As predicted yesterday, Google’s Street View is now available on Mobile Safari and Chrome on iOS devices. Having a quick look around, the service is very fluid, especially for a web page, and the quality is superb with graphics that really look solid on a Retina display.
Perhaps Apple should make a “pop-out” service that lets you open a Street View web page from within the new iOS Maps.app? Expand Expanding Close
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today that the service he started in his Harvard dorm room roughly eight years ago now has over 1 billion monthly users (or over one-seventh of the world’s population).
“Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life,” wrote Zuckerberg. “I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too.”
The … video above was made for the occasion. Apple is obviously a huge partner with Facebook due to deep integration on both iOS 6 and Mountain Lion, and Zuckerberg talked with Matt Laurer on the “Today Show” about his relationship and admiration for the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs:
Zuckerberg also mentioned that current Apple CEO Tim Cook sent him an iPhone 5 and most people actually access Facebook on the mobile web rather than an app.
More big numbers, including 1.13 trillion likes, 140.3 billion friend connections, 219 billion photo uploads, 62.6 million songs played, 600 million mobile users, 17 billion location-tagged posts, were revealed in the data sheet (DOCX).
Former Apple CEO John Sculley recently attended a South Florida Technology Alliance event to discuss Apple and the genesis of tablet computing, specifically: the Newton MessagePad and ARM Processor.
The MessagePad is the first series of ARM 610 RISC processor-based mobile devices developed by Apple for the Newton OS platform in 1993. Since then, it has become the dominant platform for mobile computing.
“Handwriting was never intended to be a very important aspect of it. […] It was really much more about the fact that you could hold this thing in your hand and it would do a lot of the graphics that you would see on the Macintosh,” explained Sculley at SFTA.
The tablet-like digital assistant spurred a flurry of models with various ARM processor. The series is generally remembered as a market flop now, of course, but Apple’s ARM initiative essentially paved the way for greatness. As The Next Web first noted, the iPhone today uses a by-product of the Newton MessagePad’s specifically designed ARM core.
“No microprocessor existed that would allow you to do mobile graphics-based software,” Sculley revealed, while discussing the birth of ARM.
Schmidt said Apple “is actually a very good partner. Our two companies are literally talking all the time about everything.” However, he added, “With respect to Apple patents, the best thing we can tell there are plenty of prior arts and I don’t want to go beyond that…”
In relation to Apple’s attempts to block competing Android phones with patents, Schmidt said:
“Literally patent wars prevent choice, prevent innovation and I think that is very bad. We are obviously working through that and trying to make sure we stay on the right side of these issues. So ultimately Google stands for innovation as opposed to patent wars,” …
“I think one of the worst things that happened in the last few years has been the belief that somehow there are so many patents in the mobile phone world, an estimated 200,000 patent that are overlapping and complicated and so forth, that one vendor can stop the sale of another vendor’s phones or devices,” he added.
Schmidt said he would talk to strategic allies on his visit, including Samsung, and he complemented South Korea’s adoption of smartphone technology: Expand Expanding Close
…following the introduction and record debut weekend of 5 million units for the iPhone 5, Samsung expects the new Galaxy Note 2 to sell three times as many units as the original Note in the first three months.
Intel Corp. (INTC) Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini told employees in Taiwan that Microsoft Corp.’s Windows 8 operating system is being released before it’s fully ready, a person who attended the company event said. Improvements still need to be made to the software, Otellini told employees at a company meeting in Taipei today,
If anyone should know, it is Otellini. He is also on Google’s Board of Directors, and he might be feeling some of the sting from the ARM-based Windows RT. Still: Ouch.
Many believe Microsoft’s Windows 8 strategy is reactionary and being dictated by the success of the iPad.
Update: Intel denied in a press release this afternoon the statements:
Intel has a long and successful heritage working with Microsoft on the release of Windows platforms, delivering devices that provide exciting experiences, stunning performance, and superior compatibility. Intel fully expects this to continue with Windows 8.
We are going to keep loving developers at Research In Motion, all the way to BlackBerry 10 and beyond. Watch our leadership team for developer relations bring back the band: Alec Saunders, VP Developer Relations & Ecosystem, Chris Smith, VP Application Platform & Tools, and Martyn Mallick, VP Global Alliances & Business. Thank you to those devs who are working hard, and for those jumping on board every day.
• A completely refreshed, user-friendly interface featuring the same engine as Adobe Photoshop – the industry standard for digital imaging – includes easily-navigated Quick, Guided and Expert editing modes; one-click options; a helpful Action bar; and big, bold icons to help users get the most from their shots
• Organize photos based on people, places (via Google maps geo-tagging) or events easily and intuitively
• New Guided Edits make pro-level effects like tilt-shift, vignettes and high and low-key easy to create
• New filters – Comic, Graphic Novel and Pen & Ink – inspire creativity by turning photos into stunning illustrations
• Intelligent Photoshop technology makes it easy to extract objects from different photos
• Easily share photos via email, Facebook, YouTube™, Vimeo® and more
Meanwhile, Premiere Elements gets:
• An entirely new and improved user interface including many of the same updates found in Photoshop Elements 11
• Add polish with a wide range of great-looking effects, transitions, themes, titles, disc menus, and professional-level effects and sound
• Give videos Hollywood movie styles with FilmLooks; easily apply slow and fast motion effects; dial-in colors with slider controls; effortlessly integrate blends for seamless transitions; and make adjustments with Quick Presets
• Show off finished creations with integrated video sharing on Vimeo
T-Mobile announced Seattle as its first iPhone-compatible 3G/4G network today at the GigaOm Mobilize conference. The 42MBps HSPA+ network will officially go live Monday and will roll out to other cities including Seattle, Washington, DC, and the New York metro area. It will also cover a ‘material’ part of T-Mobile’s U.S. coverage by the end of the year.
Why would you want to ride on T-Mobile’s network? As you can see above, the iPhone 5 uses 42Mb HSPA+ radios. So, you can get some pretty mean speeds (and even the older iPhones can still ride on the 14.4 networks). T-Mobile’s tests of unlocked iPhone 4S devices running over 4G (HSPA+) on its 1900 band have recorded 70 percent faster average download speeds than iPhone 4S on AT&T’s network.
Even on EDGE, the T-Mobile pre-paid plans are the best in the business. The $30 a month unlimited text/data plan with 100 minutes of talk is about the least-expensive plan you can find for an unlocked iPhone. Virgin offers the same.
Google employee and XML pioneer Tim Bray might have just hinted at Google’s plans for an integrated password storage solution aimed at simplifying logins. 9to5Google has the full story.
The Wall Street Journal has a story today on HP CEO Meg Whitman “taking a cue from Apple” and planning to release a redesigned line of PCs that could one day rival Apple. While mentioning the “brick” of a company laptop she received when taking over as CEO in September 2011, Whitman discussed the company’s struggle to keep up with Apple’s product design:
As part of her plan, Ms. Whitman is counting on better-looking PCs, hoping her company might one day rival Apple Inc. as the industry’s standard bearer for sleek design…”I don’t think we kept up with the innovation,” said the 56-year-old CEO. “The whole market has moved to something that is more beautiful… Apple taught us that design really matters,” she said. “I think we’ve made a lot of progress.”
HP executive Stacy Wolff is behind the new look, which he explained uses a common color palette, standard logo size, and reduced components “so that a computer’s chassis, for example, was a single piece of metal or plastic, instead of multiple pieces.”
Not only did the change make the products look better-built, but it sometimes made them cheaper or lighter…”We’re working on a cleaner, more minimalistic look,” he said.
The former Google executive did offer high-end smartphones to most of its employees (if the memo BI received is legit) including the iPhone 5, three Androids and a Nokia Lumia Windows Phone. These are probably the top phones on the market today, and they will replace the BlackBerries that Yahoo! employees were given until this point.
The memo is below. Mayer was notorious for her use of Apple’s iPhone, even within the walls of Google.
We have a very exciting update to share with you today – we are announcing Yahoo! Smart Phones, Smart Fun! As of today, Yahoo is moving off of blackberries as our corporate phones and on to smartphones in 22 countries. A few weeks ago, we said that we would look into smartphone penetration rates globally and take those rates into account when deciding on corporate phones. Ideally, we’d like our employees to have devices similar to our users, so we can think and work as the majority of our users do.
Moving forward, we’ll offer you a choice of devices as well as provide monthly plans for the data and phone.
The smartphone choices that we are including in the program are:
* Apple iPhone 5
* Android:
– Samsung Galaxy S3
– HTC One X
– HTC EVO 4G LTE
* Windows Phone 8:
– Nokia Lumia 920
We’re getting started right away and taking orders starting now
Clearly, Yahoo will buy a lot of iPhone 5s for its employees if they truly have freewill in the decision.
You can say many things about Samsung, but one you cannot say it is slow (you could also say it leaked the rumored 1GB of RAM on the iPhone 5). However, a reader has taken an “S-pen” to the ad above:
Before I even start typing, I would like to note that this will probably be a little bit biased towards Apple.
So, I’m sure you’ve all seen Samsgun’s latest anti-Apple ad. If you haven’t, you can go and check it out here. Notice how they list a lot of features that the iPhone apparently doesn’t have. Well, here’s what they do.
NFC: Near field communication let’s your phone establish a connection with another phone that is touching it or very close to it. It can accomplish almost everything that Bluetooth can, but in a much closer proximity and without dealing with pairing.
Smart-stay: This feature aims to prevent the display backlight from turning off while you are looking at the phone’s display. Critics have said that this feature works fine in well-lit areas, but not in the dark.
S-Beam: This is a feature available in Ice Cream Sandwich, and uses NFC to transfer data between two phones that are held closely together. It does the same thing that the iPhone application Bump does.
Share Shot: This is an easy way to share photos with another S3 owner. It lets you upload pictures you’ve taken to another S3 decide through a WiFi network. The iPhone’s equivalent is Shared Photo-Streams, only Share Shot only works through WiFi.
Group Cast: Group Cast is designed for presentations. It lets users view and interact with PDF, PowerPoint, and image files through their phones.
Direct Call: This feature aims to know when you want to talk vs. when you want to text. For instance, if you’re composing a text message but decide to call the receiver instead, you simply hold your phone to your ear and it will dial their number. (Seems silly to me)
Smart Alert: This feature activates when you’ve been away from your phone. It vibrates to let you know that you have missed calls or text-messages. It seems like a much more annoying version of Notification Center, BUT you don’t have to manually check it– it automatically notifies you as oppose to you manually checking Notification Center.
Tilt-to-Zoom: This feature let’s you simply tilt the phone – as opposed to pinching and zooming – to zoom in on a picture or website.
Palm Swipe Capture: This feature lets you swipe your palm over your phone to take a screenshot. On the iPhone this is accomplished by simultaneously pressing the Home button and the Sleep-Wake button.
Palm touch to mute/pause: You can mute and pause media on the screen by covering the screen with your hand.
Picture-in-picture: This let’s you watch a video and normally use your phone at the same time by placing the video in a popup window.
Turn Over To Mute: Let’s you turn over your phone to mute incoming calls.
Shake To Update: Lets you shake your phone to update the information most apps are displaying. For instance, shaking your phone while in the Twitter app will load new tweets, etc.
Removable Battery: Pretty self explanatory. Lets you take out your battery.
Miller has a long list of epic hacks in his recent past: In 2007, he was the first to fully compromise the iPhone through its web browser. Six months later he won the Pwn2Own hacking competition in Vancouver by compromising a Macbook Air in two minutes. In 2009, he revealed a technique that would have allowed an attacker to hijack iPhones via text message, virally spreading from phone to phone. He’s found a method of infecting Macbooks with malware via their power adapter, and had his Apple developer license revoked for successfully sneaking an iOS app past Apple’s safeguards. Most recently he’s shifted his focus to Android, defeating Google’s “Bouncer” program for detecting malware in the Android Market and using near-field communications chips to wirelessly compromise Samsung and Nokia phones just by waving another device near them.
On Aug. 6, Beta 4 of iOS 6 came out with one huge gaping hole: Apple’s YouTube app. There was speculation on both sides of the fence that Apple might have pulled it because of the ongoing war with Android or perhaps Google pulled it because it wanted more control of the app and/or it wanted to show more ads. In reality, it was probably a little of both.
Whatever the case, just a month after being pulled and just a day ahead of Apple’s iOS 6/iPhone 5 event, Google has released its own homegrown YouTube app into the App Store. It is formatted for the iPhone only (an iPad version is in the works), but it already has many features that its Apple-built counterpart lacked.
Description
Watch the world’s videos and keep up with your favorite YouTube channels with the official YouTube app for iOS. Sign in to access your subscriptions, playlists, uploads and more.
Features:
✓ Enjoy YouTube’s vast video catalog, including official music videos
✓ Find videos and channels more easily with voice search and query autocomplete
✓ Subscribe to channels and instantly access your subscriptions with the channel guide UI
✓ Read comments, browse related videos, enable subtitles and more – all while watching
✓ Easy video sharing to Google+, E-mail, Facebook and Twitter
Did Google throw this together in just one month or did it have some advance warning? We are thinking the latter; it is already receiving some good reviews and appears to be a well-polished product.
As TheNextWeb points out, it is not certain how you will upload videos to YouTube in the new app. Matt Panzerino postulates that Apple will allow YouTube to be granted rights in iOS to have a file handling menu option. We are not so sure that Apple cares if you can upload to YouTube natively (see Mountain Lion) from the OS. We are thinking that you will eventually need to open the YouTube app manually, browse to the video, and do it the old-fashioned way.
The more important question now becomes: where is the Google Maps app for iOS?
More… including a walkthrough YouTube video below:
When Pender asked whether Apple would be announcing its newest iPhone next week, Apple lawyer Michael McKeon of Fish & Richardson in Washington said he wasn’t told of the company’s plans. “It will be thinner and the screen bigger?” the judge asked. McKeon would only say, “That’s what the blogs are saying.”
T-Mobile announced a huge new “unlimited and unlocked iPhone” initiative today that will launch Sept. 12—a date that should ring a bell. The nation’s fourth-largest carrier does not and will not officially carry the iPhone, but its parent company carries the iPhone all over Europe and was even the original carrier in its home Germany. The biggest issue with T-Mobile USA and the iPhone is that T-Mobile’s 3G/4G bands are incompatible with Apple’s iPhone hardware. Therefore, a million plus iPhone users are kept to EDGE 2.5G speeds, which seemed to work O.K. for the original iPhone, but five years have passed since it first launched and expectations have largely risen.
Today’s announcement is a big one for T-Mobile and will be accompanied by a large marketing push. T-Mobile claims —and the math seems to work— that it will save users $50 a month over similar AT&T plans. The total savings amount equals $1,200 over the life of a two-year contract.
T-Mobile will have a store-within-a-store for iPhone users who want to make the hop. Trained T-Mobile salespeople will be able to instruct users on unlocking, but they will not physically open the devices. This is an unprecedented move…especially for a device that T-Mobile does not officially carry.
Getting your hands on an unlocked device is pretty easy and will probably get a lot easier over the next weeks as the new iPhone is announced. Apple has offered the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S unlocked almost since it released last year and you can currently snap up a new one at eBay for about $580.
T-Mobile has some more good news for prospective iPhone customers today: Remember the iPhone-compatible 1900MHz network it demo’ed at WWDC? That same 1900MHz 4G network is rolling out in Seattle, Las Vegas, Washington, DC, and the New York metro area currently (readers? sightings?).
Even better: T-Mobile’s tests of unlocked iPhone 4S devices running over 4G (HSPA+) on its 1900 band have recorded 70 percent faster average download speeds than iPhone 4S on AT&T’s network. We will wait for neutral parties to review before judging and, obviously, LTE is coming for the iPhone 5, which T-Mobile expects will run on its network.
However, the best part might be the company behind the network. T-Mobile allows its customers to make and receive calls over Wi-Fi when there is no network on their smartphones. The iPhone is no exception. T-Mobile has the Bobsled app for iPhone for making calls. This is fantastic not only when in low -service areas but also when travelling abroad. T-Mobile will release other apps soon for things like live TV, account management and visual voicemail.
For those thinking about making the jump, remember that T-Mobile is not an official carrier and things like the following may apply:
Also, AT&T offers customers a chance to request a device unlock for their iPhone. The main requirements are that the device is an AT&T iPhone and all contract and term commitments are satisfied before submitting a request. The carrier can take up to a week to process a request, and it “reserves the right to deny any unlock request that it concludes would result in an abuse of this policy or is part of an effort to defraud AT&T or its customers.” AT&T further said it could “alter this unlocking policy at its discretion without advance notice.”
HP’s Spectre One comes with accessories that look and act almost identical to Apple counterparts including the wireless keyboard, trackpad and mouse. The screen looks like a Cinema Display with HP pasted over the Apple. The only difference is the back (which few will see).
Perhaps manufacturers are learning the wrong lesson from Samsung. Although Engadget did not notice (or mention) any resemblance beyond the “Magic Trackpad style,” just about every commenter did. Update: Engadget Editor Tim Stevens says it was too obvious to mention:
Avid, maker of the music industry’s leading digital audio workstation software called Pro Tools, has officially announced its first Thunderbolt interface for Pro Tools with the new Pro Tools|HD Native Thunderbolt interface and PCIe card. Thanks to Thunderbolt, Avid says the new Pro Tools|HD Native provides the “highest performance and lowest latency of any native DAW” yet. As usual, Avid bundles your choice of either the Thunderbolt interface or PCIe card with its Pro Tools HD software, and you will also get a choice of a Pro Tools HD Series audio interface including either the HD OMNI or HD I/O.
In addition to an “audiophile-grade headphone output” powerful enough to drive high impedance headphones, a few of the benefits of the new Thunderbolt interface according to Avid:
Unlike USB- or FireWire-based DAWs, which are inherently prone to latency, Pro Tools|HD Native employs either a high-speed Thunderbolt interface or PCIe core card to connect Pro Tools HD Series interfaces with your laptop or desktop computer. By eliminating distracting monitor latency while recording, increasing your I/O capabilities, and providing 64-bit floating-point processing for more headroom and a higher mix resolution, you get a professional native solution that meets the highest audio standards.
Reliable sources recently provided 9to5Mac with official blueprints of Apple Campus 2 that detail and illustrate the mammoth project currently in development. (These are just a few of the confidential images.)
Solar panels cover the main building’s entire roof, and the images above depict additional outdoor and indoor aspects of the new structure. The exclusive slides named Foster + Partners as one of the architecture firms working on the project, and they cited Arup for consulting engineering, OLIN for landscape architecture, and Davis Langdon for construction. Previous reports indicated that construction is supposed to start later this year.
In related news: Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer sent neighbors brochures recently to solicit feedback on the project.
We noted last month that Apple filed a document with the Southern District of New York attempting to have settlements with the U.S. Department of Justice and three publishers delayed until after the high profile eBook price-fixing case goes to trial in June 2013. The Wall Street Journal reported today that a federal judge approved the settlements, which would allow Amazon and other retailers to return to its previous model and freely set eBook prices. Not surprisingly, Apple is expected to appeal the decision:
In a move that could reshape the publishing industry, a federal judge has approved a settlement with three of the nation’s largest book publishers over alleged collusion in the pricing of e-books… Apple has previously indicated in court papers that it would seek to appeal any decision approving the settlement. As a result, it could take some time before consumers see lower prices on e-books… “It’s devastating to bookstores,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “For two years the settling publishers must allow vendors to discount e-books at any price they want. The court acknowledges that this restores the status quo conditions before 2010, when Amazon was able capture 90% of the e-book market. The Justice Department is reshaping the literary marketplace without submitting a single economic study to the court to justify its actions.”
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