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.
We already got a look at HP’s sleeker [MacBook Air] look with its new Windows 8 notebooks at IFA (pictured above) and recently announced iMac with Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad (pictured right)…
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A fantastic, if not very accurate, title at BusinessInsider: “Marissa Mayer Just Gave Every Yahoo Employee An iPhone 5”! Well, not really, but it backs up an earlier claim.
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 920We’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.
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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:
[tweet https://twitter.com/jshchnz/status/247134888321495040]
Here’s a Redditer’s breakdown of the features:
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.
From 9to5Toys.com
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAOJyBxjpcs]
Amazon just opened the floodgates to its forked-Android powered Kindles (7-inch only so far).
The original with some beefed up internals is just $159. The new HD version (which closely matches up with the Google Nexus 7) is $199 for 16GB and $249 for 32GB.
(Or you could wait a month and probably not hate yourself :P)
[tweet https://twitter.com/0xcharlie/statuses/246598708865679360]
Forbes reported on Twitter’s latest hire: Charlie Miller. He is a well-known iOS and Mac hacker who discovered various exploits for the platforms in recent years. Miller will join Twitter’s security team with the title “Software Engineer, Systems.”
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:
Funny exchange we missed over the weekend from the Apple vs. HTC courtroom:
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.”
Indeed.
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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.
We’re also developing iOS versions of helpful T-Mobile applications like T-Mobile myAccount, T-MobileVisual Voicemail and T-Mobile TV (we already offer an iOS version of our popular Bobsled application).
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.”
Check out AT&T’s Customer Device Unlock page for more information.
The full press release follows:
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It feels like consumer PC hardware can now be defined thusly: “Make something as close as possible to an Apple product without getting sued.”
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:
[tweet https://twitter.com/tim_stevens/status/245136336883965952]
[tweet https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/245118820098920448]
What say you? Homage or Rip-off? (Also: What is Kirf?)
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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.
Pricing for the two packages ranges from $4,999 to $5,999, but Avid is also offering Digi 002, Digi 003, and Mbox Pro owners a hardware trade-in worth $1000:
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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.)
The spaceship-like building, called “Campus 2,” is nearly a mile in circumference. Apple bought the land from HP and other neighbors in Cupertino, Calif., for around $300 million. The company’s late cofounder, Steve Jobs, oversaw the building’s design, while the project’s proposal was his last public appearance (video below).
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.
A previous 9to5Mac gallery featured 100 other high-quality images, and one of the highlights was an auditorium that Apple plans to give presentations at when the facilities open in 2015.
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.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrgO8Zseh6E&feature=youtu.be]
Live from Amazon’s Kindle event; the company just unveiled a refreshed Kindle Fire lineup dubbed the “Kindle Fire HD”. A few of the highlights: the device now comes in an 8.9-inch 1,920-by-1,200-pixel variant (in addition to a new 7-inch 1,280-by-800-pixel HD model) with 254 ppi, double the RAM of previous models, longer battery life, and a laminated touch sensor that reduces screen glare by up to 25 percent. The 8.9-inch Fire HD is set to ship Nov. 20 for $299, while a 7-inch Fire HD will cost you $199 when it ships Sept. 14.
Amazon also announced a 32GB 4G LTE model will ship Nov. 20 for $499 with LTE packages starting at $50 per year:
A few other notable specs for the new Fire HD line:
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PTY–FKgUFQ]
Two of the big names in slick, Mac-compatible audio interfaces have announced new products that OS X gearheads will want to take note of. While these two interfaces from Apogee and Focusrite include different feature sets and price points, both feature a polished, Apple design aesthetic and introduce features not currently available in the companies’ current audio interface lineups.
Starting with the Quartet desktop interface by Apogee (which is widely considered to be the industry leader in digital audio interface technology), this new interface and control center for Mac is the company’s first to feature a USB MIDI connection. Coming in at $1,295 when it ships later this month, the Quartet lands somewhere between the company’s popular $595 Duet 2 and $1,995 Ensemble interfaces. Included is six touchpads for your inputs and outputs, three assignable touchpads, monitor control for up to three sets of monitors, four analog inputs with Apogee’s reference standard mic preamps and eight analog outputs. We look forward to bringing you a full review of the Apogee Quartet ASAP.
A full list of specs is below:
Features and specifications:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_4n3I-kpcww#!]
Also just announced is a new audio interface from Focusrite that comes closer to the price point of Apogee’s $600 Duet 2. Focusrite’s new “Forte” interface is a 2 in, 4 out, USB 2.0, which features two remote-controlled mic preamps, touch sensitive buttons, a large control knob, and an included breakout cable for XLR connections. The Forte can handle A-D and D-A conversion at up to 24-bit/192kHz resolution, and it will hit stores in October for roughly $600.
As part the International keynote presentations at IFA this year, AMD exec and president of the HSA foundation, Phil Rogers, took the stage to give an update on the current state of the not-for-profit alliance. For those of you unfamiliar with the foundation, HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture), is described as “a heterogeneous compute ecosystem, rooted in industry standards, for combining scalar processing on the CPU with parallel processing on the GPU while enabling high bandwidth access to memory and high application performance at low power consumption.”
While the addition of Samsung, among other partners Texas Instruments, ARM, AMD, and Imagination Technologies, was the big news of the day for most, a short demo by partner Apical was what really caught our attention.
Apical’s “Assertive Display” technology is already present in a few devices, such as Sharp’s AQUOS PHONE SH-01D, but during its demo for the HSA keynote, Apical showed off the tech working on an iPad…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQUTHGE3qs0]
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fctZx8_Naa8]
We had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with Sharp today at its IGZO display booth. While they would not say which Apple products would incorporate their new displays, they did seem to insinuate these were the best displays on the market, and Apple is the type of company that uses the best displays.
So why are these the best?
If you aren’t making a laptop that apes the MacBook Air, you aren’t even in the game anymore.
The fast keep getting faster. Western Digital announced two new speedy new platter drives aimed at Mac users today. The Thunderbolt “My Book VelociRaptor Duo” is a speed improvement on WD’s previous Thunderbolt Drives coming from the addition of two 10,000RPM internal HDDs (the speed of the drives is actually still the bottleneck here —Thunderbolt is very fast).
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Extreme speed of WD VelociRaptor drives inside. With the extreme speed of two 10,000 RPM WD VelociRaptor drives inside united with the revolutionary speed of Thunderbolt technology your creative inspirations have never moved so fast.
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Enhanced workflow efficiency. The dual Thunderbolt ports make it easy to daisy chain more drives for even greater speeds and higher capacity. Add peripherals to further enhance your productivity.
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User-configurable for speed or double-safe data protection. Customize this dual-drive storage system to your needs – RAID 0 for speed, RAID 1 for data protection, JBOD to use the drives individually.
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Did you know… My Book VelociRaptor Duo is a bootable external device supported by Mac OS X. For additional information, please click here.
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Western Digitial also upped the speed of its Mac Portable Drives (which we’ve reviewed favorably) with USB 3.0 and sizes up to 2TB:
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Ultra-fast USB 3.0 connectivity. With the blazing-fast connectivity of USB 3.0, this drive lets you access and save files in record time. Reduce transfer time by up to 3 times when compared to USB 2.0 transfer rates.**Performance may vary based on user’s hardware and system configuration. |
Massive capacity in a small design. This compact enclosure offers up to a massive 2 TB of storage. It’s the ideal companion for anyone with lots of photos, movies, videos and files that they want to take with them.
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Password protection secures
your drive. Use WD Security utility to set password protection and hardware encryption and protect your files from unauthorized use or access.
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Both Press releases follow:
AT&T has announced the upcoming opening of its new flagship retail store in Chicago. The store, located in the Magnificent Mile district, features 10,000 square feet of store place and lots of advanced new technologies. The store has an 18 foot high “Connect Wall” that showcases AT&T’s latest news and product details to both people inside and outside of the store.
As you can see in the image above, the store has displays throughout: over 100, according to AT&T. This new flagship store is spread into a few sections, including an apps lounge and lifestyle boutiques. Here’s AT&T’s video guided tour of the store:
President Barack Obama just began a Reddit “AMA” (ask me anything) that invites Internet folk to ask questions and hopefully get answers. He is notably using a MacBook Pro and Magic Mouse to work his magic. We previously noted his fondness of Apple, as he has been caught several times with a MacBook at his side. Someone go ask about the next-generation iPhone. [Reddit]
By the way, is he rocking the same tie from when he tweeted?
[tweet https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/240909486234161152]
[tweet http://twitter.com/AntDeRosa/status/240909818511126528]
[tweet https://twitter.com/johnnie/status/240913600603115521]
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A report surfaced this morning about T-Mobile sending a memo to its sales staff that encourages them to sell against Apple’s iPhone beginning Sept. 21. Unsurprisingly, the memo confirmed T-Mobile would not be a carrier for the next-generation iPhone due out next month. Adding a bit to this morning’s story, TmoNews followed up with a new flyer that T-Mobile aims to show customers. The flyer boasts just how much iPhone users will save if they ditch AT&T and bring their unlocked iPhone to T-Mobile. Magenta is promising customers can save up to $1,500 over two years if they switch. T-Mobile’s single line offering actually sounds fabulous, as it offers customers truly unlimited data, text and minutes for only $75. That seems like a plan you can’t beat…unless you want 3G speeds. T-Mobile made a recent push to iPhone-compatible 1900MHz 3G network (and 4G at WWDC), but we are not sure how well it is doing on that front. Until then, EDGE 2.5G is as fast as you will get.
T-Mobile has not been able to sign up as an official iPhone carrier, so it has always made strides to welcome unlocked iPhone users. We previously reported there are roughly 1 million iPhone users on T-Mobile’s network. T-Mobile offers a MicroSIM kit to make the switch on your iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S a little easier. An updated version of the kit will hit stores beginning Aug. 29.
A few features —which Google is looking to bulk Google Wallet with— are dangerously Passbook-like.
Read about it on 9to5Google.com.
