iPad (2021)

Remember that cool iHub USB device that was briefly selling on M.I.C. Gadget, but then was pulled by Apple’s lawyers? It is back, and at a place you’ll probably feel a bit more familiar with: Amazon. Amazon has a few sellers selling that iHub again for prices (white, black) as low as $12.40. Interestingly, Amazon is fulfilling these orders (free shipping) which indicates that they might be complicit.

The iHub isn’t the only Apple branded device making its way through Amazon’s fulfillment centers. the iAccessory Store has a new look “silver” iHub for $9 (black too) and some questionable iPhone HDD enclosures as well as external speakers that bear the Apple logo.

An unboxing video from Nowhereelse.fr of the iHDD and iAudio below:

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Update: This isn’t likely real

The image above was posted on Weibo, a Chinese Twitter clone of sorts, showing what is thought to be components of Apple’s yet to be released next-gen iPhone.

Clearly showing the familiar Apple “A5” stamp, the chipset is mysteriously not from an iPad 2, and as Phone Arena points out, closer resembles that of the current iPhone 4’s A4 chipset layout. Curiously, the visible part of the battery reads “430 mAh”, which leads us to believe a similar battery to the iPhone 4’s 1420 mAh battery may be included in the next-gen iPhone.

There is reason to be skeptical of these images. Apart from the overall blurriness of the shot, the A5 logo itself seems a little off and the source of the image cannot be confirmed.

We still expect two variations of a next-gen iPhone to be unveiled late September and becoming available for purchase sometime around October 7th. You can get all the details here.

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“Is 2011 going to be the year of copycats?”, Apple’s then chief executive rhetorically asked at the March iPad 2 introduction in San Francisco. Really, the title of this article couldn’t be more true. iPad is now stealing market share from Android, climbing from 65.7 percent share to 68.3 percent globally as Android slipped from 34.0 percent to 26.8 percent. HP exited the game, having retired its TouchPad and today lackluster sales of RIM’s PlayBook tablet made the news.

Apple decimated competition so thoroughly that analysts are saying the company can take its time releasing a third-generation iPad. According to J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz, Apple should be in “no rush” with iPad 3:

Our latest research continues to indicate that there is no such device slated for production this year. In our view, Apple should be in no rush. The other tablet entrants have stumbled so far, and that trend-line could persist deep into 2012.

He also wasn’t impressed by Sony’s tablet which “lacks the refined, sleek feel of the iPad and its bezel-like back is not user-friendly”. And Research In Motion’s BlackBerry PlayBook tablet? On a downward spiral and probably due for life support. Per RIM’s quarterly filing, they shipped only 200,000 PlayBooks in the quarter, a paltry number compared to Wall Street expectations of 700,000 units. RIM refused to reveal actual sell-through as it is no doubt significantly lower than the sell-in. Ticonderoga analyst Brian White weighs in:

We believe the PlayBook is poised to follow HP’s TouchPad as the next casualty of iPad’s tablet dominance

To put PlayBook sales into perspective, RIM shipped one PlayBook to every 46 iPads. With just 200,000 units, PlayBook may very well be heading to the technology graveyard. BlackBerry phones are also shrinking due to “lower than expected sales for older models”. One fifth of RIM’s stock valuation was wiped out today as a result of poor tablet and smartphone performance. By the way, RIM’s global market share is now dropping to single digits. Did the Waterloo, Ontario company learn a valuable lesson?

Many watchers have written off the PlayBook, but RIM has bigger worries on its mind: Its smartphone business is declining and global market share dropping to single digits. Chart courtesy of Asymco.

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Kensington has just announced two new security products for iPad and iPhone including the SecureBack lock mechanism and the BungeeAir integrated alarm case for iPhone. We had some hands on time at Pepcom last night with working demos.

The BungeeAir tech ($99) is packed into a typical looking iPhone case (above), a key fob, and the BungeeAir app. Simply attach the fob to your keys or any other always handy location and configure your preferences from within the app. Now, when you are separated from your device (based on your preferred settings) you will receive a buzz and/or beep notification to the key fob. The device will also go into Password protect mode if it was left open. You can even locate your lost keys or fob itself by activating the key fob from within the app.

The case also integrates a built-in back up 1500 mAh battery and the ability to prop up the device in landscape or portrait view.

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Unwire.hk (via MacRumors) shows what they indicate may be screen protectors for the new iPhone 5. Interestingly, the screen protectors here show a wide home button (above) and when compared to the current iPhone 4, show a wider screen area (below).

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If the current aspect ratio is preserved, the new size would indicate that the screen extended further toward the top and bottom of the device.

Another closeup image, below:

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Apple and Sprint have completed work on a version of the iPad for Sprint’s data network. This Sprint compatible iPad appears to be ready for public consumption and will join the family of GSM (AT&T) and Verizon capable Apple tablets before the holidays. With Apple soon launching a Sprint version of the iPhone – which we independently confirmed in June – we suspect that the Sprint iPad will come alongside or soon after that release. The iPhone 5 release is still scheduled for October 7th according to our source (and others), but changes/delays are always possible.

The first week of October date for the new iPhone’s availability fits nicely with our report about AT&T’s major early October changes: data throttling and a new insurance plan for $199 devices.

The Sprint version of the iPad is completely separate from the CDMA Verizon model.  We can’t confirm that this new iPad will run on Sprint’s powerful 4G WiMAX network, but the question begs to be asked: Why would Apple build a new iPad for Sprint and not use the CDMA iPad that Verizon already carries?  A report yesterday from TUAW seemed to imply that a 4G iPad from Sprint would be happening at some point.

What’s perhaps most enticing about the Sprint iPad (besides the possibility of 4G) is that Sprint is a lot more generous with its data plans, perhaps offering iPad users once again a truly unlimited data option.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59mP3R4I8wU]

Joanna Stern at the Verge does an overview of the Windows 8 Samsung tablet that Microsoft is displaying at BUILD today.

One caveat noticed by DF:

However, fan noise is very noticeable, as is the heat coming out of the top vent, and a fast boot doesn’t excuse the slow wake-up times compared to ARM-based cellphones and tablets.

Tablet devices running Windows 8 should be showing up next year and look to take on Apple’s dominance in tablets with its iPad (which should be on version 3 by then).

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In response to the HP Print Control scanner app that we covered yesterday, a source at Apple told us that Apple is working on an app called “scanner” that uses iOS devices camera to act like a digital scanner.  Clearly this is meant for higher iPhone class cameras rather than current iPad or iPod touch cameras.

Here’s what we’ve heard on how it works:

1. The user opens the app and holds the iPhone over the document or object they want scanned.  They then snap a picture of it.  Apple’s on-board software then resizes the image to ‘letter’ or business card, A4 or whatever depending on original document.  Resizing includes aligning edges that get skewed by a sigle scan point rather than traditional scanning methods.  The user can then manually change the size of the document or the use (biz card?)
2. On board software then separates images blocks from text.
3. This is where it gets murky.  At last word, Apple was trying to do OCR both on-device and using alternative cloud methods for recognizing text.  Third party Optical Character Recognition (OCR) vs. in house solutions were also being tested.
4. The resulting file can then be saved as a PDF, .Pages, exported to contacts (in the case of business cards for example).

Third party apps already exist in this field but word is that Apple wanted a polished in-house app that directly tied to its contacts and Pages apps.  Apple has numerous patents in this field so they’ve been thinking about this for awhile.

It isn’t certain when or if this application will be released or if Apple will bundle it as part of its iOS, iWork Apps, or a separate app going forward.

Google does something similar to this with their Docs App in Android.
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Martin Fichter, the acting president of HTC America, has a daughter down at Steve Jobs’ alma mater, Reed College, where he conducted the very scientific focus group:

On the iPhone 5 hype: “Apple is innovating. Samsung is innovating. We are innovating. Everybody is innovating. And everybody is doing different things for the end consumers. I brought my daughter back to college — she’s down in Portland at Reed — and I talked to a few of the kids on her floor. And none of them has an iPhone because they told me: ‘My dad has an iPhone.’ There’s an interesting thing that’s going on in the market. The iPhone becomes a little less cool than it was. They were carrying HTCs. They were carrying Samsungs. They were even carrying some Chinese manufacture’s devices. If you look at a college campus, Mac Book Airs are cool. iPhones are not that cool anymore. We here are using iPhones, but our kids don’t find them that cool anymore.”

They also have no interest in dad’s Porsche.
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Image courtesy of Anandtech

Anandtech has published some interesting findings based on their extensive Samsung Galaxy S II review. It’s the first smartphone to use the graphics processing unit based on the Mali-400 core from ARM Holdings, a fables chip maker from the UK. In fact, Samsung has engineered and manufactured its own system-on-a-chip solution for the handset.

They call it the Exynos 4210 and it combines a dual-core Cortex-A9 CPU core and the aforementioned Mali-400 GPU sporting four cores. The resulting performance, says Anandtech, is comparable to Texas Instruments OMAP 4 chip that incorporates Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR SGX540 GPU core. However, the quad-core 1.2GHz Exynos 4210 probably won’t hold a candle to iPhone 4S, which will likely carry the same dual-core processor-GPU combo as the iPad 2’s 1GHz A5 chip:

Samsung implemented a 4-core version of the Mali-400 in the 4210 and its resulting performance is staggering as you can see above. Although it’s still not as fast as the PowerVR SGX 543MP2 found in the iPad 2, it’s anywhere from 1.7 – 4x faster than anything that’s shipping in a smartphone today.

Interestingly, and per the GL Benchmark included below, the Exynos 4210 is more than twice as fast compared to the Galaxy Tab 10.1 that runs Nvidia’s Tegra 2 chip and nearly four times speedier than iPhone 4’s 800 MHz A4 chip that sports the PowerVT SGX535 GPU core. However, the 4210 falls short in the triangle throughput department, a big disadvantage over the iPad 2’s A5 processor that clocks nine times the graphics performance of the original iPad’s A4 chip.

Triangle throughput is important in graphics-intensive games and will become key in “future games that may scale along that vector rather than simply increasing pixel shader complexity”. The video of Anandtech’s Samsung Galaxy S II review is right after the break.

Cross-posted on 9to5Google.com.

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Cable television channel TNT, owned by the Turner Broadcasting System division of Time Warner, has released an iPad app which gives you complete access to full-length television shows and movies aired by the network. As you’ve come to expect from similar apps, TNT for iPad lets you access behind-the-scenes videos, check out program guides and schedule reminders. It also integrates with GetGlue, Facebook and Twitter so you can pollute your friends’ social stream with the seemingly unimportant “I’m watching…” status updates.

Important caveat: Watching full episodes of television shows such as The Closer, Falling Skies and Rizzoli & Isles requires authenticating through your television provider. The TNT for iPad app is a free download from the App Store. Go past the fold for three additional screenshots of the TNT for iPad app.

NBC has also updated its iPad app with the same content found on the NBC.com web site. Yes, you can finally stream The Office to your iPad! Also, their TBS for iPad program does the same for Turner’s other shows, including episodes of Conan, Tyler Perry’s House of Payne, available free on your tablet.

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Apple has just sent out an email this afternoon notifying developers that iTunes Match has re-opened for developers, after registration was shut-down shortly after it launched. Sadly, we’re hearing from several people around the web that they still aren’t able to get in, but some lucky few are. Frustrating, huh?

iTunes Match beta testing has now been expanded to additional developers in the United States.
iTunes Match stores your music library in iCloud and allows you to enjoy your collection from anywhere, any time, on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or computer. Any of your songs, including music you’ve imported from CDs, that matches with the 18 million songs in the iTunes Store will become available in iCloud and will play back at iTunes Plus quality (256 Kbps DRM-free AAC) — even if your original was of a lower quality.

iTunes Match allows users to store their music library in iCloud, where it can then be downloaded to their iOS devices or other Macs. The service is currently available to developers for $24.99 a year, but it will see a public launch alongside iOS 5. Let us know in the comments section below if you’re able to get in. Full email below:

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Developers get downloading! Apple has just begun seeding iTunes 10.5 beta 8 (Mac only) and iWork for iOS beta 3 to developers, on the Developer Center. According to the release notes after the break, iTunes 10.5 beta 8 brings several bug fixes and performance updates for subscribers using iTunes Match beta. The new iTunes beta also brings the ability to back up to iCloud from inside of iTunes. We assume iWork for iOS beta 3 brings bug fixes, too.

Thanks, Hurdle!

If you find anything let us know; tips@9to5mac.com.

Release notes after the break:

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Adobe is finally bringing decent Flash video support to iOS, only it will have to do an on the fly transcoding to do so. The latest release of Flash Media Server, version 4.5, implements new features that will allow same source video delivery thanks to “on demand repackaging” to both Flash and iOS via HTTP Dynamic or Live Streaming.

“Now publishers can simplify their video publishing and protection workflows with Adobe Flash Media Server 4.5 with protected HLS support, audio channel extraction, DVR/PVR live, on demand and variant playlists. One set of content without any preparation or additional storage and deliver safely to both Adobe Flash with HDS and to Apple devices using HLS.”

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A new report from Taiwan Economic News claims Apple’s main supplier Foxconn has significantly upped its iPad 2 shipment estimates from 14 million to  20 million units for Q3. The report notes this marks a significant “42.8% increase from its original projection” made in July. This confirms previous reports for third quarter estimates we told you about last week.

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The verdict is in.  German consumers won’t soon be able to pick up a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.

A Dusseldorf court today upheld the temporary sales ban it issued Aug. 9, rejecting Samsung’s bid to overturn it for the most part. The judges won’t ban sales in other European Union countries as Apple had sought, Presiding Judge Johanna Brueckner-Hofmann said when delivering the verdict.

The judge stopped at German borders instead of issuing a full EU wide ban but further rulings could see the ban spread.

“The court is of the opinion that Apple’s minimalistic design isn’t the only technical solution to make a tablet computer, other designs are possible,” Brueckner-Hofmann said. “For the informed customer there remains the predominant overall impression that the device looks” like the design Apple has protected in Europe.

The ruling is a big victory for Apple and as the Verge puts it, “the decision could foreshadow the future of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 7.7 and, honestly, any number of rectangular-shaped tablets in Germany as well.”

FOSSPatents mentions some other “oddities” which could play a role in the widening scope of the case:

 The Community design that the Düsseldorf Regional Court deems valid and infringed was also presented by Apple in its Dutch proceeding, but a judge in The Hague threw it out.

If the face of the Galaxy Tab is what is at issue, it isn’t Samsung that is at fault, it is Android.  Cross-posted at 9to5Google.

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Apple’s patent infringement claims against Samsung now include twelve courts in nine countries on four continents. Reuters reported this morning that Apple is now formally suing Samsung in Japan and seeking to block sales of Samsung phones and tablets in the country:

Apple has filed a suit with the Tokyo District Court seeking the suspension of sales of Galaxy S and its sequel S II smartphones and the Galaxy Tab 7 in Japan, according to sources close to the matter. The first hearing was held on Wednesday, the source said.

The iPhone maker is seeking 100 million yen, or approximately $1.3 million, in damages. Apple previously had filed four complaints before the Tokyo District Court, according to patent expert Florian Müller. Coincidentally, Japan is also another high-revenue market for Apple. Other countries where Apple took Samsung to court include Germany, U.K., U.S., Australia and more.

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iFixyouri iPhone repair shops have just received a limited order of color iPad 2 front glass customized replacements in blue, green, yellow and pink. We’re told that if you use code “9to5mac” at checkout you’ll get 10% off the $200 iPad customization (yes, that’s pretty steep but we have a feeling there is a pretty big market for these).

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Update: DVICE has a review up with the following notes:

1. It is a 30 pin dock connector, not Bluetooth. It runs on the iPads battery and gets 8-10 hours of battery life (pretty efficient!). The downside to that: Portrait playing only.
2. The Atari Arcade is scheduled to drop on October 2 at Target and then in November at Toys “R” Us and Walmart for $60.

Coming soon to DiscoveryBayGames, a new Atari controller that will go head to head with the popular iCade box. The appliance was discovered in the Atari’s Greatest Hits update by MacRumors.

What’s New in Version 1.3

Hello Atari fans! We’ve been paying close attention to your feedback and have made a ton of improvements:

• New and improved control schemes
• OpenFeint integration
• Optimized iPad layouts with larger playfields
• Better multiplayer connectivity
• Compatibility with the Discovery Bay Games Duo Controller
• Play with the official Atari® Arcade – Duo™ Powered joystick. http://bit.ly/atariarcade

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We’ve received a word from several sources that GameStop will soon begin offering the entire lineup of Apple’s popular iOS mobile devices such as iPhones, iPods and iPads at their stores.  The announcement was made to dealers at an annual trade show in Las Vegas this past week. Also, as of this week, GameStop began accepting iOS device trade-ins for in-store credits.  From the sound of it, our take is GameStop is first doing trade-ins/used products before phasing in new ones, perhaps as Apple launches iPhone 5 in October (Deutsche Telekom in Germany is now quietly accepting pre-orders).

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q9w0dxosTE]
(We got a look at the Tab 7.7 before it was pulled)

Apple won a pretty significant victory today in its attempts to block Samsung from selling its iPad competitor products in Germany and in greater Europe.  This week’s IFA show is a CES-like pan-European event which showcases new consumer products from just about everyone except Apple.

Most of the buzz this year however is around two of Samsung’s new products, the Galaxy Tab 7.7 and the Galaxy Note 5.3.  Both have 1280×800 SuperAMOLED Displays and run Android 3.2 but the Tab falls under the line of products that Apple is trying to block and is currently under a set of injunctions in various parts of the world.

Interestingly, Samsung was originally showing the 7.7 devices to reporters with “not for sale in Germany” stickers attached. However last night, Samsung started removing the devices from the floor and covering up the advertisements like the product never existed (below).

It appears that Apple got Samsung to block the whole Tab line.  The Tab 7.7 is much smaller than the iPad weighing only 334 grams, yet has a higher resolution screen – so it appears that Apple’s injunction is very broad.

Bloomberg reports:

Samsung, Apple’s closest rival in tablet computers, pulled the just-unveiled Galaxy Tab 7.7 out of the IFA consumer- electronics show in Berlin after a Dusseldorf court on Sept. 2 granted Apple’s request to ban sales and marketing of the product, James Chung, a Seoul-based spokesman for Samsung, said by telephone today.

“Samsung respects the court’s decision,” Chung said, adding that the company believes it “severely limits consumer choice in Germany.” Samsung will pursue all available options, including legal action, to defend its intellectual property rights, he said.

It will be interesting to see what direction this goes.  Will Apple be able to successfully block Samsung’s (and others’) tablets for sale across the world? There is some concern that if Apple doesn’t win in these cases, damages to Samsung could be significant.

Images via ThisismyNext, Cross-posted on 9to5Google.com
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