Vodafone began offering the iPhone to its UK customers today, and seems off to a strong start – it despatched 50,000 units to customers pre-ordering the device today.
Vodafone joins Orange, O2 and Tesco Mobile in offering Apple
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KVFmE8la6w&w=560&h=340]
Tenone Design has introduced Inklet, $24.95 software which tranforms your trackpad into a graphic tablet.
Inklet allows your trackpad to emulate a pen tablet. When you’re using a Pogo Sketch, the trackpad even becomes pressure sensitive. It works with the handwriting recognition built into OS X.
It also includes an advanced algorithm to detect unwanted trackpad touches.
We think it seems pretty cool.
I’m sure I should have learned this somewhere before but option-clicking on the wireless icon on the upper right hand part of your screen quickly gives you information about your wireless connection. Great for troubleshooting wireless issues and making sure you are on a legit wireless router. That is all. Thanks Ken!
Bloomberg has a weird one today from Goldman Sachs analyst Robert Chan who lays out the following features for iPhone 4G:
Apple Inc.
Apple
BGR got a bit of supposed spy info on the tablet:
Spanish site Faq-Mac.com found an interesting little Intel promotion which seems to indicate that Apple is on the cusp of releasing some new Core i5 MacBooks. The advert says that two lucky winners will recieve MacBook Pros with the new Core i5 processors. We think Apple might be giving Intel Spain a call fairly soon. Intel demoed the performance gains between Core 2 Duo and Core i5 laptops in this video at CES.
As for us? We’re recommending that you hold off on MacBook Pro purchasing for a few weeks – pehaps until, oh say around January 27th. As Macrumors points out, the adverts have gone out globally.
Not really an Apple story here but an important one for the technology world. As you’ve undoubtedly heard by now, Google has thrown down the gauntlet and said they’d no longer be willing to censor Chinese search results and are willing to leave China before doing so. The move is related to recent attacks on around 20 corporations by Chinese hackers where trade secrets and personal information of human rights activists might have been compromised. Google seems to insinuate that the attacks were carried out by state-sponsored groups.
Google also were previously minority owners of Baidu, the leading Chinese search engine — which is not probably prepared to leave China. We’re interested in knowing what you think of all of this.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m27RITODCj0&w=600&h=385]
We like this visual guide to the many rumours presaging Apple
Avie Tevanian caught headlines yesterday on news he
Elgato has untroduced the EyeTV One to the US market, its lowest-priced TV tuner for DTV antennas for Mac solution for $119.95 (or $101 at Amazon).
EyeTV One delivers digital TV and HDTV channels straight to a Mac or PC, enabling users to watch and record the huge variety of TV shows that are broadcast over-the-air for free – it
iPhone App Defriended lets you track those Facebook friends and acquaintances who have defriended you on the social networking service, while Facebook itself has
Apple Inc.’s 2010 Annual Meeting of Shareholders is scheduled for February 25, 2010 at 10am PST at 1 Infinite Loop, Building 4, Cupertino, California. Attendance at the 2010 Annual Meeting of Shareholders is limited to shareholders[O RLY]. Admission to the meeting will be on a first-come, first-served basis.
You can browse the report here folks. Spoiler alert: Steve Jobs is still richer than you. (via MDN)
Google announced its GDrive storage today which will compete with Apple’s $99/year or less MobileMe service (and Microsoft’s Office Live). Google’s service will be an add on to its Docs storage interface and will be Web only for the moment, though third party ‘uploaders’ exist. Google’s service is free for the first Gigabyte but then is another $.25/GB/year. So for instance, if you wanted to store MobileMe iDisk’s 20GB of Cloud storage, you’d have to pay Google $5/year. The service is also consolidated for enterprise users that is $17/year for 5GB of shared storage.
To be fair, MobileMe is far more integrated into the OS than Google’s offering. Google seems to be building for future storage with its ChomeOS rather that being a virtual drive for your current file system.
Do any of you have plans to use Google’s storage services?
Like Palm, investment company Elevation Partners sure likes homing those ex-Apple people, with the computer company
Well, that’s no fun is it? John Gruber says there is no camera on Apple’s upcoming tablet. Not just a webcam but even a still shot camera ain’t going to be there. That certainly flies in the face of other reports we’ve been hearing this week. Maybe Apple had to cut corners to get it down to $1000 – or a matter of thinness just like the iPod touch?
I
MacObserver says they’ve got a picture of the forthcoming tablet’s glass display. They’ve had mixed luck with these things before (remember the 3GS rubberized back plate?). This one has a hole in the upper left corner, presumably for a camera. That would be interesting because there have been Apple patents on dual lens cameras.
We’re not sure of the scale (they say 10-inches diagonal conveniently), but could this also be the 4G iPhone? Or a knockoff.
Speaking of innovation and the uncanny Apple-related coverage storming out of France this week, news now that the new version of DisplayPort, (v.1.2) has been officially unveiled, with the final spec expected this year.
As we all know, all current Macs support output through a Mini DisplayPort: iMac, MacBook and MacBook Pro models use Mini DisplayPort while the Mac Mini and Mac Pro models have both a Mini DisplayPort and either a DVI port (Mac Pro) or Mini DVI port (Mac Mini).
What
Hardmac reports that the latest developer releases of the Mac OS are starting to support OpenGL 3.0. In fact, according to ATI’s utility, 95% of th elibraries are currently supported. The only extention not supported in the current build is Shader language Language 1.3.
Apple continues to deploy support for Open GL 3.0 that was so far absent in Mac OS X while already supported by our graphic cards. Maybe with some luck we could soon expect a full support for Open GL 3.0 as well as a game editor based on Open GL 3.0, that will give us an optimized engine, instead of “Ciderized” games with important compatibility issues with Snow Leopard (such as Spore…)
With tablets of all kinds shimmering onto the debutante
More info relating to Apple
Apple has introduced Apple Remote Desktop 3.3.2, recommending all users update to the latest version.
The release,
Those French Mobile Operators….they love to talk. The latest information escaping their lips, according to French Magazine Challenges.fr (via TiPB), is that the iPhone 4G* is coming in early May, not the typical June-July timeframe that we are used to. The magazine cites “several industry sources” but couldn’t offer any details on the 4G iPhone. They also speculate that the reason for an early launch would be to counter Google’s rush of higher specced smart super phones with the Android OS.
They also mention that Microsoft could be a competitor as well, though we heard today that Windows Mobile 7 might not come until 2011 – which might as well be 3011.
*4th generation as in iteration of iPhone not 4G network
Virgin’s new plan to use Google Apps for email might have just hit a small snag for its Mac users. According to their new FAQ, .pages (iWork word processor) docs won’t be accepted as incoming email attachements, even when zipped. I’ve personally sent Pages docs through my enterprise Google mail so this must be a communication issue between Virgin and Google…unless there are .pages viruses we aren’t familiar with?
We hope it gets cleared up before too long. Anyone know someone at Virgin who can clarify this? Thanks Rob!