News tagged ‘SIM’

The Taiwanese Internet resource Apple.pro has posted pictures of black and white next-gen iPhones that are very similar to those prototypes that have been leaked. As you see the color took up both the front panel and the recessed home button. Some time earlier the same site posted the photo of the white panel separately, so we can assume it was simply put on top of the rest iPhone just to show how it can look like.

Recently Billboard published a report that reveals new information on Apple's share on music sales market. When the first generation iPhone was presented, iTunes had only 12,7% of American music market. In 2008 Apple almost doubled it and made 21,4%. 2009 reveals five percentage points increase - now iTunes has 26,7% of music sales.

Such mobile providers as AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon Wireless on the contrary lose their positions, downing from 6,6% to 4,9% in 2009. Partly it is explained by lower priced ringtones in iTunes and its free tools for making custom ringtones. Both of these factors eventually attracted more people.

Physical media music in turn loses its popularity from year to year. Numbers reveal its share fell from 57,5% in 2008 to 49,3% in 2009. That means that iTunes actually makes a half of all digital music downloads overall.

iTunes' closest rival Amazon also increased its sales. But in digital MP3 sales the company's share grew from 0,8% in 2008 to 1,3% in 2009, which is not even close to Apple's 26,7% share. Such results, according to Billboard, were "still well short of where major labels had hoped Amazon's download store would be by now, dimming earlier expectations that it will be able to significantly reduce the labels' heavy dependence on iTunes for digital sales."

It is interesting to look forward for Google which recently acquired Simplify Media to expectedly turn it into iTunes rival for Android users. But for now the company's subsidiary AdMob reveals the amount of media bought or even downloaded by Android users is still so small that it cannot be compared with iTunes success.

Here are the latest news from Google I/O conference: Tablet based on Android operating system. This one is 8.9 inch widescreen from NVIDIA that runs a multicore ARM Cortex A9 processor and has a front facing camera and two USB ports. The video below shows it running the football. However this is only a demo at a tradeshow, not an actual shipping product.

YouPorn, one of the world's largest porn sites, has announced that they will be soon iPad compatible. The site has begun re-encoding their entire video archive to make them viewable on the iPad. In the App Store parental controls can limit access to content inappropriate for minors. On the web, this gets much more difficult.

After several weeks of rumors concerning the future iPhone 4G (iPhone HD), it's internal components, memory and all the features, the guys from AppAdvice decided to create an image that sums up everything we know so far.

The iPhone is called iPhone HD and the specs are placed on a page similar to the Apple site.

iPhone HD will have a display with higher resolution of 960×640 pixels, 5 MP camera, flash, autofocus, video recording at 720p, iChat with a 2 MP front camera, 256 or 512 MB of RAM, better connectivity and more battery life.

According to Digitimes senior analyst, Ming-Chi Kuo, the iPhone 4G (iPhone HD) manufacturer Foxconn will ship at least 24 million units of the device this year. The shipments will start in June.

4.5 million units are scheduled for the first half and 19.5 million units for the rest of 2010. Apple is expected to present the new iPhone on June 7, 2010 during Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference.

The new device will adopt IPS (in-plane switching) panels with FFS (fringe-field switching) technology and a 960x640 resolution, Kuo said, noting that LG Display and Prime View International are the panel suppliers. By incorporating FFS technology, which enables a wider viewing angle and clearer visual quality under in sunlight, Apple is aiming to improve the handset's e-book reader features and promote its iBooks Store.

As for internals the iPhone 4G will run on the Arm Cortex A8 processor and will have 512MB memory module from Samsung Electronics, doubling the memory capacity to enable better multi-tasking.

iPhone 4G will have a bigger battery supplied by Simplo Technology and Dynapack International Technology. This will be achieved by reducing the panel width by 33%.

Hours before we posted photos of another iPhone 4G prototype that were obtained by someone from Vietnamese forum Taoviet. It was revealed that device has a SoC with Apple A4 processor and 256 Megabytes of Samsung DRAM. According to iFixit, the marking "APL0398 339S0084" indicates the A4 processor, and "K4X2G643GE" goes for 256 Mb Samsung RAM.

"Our engineers are not surprised by this finding. We were very impressed by the extraordinarily low power consumption of the iPad, and remarked at the time that its power consumption and board design was much more in line with handheld devices than laptop computers."

So now we're sure that new prototype has the same hardware as in Apple's iPad. By the way, iPhone 3GS has also 256 Mb of DRAM.

It is also examined that the leaked device has a 16 GB capacity instead of Gizmodo's "XXGB", and there are no visible screws on its sites. The new iPhone has a micro-SIM port on its side. A video reveals that new device was turned on but it wasn't running the iPhone OS.

More photos of iPhone 4G hardware are posted below and here.

Read the rest of this entry »

As you remember, last week Steve Jobs posted a letter about his thoughts on Flash and that same day Adobe’s CEO commented on it.  Sometime later chief technology officer Kevin Lynch also expressed his opinion on the situation:

"It's not about HTML5 vs. Flash. They're mutually beneficial. The more important question is the freedom of choice on the Web."

In the meantime, Instead of using plugin-based technologies like Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, Apple created a new client-side framework Gianduia to produce quality online applications for retail users.

Read the rest of this entry »

iPad USB Camera Connection Kit is much more useful as it seems. Max Sha, an experienced user, was able to access external hard drive with this kit. All you need is a jailbroken iPad, an external drive, a split-USB cable to give the drive some power and a terminal of some sort (f.e. MacBook) to mount the external storage. While it is a little unwieldy, it shows that Terabytes of external storage for iPad is possible.

Here is a complete step-by-step guide from Max Sha:

Read the rest of this entry »

An Italian blog ispazio.net had recently acquired photos of iPhone 4G screen and frame. They say it's real because the pictures were taken from reliable sources.

The iPhone looks very similar to the prototype found by Gizmodo. The frame has the same front-facing camera and corners. Screen connector looks bigger than before, which confirms that there will be more connections to the motherboard and as a result - more pixels than in the current models.

The blog also say its iPhone has LCD display. The current Apple's models also have LCD, but most of the company's competitors already use AMOLED displays in their phones.

Dropbox is a great service similar to Apple’s iDisk. It lets you store your files on a server and immediately share your pictures, documents and other files across different computers and phones. Users can get 2Gb of server storage for free. There is an app for desktops, iPhone and other phones. recently a special version for iPad was released.

You can register and download the application for your desktop computer here (Windows, Mac and Linux). Here is a link to a free iPhone/iPad application in AppStore.

With DropBox on the iPad you can:

• Access your Dropbox on the go.
• All the contents of your Dropbox are available for viewing.
• You can even stream music and movies in your Dropbox straight to your iPad.
• Upload files and sync them to your Dropbox.
• Upload photos from your iPad and email its public link to a friend in less than a minute.
• Export files to other iPad apps.

According to a web-resource DigiTimes.com (which in turn cites Chinese newspaper Economic Daily News), panels for the iPhone 4G will be also provided by Chimei Innolux, which will join existing Apple's partners Wintek and TPK Touch Solution who have been supplying some parts for iPhone 3GS. The companies will take 15, 40 and 45 percents of total orders respectively.

All of the assembly responsibilities will be allegedly taken again by FoxConn, a company that has already had the successful similar experience with iPhone 3GS. The company already began receiving components for the iPhone 4G in April, though there is no information yet about the date of assembling it for final products.

The report also reveals that camera modules will be produced by Largan Precision (80%) and Genius Electronic (20%). TXC will continue to produce quartz components and its share will rise from 15% to 40%.

Next-generation iPhone is expected to be announced on Apple's annual WorldWide Developers Conference keynote, which will take place at San Francisco's Moscone West on June 7-11. It is rumored that the iPhone 4G will be available for sale soon after its announce.

Lately Apple has released a third beta of the iPhone OS 4. It is specified as build 10M2247 and available for registered developers. Previous beta release was issued two weeks ago. The situation looks familiar as last year iPhone OS 3 had also gone through 5 beta cycles before it was publicly announced.

Currently the new update is unavailable due to installation problems, but those of the developers who successfully downloaded and installed it have already revealed what's new in the release.

Read the rest of this entry »

The picture above reveals that World of Warcraft was launched on the iPad. We don't know does it work correctly because there is no video yet, but there is information that the game was launched via Gaikai.

Gaikai is a service that allows you to play games in a browser, directly from the cloud. The scheme is pretty simple - the service runs and hosts the games and then streams it to the user using Silverlight, Java or Flash. As you know, iPad doesn't support Flash but somehow WoW works through Gaikai.

Gaikai and its competitors (OnLive and OTOY) are still in beta, but when it'll reach maturity there is a big chance to successfully use it for playing graphically intensive games on different devices including iPad.

Yesterday The Wall Street Journal reported that this year Apple is going to charge companies 1$ million for iAds on its mobile devices. Citing an unknown but reliable source familiar with the matter those companies that want to become a part of the iAds launch will pay $10 million to be first in the door.

The pricing policy of iAds is pretty simple. Every time user sees an ad the advertiser is charged a penny. If he's tapping the banner, Apple charges $2. So $1 million ad buy will provoke a big amount of its views and user taps.

In addition to a higher price Apple wants to take more control over marketing campaigns of its clients. But still it doesn't reduce companies' interest in iAds:

"Despite the high price, ad executives at agencies from Boston to New York and San Francisco to Los Angeles have crowded into conference rooms in recent weeks to listen to the tech company's pitch for iAd".

One of the advertisements that is already developed is an ad for Nike's Air Jordan basketball shoes. It includes iAd logo and animated banner. If you select it, you'll see an interactive store locator, special videoclip and exclusive offers taking place at local stores. This iAd was also shown by Apple on its iPhone OS 4 preview event.

Some experts think Apple's appearance at the market of mobile advertisement may convince some other selling ads companies to switch to other mobile platforms (for example, Google Android).

With a growing popularity of apps for Apple devices advertisers and developers see iAds as a potential opportunity to reach a wide audience and raise more money on it.