9to5 Staff

If you attempt to sign in to Google+, the search giant’s latest social thing (available now on your phone via Android Market, coming soon to iPhone as a native app), the system will cut you off if you are not over a certain age, putting up this warning (thanks, @admhawrth):

Could not sign you in to Google+. You must be over a certain age to use Google+.

By the way, what’s a certain age anyway and why don’t they make public the age limit? Because Google+ authorizes users with their Google Account, which is widely used across other Google properties, the system can tell your age by looking up the birth date information in your account.

Of course, kids can circumvent this by creating a brand new account and lying about their age, but the vast majority of ordinary users would prefer using Google+ with their real Google identity. The fun part? You cannot change the year of birth in your Google account. Also notice how the mobile Google+ site cleverly replicates standard iOS 5 dialogue box…

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As Apple’s iPad is picking up steam, so is the user base which in turn drives the increasing number of developers to write iPad-optimized apps. Today is a special day for Apple’s tablet which now counts more than a hundred thousand apps in the iPad App Store, MacStories points out.

In April of 2010 when the original iPad launched, there were only a few apps available. At the end of March the number of software items on the iPad App Store swelled to 75,000. In other words, 25,000 new iPad apps were added since then, averaging to about 280 new apps a day. Strange how Apple isn’t making a big deal out of this milestone since the wealth and the breadth of apps are probably the biggest differentiators with Android.

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Asian component suppliers say Apple has been increasing third-quarter orders for parts that go into its iPad 2 tablet. The company is seen shipping 12 million iPad 2 units in the third quarter, a substantial increase over an estimated 7-9 million units in the second quarter (we will know for sure July 19 when Apple will release earnings report) and especially compared to the 4.69 million iPad units shipped in the first quarter. DigiTimes reports:

In order to significantly increase its shipments in the third quarter, Apple has been piling up its inventory of iPad 2 components such as panels in the second quarter to minimize the risk of facing component shortages.

Apple’s increased appetite will benefit the most LG Display, Catcher Technology, TPK Holdings and Radiant Opto-Electronics Corporation, the report notes.

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First reviews of Hewlett-Packard’s webOS-driven TouchPad tablet are trickling in and they don’t bode well for the device, even though many reviewers concluded that the TouchPad is a fine first-generation tablet that will only get better over time, helped in no small part by HP’s backing and them actively seeking to license the webOS operating system to third-parties.

The TouchPad has the same 9.7-inch display with a 1024-by-768 pixel resolution as the iPad and the two sport nearly identical dimensions. HP’s slab, however, doesn’t match Apple’s device on thinness: Measuring 13.7mm in profile versus iPad’s 8.8mm, it is much closer to the original iPad. The TouchPad is also bulkier: Weighing in at 740 grams, it is heavier than the original iPad, let alone compared to iPad 2 (601 gram). Its glossy back made from black plastic akin to the iPhone 3GS is a magnet for smudges and fingerprints, the reviewers agree.

The TouchPad runs a Qualcomm Snapdragon dual-core 1.2GHz processor, it has 1GB of RAM and a front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera for video calls. HP matched Apple on pricing, too: The TouchPad costs $499/$599 for the 16GB/32GB version. HP is sweetening the deal for early adopters with a $50 mail-in rebate available for webOS smartphone owners who purchase the tablet before July 31 And now the bad news…

[vodpod id=Video.11989744&w=425&h=350&fv=]

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Alright, I know you’re tempted to hit the comments and argue how the vast majority of Apple users are the creative, fashion-conscious types anyway and that might just as well be true. But as a rule of thumb, when Porsche Design teams up with gadget makers the resulting toys and accessories carry a hefty premium. In the case of the new LaCie Porsche Design mobile and desktop drives, the Mac tax is bearable. You’re paying $110/$150 for the 1TB/2TB desktop drive or $110 for the half a terabyte mobile unit.

That isn’t so bad, but isn’t fab either – especially compared to the insanely low prices at 9to5Toys.com. The aesthetic appeal stems from the puristic design (obviously) while its solid aluminum frame will blend nicely with your new MacBook Air. Additional info, a promo clip and more eye-popping press shots right below.

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The iPhone 4 officially landed in the 1.2 billion people market of India on May 27, beginning at 34,500  Indian rupees (about $760) for the 16GB version after a two-year service agreement. But pricing the phone at $760 (which also raised red flags with the government) meant putting the iconic product out of reach for the 41.6 percent of the total population that lives below the international poverty line of $1.25 a day.

No wonder Android is a big hit in India. Not for long, if Apple has any say over it. According to a local report, Apple’s pulling out its secret weapon – the cheaper, unlocked iPhone 3GS which is now being advertised by local carriers Airtel and Aircel. It ain’t gonna be cheap either – certainly not by the living standards of the 41.6 percent of impoverished population – but the upper-middle class could take the bait:

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYg0VgPy6Uk]

Let’s step back for a moment from Final Cut Pro X woes and turn our attention a bit to the brighter side of film-making. Award-winning animation studio Pixar that brought you such hits as A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo and WALL-E is hard at work on their next big project called Brave. It’s going to be Pixar’s thirteenth cinema release, also filed as their first-ever project with a female lead, voiced by Kelly Macdonald.

They’ve put out a promising teaser, embedded above. The clip reveals a cool-looking fantasy setting filled with RPG-like creatures. The project features a red-headed female character named Merinda who apparently teams up with an old Witch to slay a bunch of beasts and set the kingdom free (or something). Count us excited! Go past the fold for the official movie poster and some interesting background info about Pixar…

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In the light of the ongoing criticism surrounding Final Cut Pro X, the latest iteration of Apple’s video editing software for professionals (so says Apple, disgruntled users says it’s a glorified “iMovie Pro”), MacRumors points at some interesting revelations by former Shake product designer Ron Brinkmann who was on the original Shake development team. When Apple acquired the company, they kept Brinkmann to work as the project’s product designer until the company silently phased out the famed video compositing software in 2007.

In a nutshell, Brinkmann says Apple doesn’t really care about the professional video editing market anymore, “not enough to focus on it as a primary business”. He says Final Cut Pro X fell victim of Apple’s focus on simplicity, ease of use and headline-grabbing features for the broader audience. As a result of that focus on consumers, he says, “if you’re really a professional you shouldn’t want to be reliant on software from a company like Apple.” He also describes a high-level meeting Steve Jobs held with top video pros from Hollywood:

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Following the Thunderbolt firmware update for Macs, Apple has published three new support documents pertaining to the new $49 Thunderbolt-to-Thunderbolt cable released Monday, using Thunderbolt with Boot Camp and Windows 7 and some tricks to get the best performance from Thunderbolt. Here’s what you need to know…

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Well, this is interesting… Google is advertising on its Google Labs page an experimental tool which aims to liberate web developers from the confines of Adobe’s Flash platform. They are calling it Swiffy (sweet) and its sole purpose is to convert Flash SWF files to HTML5. But make no mistake about it – this is about Apple’s iOS gadgets. Google itself says Swiffy lets you “reuse Flash content on devices without a Flash player (such as iPhones and iPads)”. Interesting Apple’s frenemy all of a sudden took it upon themselves to help port Flash content to Apple’s devices.

It’s a web-based tool and we’ve tried it on several relatively simple Flash animations, the ones usually seen running as annoying adverts on web sites. Surprisingly, Swiffy did quite a good job converting sample SWFs to HTML5, sans custom fonts that didn’t translate well into HTML5. Just don’t expect the latest Flash games and heavy project with lots of interactive features to translate smoothly or port at all.

Google itself is downplaying the importance of Swiffy, saying you shouldn’t expect miracles. “Swiffy currently supports a subset of SWF 8 and ActionScript 2.0, and the output works in all Webkit browsers such as Chrome and Mobile Safari,” the company noted.

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Nothing about the iPhone 4 sparked so much controversy like its stainless steel band running around the phone’s profile and doubling as wireless and cellular antennas. In spite of Antennagate, many people passed on the free bumper case program because some felt that keeping the iPhone 4’s iconic glass and aluminum design intact was the matter of design consciousness. Put simply, the stainless steel band was meant to be touched (no pun intended), seen and marveled at. How about taking it to the next level?

Folks at CaseMate came up with a sophisticated case which reframes your device with a cool titanium edge. The iPhone 4 Titanium case is sompatible with all iPhone 4 versions and machined from a single piece of titanium for a handcrafted look. It isolates the original stainless steel band from your fingers, so you might not experience a signal drop when touching that troubling gap. On the other hand, we cannot testify to the reception issues stemming from a possible interference with the phone’s antennas.

If none of that bothers you, the iPhone 4 Titanium case can be yours in exchange for a cool $300, which is the price of going outside of the norm for a cellphone case. It ships with a tool kit containing a mini-screw driver, screws and the buttons (volume up and down, power, mute) so minor assembly is required on your part.

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

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Some interesting observations from Asymco’s Horace Dediu who used data published by Deutsche Bank and the ITU to put into perspective the world’s pre-paid users who buy contract-free $700-$1000 handsets for use with pay-as-you-go plans against post-paid subscribers who get the latest and greatest devices subsidized for up to $200 provided they pledge to a lengthy 12-24 months wireless contract:

Roughly 1.5 billion are post-paid and 3.7 billion are pre-paid. That means that nearly 70% of the world is not being addressed by the iPhone as it currently stands. Put another way, a shift in positioning might result in a 250% increase in addressable market.

The regional breakdown tells a similar story (below). Apple will eventually fill 100 percent of key post-paid (blue areas) addressable markets through the virtue of the expansion of carrier agreements. For example, half the US and Canada area being finally filled in this year. What about pre-paid orange areas?

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The iPhone-Dev team dashed avid jailbreakers’ hopes with a morning post (via Ars) explaining that with iOS 5 Apple upped the ante in its cat-and-mouse game with the jailbreak community. According to the team, starting at iOS 5 and onward you will no longer be able to use iTunes to restore to previous firmware versions using saved SHSH blobs (created with tools such as Cydia or TinyUmbrella). Previously, jailbreakers always had peace of mind knowing they could revert back to a previous firmware should anything go wrong.

“Apple will be able to flip that switch off and on at will”, the team warns, adding that “tethered jailbreaks will still always be possible for devices where limera1n applies”. You will also be able to restore to pre-iOS 5.0 versions (with saved blobs) provided you carry out the procedure using an older iTunes version. This wasn’t entirely unexpected, the team wrote:

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Austin, Texas-based Aspyr Media has confirmed this morning that Duke Nukem Forever, a tongue-in-cheek first-person shooter franchise, will be making its way onto the Mac platform this summer. Expect a good measure of catchy one-liners, pig cops and huge bosses plus juicy visuals and signature weapons such as alien shrink rays, shotguns and grenades.

The game will be released via Steam for Mac and will support Steamworks features and Steam Play for cross-platform gameplay. Aspyr would only say that Duke will hit the Mac in August. You can pre-order your digital copy for $45, a $5 saving over the retail price of fifty bucks. Should you prefer a dead trees version, Aspyr will throw in free shipping as a bonus.

Preliminary system requirements include a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Mac with 2GB RAM and ATI Radeon 2600 or Nvidia GeForce 8600 graphics or better. Will you take the plunge, slay the alien scum and save the Earth and our babes from the hordes of invading aliens? Full release and a pair of screenies after the break.

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UK military has been using iPads to train soldiers since August 2010

PhysOrg.com is reporting (via Engadget) that Singapore will be equipping their armed forces and navy recruits with iPad 2s beginning November. Some eight thousand devices will be distributed to servicemen who will run custom apps on the tablet and upload footage and stills to their online education platform. An interesting observation:

Considering all able-bodied male citizens are required to serve for two years, a large portion of the city-state’s population could eventually be using the Apple tablet. 

Good way to improve recruitment. US Marine Corps aviators are also using iPads to obsolete paper charts and grid reference drawings with interactive multitouch interface and cutting-edge digital maps.

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And you thought iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 were code-names for exactly the same thing, a fifth-generation iPhone… Taking the rumor mill reporting to the next level, Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley is calling for a late September launch of the next-generation iPhone, with production kicking off in August. So far so good: The time-frame jibes with various tidbits we’ve been hearing from Asian component suppliers for some time.

But check this out: It’ll be two phones, speculates Deutsche Bank’s Chris Whitmore in a note to clients this morning. One will be a modest upgrade sold contract-free and unlocked at aggressive price points, the iPhone 4S, and the other is a substantial, superphone upgrade, presumably to be named the iPhone 5. Whitmores rationale:

With Nokia and RIMM struggling, the time is right for Apple to aggressively penetrate the mid range smart-phone market (i.e. $300-500 category) to dramatically expand its [total addressable market] and market share.

One problem: The $349 price point Whitmore mentioned for the iPhone 4S ain’t exactly what we’d call inexpensive, especially compared to the sub-$200 Android cheapos, like the $150 Huawei Ascend contract-free smartphone.

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For a variety of reasons, chief among them not being the news that some investors are giving up on the iconic smartphone maker, RIM has been losing share in the smartphone market and unable to fight off the immense competition from Apple and Google. And now we’re hearing that RIM developers are jumping ship over the same concerns we’ve heard before from the Android camp: Fragmentation. Only with RIM, it’s the mother of all fragmentations. Here’s an interesting quote from a Bloomberg story this morning by developer Purple Forge’s CEO Brian Hurley:

As soon as RIM brought in a touchscreen and mixed it with a thumbwheel, a keyboard and shortcut keys, it made it really difficult and expensive to develop across devices. What Apple scored big on is having a touch screen and a button and that’s it. In deploying Apple applications, there are very few surprises. In Android, there are increasingly more surprises. But in BlackBerry, there are immediately lots of gotchas across the board. When we put an application in the field, there was a 20- to-1 difference between Apple and BlackBerry downloads.

Anyone still think Apple needs to branch out the iPhone family into multiple phone models with different screen sizes, slide-out keyboards, screen resolutions and so forth?

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Apple last week bumped up its Time Capsule wireless backup appliance to 2TB and 3TB models, priced the same $299 and $499, respectively. In addition, Apple appears to be now using consumer public drives from Western Digital (bumped up from Hitachi Deskstar drives). That, plus the $499 price point puts the new 3TB Time Capsule pretty much out of reach on price-conscious buyers. In fact, you’re better off, as we explained, hooking up an external USB drive to your 1TB Time Capsule.

But if you hate the clutter and yearn for a sealed, elegant solution with only one plug, you needn’t pony up $200 extra for a 3TB Time Capsule: It would seem that the wireless gizmo accepts 3TB internal drives, if properly partitioned. According to a HardMac reader:

I personally installed a 3 TB WD Caviar Green 3To (by chance!), when it came out 5 months ago, in a 1 TB Time Capsule that I bought around that time as well. I formatted it with Airport Utility to have the 3 partitions that are necessary for Time Machine and it was immediately recognized as a 3 TB disk. I’ve been using it ever since without any problem.

One caveat…

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z3SRLwSZfA]

If you loved the i3D app which tracks your eye movement through the iPad 2’s front camera to create an illusion of a glasses-free 3D display, here’s another entertainment entry that you’d want to show off to your friends. It attempts to make your tablet’s display “invisible” by employing some back-camera wizardry in conjunction with accelerometer and gyroscope data.

In a nutshell, the program tracks the movement of your iPad and updates the display accordingly in order to keep the background image aligned as if the display were transparent. Plus, you can load up your own image and turn it into an endless Kaleidoscope-like browsable surface. The program also responds to perspective tilt and throws realistic shadows for some added wow. Developer Levity Novelty conveniently calls it Invisibility. You like? It’s a 99 cent download from the App Store. Two more clips right below…

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRzLP0FJ82I]

You can tell that Apple has either a smash hit or a huge debacle on its hands when a product becomes a punchline on late night TV. Conan O’ Brien lampoons Final Cut Pro X which got released Tuesday, immediately sparking criticism for its overhauled interface, the inability to import old projects (except for iMovie), removal of some features and what not.

Apparently it’s so different from the last version of Final Cut that video and film editor all over Hollywood have a very hard time adjusting to it.

He then proceeds showing off a video statement by his video editors “voicing their support” for the software. (Team Coco)

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Research firm comScore is out with a new survey that pegs iPad’s share of all tablet traffic in the US at a whopping 97 percent and 89 percent across all markets. The comprehensive research measured digital traffic from all devices across key territories worldwide. Silicon Alley Insider drilled through the numbers, creating an easily digestible chart, seen above, focused on just the tablet traffic.

While iPad numbers seem too high, remember that Apple so far sold 25 million units while competitors are just getting started. For example, Samsung only recently began selling its patent-infringing (so says Apple) Galaxy Tab 10.1 last Friday in the United States and it won’t arrive in the UK before August. Key takeaway: Apple’s tablet traffic is 95 percent or higher in twelve of the thirteen countries. Either the buying public is picking up iPads left and right or iPad users surf the web more often than other tablet owners.

In Japan and UK, for example, the iPad accounted for 100 percent and 99 percent of all tablet traffic, respectively. When the scope is expanded from just tablets to all non-computer devices (mobile phones, tablets, music players, e-readers, gaming devices and other web-enabled devices), iPad’s share drops, says comScore:

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