FaceTime

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My new iPad came to my door while I was filming the long lines at New York’s Grand Central and 5th Avenue stores yesterday. I got home around 2 p.m., and I have since played with it almost non-stop. Here are my first impressions:

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Love this LTE iPad screengrab from The Verge. It really just says it all.

Sure, there might be some latency issues with LTE over Wi-Fi, but —come on—throw us a bone. We had a fine time using FaceTime over 3G almost two years ago. Something tells us Apple is not to blame.

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The 13-inch MacBook Air of today

Had Apple’s “next-generation of notebooks” announcement in October 2010 played out as planned, the MacBook family of today would look very different. In October 2010, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs took the stage at the Apple Cupertino campus to unveil a preview of OS X Lion, FaceTime for Mac, iLife ’11 and the latest MacBook Air design as the closing “one more thing” announcement. That MacBook Air brought with it an all-new and thinner form-factor, a higher-resolution display, an incredibly light body, a large Multi-Touch single-button trackpad, flash SSD storage, and battery life improvements. 

Those aforementioned features, according to Apple, are what constitute the future of notebooks. This notebook announcement not only brought the successor to the previously available 13-inch MacBook Air, but brought along with it an 11-inch MacBook Air for the first time.

But these new notebooks weren’t the only planned pieces of the late 2010 MacBook Air story, though. Reliable sources have told us that not only were 13 and 11-inch models planned, but a groudbreaking new 15 inch MacBook Air was scheduled for a late 2010 release. Read on to learn about what could have been: 

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/?v=V6p5mbp_M98]

I don’t know about you, but this is one freakily awesome Halloween costume. If you have a pair of iPad 2s lying around, you could put them to work and create an illusion of a huge hole in your torso. How? Dead simple, says one Mark Rober, a NASA employee. Just strap one iPad to your front and the other to your back and start a FaceTime chat between them.

The front iPad will display live video feed recorded by the back camera of the device strapped to your back and vice versa. The effect is totally believable, as if someone shot a hole through your body. Spray a little red paint around cutouts in your T-shirt and paint some gruesome flesh parts and you could easily become the star of this year’s Halloween amongst your geek friends.

via Gizmodo

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AllThingsD, which seems to have a bead on Apple’s Fall Event, says the event will be held on Apple’s campus.

Sources close to the company say the demonstration — currently scheduled for Tuesday October 4 — will be held at Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California. Why? That’s not entirely clear. Perhaps the release date was too much of a moving target to risk booking a large space like Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), which has hosted a number of big product unveils in the past.

OracleWorld is happening in the Moscone/Yerba Buena area during the October 4th announcement so that could be a reason for the move. Though Yerba Buena, the usual venue for such announcements, isn’t marked as booked.

Also, Apple has much more control over the wireless access at its campus auditorium, something that had caused some issues during the iPhone 4 announcement. With all of the wireless devices in the audience, Steve Jobs had trouble demonstrating things like FaceTime and the improved speed of the iPhone 4.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xkfp2HNIEBM]

(Concept video via MacStories)

Could Apple have plans to integrate iMessage, the new all-in-one messaging app in iOS 5, into OS Lion’s iChat, an app that is indeed in need of desperate attention? Perhaps.

The evidence comes from a developer who provided the following hints found in iChat’s framework in Lion. Of course it is only speculation at this point, but MacRumors guesses these elements have been added to provide cross-platform support for the iMessage protocol in iChat.

MacRumors reports:

Buried in the framework of OS X Lion’s iChat, are two new properties – The “timeDelivered” and “timeRead’ fields that indicate the tracking of delivery and read receipts for instant messages. These features, however, are not supported in any of iChat’s native messaging protocols, while the same features are offered in Apple’s iMessage protocol. These properties were also not present in previous versions of iChat prior to OS X Lion.

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Want that face on your big screen? No problem! Just Facetime with Rene Ritchie over at TiPb.  You see, the latest build of iOS 5 Beta 3 has support for Airplay.

With all of the new trickery in the AppleTV 5.0 software, it wouldn’t surprise us to see a family-like FacetimeHD option for the current AppleTV or even a new 1080P version.

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Standouts from 9to5toys.com  (Twitter, Feed) today:

1.  InCase 900mAh iPhone 4 battery case (pictured) $29.95 plus FREE SHIPPING using this promo code – “dealnewssnapbatt05”
2. Ringke Case for 4th-Gen iPod touch for $10 + free shipping
3. rooCASE TPU Skin Wave Case for AT&T iPhone 4, more for $4 + free shipping
4. Maxell FireWire / USB Universal iPod Charging Dock for $7 + $5 s&h
5. Leather Case w/ Bluetooth Keyboard for Apple iPad 2, $2 credit for $40 + $6 s&h
6. Lenovo P950 Headset w/ Noise Canceling Mic for $10 + free shipping
7. Executive Capacitive Stylus / Ballpoint Pen for $9 + $3 s&h, more
8. Kensington BlackBelt Protective Band for iPad for $11 + free shipping
9. SquareTrade 2-Year iPad 2 Warranty for $70, more
10. Perhaps the best:  $2 of free music using this link and code CLOUDMP3 at Amazon

A BGR Source has the 4.3.2 update and it appears to fix those Verizon iPad 2 issues that have 3G connections freezing. The update…

will fix the issues we’ve been hearing about with some Verizon iPad 2 models. Additionally, the new update is said to contain a fix for FaceTime in addition to security fixes for things like WebKit vulnerabilities and other minor changes.

It isn’t certain yet if this update is for Verizon iPhone 4s but that’s a bit …due as well.
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3G and GPS are supposedly the only notable differences between WiFi and 3G models of iPad 2. Alas, the WiFi model records higher-quality audio than its 3G counterpart. Mind you, it’s a design deficiency rather than a feature. iLounge did some testing and discovered that WiFi units evidently record better-sounding audio.

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With iPad 2 now in the picture (no pun intended), exhaustive camera benchmarks from numerous publications paint a pretty bleak picture for Apple’s magical device. Like it or not, iPad 2 cameras mostly earn lower scores when pitted against Motorola’s Xoom, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and even Apple’s own iPod touch. The empirical testing backed by real-life footage proves what we’ve been suspecting all along, that iPad 2 takes substandard stills and grainier video than most tablets.

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That’s the conclusion from Forrester Research in their latest research which predicts US tablet sales will double this year.

They now anticipate tablet sales last year of (a deeply conservative) 10.3 million units, thanks to stronger than expected iPad sales. And they think iPad will take the ‘lion’s share’ of a market they expect will double in size (to 24.1 million units) this year, despite all those new CES-introduced ‘competitors’.
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Skype just updated their Skype application for iOS to include video chat functionality. It works both over WiFi and 3G networks and two-way video calling is supported by the iPhone 4, iPod touch 4, and iPhone 3GS. The iPad and third generation iPod touch support one-way video calling. Just like on Apple’s FaceTime application Skype for iPhone will video conference in both portrait and landscape orientations.

Seth and I just tested out the application and it looks very smooth on both ends. It even works in the background but your face gets frozen for the person on the other end (audio still works). Just like with FaceTime there is an option for the iPhone user to display either the front camera’s view, back camera’s or no camera. We have more screenshots of Skype video chat after the break.

We also ran some tests over 3G and it looked very smooth. I was on 3G and Seth was on WiFi and he saw me as crisp as I looked over my WiFi network. My view of him was also smooth and when he pointing his camera at a moving fan that looked smooth as well. Also, we tested it on an iPad (which still is blown up, not a universal binary) and it looked as expected without the camera. When used with an iPhone 3GS you should get the option to see the user’s back camera. Release notes, official promo video, and more screenshots are after the break.

Update: Skype video calls over 3G will use around 3.4 MB of data per minute. We calculated this by looking at our usage info on our iPhone 4 before and after a one minute (timed of course) call. Below are our screenshots:

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