Invitations to Apple’s 27 January event have begun circulating. Next Wednesday we’ll know what all of the commotion was about.
These confirm the rumored date, and invite media and others to, “Come see our latest creation”. The proceedings will take place at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco, and will get underway at 10AM Pacific.
Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars is now available in the App Store for $10. We’ll just leave it at that. (via Touch Arcade)
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When can we have this on the iPhone is our only question:
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Ars tackled one specific feature of Apple’s tablet this week: The Display and specifically would it be OLED-based or traditional LCD? Their conclusion? Not OLED.
Based on the assumption that it would be a 10-inch variety (and that’s been reported often), they talked to part suppliers who noted that there were only two producers of AMOLEDs that size. Samsung, the biggest producer and also an Apple supplier, can only produce about 150,000/month. And those are apparently more than accounted for. Another Apple partner, LG, makes about one fifth of what Samsung can produce. Neither of these companies, nor both of them together could possibly supply the amount of displays that Apple would need.
Therefore, they conclude that the tablet wil be a traditional LCD.
That’s not to say the iPhone 4G won’t have OLED however.
Patently Apple is going over all of Apple’s past patent applications that deal with tablets and a tablet interface this week (coincidence?). There is a lot there and they detail so much of what Apple has been working on in the tablet space. It is almost enough to make your head explode. Not convinced? Check out some of the images below. We’re especially fans of the DJ and video application patents. Oh, and this is only part 1.
There
If you
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Really impressed by this pair of simulations coming out of Patently Apple – both describe different potential applications for Apple
So you want to be a lawyer – well, here
Digg founder Kevin Rose does a quick demo of the Square payment system for iPhone (oh yeah, he’s now an investor). The system looks pretty innovative overall but it will be interesting to see if they can get the credit card companies to lower their margins on the transactions enough to make it worthwhile.
What percentage of a credit card transaction would you be willing to give up for the convenience? 3%? 6%? 10%?
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By the way, were you quick enough to get the numbers off of Kevin Rose’s Platinum Amex card?
New York Magazine reports that the New York Times is going to a paid model in the coming months and the time frame coincides with Apple’s tablet launch, which also is expected to go public in the coming months. That’s not the only really vague correlation, however.
Bill Keller, Executive Editor for the New York Times recently told an internal meeting of NY Times employees:
“I’m hoping we can get the newsroom more actively involved in the challenge of delivering our best journalism in the form of Times Reader, iPhone apps, WAP, or the impending Apple slate…“
Finally, Apple CEO Steve Jobs often uses the New York Times when demonstrating the iPhone’s web browsing capabilities. In fact, at the original introduction of the iPhone (below), when demonstrating mobile Safari the first time, the New York Times was the first real site that he demonstrated.
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While the NYTimes may have content specifically for the tablet, there will of course need to be other means by which readers can purchase and view Times articles. Most notably, on any Web browser out there.
Mark Twain once said:
From one citizen you gather the idea that Mauritius was made first, and then heaven; and that heaven was copied after Mauritius. “
Apple might have gotten their order of operations in Mauritius reversed as well. Orange is selling the iPhone in Mauritius but without an iTunes store. That means that you can’t buy anything from Apple, but you can use the iTunes application to upload media. Without a jailbreak there is no way to get your hands on any of those 100,000+ apps out there.
As Steven Sande notes at TUAW, Mauritian iPhone users are trying to get Apple to build them an iTunes store. They’ve even set up a Facebook page.
We’ve confirmed Orange is definitely selling the iPhone in Mauritius though nowhere in the advertising do they mention that the iPhone can download apps, music or movies. In fact, it is conspicuously absent.
Not to worry though citizens of Mauritius, Apple has just hired Liesbeth Matthieu to be its iTunes Localization Producer. She’s got a French and English background which should be perfect for building out an iTunes store for your French-English populace.
CNET reports on Akamai’s latest survey of Internet speeds throughout the world. All of the big players are there, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, etc.
The bad news? The US comes in 18th — which is pretty sad. Didn’t Al Gore invent the Internet right here in the good ol’ US of A?
The most surprising part, however, is that speeds actually decreased somewhat (2.4%) over the previous year. How can our Internet speeds be getting slower? Are people going back to dialup because of the recession? Are the cable/phone companies slowly turning down our speeds? We don’t get it.
On a personal note, I had 100mb up and down fiber in France in 2007 for
We wondered yesterday why Skype hadn’t enabled Push Notifications in their latest iPhone update, and more importantly, why we couldn’t use Skype, or any voice over IP service, over 3G? Peter Parkes (not Spiderman), a Skype blogger, wrote in to clarify a few things for us.
First of all, they are working on Push Notifications. It’s coming. Soon.
“we
The tit-for-tat continued yesterday as Apple lawyers fired back at Nokia over the patent portfolio dispute by asking the ITC to ban all imports of Nokia phones to the US. This follows Nokia’s attempt to do the same to Apple.
The dispute originated when Nokia demanded that Apple share its iPhone patents to gain broad access to Nokia’s portfolio. Apple, unwilling to do so, didn’t follow the industry in licensing Nokia’s patents. The dispute has been escalating ever since.
Nokia gave a typical rebuttal:
So the one thing that everyone has been after — Push Notifications in Skype — has been passed it over yet again. Instead, they’ve given us the following in 1.3:
– Landscape mode for IM
– Hints and Tips
– General performance improvements
– Call quality indicator
– Fixed call drop issue when returning to a held Skype call
Come to think of it, didn’t AT&T OK VoIP apps on the iPhone? In October of last year?! Where’s that too? Something a bit fishy going on wethinks.
You can download Skype from the App Store for free.
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Even if Apple never lets a Flash plugin within 50 yards of an iPhone, you may yet be able to enjoy the richness of those blinking banner ads. Gordon (Get it? Like Flash Gordon?) is an open source Flash runtime written in pure JavaScript. For simple Flash animations, web developers must only slip in a bit of code into the website to allow non-Flash enabled devices like the iPhone. The Javascript pulls the relevant animations.
This only works with simple animations and is still quite resource heavy on the iPhone.
As a JRE extension it runs natively inside the iPhone’s Safari browser, however it will only work on sites that have specifically incorporated the Gordon code. Reports indicate that a static image presented in flash will peg an iPhone at 100% CPU, so it’s not quite ready for browsing YouTube via Safari just yet. It does support the full feature-set of Flash, including interactivity and animation, but full-Flash sites may not be viable on mobile devices for some time.
Take a look at some of the demos – they work on the iPhone as well. Interestingly, running the demos on my MacBook Pro, I saw less CPU usage with the Javascript version than I saw with the Flash version.
It might make sense for Adobe to incorporate this type of system so that developers can get their animations to work on all web-enabled devices. The downside is of course that fewer people will need Flash on their computers – which flies in the face of everything they stand for.
So is Gordon, as iPhone processors get faster and faster, the long term solution to Flash on the iPhone?
Apple
Steve Jobs is indeed a tech industry visionary with the capacity to create success, and the ability to turn an ailing company around, but not everything he does is laden with his Disney pixie magic, at least if fresh info detailing his originally championed name for the iMac is to be believed.
Last November Ken Segall was revealed as the man who came up with the iMac name while at TBWA\Chiat\Day.
He was shown the Mac which became the iMac well before launch of the product (duh, he had to write the ads).
As reported then,
Apple
If you
Patently Apple has detailed a recent patent application by Apple that shows that the computer maker is interested in HomePlug Powerline Networking (video below), looking for ways to enhance and improve such implementations that really could open up new opportunities for in-house entertainment systems and home power efficiency savings.
Also interesting, the controller device being described in the patent sounds like a standard iPod or iPhone (or tablet – killer app?) by naming such things as a touch screen, audio speakers, media playback and storage.
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Interestingly the patent was filed in 2009 by Anthony Fadell, who left Apple last year (and will probably turn up at Elevation Partners at some point soon).
Just in case anyone out there still believes publishers aren
Just in case you missed it amid the excitement at Apple
Intel has rejected yesterday
