March 2009: Monthly Archive

Mac Mini, iMac? Check. Check. Mac Pro. Check. Airport Extreme. Check. Time Capsule. Check. Yep, that’s the rumor list Apple just plowed through one after the other, with nary anything resembling a “Spotlight on Desktops” Event in sight.

Nary anything, aside from the friendliness of the new routers, approaching iPhone updates either — though we imagine new developers eyeing Macs to get into iPhone App-making with have their hands, and charge cards, full today.

You getting anything?

Confession: I bought the Watchmen comics as they came out. I remember my jaw dropping as I finished issue 11, and the interminable wait for issue 12 to come out. That, along with Dark Knight Returns informed a lot of my early thinking about deconstruction, dialog, and dramatic endings (yes, back then the actually considered and built to endings!). I’m a huge fan of writer Alan Moore (Wikipedia link) in general (Watchmen, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V for Vendetta, and too much more to name.) And while the derivatives of those works, including the movie adaptions thus far, are the palest of imitations, and while Moore himself has begged, pleaded, and finally insisted his name be removed from any and all adaptions, the geek in me is still mind-blown to see the video above (and that’s as close to a Harry Knowles intro I’ll ever write).

G4 has the inside:

By using its patent-pending CloudMMO technology running on Amazon’s Cloud, Last Legion were able to create a persistent world for the iPhone in the Watchmen universe. Players can roam the city streets, chat with total strangers, battle with people on the other side of the country, and ride the subway to another part of the city to continue their crusade against crime, all in real-time. Watch what happened when developers from Last Legion Games brought Watchmen: Justice is Coming to our office recently, and hit the Read More link for the full press release.

So, who’s interested in not only Watching the Watchmen — but living in their world?

(Via TUAW)

We repeat, this is not a drill! The Apple Store is Down! Reports are flooding in from all over the intertubes… Details are sketchy but could this be the Mac Mini, iMac, and Mac Pro update to bring in Nvidia chipsets and Nehalem cores? What about a new 30″ LED Display? How about those iPhone friendlier Airport Extreme and Time Capsule base stations we just heard about? And what does this mean for that Apple Special event we heard rumored for March 24? Almost certainly no new iPhones yet, but last March was the iPhone SDK Road Map event…

Find your loved ones. Cling to them. And hold to hope. The Apple Store WILL be back. And it will once again restore your childlike sense of wonder.

Since all current and previous iPhone (and iPod touch) devices have 802.11b/g WiFi, if placed on a faster, wider-range 802.11n network, they typically cause such networks to downgrade to 802.11b/g speeds for compatibility. This means your hyper-fast router will slow down your iMac or MacBook whenever your iPhone hits the network…

…But maybe not for much longer?

Apple Insider reports that the FCC has just been hit with new versions of the Airport Extreme (802.11n Router) and Time Capsule (802.11n Router + HD for Time Machine backup) that handle things a tad more gracefully:

The documents appear to indicate that Apple is adding a combined mode, allowing its AirPort base stations to simultaneously support iPhones and other 802.11b/g devices operating at 2.4 GHz, while also broadcasting 802.11n wide signals in the 5GHz band to maximize throughput for notebooks and devices such as Apple TV. Existing models can only run in one mode or the other, providing either wide compatibility or the highest possible network performance, but not both.

While only the most power-mad of power users will likely ditch their old Airport Extreme or Time Capsule for the latest/greatest, the new features should appeal to iPhone users looking for high-quality routers to round out their setups.

Now who wants one?

Pulling from a Melinda Gates interview with Vogue (via Geeksugar), being married to Bill, who loves the power of software, isn’t without its limitations:

There are very few things that are on the banned list in our household. But iPods and iPhones are two things we don’t get for our kids [...] Every now and then I look at my friends and say ‘Ooh, I wouldn’t mind having that iPhone’

Gizmodo imagines all sorts of iPhones secretly hidden beneath the mattresses at Casa Gates, but we imagine some fancy Minority Report-like future security that just scans people for Apple-tech coming and going. And, hey, seriously, who can blame Gates? Can we really see Steve Jobs giving his kids Zunes… or Xbox’s?

Heh. Internet Explorer, for reasons unfathomable to any modern web designer, still rules the desktop with a massive, if waning browser share. In the mobile space, however, things they are a different.

Net Applications (via CNet) is reporting that the iPhone owns 66.61% share, which compare to Java2ME (RIM’s OS) 9.06% and WinPho’s 6.91%, Android and Symbian’s 6.15% each, and Palm’s 2.37% and the assorted others’ at 2.75%.

No doubt rivals will gain share as the overall market increases, and new products like the Palm Pre hit. What’s interesting, however, is that the WebKit engine beneath Safari is also powering Android’s Chome Lite and will also be powering the Palm Pre, making WebKit’s share of the market extra impressive…

It should also be noted that, when looking at these numbers, even with 16+ million iPhones on the market, the sheer usability of Mobile Safari has to be factored in. Simply put, on many platforms the browsers are still crippled from a rendering standpoint, and frustrating from a interaction standpoint. Make it usable and people will use it, who’d a thunk it?

No doubt other platforms will be addressing this in future updates… but will it be enough to catch Apple’s lead?

(Thanks to Phil from sibling site WMExperts for sharing!)

Every week I will be bringing you what I think are the week’s biggest stories and articles. Let’s get started, after the break! Read the rest of this entry »

Just a rumor for now, according to World of Apple and My Apple Guide (via Engadget), and it will likely be a “Spotlight Turns to Desktops” with architectural bumps for the Mac Mini, iMac, and/or Mac Pro to bring them in line with the Nvidia chipsets and latest gen Intel procs the laptops received last fall, and maybe a new 30″ LED display, but March 2008 did see the iPhone SDK Roadmap event, so we’re not above hoping there may be some iPhone news on our horizon.

When Apple announced they’d no longer be attending Macworld, they also said they would be calling their own news events on their own schedule, so likewise the March 24 data has to be seen as fluid and depending on the final readiness of the product(s) and service(s) to be announced. Since Apple rarely sends out invitations until less then a week before the drop date anyway, all we can do is wait… and maybe drool…

Won’t be Steve Jobs, of course, as he’ll still be on leave, but Phil Schiller did the last keynote, and also the last new iMac form-factor reveal (while Jobs was on his previous leave) so there’s some history to suggest he may be the main man on stage again.

Meanwhile, what do you expect to see at a March Apple Special Event, and what do you really want to see?

In a sense, it was a calm after the Mobile World Congress storm this week, but we got together and recorded a massive hour-and-a-half-long Smartphone Experts Roundtable Podcast to discuss all the news from Windows Mobile 6.5 to the Ovi app Store to Apple’s “absent presence” at the show.

If you didn’t realize, SPE has four podcasts for your listening pleasure: the CrackBerry.com Podcast, the Phone Different Podcast (with the occasional iPhone LIVE! show), the PalmCast on both TreoCentral and PreCentral.net, and finally the WMExperts Podcast. The bold and daring may even want to try the (still in Beta, since it’s based on the somewhat unreliable Yahoo Pipes feature) Smartphone Experts Combined Podcast Feed, which puts all four podcasts into a single feed — also available in iTunes, if that’s how you roll.

Now for the roundup of the week’s news!

Read the rest of this entry »

BGR has just reported that AT&T may be working on a handset exchange program to be unveiled this upcoming June. Do you think this may have something to do with a new iPhone being released? Yeah, TiPb thinks so as well.

So, say you bought the iPhone 3G sometime in the last year and a new one comes out this June or July, technically you should not be eligible for the subsidy price. What does AT&T do about this? They introduce their new “Phone Trade-In” program of course. This may be one way AT&T will try to calm the angry hordes of people who feel they are owed the lower price. Keep in mind this is not without strings attached.

• The phone being traded in can’t be more than two years old and must be in fair shape
• The new phone will not have any subsidies applied to it, so basically whatever your trade-in covers will be your “savings”
• Trade-ins will be valued from $50 to $200

This is very nice of AT&T if this does indeed turn out to be true. While I would not go this route, it may be a valuable option for people looking to upgrade to the latest and greatest iPhone this summer.

(Personally, I say unlock your current iPhone and sell it on eBay. You should receive more $$$ than AT&T is willing to give you…)

[Via BGR]