iOS Devices

Reg hardware is quoting  AmTech Research’s Doug Freedman (who happens to follow NVIDIA) when they say there is a good chance that Apple’s upcoming iPhone 3.0 will contain an ARM System on a Chip from NVIDIA called Tegra.  While the specs on this thing are pretty sweet:

Tegra was launched in June 2008. The Tegra 650 can support 1080p HD output using the H.264 codec – another Apple favorite, we note – and can encode video at 720p. It supports cameras with sensors of up to 12Mp.

An on-board Ultra-low Power (ULP) GeForce graphics core provides 3D graphics through the OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics API. The 650’s ARM 11 core runs at 750MHz, though Nvidia also offers a lesser part, the 600, which runs at 650MHz.

..and Apple has been real chummy with NVIDIA of late:

Apple has certainly been cozying up to Nvidia a lot of late, in particular buying in the chip maker’s GeForce 9400M integrated chipset for MacBook laptops. It’s also been claimed – though not confirmed by either Apple or Nvidia – that the next Apple TV could be based on Nvidia’s Ion platform. Ditto a revamped Mac Mini.

There is one little problem.  Apple’s PA Semi crew hasn’t been sitting on their laurels for the past couple years.  They’ve most likely been working on a SoC with integrated Imagination chips.  Unless they screw up.  Then NVIDIA can swoop in we guess.  Don’t bet the farm on this one however.

IntoMobile really, really believes  there is a big future in multi-core iPhones.  We agree, but just aren’t sure the battery technology is there yet (for June iPhones that are running around South San Francisco).  One of ARM’s strengths is the ability to idle at incredibly low power rates then step up the power usage incrementally based on the CPU needed.

PowerVR Chip Design

Would you give up a few hours of battery time to be able to play graphic-intensive video games on your iPhone? – That’s what you’d get with Multi-core.  With a solid single core Cortex A8 architecture (Like the Pre) Apple’s browsing and gaming experience would improve without cost to the battery life.

For those of you that can’t get by on the current limit of 120Gb of music or the former iPod’s 160GB of space, we have some great news for you.  You can now get an aftermarket (damn!) 240Gb iPod Classic 5G from Rapid Repair. 

The science isn’t really that hard.  Toshiba has a 240Gb drive that fits into a former generation 5G iPod’s 160GB drive bay.  Bada bing, bada boom, 240GB iPod.  The price for the new drive will be $295.  DIYer?  You won’t have to send it in, they’ll just send you the drive with these instructions.

Rapid Repair will upgrade the drive for you at no cost, or you can crack open your iPod and install the drive yourself. To help you out, the company has published a guide to replacing the drive on its site. “It’s not very difficult, you just need a reasonable mechanical aptitude,” Mr. Vronko says. “But if, when you were a kid, you took things apart and ended up with a lot of extra pieces when you put it back together, this might not be for you.”

Indeed, if the guide makes you queasy, you might want to just send your iPod in for a professional install. The turn-around time should be less than a week, according to Mr. Vronko.

Of course this voids your warranty….if you still have one on a two year old iPod. 

A really good trick would be a 240GB iPod Touch.  We can dream can’t we?

via Gadgetwise

MacBlogz thinks they have an idea of the design of next Mac Pro. We like!

From 9to5mac/Toys (we think this flick might be a little tooo fanboy but who are we to judge?):

Amazon Video on Demand offers downloads of Kobi and Ron Shelly’s "MacHEADS" for $9.99 or $2.99 to rent. That’s the best deal we could find for this documentary which, "explores what makes Apple products a "cultural phenomenon", rather than just consumer electronics". (iTunes charges $14.99 or $3.99 to rent)

A preview can be seen at Amazon or below:

Another day, another Google product for iPhone.  This is another interesting one too.  Google Latitude pulls your GPS data and allows you to share it with friends in a convenient map form.  Potential for abuse?  Possibly big.  Potential to ruin teenagers lives, even bigger.  No more of the ol’ staying at the friends house while the friend is staying at yours but really you are both hangin’ out at the lake.  Sucks to be you kids!

Yes you can manually set your location or turn it off (see below)- but don’t think you won’t be able to tell the difference between movement and manual settings.

According to Slashdot, that iTunes EULA aggreement that you just agreed to without reading contained some big changes for those of us who travel and live abroad:

"I just accepted the new terms of service for iTunes and found that I will no longer be allowed to access US iTunes outside of the United States. This may seem like no big deal but, I am a US citizen living abroad and I regularly purchase and view TV and movies from AppleTV. Not to mention US citizens just traveling abroad. Does anyone know if this has been enforced or have themselves been affected by this?"

Obviously, Apple wants to sell as much media as possible and doesn’t care if you are in St. Petersburg Florida or St. Petersburg, Russia.  This has the entertainment industry written all over it.  Perhaps this had something to do with the recent deals made for DRM-Free Music. 

They just don’t get it do they?

Jeez Google, give us a day without some Mac news?  Today Google Tasks, fresh off its introduction as a Labs feature in GMail is now at home on the iPhone.

Fake iPod accessories designed in fake California.

via Boing Boing

It even looks like that seal is already breaking.  I want my 99 cents back!

Oh, dayum!  We just noticed something peculiar in this week’s marketshare numbers from Net Applications.  Sketchy Mac OS’s that didn’t register version numbers outpaced Linux (and the iPhone) in January.  Those is most likely Hackintoshes.

Can we start talking about a mid-range Mac yet?

Operating System      Total Market Share

  Windows XP      63.76%
  Windows Vista      22.48%
  Mac OS X 10.5      5.28%
  Mac OS X 10.4      2.74%
  Windows 2000      1.37%
  Mac OS X (no version reported)      1.00%
  Linux      0.83%
  iPhone      0.48%
  MacIntel      0.47%
  Mac OS X Mach-O      0.29%
  Windows 98      0.23%
  Mac OS      0.14%

Video conferencing on the iPhone rumors have been around almost as long as the iPhone itself.  Well, they are still in rumor mode but have a very slightly more realistic chance at coming to fruition if Apple’s latest patent unearthing gets the go-ahead.  Informationweek (via Apple Core) found a bunch of information relating to video conferencing on the iPhone.  Quoth the patent:

In some embodiments, the functions may include telephoning, video conferencing, e-mailing, instant messaging, blogging, digital photographing, digital videoing, Web browsing, digital music playing, and/or digital video playing. Instructions for performing these functions may be included in a computer-readable storage medium or other computer program product configured for execution by one or more processors.
….
In some embodiments, an optical sensor is located on the back of the device, opposite the touch screen display on the front of the device, so that the touch screen display may be used as a viewfinder for either still and/or video image acquisition. In some embodiments, an optical sensor is located on the front of the device so that the user’s image may be obtained for videoconferencing while the user views the other video conference participants on the touch screen display.

Is this something we’ll see in iPhone 3.0?  Although patents are rarely a good indication of upcoming products, this one is an interesting read.

Shuffle Magazine reports:

In a full page ad in this morning’s Gulf News, Etisalat announces that they will be brining the iPhone to the UAE at a later day. The ad reads:

The UAE’s Emirates Telecommunications Corporation – Etisalat today announced that they have signed an agreement with Apple to bring the iPhone 3G to the United Arab Emirates and to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia through Mobily later this month. More information will be released at a later date.

You’ll recall that neighboring Egypt disables GPS on all local and roaming iPhones as per national policy.  There is no word yet on whether or not other Middle Eastern carriers are forced to do so as well.  If we had to guess we’d say yay in UAE and nay in Saudi Arabia.  But we don’t know nothin’

For you right to lefters:

??????? ???? ?? ???? ????? ???????? ? ???????? ???? ??? ?????

??? ???? ????? ?? ????? ” ??? ???? Gulf News” ??????? ???? ????? ????? ??????? ?? ??????? ?????? ??????? ????? ???????? ??????. ?? ??????? ???????:
“???? ???????? ?????????, ???????? ????? ?? ??????? ???????? ?? ??? ?????? ???? ????? “??? ??” ??? ???? ???????? ??????? ??????? ? ??????? ??????? ???????? ???? ???? ??????? ?? ??? ???? ?? ??? ?????. ?????? ?? ????????? ??? ???? ??????.”
??? ? ??? ???? ??? ????? ?? ???? ?? ???????? ???? ?? ???? ???? ?????? ??????? ?? ??? ????? ???? ????? ???? ??? ?????? ? ????? ?? ” Stuff Middle East” ??? ?? ?????? ???????????.

Credit crunch hits Apple?  Not likely with that $28 billion in the bank.  But there seems to have been some problems affecting people’s iTunes store credit.

According to Venture Beat and a few hundred Twitterers, there seems to have been a minor glitch when purchasing videos or music.  The error reads:

Due to a problem with the iTunes Store, your store credit balance is temporarily unavailable for use in purchasing music; you may continue purchasing using a different method of payment.

As of this writing the problem appears to be solved.

Well, we guess it had to happen.  There is now an app that breaks the encyption on App Store apps and allows people to (pirate) share them with others.

A project started by a coder named ‘SaladFork’, Crackulous was officially only available to a limited number of individuals, but it quickly gained notoriety as it makes the process of cracking software ridiculously easy. The successor to the more fiddly xCrack script, Crackulous is now being developed by ‘Angel’ and has a full GUI. All people have to do is buy an app from Apple and click a button, it’s that easy.

Although the software package was publicly released just hours ago, the source for this version (0.9) isn’t yet available. Crackulous is set to be released as open source software so that many people can contribute to its development, with original dev SaladFork commenting, “I’ve filled the source code heavily with comments explaining exactly what it’s doing and how it’s doing it. My hope is that Crackulous can be a learning resource for all the prospective iPhone developers out there, and will be able to revolutionize the cracking scene by producing a standard for application quality and functionality that can easily be reproduced to great effect.”

Normally, this would be a big deal.  However, Apps at the app store are pretty reasonably priced and the experience of purchasing and installing them is so easy that we don’t see that many people switching over to the dark side to save a few bucks.

Bloomberg reported this weekend that Adobe engineers are working diligently on getting Flash down to an acceptable level of power usage and performance to work on the iPhone/iPod touch architecture.  The bad news?  Don’t expect this technology to become available in the first half of 2009.  According to Adobe’s press release on the matter:

The joint technology optimization is targeted for the ARMv6 and ARMv7architectures used in the ARM11™ family and the Cortex™-A series of processors and is expected to be available in the second half of 2009. The partnership stems from the Open Screen Project, a broad Adobe sponsored initiative of industry leaders – including ARM – to deliver a consistent runtime environment across multiple devices by taking advantage of Adobe Flash Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR. The initiative is set to address the challenges of Web browsing on a broad range of screens, and remove the barriers to publish content and applications seamlessly across screens. For more information, visit www.openscreenproject.org .

By the second half of 2009, the iPhone 3.0 Operating System will be around.  So will new iPhone ARM Cortex A(8?) series hardware that will likely be able to handle the intensive CPU requirements that Flash takes to perform well.  Will Apple back port it to older hardware?  Perhaps but it is unclear how it will perform.

Tough times are hitting New York City.  Mayor Bloomberg has to come up with ways to make up for all of the lost tax revenue on Wall St.  One of his solutions?  Levy taxes on music downloads from Apple,  Amazon and anyone else still selling music online. 

For now, Bloomberg is proposing $894 million in new sales taxes, including:
-Increasing the sales tax by one quarter of one percent from 8.375 percent to 8.625 percent
-Repealing the sales tax exemption on clothing purchases under $110
-And new taxes on lots of things that are now tax-free, like music downloads.

That’s right – download a song or movie on your iPod and you pay new sales taxes.

We aren’t exactly sure how it would be enforced (by address of credit card?) nor when this will go into effect.

CNet points us to an interview that Steve Jobs gave to Rolling Stone in 2003.  It is almost eerie how spot on Apple’s viewpoint was on music six years later.  Jobs goes into detail on how much thinking is done by a lot of Apple’s PhDs who "know this stuff cold".

I don’t know what hand-wringing is. We did a lot of thinking about it. The biggest risk, obviously, was that we saw people buying Macs just to get their hands on iPods. So taking iPods to Windows was really the choice. That was the big decision. We knew once we did that that we were going to go all the way. I’m sure we’re losing some Mac sales, but half our sales of iPods are to the Windows world already.

He also went out of his way to show his understanding of the music business.  A lot of people have asked why Apple doesn’t become a record label.  Jobs knows this isn’t Apple’s core competency.

Well, there’s a lot of smart people at the music companies. The problem is, they’re not technology people. The good music companies do an amazing thing. They have people who can pick the person that’s gonna be successful out of 5,000 candidates. And there’s not enough information to do that — it’s an intuitive process. And the best music companies know how to do that with a reasonably high success rate.

Great article.

OK, we are just a bit too intrigued by this little Pre thing. Here’s Peter Skillman, VP of Design at Palm, Inc. showing why he’s so proud of the WebOS. Notice the Snappiness™ of that ARM Cortex processor and the Amazon Music store at 3:20.  MobileDivide via Engadget.

Although he is saying Nokia N95, about no one is fooled that the iPhone is the real competitor for this device.  We hope Apple answers a lot of these features in iPhone OS 3 in June? 

Prepare to avert your eyes.  Dell is planning on entering the Smartphone space with a little gem they might call the MePhone, according to SAI.  People they’ve chatted with (as well as the Wall Street Journal) say Dell has two models coming our way.  One running Android a la the G1.  The other running Windows Mobile.  How will Dell differentiate itself?  That remains to be seen.  They are entering a very crowded market currently dominated by RIM and Apple’s iPhone.

The move isn’t surprising as mobile phones are rapidly catching up with computers as the preferred way people access the Internet.  Dell, coming off a pretty bad quarter has to be gazing over at Apple’s earnings sheet with a bit of envy.  Dell’s been rumored to be working on a mobile phone since the iPhone was announced.

According to SAI, we aren’t going to be graced by these beauties until September 9th but Shaw Wu (our fav Mac Analyst) told the Wall St. Journal that they might be coming (or announcing) as early as 3GSM in Barcelona next month. 

This wouldn’t be Dell’s first forray into the wireles space.  Dell has also been moseying up the the telecoms carriers lately striking deals to sell their Mini 9 w/3G with two year plans in Europe.