GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

LAS VEGAS — Speakal has created a dock for your iOS devices in the shape of the iconic TARDIS from Doctor Who. The bottom of the box slides out like a tray, revealing a small docking station. Speakers are built into the windows, and there’s a volume knob in the back.

The company has also created an iOS app that turns your iPhone or iPod into a wireless remote control for your home theater, controlling the TV, stereo and DVD or Blu-ray player. The free app connects to the TARDIS via Bluetooth, and the commands are beamed to your various home theater devices using a small infrared emitter in the lamp at the top of the TARDIS.

It will be available this spring for around $130, and it will be slightly smaller than this demo unit (It’s actually bigger on the inside than it is on the outside).

Speakal has a few other official BBC-licensed products, including a dock shaped like Stig’s helmet from Top Gear. Your iPhone plugs into the top, which looks kind of silly, but it’s still a wicked cool piece of art.

See also:

• Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver Wiimote
• Can Doctor Who Redeem Ebenezer Scrooge?
• Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver, Now Screws Screws

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LAS VEGAS — Eye-Fi will add a new “Direct Mode” to its Wi-Fi-enabled SD cards, allowing cameras to send photos direct to smart-phones and tablets as they are taken.

Currently it is only possible to beam photos from an Eye-Fi filled camera to, say, an iPad with a rather clunky chain of tools. First, you need a pre-existing Wi-Fi network for both camera and iPad to connect to. Then you need the nifty but tricky to set up Shutter Snitch app for the iPad. Then you have to cross your fingers and hope.

Eye-Fi’s Direct Mode turns the card itself into a Wi-Fi access-point, to which you connect your phone. An update to Eye-Fi’s iOS apps will then let them receive photos direct. From there you can upload them, or process them with apps like Instagram. All the existing Eye-Fi functions – direct uploads from the camera, for example – will also still work.

Direct Mode will come as a free firmware update “later in 2011″, and will work with any X2 Eye-Fi cards.

Direct Mode press release [Eye-Fi]

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Apple’s iOS App Store hit the ground sprinting two-and-a-half years ago, and it hasn’t slowed down. In 2010, programmers unleashed a plethora of high-quality apps for the iPhone and its brand-new big sibling, the iPad.

For Apple’s tablet, many of the most impressive apps focused on the reading experience. That’s not surprising, because what better to do with that big, beautiful screen? And for the iPhone, we saw some clever apps that made excellent use of the handset’s always-on data connection, geo-awareness and camera.

With 400,000 apps crowding the iOS App Store, it’s tough to choose what’s worthy of a space on your screen. Here are Wired staff’s picks for the best iOS apps of 2010. There may be a lot of useless apps out there, but these are worth downloading.

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See Also:

• 15 iPad Apps You Should Download Today
• 10 Stellar iPad Apps That Will Blow You Away
• Top Five iPad Comic-Book Apps Reviewed
• GeekDad: IPhone Apps
• Underwire: IPhone Apps

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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The extremely popular iPhone and iPad game Angry Birds has accumulated 50 million users who play it for 200 million minutes a day, according to its maker.

Humongous.How did Angry Birds do it? It hardly seems like luck; if you look at it closely, the game’s success was brilliantly engineered.

The company Rovio hit all the check boxes. Angry Birds has a really sharp style, fits in an accessible game genre and features a physics-based gameplay that creates a ton of different situations to keep the game interesting at various skill levels.

On top of that, it’s priced at an irresistible 99 cents. Plus, the game’s makers regularly add new stages through software updates to keep people talking about Angry Birds (just like Doodle Jump does), which makes it a constant viral sensation. So whenever people buy an iPhone, one of the first apps recommended by friends is Angry Birds. Add that all together and you have a mega hit.

And it’s only going to get bigger. Angry Birds recently soared onto the Android platform, and soon it’s also heading to PCs, Macs, every game console and Facebook, according to Rovio.

From CNET

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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Apple banned an iPhone magazine app because it contained content related to using Android phones, according to the app’s creator.

Apple refused to approve the magazine Android Magasinet, a publication about Google’s Android OS, according to Brian Dixen, managing editor of Danish magazine publisher Mediaprovider.

Dixen said when he asked why, an Apple executive replied, “You know… your magazine… it’s just about Android…. we can’t have that in our App Store.”

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

File this under “trivial” for now, because it’s questionable why an iPhone owner would want to read an Android magazine in the first place. However, Dixen said he’s concerned about the implications that this incident poses about editorial independence in the App Store. I’d agree the implications are more concerning than the end result: As I’ve argued before, the issue of Apple’s editorial control is poised to grow as the iPad matures into a major publishing platform.

From Fortune

Photo: laihiu/Flickr

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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Apple last week rolled out a major update for its mobile operating system iOS 4, and among the new features is a nifty free tool: Find My iPhone.

As its name suggests, Find My iPhone is a tracking feature to locate a missing iPhone 4, iPad or fourth-generation iPod Touch. (Only the latest models get the free feature.) If you’ve dropped your iDevice in a cab, or if someone’s stolen it, you can hop on a computer to follow the GPS coordinates of the iPhone on a Google map (see above).

Or, if you’re just absent-minded like me and you misplace your iPhone as often as you lose your keys, you can use your computer to trigger a beeping sound to help you find it. It should be loud enough to hear from under a couch cushion. (You’ll never have to bug a friend to call your phone again.)

If you do indeed think your iPhone is in the hands of a thief, you can use Find My iPhone to remotely lock the device or wipe the data. (Do note, however, that a clever thief could just remove the SIM card, and you wouldn’t be able to track or wipe the phone.)

Of the many new features in iOS 4.2.1, I found this one to be one of the sweetest bonuses. Find My iPhone originally was only available as part of a MobileMe subscription, which costs $10 per month. Making it free was a nice move on Apple’s part: An iPhone can potentially contain a treasure trove of personal information, so losing one is a big deal.

You need to activate Find My iPhone before you lose your phone, so do it now. Since the steps to turn this useful feature on aren’t immediately obvious, here’s how to do it:

1. Make sure you have the latest iOS update (iOS 4.2.1) installed. Plug in your iPhone and click “Check for updates” in iTunes to get the software.

2. With iOS 4.2.1 installed, tap the Settings app on your iPhone. Then tap “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” and “Add Account.”

3. In the account menu, enter your iTunes or Apple ID and password (i.e., the login you use to buy iTunes media on the iPhone).

4. The “Find My iPhone” option should appear. Slide it to “ON” to activate it.”

And you’re done! From here on, you can hop on a computer and enter www.me.com in a web browser. Then enter the same login credentials you used to register for Find My iPhone, and you’ll immediately get a GPS reading of the phone, along with a simple menu of buttons allowing you to lock, wipe, or send a message or sound to the iPhone.

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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Amazon has figured out a way to advertise its own products is everyone else’s stores, using a clever application that leverages the key features of smartphones — in particular, Apple’s latest iPhones.

Price Check for iPhone initially doesn’t seem very different from Amazon’s well-established, multiplatform “shopping cart” frontend, which has always allowed users to check prices and buy products on the go. The difference is the variety and speed of inputs you can use to find items in the store, which make the app particularly well-suited for in-store holiday comparison shopping.

• Say It brings up a picture of a microphone with an “I’m listening” message. Speak the product’s name into the smartphone mic, and Amazon will try to find it. The speech recognition is a little iffy, and obviously homophones give it some trouble (my search for “Kinect” brought up “Connect Four”), but it’s generally pretty good.
• Snap It opens up your iPhone’s camera, along with a textual reminder that the service “works best in good light with a book, DVD, CD, or video game” — in short, media objects with well-established cover art that Amazon can try to match in its database (and Amazon says it’s steadily increasing the size and variety of this database). “Snap It” worked extraordinarily well with every book I tried in the decidedly poor light of my office.
• Scan It is particularly powerful, since it can use a product’s barcode to find a unique copy: it won’t confuse hardbacks with paperbacks, or widescreen and fullscreen copies of a DVD. But it requires an autofocusing camera to get high-quality resolution on the barcode — which means iPhone 4 or 3GS. My iPhone 3G has the “Scan It” button grayed out; if I click it, I get a short, apologetic notice that my non-autofocusing camera can’t scan a barcode, at least up to the standards of Amazon’s new app.

Finally, you can also type in a product’s name in the “Type It” box at the top. Once you’ve found an item, you can browse specs and reviews, or share the price over email, Facebook or Twitter, or narrow the stores between Amazon and its partners (the “Prime” compatible button is quite nice.)

There’s also a handy list of “Recent Price Checks,” so you can keep track of products you’ve scanned, and a shopping cart, so you can buy products from Amazon directly. You can’t access your own wish list, which skews the app towards impulse buys or holiday shopping for other people.

When the app was first announced, I was confused; why was Amazon launching yet another shopping application for iOS? There’s the old standby Amazon.com, the Windowshop App for iPad and now PriceCheck? Did customers really need a whole page (or in iOS 4, a folder) devoted just to apps for Amazon?

Now I think I understand the strategy much better. Each Amazon application capitalizes on the unique hardware and anthropology of the device. Windowshop is a browsing catalog, suited to the full-sized screen and laid-back posture of the iPad. Even the name suggests voyeurism and fantasy. Price Check is mobile, pulling in camera, voice and autofocus to make something you can whip out of your pocket to make a snap decision while the Black Friday hordes crowd in around you.

Different devices, different scenarios, different shopping experiences — but all of them funneling you to just one store, up in the cloud. Smart. Now I wonder when and if other platforms (Android, Blackberry, etc.) will get their chance to play with similar new toys.




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This post was written by Journalist on November 23, 2010

Tags: 'Apple Store' Application: Buy an iPhone with Your iPhone, Amazon, Amazon iPhone App Adds Barcode Scanning, Amazon Shows Off Kindle for iPad, Amazon's iPhone App Remembers So You Don't Have to, Amazon's Price Check Might Be Perfect Smartphone Shopping App, iOS, iPad, iPhone, iPhone App Digitizes Brick-and-Mortar Coupons, Price Check, Tablet Catalogs Rethink Casual Page-Flipping, Windowshop

One of the features pulled from the iOS 4.2 update at the last minute was the ability to print to any printer connected to your Mac (more correctly, the functionality was not added in OS X 10.6.5). Printopia, from Ecamm, solves this, without any messy hacks, and it adds more besides.

You can still print from an iPad to a purpose-made AirPrint printer, but who wants to buy a printer these days? Nope, better to repurpose the piece of junk you already have (and lets face it, nobody has ever designed a good printer). Printopia is a preference-pane that lists any printers you have installed on your Mac, and when you choose the print option in any compatible iOS app, (Safari, for instance), the printer shows up right in the menu.

But what if you don’t have, or want, a printer? Printopia has you covered. You can choose to print to a PDF, which is then saved on the Mac (in a new Documents/Printopia folder), and if you have Dropbox installed (which you should, as it is both awesome and free) then there’s even an option to save a PDF into your Dropbox. This last option should show up automatically, but for me it only works on my MacBook, not my iMac. Then again, my entire Documents folder is inside my Dropbox so, like, whatever.

Printopia is available now, for $10, and you can try it free for a week.

Printopia product page [Ecamm]

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Apple’s found itself in market cold wars with many tech companies, most notably Microsoft, Adobe and Google. But things are really heating up with smartphone maker RIM. In the last 24 hours, RIM has attacked Apple’s technical chops and software philosophy.

First, RIM’s Playbook team posted a video (see below) comparing its forthcoming tablet’s mobile browser to the iPad’s. Interestingly, the video highlighted not just the iPad’s lack of Flash (which everyone knows about), but also its slow page-loading speed, lack of pixel-by-pixel rendering fidelity and lack of support for high-quality JavaScript and HTML5 video.

The implication is clear: Steve Jobs has said that Apple isn’t putting resources behind Flash so it can focus on HTML5 and other open web standards. But the iPad’s implementation of those standards is far from perfect. RIM is now claiming that it has been able to put together a faster browser with better HTML5 performance — and, as a bonus, support for Flash — even though Apple’s had more time to get its browser right.

RIM’s HTML5 emphasis is key for its second attack on Apple, which CEO Jim Balsillie voiced at Tuesday’s Web 2.0 conference: Apple’s highly-touted app marketplace really just masks iOS’s subpar web performance.

“You dont need an app for the Web,” Balsillie said. Since many iOS apps are just frontend clients for web properties — stores, games, media companies, social networking sites — and RIM’s app strength is in documents and productivity, it’s a clear contrast.

Theres still a role for apps, but can you use your existing content? Balsillie asked web companies. Can you use your existing web assets? Do you need a set of proprietary tools to bring existing assets on to a device, or can you use known tools that you use for creating websites?

As for Apple catching up to Blackberry in the smartphone market, when asked what he would tell Jobs if he were there, Balsillie simply said, “You finally showed up.”

This isn’t the first time Balsillie has shot back at Jobs and Apple. After an October earnings call where Jobs crowed about passing RIM in quarterly smartphone sales and denigrated 7-inch tablets (a class that includes RIM’s Playbook) as overexpensive underperformers, Balsillie took to the official Blackberry blog, questioning Apple’s numbers (RIM’s fiscal quarters are slightly different from Apple’s), its software philosophy and Jobs’s treatment by the media.

“For those of us who live outside of Apples distortion field,” Balsillie wrote, “we know that 7-inch tablets will actually be a big portion of the market and we know that Adobe Flash support actually matters to customers who want a real web experience.” He added, “We think many customers are getting tired of being told what to think by Apple.”

It might be surprising that Balsillie taken such a hard line against Apple, considering that Android smartphones are arguably taking a bigger bite out of RIM’s core smartphone business, while Windows Phone 7 is trying to peel away customers too. But targeting Apple makes a lot of sense.

First, no company in technology is more visible than Apple and no person in technology is more recognizable than Steve Jobs. Shooting down Apple and the iPad is news, and doing it on the basis of HTML5 and web support is a strike at the heart of what Apple has staked its claim on. It’s like Pepsi beating Coke in a sip test.

Second, the iPad surprised everyone — including Apple — by its adoption rate among business users. RIM, which has traditionally been very strong in the business world, is eager to stop that trend in its tracks, before companies that were RIM-only decide to go iOS-only.

Finally, Blackberry offers a lot more smartphone models, at different price points and in different form factors, than it did when the iPhone was announced. It’s rebranding itself in the consumer market as a company that’s all about the web and communication. This week’s attacks were aimed at driving that point home.

No more of what Jobs once called “the baby web” for baby-sized smartphone screens. Email, Messenger, text entry, and the full web: that’s the space Blackberry wants to occupy in the customer’s imagination.

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Instapaper, our favorite iOS web reading application, works because it recognizes both the strengths and weaknesses of your device — something most websites either don’t or can’t consider. Just-released version 2.3 provides a terrific example of this in the new way it handles nighttime reading.

Impresario Marco Arment, who recently left his job at Tumblr to work on Instapaper full-time, outlines the changes on the Instapaper blog. Here, I’m going to highlight just one, because I think it’s both very cool and a good illustration of this problem of working within constraints of both a device and a platform.

Instapaper can now automatically switch modes from light (dark text on a light screen) to dark (light text on a dark screen). How the application pulls it off is very clever.

“Theres no API access to the iPhones ambient light sensor,” Marco writes, “so I cant just enable dark mode in dark rooms… And I cant just look at hours and the date, because 5 PM in December is much darker in Alaska than in Costa Rica.”

Instead, Instapaper uses the phone’s location (there’s an API for that!) and the local sunset time wherever your phone is. After dark, Instapaper goes into dark mode. If you mostly use Instapaper indoors, in light rooms, you can always leave the light/dark toggle on manual.

“Leave it to me to come up with the least-social use of locations possible,” Marco writes.

Other changes include text preview snippets on both iPhone and iPad; a smart Kindle-inspired length and progress meter (more dots equal longer articles – darkened dots show progress); improved account syncing and sharing features; and a bookmarklet-installation feature that cuts out a few steps, but is still harder than it ought to be (Apple’s fault, not Instapaper’s).

On another app, the new version’s interface changes would be tweaks. Here, they’re key design choices for better readability. It’s the best-designed undesign service going, stripping the core design from the story and reformatting it in a way that gives the user more control (but also more guidance) over the content’s look and feel.

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Apple’s next iOS software upgrade is supposed to introduce wireless printing to the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, but early reports suggest that the print feature won’t fully work as promised.

When Steve Jobs introduced AirPrint as a new feature in iOS 4.2, he said it would enable Apple’s mobile devices to print without needing to install drivers or additional software. He explained that AirPrint would work with printers shared on a network by a Mac or PC, or with HP printers that market themselves as AirPrint-compatible.

However, Mac app programmers told MacStories that Apple had removed references to shared printing in Apple’s developer support documentation, and one developer heard the shared-printing feature had been removed because of instability and incompatibility with some printers.

Also, Apple just released the latest Mac OS update (10.6.5), and some have reported that shared printing indeed is not supported through AirPrint.

A statement from an Apple spokeswoman also does not mention support for shared printing:

“With iOS 4.2 available this month, iPad, iPhone and iPod touch users can print to directly to AirPrint compatible printers without the need to install drivers or download software. HP is bringing AirPrint to their fall lineup of ePrint printers including the Photosmart, Officejet, Officejet Pro and LaserJet Pro series.”

For now, it looks like AirPrint is only going to print with a few HP printers labeled as AirPrint-compatible, so it won’t be very useful for many customers. We’ll know for sure when iOS 4.2 officially ships presumably soon because the near-final version recently released for iOS developers.

It seemed too good to be true when Apple said that the next iOS software update would introduce simple, pain-free wireless printing. Printers, as anyone who’s ever used a computer should already know, are a royal pain in the rear, and it looks like Apple hasn’t solved the problem yet.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

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Year-over-year smartphone sales are up 98% worldwide. Over 80 million of the over 400 million handsets sold in the third quarter were smartphones.

The sheer growth of the global market and the meteoric rise of Android means that hardware and software companies who once dominated this market can ship tens of millions additional units and still lose share, in some cases by double digits.

Smartphone OS providers have entered a period of accelerated platform evolution, stimulated by more regular product releases, new platform entrants and new device types, said Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza. Any platform that fails to innovate quickly either through a vibrant multi-player ecosystem or clear vision of a single controlling entity will lose developers, manufacturers, potential partners and ultimately users.

Market share and unit numbers don’t tell us everything, even how profitable a mobile company has become. But they do reveal an evolving space.

Customers in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia — what Gartner’s report calls “mature markets” — are gravitating towards full-featured, name-brand, consumer-oriented smartphones. This seems to be partly a function of wider 3G data capability, greater hardware and software choices, and especially lower prices. Gartner’s report singles out ZTE’s sub-100 Android phone with the UK’s Orange carrier. Smartphones can be burners now.

Meanwhile, generic manufacturers are cranking out handsets for developing markets in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Growth in non-3G mobiles isn’t as sharp as smartphones in terms of percentages, but the global distribution is radically different.

This growth on either side squeezes out name-brand midlist feature phones — Gartner’s report singles out LG — who can’t command the prices or share they used to hold through carrier sales in Europe, Asia and North America.

The report closes by predicting that the growth of the media tablet market (projected sales of 54.8 million units) will begin to affect smartphone sales, attracting consumer dollars and developer attention away from some platforms and towards others — especially Apple’s iOS.

It’s a sharp reminder that companies with forthcoming tablets like Samsung or RIM/Blackberry aren’t simply trying to open up new growth areas or slow iPad purchases. These companies need to offer tablets in order to protect their customer and developer relationships in their core businesses — multimedia entertainment for Samsung, smartphones for RIM.

“Apple’s dramatic expansion of iOS with the iPad and the continuing success of the iPod Touch are important sales achievements in their own right,” said Carolina Milanesi. “But more importantly they contribute to the strength of Apple’s ecosystem and the iPhone in a way that smartphone-only manufacturers cannot compete with.

Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Grew 35 Percent in Third Quarter 2010; Smartphone Sales Increased 96 Percent [Press Release]

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AT&T’s Windows Phone 7 handsets drop today, but if you navigate past the company’s big splash page, you’d never know it.

That’s because like most other phone retailers, AT&T’s online store drills down by manufacturer and device type (e.g., smartphone, feature phone, tablet/computer), but not operating system. The only smartphone OS it currently separates out is Android, grouped with categories like “free,” “slider” and “refurbished.”

MoreWindowsPhone7 coverage on Gadget Lab:

• Samsung’s Windows Phone 7 Packs Intuitive, Visual Punch
• Microsoft Announces First Windows Phone 7 Handsets
• A Humbled Microsoft Prepares to Boot UpWindowsPhone7
• Microsoft Blends Zune Media, Xbox Live Into NewPhoneOS
• Microsoft’s Mobile Strategy Takes Aim at Apple, Google
• Microsoft TellsWindowsPhone7’s App Story

While tech-savvy consumers increasingly think of smartphones in terms of competing operating systems, wireless companies still think of their own relationship with their subscribers first, manufacturers second and platforms a distant third.

It’s even starker if you’re an existing customer looking to upgrade a mobile phone; an AT&T customer trying to find an Android phone has to navigate a long list of smartphones, while Apple and Blackberry’s models jump to the top.

Verizon Wireless’s online store does break phones down by operating system if you mouse over the “Phones & Devices” menu. The choices are Android, Apple iOS, Blackberry, Palm WebOS and “Windows phone” — the last something of a misnomer, since Verizon only offers older Windows Mobile devices, not the new Windows Phone 7.

This arguably benefits companies like Apple and Blackberry, who enjoy high name recognition and whose platforms are only available on their own branded devices. It also benefits particular smartphones, like Motorola’s Droid on Verizon, who are featured prominently on store websites and network advertisements.

But the balance is tipping in favor of the operating systems. With Windows Phone 7 now offering devices from multiple manufacturers on AT&T and T-Mobile, Verizon selling iOS devices like the iPad (and perhaps soon the iPhone) and Android’s share of the market growing an extraordinary rate, wireless companies will be hard-pressed not to put a device’s operating system front and center — not buried at the bottom of a tech sheet next to its Bluetooth spec and its camera’s megapixel count.

AT&T has made a big bet on its support of Windows Phone 7 — I wouldn’t be surprised if we see those menus get an upgrade soon.

Images: screenshots from AT&T Wireless Store by Tim Carmody.

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The WOWKeys keyboard from Omnio, an Apple-certified iPhone dock, manages to beat out Apple’s own offerings in almost every way. The keyboard features a bay on the right-side, where a number-pad would usually sit, into which your iPhone slides. From there, you can proceed in two ways.

First, and most obvious, is that you now have a hardware keyboard for your iPhone, giving you an iOS version of Asus’ Eee keyboard, only for $100 instead of $600 (not including the iPhone, of course). There are a slew of special keys dedicated to the iPhone, including volume, display-off,brightness, media keys, keyboard toggle and a home-screen button. Even Apple’s own Bluetooth keyboard can manage all those.

The second option is to hook this up to a Mac or PC (via USB-cable) and let the iPhone take on some extra duties. Coupled with any of a number of third-party apps, you can turn the iPhone into a trackpad, number-pad or full-on remote for your computer. You could of course do this without the WOWKeys, but locking the trackpad to the keyboard makes sense, and it’ll also charge the iPhone as you use it. Flipping between these two modes is done by toggling a switch.

The WOWKeys should be available in Korea soon for the equivalent of $105. Start harassing your friendly, neighborhood gray-importer now.

IPhone PC keyboards and fusion [AVING via the Engadget]

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Google Instant on a PC browser has always been a clever idea in search of a use case. With the new mobile beta for Android and iOS, the search giant has found its first.

“Wouldnt it be great to have Google Instant on mobile devices, where each keystroke and page load is much slower and you frequently have just a moment to find the information you need?” writes Google engineer Steve Kanefsky.

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Software upgrades are supposed to fix things, but sometimes they do the opposite.

Disgruntled about the effects of an operating system update on her iPhone, a customer wants to battle Apple in court with a class-action suit.

San Diego resident Bianca Wofford last week filed a lawsuit seeking class-action status, alleging that Apple committed false advertising and unfair and deceptive business practices by encouraging iPhone 3G users to download iOS 4, the latest version of Apple’s mobile OS. Wofford claims that even though the iOS upgrade promises fixes and improvements, it made her second-generation iPhone unusable.

“The true fact of the matter … is that the iOS 4 is a substantial ‘downgrade’ for earlier iPhone devices and renders many of them virtually useless iBricks,” Wofford’s lawyers wrote in thecomplaint [pdf].

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

Apple’s iOS operating system has received a major upgrade once a year, and the company has disclosed that some new features do not work with older handsets because they carry less memory or slower processors. When Apple announced iOS 4, it said that multitasking would not work on the second-generation iPhone, for example, but it would be supported on newer handsets. Also, Apple said iOS 4 was not compatible with the original iPhone at all — but it was supposed to work with the more recent iPhone 3G.

However, when iOS 4 shipped in the summer, some iPhone 3G customers complained that the update caused performance to become very sluggish. Months later at Apple’s Apple TV press conference, Steve Jobs said iOS 4.1 would address performance issues on the iPhone 3G. Some tests showed that iOS 4.1 improved the iPhone 3G’s performance only slightly.

In her complaint, Wofford claims that Apple was aware that iOS 4 would cause degraded performance on older iPhones, and she accused Apple of purposely creating an incentive for customers to purchase newer iPhones.

“Apple has falsely, intentionally and repeatedly represented to owners and consumers of the iPhone 3G that its new operating system for the device, iOS4, was of a nature, quality, and a significant upgrade for the functionality of all iPhone devices, when in fact, the installation and use of the iOS4 on iPhone 3G resulted in the opposite a device with little more use than that of a paper weight,” the complaint read.

Wofford’s suit, filed in the judicial district of the county of San Diego, requires approval from a judge to gain class-action status. If it became a class-action suit and won, Apple would likely be forced to pay damages to iPhone 3G customers.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

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Apple has released the “Gold Master” of iOS 4.2, and it is available for developers to download today. IOS 4.2 is the unifying version of iOS that will bring the same multitasking and UI features to all iDevices. This is most significant for the iPad, which has been waiting patiently for features that it is clearly desperate for. Apple has also asked developers to submit iOS 4.2 apps to the App Store.

“Gold Master” is software talk for “finished”. Barring any horrible last-minute discoveries, the GM is the same version that would, in the days of software on CD and DVD, be duplicated and then sent to stores. Apple promised iOS 4 for the iPad in November, which we took, as always with Apple, to mean the very last days of November. Could it be that it will be here sooner?

Aside from the multitasking and the folders which the iPad needs so much, the latest OS version brings a new multitask-bar, the little panel that is revealed with a double-tap on the home button:

Here you see that you have quick-access to volume and brightness (at last!) controls, as well as the standard music controls and a screen-orientation lock toggle. To the right of the media controls is the new AirPlay button. Press this and your media, be it audio or video, will then stream to compatible gear like the Airport Express or the new AppleTV. AirPlay, as well as AirPrint, will also come to the iPhone and iPod Touch with this update.

Apple Releases iOS 4.2 Golden Master to Developers [MacRumors Forums]

iOS 4.2 iPad sneak peek [Apple]

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The free VLC Media Player app for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad will likely soon disappear from the app store. Rmi Denis-Courmont, one of VLC’s core project developers, confirmed that he’s filed copyright infringement against Apple for distribution of the app through its store.

“VLC media player is free software licensed solely under the terms of the open source GNU General Public License (a.k.a. GPL),” Denis-Courmont explains, noting that even though VLC for iOS is free, Apple’s application DRM violates the terms of the license. “At the time of writing, the infringing application is still available. However, it is to be expected that Apple will cease distribution soon, just like it did with GNU Go earlier this year in strikingly similar circumstances.

“VLC and open-source software in general would not have reached their current quality and success if it had not been for their license. Therefore, blatant license violation cannot be tolerated at any rate. Concerned users are advised to look for application on more open mobile platforms for the time being.”

VLC is an extremely popular cross-platform, open-source media player known for its ability to play virtually any video or audio file type. A separate group of developers called Applidium ported VLC to Apple’s iOS and submitted it to the app store, where it was (perhaps surprisingly) accepted. Apple distributed it through their store with the DRM they use on every application — which is where the trouble really begins.

Now it’s the core group of developers of the VLC project, not the developers of the iOS app, who’ve filed suit against Apple for violation of the license. Apple has two choices: distribute the app without DRM — which would be absolutely unprecedented and cause all manner of problems for Apple, which manages applications through individual user accounts, handling updates through the App Store, etc. — or pull the app, which is what’s likely to happen.

“The fact of the GPL incompatibility was already well known,” Denis-Courmont observes. “JB [Jean-Baptiste Kempf, one of the Applidium/VLC developers who ported VLC to iOS] himself described it as a “grey area”. They decided to take the risk anyway, and they bear full responsibility for any consequences. Personally, I don’t blame them because I know very well how a geek feels when writing cool code for a cool new gadget.”

So:

1. If you want to grab VLC for iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, get it now. The easiest thing Apple can do to resolve this is pull the app, and I doubt they’ll dither.
2. Even if you get VLC now, it could break after iOS 4.2 is released (some folks are already documenting problems with the beta) and the developers would have no way to update it. This sucks.
3. There are serious problems with trying to port open-source projects to iOS, even as free applications. Without allowing sideloading or some alternate manner of distribution through the app store that respects the terms of the various open-source licenses under which these projects were developed and released, there’s a whole class of really interesting, powerful, well-known projects that may never see mobile versions on Apple’s platforms. And it would probably have to offer Android or another platform a serious competitive advantage to get Apple to change that.
4. Apple’s forthcoming App Store for OS X 10.7 may wind up posing exactly the same problems, as it promises to use exactly the same account-based model to sync applications across devices. And that could be when we really start seeing some backlash.

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Resolution independence, or the lack of it, is one of those nagging problems most users don’t even realize have a name. But the concept is simple: user-interface elements like icons, buttons and window borders on the same OS should be the same physical size no matter what screen you’re using.

From the 1980s until just a few years ago, the gold standard for computer screen resolution was 72 dots per inch (dpi). This wasn’t an accident.

“When the Mac first came out, one of its great WYSIWYG features was that a pixel on the screen was supposed to be equal in size to a printers point: 1/72,” says Mac blogger Dr Drang. “Back then, onscreen rulers matched up quite well with physical rulers, and 12-point type on the screen looked to be the same size as 12-point type on the printed page. But those days are long gone.”

Manufacturers can fit an ever-larger number of pixels onto screens. This is generally a good thing, as it makes images sharper, clearer and more like physical objects. But it also makes anything defined by its pixel-count resolution smaller.

Operating systems, including Mac OS X, began to move away from 72dpi in the middle of this decade. “The old assumption that displays are 72dpi has been rendered obsolete by advances in display technology,” Apple said in 2006, in a developer overview of OS X 10.5 Leopard. “But it also means that interfaces that are pixel-based will shrink to the point of being unusable. The solution is to remove the 72dpi assumption that has been the norm.”

Leopard and then Snow Leopard were supposed to do away with pixel-defined resolutions, allowing developers to draw user interface elements using a scale factor. But while screen resolutions kept getting sharper, resolution independence never quite came.

That is, it never quite came for the desktop. For iOS, resolution independence is essential, mostly because the UI elements need to match our bodies. On the desktop, if icons get smaller, well, pointers and cursors get smaller too. Your fingertip is always the same size.

But even on the iPhone and iPad, resolution-independence is only partial. Yes, icons might register at the same size, but images within the application don’t. Developers who built a pixel-defined app for an older model iPhone find those apps not looking quite so sharp on the higher resolution of a retina-display iPhone 4 or blown up onto the larger screen of an iPad.

For Dr Drang, the absolute size of interface elements matters less than their variability. “On an 11-inch MacBook Air, a 72-pixel linewhich would measure 1 inch long against an onscreen ruleris just 0.53 physical inches long. On a 21.5-inch iMac, that same line is 0.70 inches long. User interface items, like buttons, menu items, and scroll bars are 30 percent bigger on the iMac than on the Air.”

Application developers are necessarily conflicted. Keeping UI tied to pixel counts saves them work rewriting their apps. On the other hand, they can’t count the physical uniformity of experience across every device. Desktop publishing and design pros also have to factor in differences in size from the screen to the page, or one screen to the next. Images and text all materialize differently.

“Microsoft has universal settings to change the size of UI elements,” Dr Drang adds. “Even X Windows allows you to set a screen dpi for fonts. Apple has nothing. With screen resolutions increasing at an accelerating pace, this has to be addressed soon.”

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Apple is turning the physical switch on the iPad into a mute button whether you like it or not, according to a purported e-mail sent by Steve Jobs.

The switch on the iPad currently locks or unlocks screen orientation on the device, but in beta versions of the next iOS update (4.2), it instead mutes or unmutes audio, just like the switch does on the iPhone.

An iPadcustomer claims he sent Jobs an e-mail asking whether the switch could be optionally set to lock screen orientation rather than mute audio, and the CEO replied, “Nope.”

Well, that stinks. From my testing of iOS 4.2 beta on an iPad, I’m not a fan of the change, nor are many others I’ve spoken to. The button to decrease volume already mutes the iPad if you hold it down, so why do we need a switch to do the same thing?

Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

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Amazon has good news for Kindle owners that it wanted to share with them first. A post from the Kindle team on Amazon’s Kindle Community forum says that 14-day lending will come to the Kindle sometime this year.

There is a catch: “Each book can be lent once for a loan period of 14-days and the lender cannot read the book during the loan period.” If you’re familiar with Barnes & Noble’s lending feature on the Nook, this isn’t a surprise. “Additionally, not all e-books will be lendable – this is solely up to the publisher or rights holder, who determines which titles are enabled for lending.” Again, to borrow some jargon, this is a known issue.

Books will be lendable both to Kindle owners and users of Kindle apps, which is nice: even if you don’t have your own Kindle, you can borrow an e-book from someone who does.

The Kindle team also revealed that Kindle app users will soon also be able to read Kindle magazines and newspapers through the app. Periodicals had been a Kindle-only feature. Support for newspapers and magazines is coming to iOS “in the coming weeks” and Android and other app platforms “down the road.”

Since there’s so much news about Kindle’s e-reading competition lately, I guess Amazon just wanted to let Kindle users know that the company still loved them — and more importantly, that it’s going to keep giving them reasons to love the Kindle.

Coming Soon for Kindle [Amazon/Kindle Community Forums, via Kindle Review]

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IOS hacker p0sixninja, aka Joshua Hill, has jailbroken the new AppleTV. To do it, he used an unreleased version of the tool greenpois0n, an exploit designed to crack iOS version 4.1.

The v2 AppleTV runs on the same iOS that Apple uses for all its mobile devices, and shares the custom A4 chip used in the iPhone 4, the iPad and the latest iPod Touch. Greenpois0n, like other jailbreak exploits, hacks the operating system to give the user access to the file system, and from there the ability to install third-party applications.

As you can see from the photograph posted by Hill on Twitter, the hack adds in greenpois0n menu to the AppleTV. It can’t be long now before he manages to install apps from Cydia, the unofficial jailbreak app store, and perhaps even official apps meant for the iPad. VLC on the AppleTV? Yes please!

Ohai AppleTV [Joshua Hill on Twitter]

Greenpois0n [Chronic Dev Team]

Photo: Joshua Hill

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7-inch tablets may have drawn Steve Jobs’ contempt, but they could be a very good thing for consumers.

During Apple’s earnings call yesterday, Apple’s CEO argued forcefully that a 7-inch Android tablet could never compete with Apple’s nearly 10-inch iPad.

7-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the iPad, Jobs said, in an extended thrashing of Apple’s competitors. These are among the reasons that the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA dead on arrival.

What I don’t understand is why that’s necessarily a bad thing for Android or tablet-makers.

If Jobs is right that the 7-inch tablets won’t be able to beat Apple’s iPad on price, that could indeed be a deal-breaker. But the pricing we have seen on smaller Android tablets suggests that they’ll be at least $100 cheaper than the current entry-level iPad, even without a data plan. If they’re sold with data plans and carrier subsidies like smartphones, they could be even cheaper than that.

Lower cost isn’t the only appeal of going small. 7-inch tablets are lighter than 10-inch devices. They’re infinitely easier to hold in one hand. They’re easier to type on with two hands (particularly if you have small hands). They fit into smaller bags. And you use them to do different things.

Really, a 7-inch tablet is closer to an e-reader, a personal media player or a handheld gaming device than the iPad is. It’s no coincidence that most e-readers, such as the Kindle and Sony Reader Daily Edition, have 6- or 7-inch screens: That’s about the size of a paperback book.

More…

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There have been other e-book price comparison sites, but I don’t think any of the others were built in 48 hours. A team of four developers built Leatherbound from scratch as part of this weekend’s Rails Rumble competition. It’s designed to help iOS app users (or anyone else who is platform-agnostic when it comes to e-books) compare prices across formats in a jiffy.

“No more searching the Kindle, Nook, and iBook stores to find the eBook you want at the price you want,” the site promises. “Search once with Leatherbound.”

There are a handful of devotes who own multiple e-readers, but Leatherbound is especially useful for readers who use the e-bookstores applications for desktops, tablets or smartphones — and consequently have greater ability and incentive to shop around. The inclusion of Apple’s iBooks suggests that the site is targeted for iPad and iPhone users, since iBooks isn’t available for any platform besides iOS.

Leatherbound has a simple but well-animated interface. When you enter in a search term (either author or title works equally well), you first get three matches for the book, with an option to load more results. Select a book, and the site fetches the prices from the Kindle, Nook and iBooks stores.

The book loads results as it finds them, meaning that it will show you a Kindle price even if it hasn’t yet found the book in Nook or iBooks. (When the site can’t find results, the “searching” wheel just never stops spinning.) Then there’s a button to tweet your search results — an easy way for readers to advertise a find or authors or publishers to let readers know about availability across the three major e-book stores, at least for iOS users. (Sony, Kobo and a few other e-bookstores are left out in the cold.)

Rails Rumble is “a kickass 48 hour web application development competition,” according to the official site, where contestants have “one caffeine-fueled weekend to design, develop, and deploy the best web property that you can.” The competition has become popular among developers using the open-source web application framework Ruby on Rails.

According to the site’s otherwise self-satirizing “About” page, the four developers — Nathan Carnes, aka “The Hand of God,” Andrew Dumont (“The Suit”), Adrian Pike (“The Brain”) and Amiel Martin (“Mr Juggles”) met while working as developers for group text-messaging company Tatango.

When searching Leatherbound, be forewarned: like every new storefront, it’s a little crowded on its first day. An unexpected deluge of visitors from tech sites (including this one) have made the quickly-built service rather slow.

Leatherbound Helps You Compare eBook Prices and Availability [ReadWriteWeb]

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There’s not much to say about the Bad Elf GPS, and that’s a good thing. The tiny, plain plastic unit, about the size of a box of matches, plugs into the 30-pin connector of any iOS device and magically adds GPS capability. It has a green LED to tell you it is working and a MicroUSB port for pass-through charging/syncing of the host iDevice. It costs $99, $10 more than the TomTom car-kit for the iPod Touch, and half the price of the Dual iPod cradle which also adds a battery.

The Bad Elf won’t turn your iPad into a Google Maps machine – you still need an internet connection to use GPS with online services. If you have an iPod Touch or iPad partnered with a MiFi device, or you use apps that store their maps locally, then you’re good to go – just plug the dongle into the port, wait for a lock and your apps will believe they’re running on a GPS-equipped machine.

This little box is probably more useful with the iPad than the smaller iPod, if only because the iPad had a battery beefy enough to sustain a notoriously power-hungry GPS radio. If you’re planning on adding GPS to your iPod, then you should probably pick the Dual for its extra battery.

If you really want GPS, though, buy the 3G iPad. It’s just $130 more than the Wi-Fi-only model, and you have a SIM-slot so you can always choose to add a data-plan later.

Bad Elf GPS [Bad El. Thanks, Brett!]

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