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More iPad Retina images found in iTunes U, iBooks 2 files

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iTunes U (Click to enlarge):

iBooks 2:

Thanks @sonnydickson for the images 

We have been finding references to 2X iPad images for well over a year (including iBooks 1.2), but with the next iPad expected soon, these images found in the iBooks 2 file have some importance:

We’re still expecting a 2X Retina iPad in the coming months.

Thanks Brenden!
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Here’s the heartwarming clip played at Apple’s education event in NYC

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJxZG2Nv4KA&feature=channel_video_title]

With Apple’s education event now behind us, there is a lot to digest here. In addition, today has brought us three interesting software releases: “iBooks 2” and “iTunes U” apps for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, and the “iBooks Author” program for the Mac. If you missed our live coverage and have been wondering why all the fuss, a clip Apple played at the presser should get you up to speed.

Available for viewing  by clicking on the above image, the video sports both teachers and students who rave about the mess that is the United States education system and how Apple is arriving to the rescue. As always, the video is heartwarming and it is well worth the 7 minutes and 22 seconds of your time. You may also want to check out this resource on Apple’s website dedicated to iBooks Textbooks for iPad that contains many video tours.


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Apple launches iTunes U, free iOS app for educators to take courses anywhere

[slideshow]

Apple’s education event is underway at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum, where Eddy Cue, the company’s vice president of Internet Software and Services, told the audience how Apple is “going to help teachers reinvent the curriculum.” Noting that Apple has seen 700 million downloads from iTunes U, Cue took the wraps off a brand new free software for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. Aptly named iTunes U, the app makes it “simple for anyone to take courses anywhere.”

Indeed, adorned with the beautiful mahogany bookshelf graphics, the app is akin to iBooks in many respects. It is aimed at teachers and supports many interesting features, including the ability to customize topics, provide students with office hours, post messages to the class and give assignments. With this app, content can be downloaded for later consumption or streamed directly to students on-demand. More information is available after the break and at Apple’s freshly updated web site.


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Apple announces iBooks Author, a free Mac app for authoring interactive e-books

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Apple’s education event is underway at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum where the company announced the “iBooks 2″ app, a major new version designed to help integrate the iPad into school curriculum. That was Apple’s first highlight of the event — reinventing textbooks. We have been given some interesting metrics, and now Schiller unveiled “iBooks Author.” It is a new (and free!) Mac app for authoring e-books.

“Authors are going to love to use iBooks Create to create not only textbooks, but any kind of book,” said Schiller. Roger Rosner, Apple’s vice president of Productivity Software and iWork took the stage to give an interesting demonstration. Upon choosing one of the templates that ship with the program, users can begin adding their own photos, movies, text and multi-touch widgets in a fashion similar to the Pages program.

The iBooks Author reflows text dynamically, WYSIWYG-style, as you drag page elements around. It also supports Microsoft Word format, and the app is clever enough to automatically create sections and headers and lay out the pages automatically when you drop a Word document onto the chapter. Additional tidbits are available after the break.

[slideshow]

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iPad already has 20,000 education and learning apps, says Apple

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Image courtesy of AllThingsD

Apple’s education event is underway at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum, where Phil Schiller, the company’s vice president of worldwide marketing, provided an update on key metrics related to Apple’s education business. Remarking that the United States “is not at the top of industrialized nations,” Schiller said: “If you’re a freshman, you only have a 70 percent chance of graduating.”

After playing a video that outlined the problem with U.S. education today, Schiller said “no one person or company” could fix it all. Apple, of course, will try. The basis for such an ambitious undertaking, of course, is the iPad, which Schiller said was No. 1 on kids wish lists this holiday season. The goal is to help integrate the iPad into the curriculum.

However, the iPad is already strong in education. Here are some interesting metrics:


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Lengthy excerpt from ‘Inside Apple’ offers fascinating insight into secrecy at Apple

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Fortune just published a long, fascinating excerpt from an upcoming book about Apple called “Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired and Secretive Company Really Works by author Adam Lashinsky, Fortune’s senior editor-at-large. It reveals how far the company is willing to go to ensure its secretive culture. It also tells a tale of Apple’s organizational structure and what makes them tick. Interestingly, Lashinsky writes that Apple’s design guru Jonathan Ive is among the “untouchables,” corroborating claims laid out in the official Jobs biography book by Walter Isaacson. Apple’s late CEO told his biographer that he made sure nobody can touch his “spiritual partner” Ive at Apple. “That’s the way I set it up,” he told Isaacson. Speaking of Apple’s famous culture of secrecy and lack of corporate transparency (at Apple, everything is a secret!), Lashinsky writes it takes two basic forms —external and internal. Needles to say, many employees can hardly stomach security policies focused on preserving internal secrets:

Apple employees know something big is afoot when the carpenters appear in their office building. New walls are quickly erected. Doors are added and new security protocols put into place. Windows that once were transparent are now frosted. Other rooms have no windows at all. They are called lockdown rooms: No information goes in or out without a reason.

As you could imagine, this is “disconcerting” for employees. Organization charts are nowhere to be seen at Apple. There are no open doors as folks use badges to access areas that sometimes even their boss cannot. Only few people at Apple are allowed into Jonathan Ive’s industrial design bunker. People working on hot projects are required to sign “extra-special agreements acknowledging that you were working on a super-secret project and you wouldn’t talk about it to anyone – not your wife, not your kids.” Even former employees do not talk to press and some were reprimanded for talking too much. Apple goes to great lengths to prevent secrets from leaking and maintain discipline culminates with carefully orchestrated media events akin to a blockbuster Hollywood movie-opening weekend.

People working on launch events will be given watermarked paper copies of a booklet called Rules of the Road that details every milestone leading up to launch day. In the booklet is a legal statement whose message is clear: If this copy ends up in the wrong hands, the responsible party will be fired.


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Apple releases OS X Lion 10.7.3 build 11D46 with no known issues ahead of public release

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Apple seeded its registered developers last night with a new version of Mac OS X Lion 10.7.3. The software carries a build number of 11D46 and arrives just a week following the 11D42 build. It has no known issues, indicating that public release is around the corner. Developers are asked to focus on iCloud Document Storage, Address Book, iCal, Mail, Spotlight and Safari. The Delta update weighs in at 996.98MB and combo update is a 1.26GB download. The OS X Lion Server 10.7.3 build 11D46 is also available for download (Delta:1GB, Combo: 1.34GB, Server Admin Tools: 202.59MB). Additional build notes after the break.


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Nielsen: Apple chasing Android in the US as iPhone 4S had ‘enormous impact’ on recent acquirers in December

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Smartphone duopoly, anyone? Source: Nielsen

There is no shortage of surveys proving that Apple’s smartphone market share has benefited from strong iPhone 4S reception thus far. A new report published this morning by reputable research firm Nielsen is another indication of Apple halting Android’s seemingly unstoppable rise as a growing number of United States consumers pick iPhones over other smartphones. Based on a poll of recent acquirers —among those who said they got a new device within the past three months— Nielsen found out that 44.5-percent chose an iPhone while 46.9-percent picked an Android phone. Contrast these figures to just 25.1-percent for Apple in October and 61.1-percent for Android.

Furthermore, 57 percent of new iPhone owners surveyed in December said they got an iPhone 4S. […] The high-profile launch of Apple’s iPhone 4S in the Fall had an enormous impact on the proportion of smartphone owners who chose an Apple iPhone.

Therefore, while fewer people bought an Android device in December compared to a month earlier, Apple substantially increased its share among recent smartphone acquirers. These findings are understandable given that iPhone 4S was announced on Oct. 4, 2011 and it became available 10 days later, selling 4 million units during the launch weekend. Pent-up demand and wider price gamut certainly did help boost domestic iPhone sales as did the fact that Sprint and local carriers Claro Puerto Rico and C Spire Wireless finally landed the device.


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Too little, too late: Google launches Orkut for iPhone

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Orkut, a Google-owned social network, has had little luck challenging MySpace, hi5, Tagged or Facebook —the undisputed social networking leader (some people even liken Orkut to a poor man’s Facebook). Nevertheless, Orkut is still popular in India and Brazil, where more than 80 percent of its 66 million active users come from, as of October 2011. Today, the search company released a native Orkut client for iPhone. It is available free of charge on the App Store and comes with the usual assortment of features, ranging from updating your status and checking your scraps and messages to browsing your friends’ profiles and uploading photographs. It is interesting that Google chose to release the app just as Facebook has finally managed to beat Orkut in Brazil, per latest comScore metrics.


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Apple resolves recent issue with faulty code signing certificates

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Apple issued an email notice to developers today, informing them it has been able to resolve an issue with faulty code signing certificates. The company’s update on developer certificates reads as follows (hat tip to our reader Jan!):

We have identified and resolved a recent issue with certificates for iOS and Mac code signing, Apple Push Notifications and Safari Extensions. If you have experienced any problems with a certificate issued over the past 4 days, simply re-generate a new one.


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Foxconn issues go mainstream thanks to This American Life and The Daily Show

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Earlier this week, Apple pledged to let the Fair Labor Association access its suppliers’ facilities to monitor working conditions. Even though Apple is the first technology company admitted to the FLA, the snowballing issue of harsh conditions at Far East plants will not go away with the announcement. Quite the contrary, the problem has escalated and gone mainstream, with both The Daily Show and This American Life focusing on the grim reality of earning a living at Foxconn-operated sweatshops in China.

Jon Stewart, The Daily Show host and chief satirist, remarked in an episode yesterday:

By creating a convenient ecosystem, China’s Foxconn draws in employees who earn 31 cents an hour working for 35 hours straight, thereby saving American companies money.

As you know, Foxconn (also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry) is Apple’s favorite contract manufacturer, it but also produces gadgets for Amazon, Microsoft, HP, Dell and a variety of other brands. With that said, both shows tackle larger issues that affect just about every electronics manufacturer. The last week’s episode of This American Life, the popular radio program, weighed in as well. You can listen to their free audio stream here.


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AT&T throttling is a death sentence (UPDATED with AT&T statement)

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW5aEQzTcW0]

UPDATE [Tuesday, January 17. 2012 at 2:29pm ET]: An AT&T spokesperson chimed in with a comment noting that “throttling only applies to top users with grandfathered unlimited plans”. The full quote is included at the article bottom.

AT&T and other major carriers in the United States recently instituted data throttling and began limiting network speeds for the top 5 percent of data-hungry users. Carriers around the world tend to hide data throttling in fine print, so users are in for a surprise when they find out that their unlimited plan entails data throttling once a carrier-imposed ceiling is reached (usually 1GB per month). Throttling is not something worth losing sleep over until it hits you. For starters, throttling reduces your downlink speed by a factor of 10 or more. Depending on your carrier’s network, this means your throttled downlink will drop all the way down to a paltry 0.1MBps. What you might not have known is how badly throttling affects the user experience on your device…

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OWC gives Mac Pro users the first PCI Express SSD option

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The easiest way to upgrade your Mac Pro’s everyday performance is to replace its slow internal hard drive units with pricier and much speedier solid-state storage (SSD), as it typically provides many times faster access times compared to HDDs and way greater sustained transfer rates. The problem is, you can only put flash storage inside the Pro’s hard drive bays that connect to the SATA interface.

Unfortunately, your super-fast SSD is limited to transfer rates of the Mac Pro’s SATA controller.

Enter OWC’s upcoming PCI Express-based SSD solution for Mac Pros, due for release “in the very near future.” Why does it matter? Well, for starters, it is a dream come true for the Hackintosh community. However, there is more to it than meets the eye…


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Adam Lashinsky’s look ‘Inside Apple’ profiles iOS head Scott Forstall as Apple’s ‘CEO-in-waiting’

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Fortune Senior Editor-at-large Adam Lashinsky’s upcoming book about Apple’s inner workings titled Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired and Secretive Company Really Works” is bound to become controversial. Unlike Steve Jobs’ authorized biographer Walter Isaacson, Lashinsky did not have direct access to Apple’s leadership team, employees nor did he have Jobs’ cooperation. Nevertheless, the author has deep connections so his book draws from this expertise, focusing on Apple’s former CEO Steve Jobs, current CEO Tim Cook, design chief Jonathan Ive and head of iOS software Scott Forstall (pictured on the right). The young executive (43) has managed to accumulate power, and he now wields tremendous influence at Apple due to his iOS division contributing to as much as 70 percent of Apple’s total revenues. As such, Forstall is seen as Apple’s next CEO once Tim Cook steps down, which probably will not happen until 2021 if he is to vest his 1 million stock shares awarded last August. Here is how one source described Forstall in Lashinsky’s upcoming book, according to Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt:

He’s a sharp, down-to-earth, and talented engineer, and a more-than-decent presenter. He’s the total package.

Lashinsky conceded and explained:


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IDG: 91% of business pros use iPad to get things done as workers ditch notebooks

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Source: IDG

Research firm IDG on Monday published a new survey called “iPad for Business 2012,” showing that the iPad is anything but a fad as far as big business is concerned. The global survey, available as a downloadable PDF document, noted that 91 percent of businesses that deployed iPads are using the device primarily for work, even if only approximately a quarter of issued devices were supplied as a corporate tool. Consumers and pros alike both use the device for media consumption, which in the case of the latter is predominantly text-based and work-related.

IT and business professionals certainly use their iPads at home. But unlike most consumers, they also use their devices in a similarly intensive way at work. In a further, decisive, break with consumer usage patterns, IT and business professionals use their devices on the road far more frequently than anywhere else.

Some 79 percent of IT professionals “always” use the iPads on the move and 59 percent “always” or “sometimes” use the device in offline mode. Road use usually entails planes, trains, automobiles, hotel lobbies, coffee shops, conference halls and meeting rooms, IDG noted, even though only 40 percent of iPads sold incorporate 3G connectivity.

More than three-quarters of polled workers use the iPads to browse the web, and 76 percent of pros said they “always” use iPads to read content. Meanwhile, 73 percent opted for news consumption and more than half— or 54 percent— use it for work communication. Some 79 percent tap into the iPad on the move and 54 percent use it at home. Social media, personal communication and entertainment follow with 44 percent, 42 percent and 31 percent, respectively.

Corporate iPads rarely supplant notebooks, though:


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Hackers demo untethered iPhone 4S jailbreak as release looms

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDBHXbwgdc4]

Hacker Pod2g posted an interesting video this morning on his blog that shows a working untethered jailbreak performed on the iPhone 4S with iOS 5.0.1. It runs without a hiccup and the device easily reboots after the jailbreak without needing to tether it to a computer. The video is credited to Dustin Howett, a Chronic Dev Team member.

According to Pod2g, with “only a few to wait now,” an untethered jailbreak for iPhone 4S and iPad 2 is around the corner. The video demonstration follows a flurry of Twitter activity last week that indicated that jailbreak community is now close to releasing a jailbreak solution for A5-driven iOS devices running iOS 5.0.1. Note that an untethered jailbreak for non-A5 devices running iOS 5.0.1 has been available since the end of 2011.


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Apple to blow past HP and become top personal computer vendor on strong holiday sales of Macs, iPhones and iPads

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Counting tablet PCs as personal computers, Apple is about to overtake Hewlett-Packard and become the world’s top personal computer vendor. All should be known soon when Apple reveals holiday quarter earnings in a conference call with analysts scheduled for Tuesday, Jan. 24.

HP CEO Meg Whitman was first to admit that such a turn of event neither would nor be entirely unsurprising given Apple’s lead in the post-PC world. Whitman said back in November, “It’s possible if you integrate tablets.” Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt wrote that, based on a poll of 42 analysts, iPad sales could hit the 14 million mark, a notable increase over the 11.12 million iPads sold during the September quarter.

Fortune’s estimates range from 11.7 million (Hendi Susanto of Gabelli & Co) to 19.47 million iPads (Alexis Cabot of the Apple Finance Board). According to research firm Gartner, HP shipped 14.7 million PCs in the last quarter, down 16 percent from a year ago.

Now, Apple in this last quarter cleared 4.89 million Macs, and its holiday sales are estimated to exceed 5 million units. Combined, iPad and Mac will have sold over 20 million units during the holiday quarter, enough to give the Cupertino, Calif.-based technology powerhouse a few million units lead over HP, the world’s leading computer vendor.

Estimated unit sales translate into a 17.6-percent market share for Apple versus 13 percent for HP, representing a landmark achievement by any measure. Again, that’s assuming tablets are counted as personal computers. As noted by Asymco’s Horace Dediu, Apple has never held the top spot. Its Apple II system peaked at 15.8 -percent share in 1984 and the Mac peaked at 12 percent in 1992. Interesting that Lenovo CEO praised Apple last week, saying about Android on tablets that “We still need to learn something, we still need to improve something”.


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The Woz on Siri, iPhone 4S battery life and Android beating iOS on navigation and voice commands (UPDATED)

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UPDATE [Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 7:35am ET]: Steve Wozniak commented on the original article on Facebook, saying he’s been misinterpreted (again). His full comment can be found at the bottom of this article.

Journalist Dan Lyons (aka Fake Steve Jobs) filed a report with The Daily Beast on Saturday that highlights Steve Wozniak’s thoughts on the iPhone 4S’s widely reported battery woes (that did not go away with iOS 5.1 Beta 3):

With the iPhone, something happened with the new OS or the new phone, and it just started running through the battery so fast. I’ve had a lot of issues with things I have to turn off just to save the battery life.

Wozniak, 61, who cofounded Apple with Jobs in 1976, also has gripes with Siri. The engineer thinks Siri is cool, but at times impractical compared to Android’s voice action. This is mostly due to Siri’s architectural reliance on network connectivity that is required to complete functions.

I have a lower success rate with Siri than I do with the voice built into the Android, and that bothers me. I’ll be saying, over and over again in my car, ‘Call the Lark Creek Steak House,’ and I can’t get it done. Then I pick up my Android, say the same thing, and it’s done. […] On the 4S I can only do that when Siri can connect over the Internet. But many times it can’t connect. I’ve never had Android come back and say, ‘I can’t connect over the Internet. […] Plus I get navigation. Android is way ahead on that.

Apple is thought to be creating its own navigation and mapping solution stemming from the company’s three mapping-related acquisitions: C3 Technologies, Poly9 in 2010, and Placebase. Wozniak is also good friends with Andy Rubin who heads the Android project and one said, “There’s more available [on Android] in some ways.”

Although Apple did not detail Siri, its voice recognition and artificial intelligence systems run on Apple’s servers rather than the phone itself. Siri may also infringe old Excite patents, said to be changing hands soon as a valuable asset in order to compete with Siri. In case you are wondering, the iPhone remains Wozniak’s primary phone. He loves “the beauty of it,” and he is first to recommend it to friends. However, Wozniak sometimes wants the iPhone to do “all the things my Android does.”


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No more iPhones in Beijing and Shanghai ‘for the time being’, Apple warns as analysts criticize China launch delays

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Yesterday’s eagerly awaited iPhone 4S launch in China quickly turned into chaos as an ugly brawl between gangs of professional scalpers grew out of control. Beijing SWAT teams intervened to calm down hundreds of angry customers and tame the rowdy lines. The New York Times explained that scalpers hired migrant workers to stand in the line and buy the phone. As Apple said it would not open the store, those individuals, identifiable by matching armbands or hats, got angry because they were not going to be paid.

An Apple spokeswoman issued the  following statement following the incident (via Reuters):

Unfortunately, we were unable to open our store at Sanlitun due to the large crowd. And to ensure the safety of our customers and our employees, iPhones will not be available in our retails stores in Beijing and Shanghai for the time being.

Instead, Apple noted, customers could order the iPhone 4S on the online Apple store or through one of the many China Unicom retail outlets, the country’s exclusive iPhone carrier. However, the iconic smartphone was out of stock on the Chinese online Apple Store at the time of this writing.

As you know, Apple rarely goes on the record unless absolutely necessary, so the statement is an indication of how the launch spiraled out of control. Moreover, the egg-throwing incident inspired funny remarks on Twitter. Really, who goes to buy a new iPhone with a pocket full of eggs? Let’s just hope this situation won’t snowball into a public relations nightmare and become a theme for another anti-Apple advert by Samsung.

In the meantime, one analyst pointed out that Apple must learn from this turmoil and consider launching its products in China and United States simultaneously. Another incredible riot clip, egg throwing video and additional tidbits are displayed after the break.

[vodpod id=Video.15951524&w=425&h=350&fv=]

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Sculley: If anyone is going to change television, it’s going to be Apple (Murdoch agrees, too)

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Photo courtesy of BBC

John Sculley, former vice-president and president of PepsiCo and CEO of Apple between 1983 and 1993, is adamant that Apple —not incumbents such as Samsung— is poised to change the first principles of the television experience. Sculley also confessed in an interview with BBC that has not read Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Apple’s late cofounder and CEO. Nevertheless, the executive turned investor underscored Apple’s history of past industry disruptions while opining that the television industry is about to experience Apple’s magic touch:

I think that Apple has revolutionized every other consumer industry, why not television? I think that televisions are unnecessarily complex. The irony is that as the pictures get better and the choice of content gets broader, that the complexity of the experience of using the television gets more and more complicated. So it seems exactly the sort of problem that if anyone is going to change the experience of what the first principles are, it is going to be Apple.

Sculely, 72, is a Silicon Valley investor nowadays, and dispelled some “myths” about his tense relationship with Apple’s cofounder. He said he did not fire Jobs, insisting they had “a terrific relationship when things were going well.” Heck, even Rupert Murdoch is commenting about Apple television, writing on Twitter this morning: “All talk is about coming Apple TV. Plenty of apprehension, no firm facts but eyes on their enormous cash pile”.


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OnLive Desktop hits App Store, letting you stream Microsoft Office onto iPad

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[slideshow]

All the talk about Microsoft bringing its Office suite to the iPad has thus far failed to develop into a tangible product—at least as native apps. In the meantime, many virtualization apps cropped up on the App Store, allowing you to share a desktop virtual machine with your tablet. OnLive today jumped on the bandwagon with an interesting cloud-based solution stemming from their expertise as a provider of streaming gaming experience through their OnLive cloud gaming platform.

The OnLive Desktop app provides access to a seamless Windows desktop experience sporting Microsoft Office applications and 2GB of free cloud storage. It leverages OnLive’s video compression technology to run the Office suite in the cloud and stream rendered video onto your iPad. This is the same technology used by OnLive’s cloud-gaming platform, meaning your experience may wary depending on your broadband Internet speed, congestion and other factors affecting video streaming.

OnLive Desktop for iPad is a free download from the App Store. You will need a free account with OnLive to use the program. Both free and paid plans are available, offering up 50GB of storage, more apps, and priority access and collaboration features for businesses…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jdzmBCH24_Q]


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Samsung: Apple Television is old news. Smart TV is the future and already here

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsMeo_7wBSs]

When Steve Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson that he finally “cracked the code” to building an integrated television set that is user-friendly and seamlessly syncs with all of your devices, Samsung Australia’s Director of Audiovisual Philip Newton told the Sydney Morning Herald that Jobs’ was talking about connectivity.

He laughed off the mythical iTV and dissed Jobs’ TV brain wave as “nothing new,” saying the future is now and it is his company’s Smart TVs:

When Steve Jobs talked about he’s ‘cracked it’, he’s talking about connectivity – so we’ve had that in the market already for 12 months, it’s nothing new, it was new for them because they didn’t play in the space. It’s old news as far as the traditional players are concerned and we have broadened that with things like voice control and touch control; the remote control for these TVs has a touch pad.

Samsung is promoting Smart TVs left and right at the CES show that is underway this week in Las Vegas. The company is showing off apps and games such as Angry Birds running smoothly on Smart TVs. Feature-wise, Samsung Smart TVs are beating Google TVs to the punch with capabilities such as voice interaction, facial recognition, integrated camera controls for multi-video conferencing and multitasking.

Sony, Panasonic and LG are also pushing integrated television sets built around the Smart TV platform. While not officially an exhibitor, Apple reportedly dispatched 250 employees to attend the show and monitor what competition is doing; among them is the head of iOS product marketing Greg Joswiak. Apple has been rumored for months to launch 32- and 37-inch television sets in the summer of 2012. Does Samsung see Apple as a threat?


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Target says it will launch upscale Apple shops in 25 of its discount stores

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Retailer Target will soon start offering Apple products in select discount stores that carry everything from dog food to electronics.

Reuters reported that Minnesota-headquartered retailer Target confirmed plans to dedicate a special section to Apple products within 25 of its discount stores across the United States:

Target also confirmed during a presentation on Thursday that it will have 25 stores featuring special displays of Apple Inc (AAPL.O) merchandise, a move that had been speculated about last week.

The move is part of a broad initiative to provide upscale shopping experience for high-end brands. Select Target stores have been carrying iPhones, iPods and iPads and selling accessories for a while now, but not Mac systems. By promoting in boutiques stores-within-a-store, Apple’s mobile and desktop products should be able to stand out from the rest of Target’s low-end offerings. Thus far, Apple ministores could be found at select Best Buy stores.

As you know, both the Target Corporation and Apple drew from the expertise of a merchandising wizard who made beautiful design a natural part of the shopping experience…


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iPad App of the Year Snapseed lands on the Mac App Store

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Snapseed for iOS is among the indispensable image editing apps for avid photographers on the go. With a vast selection of professional-grade filters and cool effects, its attractive user interface and editing tools such as Grunge, Vintage and Drama, no wonder Apple named Snapseed the iPad App of the Year 2011 in its annual iTunes Rewind 2011 selection.

The Mac version brings all these features and more on your desktop, featuring tools such as Auto Correct and Selective Adjust for precise editing. You can quickly touch up photographs in low-light conditions and adjust the white balance, saturation and contrast, add various image borders, crop, straighten and rotate your images, apply a bunch of filters and special effects and share your work on Facebook and Flickr.

If you enjoyed FX Photo Studio Pro for Mac (review), this one is a must-have. Snapseed is a $20 download from the Mac App Store. The program supports both Mac OS 10.6.8 and 10.7.2. Nik Software, the company behind Snapseed, also announced it will “soon” port the program to Tegra-powered Android tablets running Ice Cream Sandwich. Surprisingly enough, Nik Software plans to price Snapseed for Android at just $5. The full press release notes are available after the break:

[slideshow]

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