iOS devices refer to any of Apple’s hardware that runs the iOS mobile operating system which include iPhones, iPads, and iPods. Historically, Apple releases a new iOS version once a year, the current version is iOS 10. Here is the complete list of iOS 10 compatible devices.
DigiTimesreported this morning on the retail channel chatter that suggests a late May launch for iPad 2 in Taiwan. They should know: DigiTimes is a Taiwanese trade publication:
Sources in the retail channel estimate that the iPad 2 should be launched as soon as within the next 1-2 weeks.
The publication also wrote that the wait for the sought-after tablet is causing weak demand for Android slates and tablet PCs in general because a portion of would-be tablet buyers are postponing their purchase until iPad 2 arrives.
Toshiba Corp will spend about 100 billion yen ($1.19 billion) to build a factory for making small LCD panels, mainly to supply to Apple Inc’s iPhones, the Nikkei business daily said.The company’s wholly owned unit, Toshiba Mobile Display Co, will construct the facility in Ishikawa prefecture and the plant will churn out low-temperature polysilicon LCD panels, which allow for high-resolution images, the paper said.Work on the plant will start by early next year, with the production due to begin in the second half of 2011, Nikkei said.Toshiba Mobile Display already makes low-temperature polysilicon LCD panels at a facility in the prefecture and its monthly production capacity of 8.55 million units is projected to more than double with the new factory, the daily said. Apple will invest in a portion of the investment for the factory, the Nikkei said.
Displays for Mobile Phones and Portable Electronics: The mobile section of the booth will feature high-resolution LTPS displays, up to 367ppi (pixels per inch) resolution density, in sizes ranging from 3.3-inch to 4.0-inch with resolution formats ranging from Wide VGA (480 x 864) to HD (720 x 1280). In addition, these displays will demonstrate advanced technologies such as high-contrast (up to 1,500:1), high-color (up to 92% NTSC), and wide viewing angle (up to H/V 176º/176º). The displays are just a few representative examples of TMD’s broad line of thin and light displays for mobile smartphones and other portable electronic devices.
Of course, numerous reports have detailed a new iPhone with edge-to-edge 4-inch display panels.
OK, go ahead and start complaining about how Apple wouldn’t ever use a 720P display in an iOS device because of the application scaling stuff/additional fragmentation. We’ll be over here dreaming about a 720P iPhone. Expand Expanding Close
You may have heard that an unknown company called Lodsys was threatening to sue small iOS developers over the use of in-app purchasing, a system-wide iOS mechanism that lets users buy additional content inside apps, using their standard iTunes credentials. This being an Apple-designed feature, a lot of folks were left scratching their head when Lodsys announced last Friday plans to take developers to court should they refuse to pay royalties.
Following a storm of criticism by many online media outlets and bloggers who said the company was acting like a patent troll, Lodsys put out a blog post. No, they’re not patent trolls and yes, they’re just trying to “get value for the assets that it owns”. Right. In a series of Q&A posts Lodsys detailed this issue. They’re entitled to claim 0.575 percent of US revenue made from in-app purchases, so says Lodsys. On annual sales of one million dollars this amounts to $5,750 a year in license costs. But wait, there’s more of that nonsense.
Seagate today announced the GoFlex mobile wireless storage for iOS devices, first uncovered in the FCC documents this past Friday. In addition to Apple’s mobile products, it works with any WiFi-enabled device thanks to its built-in 802.11 b/g/n wireless networking. The half a terabyte drive has fifteen times the capacity of a 32GB iPhone 4 and eight times more room to hold your apps, photos, videos and other data than a 64GB iPad.
In fact, 500GB should be enough for most folks to carry their entire iTunes library with them. The drive has a rechargeable battery that provides up to five hours of continuous operation and up to 25 hours of stand-by time. Your iOS devices talk to it via the free GoFlex Media app. GoFlex Satellite will retail for $199 when it arrives this July at Amazon, BestBuy.com and Seagate.com stores.
Epic Citadel, a free tech demo, was an eye-opener that showcased what the Unreal Engine could pull on A4-enabled gadgets like iPad and iPhone 4. TouchArcade now uncovered Castlerama, another Unreal tech showcase that lets you explore lush environments with amazing detail. Developer Codenrama noted in the YouTube description that graphics could have been even better had they targeted the code for iPad 2 and iPhone 4 only. The reason? Those devices sport 512MB RAM, twice their predecessors:
While developing Castlerama, we had to face the fact that newer devices such as iPhone4s and iPad2s are very different from their predecessors, iPhone3GSs and iPads, in that the former have twice as much memory. In order to have the app run on all devices, we had to compromise quite a bit, pushing the old devices to their limits (risking crash if other applications are left running) while keeping the new devices well behind their capabilities. In the future we believe we will have to develop two versions for each application.
Castlerama can be downloaded for free from the App Store. The universal binary works on all iOS devices and weighs in at 244MB. If you ask me, it’s an exciting example of high-quality games powered by the Unreal Engine coming our way.
There is no shortage of music-creation software on iPad, ranging from the for-dummies apps like Apple’s awesome GarageBand to the casual yet powerful items like Algoriddim’s djay program to the full-fledged synth studios such as Korg iMS-20, classed as a complete recreation of the Korg MS-20 synth.
Heck, people are even exploring crazy concepts like air-scratching. That said, SynthTronica, a LeisuresonicView production, looks like the ultimate synthesizer app for your iPad. Another nice video introduction and a couple of screenies after the break.
With well over two hundred Android-driven slates either available or arriving, one might fall into a trap thinking Apple’s iPad is becoming an endangered specie. Not so fast. If you ask Jen-Hsun Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, there are a few reasons iPad outsells Android tablets by a large margin. Android slates have several shortcomings that Apple successfully turned into their advantage, he said in a Saturday interview with CNET. Here’s your quote:
It’s a point of sales problem. It’s an expertise at retail problem. It’s a marketing problem to consumers. It is a price point problem. And it’s a software richness of content problem. Apple is not only better able to explain its product to consumers through dedicated sales people, but it also captures more margin than competitors who have to share margin with retail partners.
Huang wasn’t pulling this from thin air. The man knows his stuff – his company is a key provider of Tegra-branded processors for Android-branded tablets. And Apple’s dramatic iPad 2 advert perfectly complements Huang’s observations, we might add.
Instead of using your iPhone and a specialized DJ app like Algoriddim’s djay for iPhone, clever minds have come up with a novel idea based on sensing a performer’s movement to alter the playback of digital audio in real-time. They call it Mopho DJ and it doesn’t require dedicated hardware or time-coded vinyl, explains Nick Brian, a researcher with the Center for Computer Research, Music and Acoustics at Stanford University. How does it work?
Following the discovery that Mac OS X Lion includes a new Reading List feature in Safari – similar to the popular Instapaper service – Instapaper’s creator went on record to say that the feature won’t be a competitor until it syncs with iOS devices. Well, it looks like Safari’s Reading List feature is going to be a competitor. Reader iBrokedk has discovered that Macs running the latest build of Lion will actually sync their Safari reading lists with iOS Safari.
The same Reading List shown on a Mac
Our tipster claims that he was able to view his Reading List on his iPad via a MobileMe bookmark sync. Additionally, we have been able to confirm that Reading List sync is also an option through iOS’s standard iOS sync process. To access your Reading List on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch you need to head over to the bookmarks tab in Safari. Your Reading List should come up as a folder named, obviously a place holder, com.Apple.ReadingList.
Just off the heels of rumors pointing to Apple repositioning the iPhone LED flash to the top-right side of the next-generation iPhone, purported iPhone 5 camera parts have appeared online. The above image shows the iPhone 5’s front-facing camera sensor in addition to the rear-camera sensor. The front-facing camera piece is re-designed, but we can’t tell any technical details, but the juicy information comes from the rear-facing camera…
A purported fifth-generation iPhone case emerged last night with an iPhone 4-shape fit and a relocated LED camera flash. The flash hole is located on the top-right side of the iPhone’s back, and Apple might be doing this to mend iPhone 4 camera flash issues, which a small percentage of users have been experiencing. Now, we have a conveniently timed tip from Tobi in Germany who sends in an image of a “prototype next-generation” iPhone (aka Photoshopped iPhone 4) that demonstrates what a repositioned LED flash would like on an iPhone.
Update: A commenter below thinks this might be real. He’s done an inversion and changed the levels to find nothing to indicate photoshopping.
Apple and Nuance’s rumored partnership is all but official at this point: Apple’s upcoming Mac OS X Lion uses Nuance’s speech technology. A quick look in Lion’s system preferences application reveals several new voice options (shown above) with accents ranging from French to Romanian to Thai. This might seem like some fancy new voice technology that Apple decided to craft up for Lion but it’s actually something that Nuance created for their RealSpeak text-to-speech software.
From Nuance RealSpeak website
Each voice preference costs $45 directly from Nuance, so it’s a safe bet that Apple made some agreement with Nuance for the technology. With the rumors that Apple and Nuance will be making some joint announcements at WWDC, we think this new Lion feature is pretty much confirmation of that. Look for something like this in iOS 5 – hopefully with some Siri technology mixed in as well. (via NetPuting)
From the obvious “don’t try this at home” category, Mobile Syrup popped their iPad 2 into a G-Form Sleeve, abused it for awhile, then had a car run it over.
Result? The video stopped playing but the iPad was unharmed, at least as far as we could tell.
We’re looking forward to some more extreme iPad sports when these start getting into users hands.
We got ours a week ago (above) but haven’t figured out any good stunts (and frankly don’t have an iPad to burn). Suggestions welcome.
According to our industry checks, the device should be called iPhone 4S and include minor cosmetic changes, better cameras, A5 dual-core processor, and HSPA+ support.
The iPhone 4S is rumored to launch in September and is said to feature T-Mobile, Sprint, and China Mobile compatibility. BGR posted photos of a T-Mobile iPhone in testing, that we quickly learned is actually the iPhone 4S with an A5 chip inside.
After a decade-long absence from the world of Apple, developer Bungie Studios is believed to be gearing up for a big comeback. The word on the street is that the studio is developing a brand new mobile game called Crimson, presumably for the hottest mobile platform out there, Apple’s iOS. If true, it’ll probably file as one of the most important iOS game releases yet. TouchArcade discovered that Bungie Aerospace, a Delaware-incorporated Bungie property, filed a trademark for “Crimson”, describing it as “computer game software for use on mobile and cellular phones”. The publication explains:
My gut says Bungie Aerospace and “Crimson” are connected to the studio’s next project, an original IP set to be published by Activision. Word on the street is that this game is a shooter MMO — an MMO that might just offer increased connectivity via mobile apps.
Crimson has potential to become a big boon for iOS gaming, especially considering Bungie’s penchant for the creation of so-called system sellers, exclusive games so good that gamers cannot resist but go out and buy a certain system just to be able to play them.
Patently Apple today details a patent in which Apple details some nuances of their current iPod Nano. Current, except for a few features like a camera and some screensavers. We’ve seen plently of additionalevidence of iPad nanos with cameras, but as we know it doesn’t go official until Apple says so, likely in September.
The patent also details screensavers for Apple’s touch screen nano as well as additional sensors which hopefully will be able to communicate with the mothership (iOS device).
Popular micro-blogging service Twitter has unveiled a revamped HTML5 web app that mimics the look and feel of its native iOS counterpart. The new rich interface works in mobile Safari and other mobile browsers, Twitter said. New features include the ability to quickly scroll through your timeline, move between tabs, compose tweets, access your timeline, @mentions, messages that you can read in conversation view, search, trending topics, lists and more.
There’s no need to install anything and it gets updated more frequently, being a cloud-based app. Check it out by pointing your iPhone, iPod touch or Android device at twitter.com. Bear in mind Twitter is gradually releasing the web app so don’t panic if it’s not yet available to you. If you use Twitter’s official Mac client, good stuff happening on that front, too…
If all the brouhaha about iPhone location tracking fell on deaf ear with you, why not plot your logged location history on a world map, just for the kicks? Sure, you can do that with Pete Warden’s simple and lightweight iPhone Tracker tool for your Mac, but it won’t preserve your location data in the cloud. And while you’re at it, how about making this data actually useful by contributing your personal database of nearby WiFi hotspots and cellular towers (so says Apple) to good causes, from surveys into movement patterns of the human species to epidemiology? That’s exactly what OpenPaths does for you.
With openpaths, you can preserve your iPhone or iPad’s location information as well as visualize where you’ve been. You can even download your data in CSV and JSON format so you can remix it and use it in your own projects. What’s more, openpaths allows you to securely and anonymously donate your data to researchers who could use it to study mobility, transportation, land use, epidemiology, and overall make the world a better place.
It only takes a minute to plot your location data in a variety of ways…
All checks indicate they have, which would be a first for the puritan California-based gadget maker that likes to keep things under control in the App Store. ZDNet has a story about SugarSugar Dating App somehow making it through Apple’s stringent review process and launching on the iPhone on June 1. The app is a mobile client to SugarSugar.com, which advertises itself as the “leading sugar dating website”.
They also say the app helps one seek “mutually beneficial” arrangements with other users, a telling tongue-in-cheek definition treading the fine line between dating and escorting, if not worse. Maybe Apple censors weren’t paying attention… So, how’s this going to work?
Taiwanese trade publication DigiTimesrelayed this morning whispers from the supply chain asserting that Apple might experience problems with shipments of iPad 2 and iPhone 4 in the second quarter amid “a shortage of both labor and materials” for smartphones and tablet PCs at Foxconn’s Chengdu, China plants. Foxconn, a long-time manufacturing partner of Apple’s, declined to comment on the rumored shipments delay. Most iPad 2 supplies still originate from Foxconn’s Shenzen plants, however.
Most market watchers have estimated that total iPad 2 shipments in the second quarter will reach as high as seven million units, but since Apple is trying to reach its shipment goal of 35-40 million units for 2011, the company has been pushing its upstream partners to aim at supplying 10-10.5 million units in the second quarter, the sources added.
Another report from the same publication re-iterated previous supply chain suspicious, citing the Japan earthquake and the power brownout policy as principal reasons. Players like Motorola, Acer, Apple, HTC and others have reportedly started “acting aggressively in securing supplies”. The real challenge will be fulfilling orders in June. Perhaps these ongoing supply woes are why Apple allegedly pushed back iPhone 5 to September or later?
This $25 Kickstarter project seems like a nice way to knock out a lot of the gadgets you need for your iPhone in one go. It is already fully funded so there is no question of whether or not they’ll make it. Sometimes the best things are the simplest. Expand Expanding Close
Sad news for fans of e-reading. BeamItDown Software announced they are closing down the shop and ceasing development of iFlow Reader, an e-book reader for iOS, due to Apple’s 30 percent cut and new rules that require all content sales to go through the iOS in-app purchasing mechanism. As a result, publishers like iFlow Reader are increasingly finding that Apple’s 30 percent cut is eating into their margins, leaving them with little or no revenue.
BeamItDown Software and the iFlow Reader will cease operations as of May 31, 2011. We absolutely do not want to do this, but Apple has made it completely impossible for anyone but Apple to make a profit selling contemporary ebooks on any iOS device. We cannot survive selling books at a loss and so we are forced to go out of business. We bet everything on Apple and iOS and then Apple killed us by changing the rules in the middle of the game. This is a very sad day for innovation on iOS in this important application category. We are a small company that thought we could build a better product. We think that we did but we are powerless against Apple’s absolute control of the iOS platform.
“They [Apple] screwed us”, BeamItDown Software’s Philip Huber toldFortune. Expand Expanding Close
IM+ Pro, one of the best multi-client chat programs for iOS devices, has been updated with a location-based feature that makes it easy to find random chat participants nearby your current location. Developer Shape Services says Neighbors provides users “the opportunity to find new real life connections and friends with common interests”. This is interesting as we haven’t seen a beneficial integration of location, which is the latest fad, with chat services.
The Neighbors feature works pretty straightforward. You locate people on the map to engage in chat sessions with nearby friends. Others discover you based on your location information that can be as accurate as house, street or city – your choice.
Just over a month ago, we showed you the case of what seems to be the next generation Nano with a camera. The leak’s proximity to April Fool’s day led many to be skeptical of the leak. Fast forward to today where the same source produced a more complete picture of what Apple may announce in September.
The new photo shows a more complete picture with the clip pulled from the design. (Back shown on the left, front shown on the right) The site says a 1.3 megapixel camera is slated to go into the new device. While a camera of this size would have limited use, it would make a great addition to an already feature packed micro-device.
What isn’t clear is how this device will be held. We’re considering a magnetic option or a iWatch attachement which seems to be all the rage. Thoughts?
