Apple has issued a 3.0.1 update to the Apple TV to address an issue that causes content to temporarily disappear from the device. They sent out this email notifying customers:

Dear Customer,
If you've installed the Apple TV 3....

Objectified, Gary Hustwit's look at the world of industrial design, featured a lengthy section on Apple Chief Designer Jon Ive—and now that clip is online for impatient Apple fans to see. [Brainstorm Tech]

The clip is pretty interesting, even if you're not normally enamored with Apple. Ive is the most prominent tech designer of the last two decades, and I like his philosophy on "getting design out of the way." Hopefully the clip motivates you guys to go see the full movie, which is great, even if it doesn't reach the heights of Hustwit's previous effort Helvetica.

The AppleInsider blog says it's gotten wind of a "hybrid iPhone," due in the third quarter of 2010, that would work on both GSM and CDMA (hear that, Verizon?).

Originally posted at News - Wireless

The latest round of iPhone rumors reads like a roundup of everything we've heard before. Now the mythical iPhone nano is back, and supposedly said device will be coming to Verizon in 2010 featuring a new hybrid cellular radio.

Keep in mind this is all coming from an industry analyst report supplied to Apple Insider, and as with all analyst reports, take it with a huge chunk of rock salt.

Rumor has it that the new iPhone will have a hybrid UMTS/CDMA radio inside, so it'll work on nearly all major carriers. The report also cites that the device will have a 2.8" screen, downsized from the current 3.5" display.

That's nothing we haven't heard before, but the one thing that might make this report more believable than others is the tidbit about who'll make the thing. According to the document, Pegatron will build the phone and not Hon Hai, the current manufacturer.

Baseless speculation, or looming product launch? Whatever the case, I'm much less excited about these rumors now that Android handsets are available on Verizon. As great as an iPhone would be on Big Red, there are very solid alternatives that you can pick up today, so why wait? [Apple Insider]

Gigabyte's been listening to all of the iPhone syncing issues from motherboard owners using Intel's P55 chipset. They've put out a beta BIOS that addresses the problem. Unfortunately, that doesn't help all the Asus and MSI users who are having the same troubles, but hopefully now that Gigabyte has set an example the others will follow.

If you're one of the unlucky few, hit the link to grab the update. [Gigabyte via PC World]

Presented for your approval without comment. [iTunes Link via The Awl]

A new report from OTR Global relayed by AppleInsider indicates that Apple is planning on manufacturing new hybrid iPhones that will support both Verizon's CDMA2000 network as well as the UMTS 3G network. Only the UMTS network is supported by the cu...

In this week's never-gonna-switch-so-stop-asking app roundup: Free games, reinvented! Airplane anxiety, averted! Photos, wirelessly printed! Cool apps, discovered by other cool apps! Navigation, cheapened! Black Friday rush, preempted! Google Wave, appified! Screens, pointlessly tapped! And more!

The Best

Chorus: Hey, Apple, when people start making apps just to help people find new apps, take it as a sign that your App Store interface could use a little help. Chorus crowdsources the effort to cut through the endless jungle of trash:

Chorus is a bit like Apple's native App Store app, except with drastically shifted emphasis: instead of giving category "Top" lists, which rank apps by overall download numbers, Chorus only pitches you apps that've been explicitly recommended by someone. These someones could include other friends who use Chorus, nearby Chorus users, or a stable of "App Mavens"-online reviewers and tech journalists, mostly.

Free.


ZenApps: An even better sign that the App Store could offer more in the way of search tools, filters and sorting options than a company making an app-finding app? Two companies making app-finding apps. ZenApps takes a more traditional approach than the social network-y Chorus, aggregating review buzz from a list of app sites into a tag cloud, or a simple list. Also free.


Million Tap Challenge: Speaking of maybe worthless crap apps, Million Tap Challenge is a simple app with a simple goal: to be tapped. A million times. This makes the cut because unlike 99.99% of the spammy crap in the App Store, Million Tap Challenge has a sense of the absurd. It knows how ridiculous it is, and for just the right kind of person, it's a brilliant timekiller.


Flying Without Fear: My pops was a pilot, and the thought of being suspended 32,000 feet in the air in a tiny aluminum tube still freaks me the hell out. Flying without fear takes a two-pronged approach to soothing panicked passengers, with relaxation exercises on one side, and more importantly, detailed explanations of each step in typical airline flight, and the terrifying sounds that accompany them. Minor complaint #1: $5 seems a little steep for a branded app—this one is slathered in Virgin Atlantic's colors and logo. Minor complaint #2: Sir Richard Branson, who provides a video intro, is scarier than the worst transatlantic turbulence I've ever sat through. IT'S THE BEARD, BEARDO.


Gokivo: It's getting hard to keep track of all the iPhone navigation apps' names, much less their price structures, so here's what you need to know: Gokivo, the decent-but-too-expensive navigation app, has become Gokivo, the decent and now-not-too-expensive navigation app. The price has dropped from $5/mo to $5 dollars 30 days or $40 for the year. It's not as dirt-cheap as products like MotionX Drive and CoPilot, but solid text-to-speech and live traffic make this a deal.


Black Friday(s): This one comes in two parts, actually! Both FatWallet and Dealnews have put together apps that'll aggregate the best last-minute Black Friday deals come (almost) Thanksgiving. Neither is getting very good reviews right now, mostly due to their lack of deals. Today November 6th, so this is mildly mind-boggling. Patience!


LexPrint: Hey, remember Lexmark? They made printers! And evidently, they still make printers! Also, they've put together one of the better iPhone photo printing apps I've seen. Instead of shipping with grossly limited compatibility like other printing apps (seriously, everyone's got one now, but they're all pretty picky about which printers they talk with) Lexmark bridged the wireless gap with a PC client called Listener, which accepts print requests in lieu of a wireless radio on the actual printer. Kind of brilliant, if you have a Lexmark.


Waveboard: Google Wave is still invite-only, so it's a little strange to see a dedicated app this early on. That said, a sizable group of people are already power-using the shit out of this service that I don't think I'll ever fully understand, so Waveboard, which is marginally better than the stock Wave web interface, might be worth the one dollar entry fee.


Eliminate: This one lands in the top ten for two reasons. One is obvious: This is a fun, smooth-running FPS with intuitive controls—rare!—and solid gameplay. The other is a little counterintuitive: To get the full Eliminate experience, you probably need to shell out for Energy Cells via in-app purchases. This is good precisely because it's terrible, and provides a perfect example to other devs of how not to use the new in-app purchase system. It's fun while the free lasts, though! A cautionary tale.


TowerMadness Zero: TowerMadness used to be a better-than-average tower defense game, rendered in 3D and priced at about $3. Then, there was a lightning strike. A developer was zapped in the skull, collapsed, and three hours later awoke, dazed. As he stood up and surveyed his charred surroundings, he froze as if he was having a stroke; his eyes, though, twinkled. He had an idea. When he finally spoke, everyone around him was stunned: "TOWERMADNESS SHALL BE FREE," he bellowed, "AND IT SHALL BE SUPPORTED BY ADS THAT ARE NOT VERY ANNOYING." Then he died, from the burns. Pointlessly dramatic fake scenario aside, this kind of thing should happen more often.

Honorable Mentions

Cry Translator: This one purports to tell you what your baby's various gurgles, yelps and screams mean. This sounds implausible! Also implausible: That it's somehow worth $30. Just jingle your keys, try to feed it, and smell for poop. Parenting, done.

Family Guy: Hey look, it's a game based on a popular-but-well-past-its-prime television series! It's a bit Nintendo-like, which is charming, and the free version is worth a few minutes of you time, provided you don't hate Family Guy.

This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory. Have a great weekend, everybody!

In a brief press release today, RadioShack announced that it will begin selling the iPhone starting with the Dallas-Fort Worth and New York City markets later this month. RadioShack plans to sell the iPhone across the U.S. in 2010.

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You've had it. Maybe with AT&T. Maybe with Apple's crushing, dictatorial grip strangling the App Store. Whatever the reason, you're going to Android: Land of freedom, carriers not named AT&T, and the great Google. Here's what you need to know.

It's All in the Google Cloud

Android phones don't sync with your computer. That's because they don't have to: Your contacts, calendar and mail are all kept up in the great Googleyplex. Unfortunately, Google's Contacts manager, while it's gotten better, is kinda crappy, and all of your Contacts are beamed down to your phone from there.

So even after you get the actual contacts you wanna talk to exported to Google Contacts, one problem is that all of your Google contacts, like everybody you email, show up on your phone. What you have to do is either sort your contacts into different groups and tell the phone's Contacts app to show only the groups you only wanna see, or to only show you people with phone numbers. If you wanna sync your contacts, so you have a master copy on your computer and can manage them from there, that problem takes a bit of legwork—at least on Windows.

If you're on a Mac, it's easy to keep your Contacts synced—just tell Address Book to sync with Google. On Windows, you'll need a third-party app, like GO contact. That way, you can manage your contacts on your desktop, and have a local copy that's always synced up with what Google's got.

Calendars are easier: Google's got an app for that.

Exchange support varies from version to version: Android 2.0 has it, previous vanilla versions of Android don't, but carriers like Sprint and hardware makers like HTC have been rolling their own Exchange solution into Android. Check the box, in other words.

The Gmail App Is Amazing

If your primary email account is Gmail, that's almost reason enough to go Android. Not only is Gmail pushed to your phone, the Gmail app is an absolutely perfect rendition of the Gmail experience for the small screen. Threaded conversations (hurray), full label support, starring, archiving and a true Gmail look-and-feel. It's even better in Android 2.0, which finally includes support for using multiple Google accounts with the Gmail app, and a few interface tweaks to make it easier to use.

For your non-Google accounts, there's a separate email app that's a pretty standard IMAP/POP mobile email app. Not amazing, not bad.

For That Matter, All of the Google Apps Are Amazing

You might be switching to Android for political reasons, or just to get away from AT&T, but what's gonna make switching actually work is that all of the Google services are fantastic, and often, more powerful than their iPhone counterparts.

Google Talk is the non-Gmail killer app for me, and highlights just how badly the iPhone needs a native messaging app—it's like BlackBerry Messenger, but for Google. (Or mobile AIM, but less shitty.) Keep in mind, anyone signed in to Gmail on a desktop browser can be reached through Google Talk if they've authorized it, so you've probably got more "buddies" than you might realize.

Latitude is actually built into the Maps app; Google Voice integrates seamlessly; and Google actually frequently releases updates them the Android Marketplace. Oh, and did I mention Google Navigation? Yeah.

What Google hasn't gotten around to yet is integrating Google Docs, but the web version with Android's HTML5-superpowered browser is pretty good.

Not Being on AT&T Is Just as Liberating As You'd Hoped

I've never had full bars on any Android phone—on T-Mobile, Sprint or Verizon—and not been able to do something online. End of story.

Multitasking Is All It's Cracked Up to Be, Mostly

"Hey look, someone @replied me on Twitter!" Pull down the window shade, check it out, go back to browsing this month's custard calendar. "Oh hey, an email." Down comes the window shade, I reply, and then instantly return to drooling more over pumpkin-pie custard, before flipping to Google Talk to tell my friend when we're going to slaughter zombies in Left 4 Dead 2 demo. All in 10 seconds, while listening to Pandora radio.

The drop down window shade is pure genius, and what makes the cacophony of background notifications from all the apps you've got running work. See, you don't actually close apps in Android like on the iPhone. You just switch between them, and the OS takes care of closing apps you haven't used in a while in the background. (Unless inside of an app, you explicitly tell it to shutdown, like Twidroid.) Anything a background app wants to tell you goes into the notification windowshade. Sure, there's a bit of lag switching back to the browser and then scrolling is choppy for a second on some phones, but it's a small price to pay. And bigger batteries in more recent hardware, like the Droid, are enough to make it through the day.

Android Takes More Work

Every version of Android gets a little smoother, a little more user-friendly, but stock versions are pretty barebones. Want to read a PDF attached to an email? You need an app. Visual voicemail? Gotta download it unless your carrier preinstalls one. Want a notepad? Find it on the Market. HTC takes care a lot of these little humps with their custom builds—which includes a PDF viewer out of the box, for example—and generally speaking, there's an app for the basic holes that need to be filled in, but get ready to do a little bit of legwork.

It's Not Quite as Secure

The lock screen is a series of swipes—not an actual passcode—and there's no remote wipe out of the box. Granted, with the iPhone you need a MobileMe plan to get remote wipe, but you don't have to look for an app to install, like SMobile Security Shield.

It's also less secure in the app department, at least on paper: Under Android, you can opt to install unverified programs through the settings menu. This may be a good thing to you—even your reason for switching—but it carries obvious extra risks.

The Android Marketplace Isn't as Nice as the App Store (Yet)

The only place to look for apps and install them is directly on your phone, through the Android Marketplace. With Android 1.6, the Marketplace did get a lot nicer to browse, with a new interface and actual app screenshots, but categories are still too broad, and you still can't do any of this on your desktop, where you have a much bigger screen. Updating apps? You've gotta do them one at a time, which is annoying.

The App Situation Is Getting Better, But Isn't There Yet

So here's the thing. The app ecosystem on Android has absolutely exploded, so it's much, much better place to be than it was six months ago, much less a year ago. In fact, for a lot of your everyday iPhone apps, there's now an Android counterpart or equivalent: Facebook, Pandora, Slacker, Remember the Milk, Foursquare, Shazam, Flixster, etc. The problem is, they're universally not as polished or full-featured. Facebook's missing messaging and events entirely; Twidroid, the best Twitter app, is hideous compared to any of the top 5 iPhone Twitter apps; Photoshop's lacks some of the effects it has on the iPhone.

Gaming is probably the single biggest thing you'll miss. There are games, yes. Some of them good. There aren't as many and they're not as fantastic. There's nothing Star Defense caliber. Or Sim City. (Oops.) Partly, this is simply a numbers issue: Android's not as big as the iPhone yet. But the other aspect is that there's a serious storage limitation for apps—just 256MB in some phones—which seriously cramps what some games can do, as well as how many apps you can install on you phone. Apps will get better, the app economy will get better, this is true. But for now, be ready for some limitations and possibly, disappointments.

Music and Video? Just Buy a Zune HD

Kidding. Sort of. Getting music and video onto your Android phone is a purely drag and drop operation—there's no official Google sync application to organize and get your 10 gigs of music onto your phone. There is an Amazon MP3 store, and it's okay. There are third-party solutions, like DoubleTwist or Windows Media Player. But once you get the music on there, the music player itself kinda blows. It's ugly and just not very nice to use. On the upside, it plays Ogg Vorbis, open source fans.

Movie watchers are in even worse shape with Android. Your best bet is to avoid the native player that's sort of hidden and to actually use a third party app, Meridian. Or just get a Zune HD for your music and video, and you'll be much happier.

I think that covers the basics guys. Yeah, Android's not as polished or smooth, but you know what? It's actually quite livable over here. If there's something else you wanna know—or want to share—about switching, drop it into the comments.

Apple has rolled out a new Reserve and Pick Up purchasing program for its retail stores, allowing customers to select and reserve products for later in-store purchase and pick up ahead of the holidays.

With Reserve and Pick Up...

Fortune reports that Apple has issued media invitations for a preview of the company's fourth Manhattan store scheduled to officially open in New York City's Upper West Side at Broadway and 67th Street on Saturday, November 14th.

A record 43.3 million smartphones shipped in the third quarter, according to a new report from IDC.

Originally posted at News - Wireless

iPhone game developer Storm8, creator of games such as World War, iMobsters and Vampires Live, has just been hit with a suit for secretly gathering the phone numbers of everyone who purchases its games.

It's not the first time we've seen this; Swiss developerMogo got busted gathering numbers and then calling people to harass them to buy more apps, which is certainly a more brazen move. Storm8 claims that this was a bug, but they're getting sued anyways. It doesn't pay to be shady, devs! [Boing Boing via Kotaku]

Apple today began notifying purchasers of its iTunes LP offerings that updated versions compatible with the new Apple TV 3.0 software are now available for download. Apple delivered the Apple TV 3.0 software update to users last week, bringing a num...

Wow, where've you been, Orb? It's been a full year since we heard anything from the once-adored media streaming outfit, and while it's been streaming out content to iPhones for quite some time, those relying on Macs to do it have been left in the damp night air. Until now, that is. Orb for Macintosh has finally hit the streets, bringing with it OS X 10.5 and 10.6 compatibility that enables any and all media from iTunes to be sent out over the internet and consumed on any outside device with access to the web. We're talking laptops, UMPCs, smartphones and even that ancient PC your grandmother still uses with Windows ME. There's no mention of any DRM restrictions, and it'll even allow you to stream live TV if you can manage to connect a tuner card to your Apple. Oh, and did we mention that Orb is completely free? Hit the download link below to get your weekend started off right.

Read - Download Orb
Read - Press release

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Software

Orb for Mac finally arrives, streams media from OS X to any internet-connected device originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It's hearsay at this point, but Boy Genius Report's sources claim the 8GB 3G will be swapped with a 3GS. They've had a decent-enough record with rumors lately, and it makes sense against the $99 Droid Eris. We'll see. [BGR]

Okay, so we fully anticipate that creating the downright adorable object you see above will take far longer than ten minutes if you a) don't have a stash of circuits and fabrics laying around and / or b) you've never done anything like this before, but for seasoned DIYers, this is about as easy as it gets. The "10-minute sewable iPod remote" can actually be any character or design you feel like making, as the crux of this project relies on the circuit chip that is actually fitted inside the dock connector. From there, you just connect a few strands of conductive fabric, attach your kitty cat (or dragon, as the case may be) and begin to enjoy your homegrown iPod remote. Hit the read link for the full how-to, but only if you're immune to cuteoverloaditus.

Filed under: Peripherals, Portable Audio, Portable Video

DIY sewable iPod remote takes just ten minutes, will absolutely warm your heart originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A few times a year, MacRumors partners with MacHeist to promote their Mac application bundle deal. Their app bundles typically deliver a dozen Mac applications at a significant discount. The latest bundle is a bit of a departure for MacHeist by del...

Love him or hate him, you have to admit that Apple CEO Steve Jobs has had a helluva decade.