News tagged ‘Time’

It seem like Apple have always been concentrated on Macs and iPhones/iPods/iPads, so their Apple TV product may be considered more like a hobby. But the company's main rival thinks of  it as of another field to work on.

Intel, Sony and Google created a team to work on the device called GoogleTV. The latter already has its prototype. The New York Times says it consists of Intel's Atom processor and Android OS with Chrome web-browser. The project has been under development for a few months and there is still a work to do, but preliminary the device will be introduced this summer. To test their set-top box Google cooperates with Dish Network.

The NYT's source say:

“Google wants to be everywhere the Internet is so they can put ads there.”

It sounds plausible, because GoogleTV device is planned to allow users to browse the Internet, watch YouTube videos, check out Hulu content and even run Web apps and games.

Here is a new commercial of Sprint that has recently offere iPhone users a new way to connect to their 4G network. As it is announced on its site:

"The Overdrive from Sprint can connect an iPhone to the Sprint 4G network to give it the advantages of 4G without switching carriers."

Overdrive allows connecting up to 5 Wi-fi enabled devices at the same time with a single 4G connection 10 times faster than 3G.

An iPhone user with a nickname Urikane have put together almost full alphabet using 500 apps. That obviously took a lot of time. Watch the video:

As you can see, there is no "W" letter, and the status bar is moving with apps, so Urikane was probably just browsing the photos, but still this work must have taken forever.

For some time people interested in the iPad's tech specs were wondering where the Dvorak keyboard support is. With iPhone SDK 3.2 Beta 5 released on Tuesday developers finally found it. But on the evidence above it is clear that there is a hardware support, but not software (so you can connect external keyboard, but there is still no way to change iPad layout to Dvorak's).

It is interesting that though the hardware support is developed, there are no Bluetooth Dvorak keyboards produced at the moment to connect to the iPad (on the other hand you can always take usual keyboard and apply stickers to its keys).

To know more about Dvorak keyboard layour read here.

Fortune has two sources saying about the number of iPads that will be pre-sold by Friday.

Venezuelan analyst and blogger Daniel Tello, who tried to track order numbers that were submitted by internet volunteers, said:

“I think sometime during Friday, perhaps before noon, the counter should roll to 200,000 units pre-ordered.”

Boy Genius counted 222 retail locations in the USA with 700 in-store pick-up reservations for the first week of pre-orders. Fortune believes it is almost the same rate as online.

Summing the numbers of online and offline pre-orders we'll have almost 400,000 iPads to be pre-sold for only 7 days!

For the last few months we have been witnessing the competition between Google and Apple that becomes more and more significant. We tried to analyze some facts and made a conclusion that the confrontation is more personal than corporate.

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New page featuring iBooks for iPad has been rolled out on the Apple's official site. The app will be available as soon as the new device will be launched (the official date is April 3rd). Apple confirms iBooks will use the open ePub standard and the same version of FairPlay DRM that continues to be applied on video content distributed via iTunes.

iBooks will allow users to switch portrait and landscape modes, change fonts and text sizes and even tap on words to see its definition from Wikipedia or built-in dictionary. It is compatible with VoiceOver functionality that makes content to be read aloud automatically.

For some time iBooks will be available only in USA, but as we know Apple already seeks for professionals to expand their book business internationally.

During the iPad presentation, Apple CEO Steve Jobs noted that it would offer a better experience than a smartphone and a notebook computer in the following areas:

• Browsing
• Email
• Photos
• Videos
• Music
• Games
• eBooks

Apple recently aired iPad ad during the Oscars, which perfectly reflects this. Tuaw analyzed the video based on the on-air time dedicated to a particular function. It showed that a particular focus was on media consumption appeal and differentiation.

About 80% of all 720 frames (30 seconds * 24 fps) of the iPad's ad showed an app being used. And within this time, the photo app was shown the most (26%), the mail app came in second (22%). iBook app used 20% of time to position the iPad as a perfect eBook reader.

Apple announced a launch date for the iPad. The result is very exciting - Apple stock (AAPL) closed at an all time high, almost 219. This puts Apple's market cap near $199 billion dollars.

This week Steve Jobs answered an email question from Sweden. The question was from Jezper Söderlund:

I'll keep it short.

I'm Jezper from Sweden, a long time Apple fan, currently about to replace the very last computer at home with a brand spanking new iMac i7. I'm also awaiting the release of the iPad. However, I have one question:

Will the wifi-only version somehow support tethering thru my iPhone?

Two devices, based on the same OS, with already built-in technology to share one data plan suggests a secondary contract could possibly be redundant.

From the look of your keynote, where the iPad sits well between my MacBook Pro and my iPhone, I was hoping the three of them could interact as seamless as possible.

All the best,
Jezper Söderlund

This is a very interesting question, since iPad's network settings with tethering were found recently. Here is Jobs' answer:

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This year list of Fortune's Most Admired Companies, based on a polling of 4,200 executives from the world’s biggest companies, was again topped by Apple. This is the most favored mobile device manufacturer with the best brand management. Google was the company’s main competitor, but, according to analysts, Apple is sure to take the same record next time due to the popularity of iPad and introduction of updated versions of iPhone.

This is good news for for those who use Cydia, an alternative to Apple's AppStore for jailbreaked iPhones and iPod Touches. Saurik has uploaded a new version of APT that has an optimized cache generator and greatly improves Cydia performance:

"I also uploaded a new version of APT I've been working on: it has an optimized cache generator and more error tolerant repository parsing."

When launching Cydia the next time you will find updates for some APT packages (up to 3 depending on what you have installed). Perform the install and enjoy the speed improvements!

Penguin, one of the biggest publishers, gave a very interesting presentation in London. Penguin CEO John Makinson spoke about eBooks, iPad Books and Apps.

Penguin is not using the ePub format for books, rather building the applications in html according to Makinson:

"We will be embedding audio, video and streaming in to everything we do. The .epub format, which is the standard for ebooks at the present, is designed to support traditional narrative text, but not this cool stuff that we’re now talking about".

"So for the time being at least we’ll be creating a lot of our content as applications, for sale on app stores and HTML, rather than in ebooks. The definition of the book itself is up for grabs".

"We don’t know whether a video introduction will be valuable to a consumer. We will only find answers to these questions by trial and error."

Makinson sees ebooks hitting 10% of book sales next year (up from 4%). Take a look at the video:

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The job was posted on February 10th. Just in time!

"In this position, you will join HTC America, Inc. at one of its most exciting phases."

You can find more details here.

Some time ago designer Antonio De Rosa created a beautiful concept of future iPhone 4G and even published a small video. Many users liked it and gave Antonio some feedback. Now we can see the updated version.

Let's watch photos and video of new concept:

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