and have found the icons of all iPhone models. Each of these can be easily recognized. There is "iPhone1, 1" (representing the model EDGE), "iPhone1, 2" (the current 3G) and "iPhone2, 1" which represents a future iPhone models.
As you can see, the icon of iPhone2, 1 is completely identical to that of the 3G model which differs from the EDGE. However these images cannot prove that the next model of iPhone will be completely identical (in appearance) to 3G.
Apple has just released iPhone OS 3.0 beta 5 build 7A312g, almost a week after they released beta 4. With this released they also released a new version of the iPhone SDK and iTunes 8.2 (b10)
Remember this are only available to register developers and if you are not we recomend not to install or you will have a device with a pink screen of death since you need to activate the beta using iTunes and your device must be register in a database.
Perceptive Development developed a hardware and software solution that allows infrared keyboards to be used for typing on the iPhone, using less than $20 of electronics. They have managed to get an external keyboard working via a custom connection built for the headphone jack. Headphone jack in/out hardware is one of the few interfaces that's open in the official SDK.
They have built a microcontroller that converts input from an external Targus IR keyboard into a format the iPhone's headphone jack can understand, which is then fed to a terminal app that doesn't require jailbreak. Nice!