Archive for the 'Apple' Category

C\’mon Google! WTF! You send us invites for a product launch, keep us in suspense for two days, hold a major press event to announce this?!

Voice actions for Android and Chrome to Phone extension? Really?

Oh well. I’ll interrupt this rant to jot down a bit of about these items.  But I’m a piece peeved, so  I’ll come again  to the rant at the tip of this post.

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Voice Actions for Android. It\’s a voice service for Android phones (thus far) , where you speak various commands into a phone, it recognizes them and performs certain actions. Currently the service supports 13 actions. Google mentions right here:

send text to [contact] [message]
hearken to [artist/song/album]
call [business]
call [contact]
send email to [contact] [message]
go to [website]
note to self [note]
navigate to [location/business name]
directions to [location/business name]
map of [location]

You can ask your phone to “Call Blue Ribbon Bakery in The big apple”, “Navigate to Rockefeller Plaza”, “Take heed to the Decemberists”, write an e-mail or SMS – and your Android phone will perform this action automatically. Here\’s the video of it:

Pretty nifty stuff, and I will see lots of use for it.

Except that Google says that Voice Actions currently are 70% accurate. That’s otherwise of saying that it  may be wrong a third of a time. Which, I suppose, is okay for navigation, music or note queries. But, no less than for me, those “call”, “e-mail” and “text” someone actions go out the window. Can you imagine what\’ll happen if the Actions mixes up the names and sends that juicy SMS to the inaccurate girlfriend, or your boss?

Another thing announced today was a Chrome browser extension and Android app called Chrome to Phone. It permits you to push stuff from the internet directly in your phone. Which can also be pretty cool, however it has already been around for Android 2.0 devices for several months.

According to Google Chrome to Phone:

adds a button on your Google Chrome browser that instantly sends the current online page, map, YouTube video, or selected phone number or text on your Android device running Froyo (or Android 2.2).

Here\’s a video about it:

And that\’s about it. Back to the rant.

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Dear Google,

This was the stuff that you just think warranted a giant press event?

As someone who was present there remarked – “this could be the largest turnout we’ve had for a non-Apple event”. Really?! Apple, at the least, has the courtesy to announce new devices, or discuss stuff that\’s really important to them and attracts numerous media interest (e.g. Antennagate).

Where you afraid that we forgot about you? Or did your engineers just get bored? It\’s been 3 months since Google I/O, in spite of everything. Did your Android guys  miss mingling with outside folks, and decided – what the heck,  let\’s do a presser, it\’ll be fun…?

Well, the subsequent time you select to do thing like this, consider our time too. Think that a number of people wasted half a day to your press event.  For a project -browser extension – developed on a 20% free time by one employee?!

So the subsequent time you might be announcing an update to Google places service, better mobile Youtube, Google Docs Viewer, or opening of Google Voice to the public, keep it to the Youtube upload and your blog, please.

It’s only been what, three years, since Apple unveiled the original iPhone and adjusted everyone’s perception of the way easy to exploit a touchscreen can also be?

That all happened due to capacitive touchscreen technology. Touchscreens were around for ages before the iPhone, but essentially the most used type were resistive touchscreens. These are more accurate, but require a press in preference to just a splash most often, and the extra layers they need to have make use a tad less intuitive.

It feels like capacitive touchscreens will make up 40-50% of the touchscreen market in 2011, as touch panel makers continue to expand their capacitive touchscreen production facilities.

Of course, resistive touchscreens are still essentially the most used, and should stay next year, because they’re cheaper and they’re more well-known in Asia. Because a resistive touchscreen is more accurate and operation with a stylus is so easy, some countries with complicated writing patterns still see great demand for phones featuring this sort of technology.

Capacitive touchscreens are commencing to get styli, but they’re still a piece more cumbersome to exploit for precise touches.

Elsewhere on the earth, resistive screens are only used for low-end devices because they’re cheaper. Capacitive touchscreens reign supreme within the high end smartphone market.

Yet there are two forms of capacitive touchscreens in the market: film based and glass based. Glass-based capacitive screens are still used rarely, and only inside the most costly phones, akin to the iPhone range. Film-based capacitive touchscreens are a chunk cheaper and therefore used in many more midrange devices.

So, not all displays are created equal. You should definitely choose the sort that fits you and your use-cases best, otherwise the frustration may overwhelm you.

Via Digitimes

China Unicom, the second biggest carrier in China, has been Apple’s partner for quite some time now.

Just last week they started selling WiFi-enabled iPhone 3GS smartphones.

And a source inside China Unicom now claims that they’re preparing to launch Apple’s latest and greatest smartphone, the iPhone 4.

This will apparently happen in early September, but not on September 13th, as previous rumors had it. Either way, “early” September can’t mean anything past the half of the month, so those desperate to purchase an iPhone 4 in China (and who haven’t gone the grey market import way) only have at most one other month to wait, which may only be good news.

Micro SIMs will make their debut on the Chinese market with the iPhone 4 launch.

According to a similar source, China Unicom has also secured a take care of Apple to be the only real distributor of Apple’s iPad within the Chinese market. There’s no release date yet, but it surely feels like China Unicom may only sell the 3G version of the iPad. Which is sensible, as they’re a mobile operator and thus most occupied with revenue from iPad 3G data plans.

We’ll bring you more details once they are available in.

Via Caixin

I love the concept of having easy accessibility to WiFi wherever i’m going. Even though I already have internet access on my iPhone or Android, WiFi is often faster and eats up less battery. It just makes for a easy and seamless internet experience on my cellphone, in spite of what phone I’m using at the time. This love is even greater when 4G enters the picture, and Clear has done an incredible job of installation 4G in most metro areas across the u. s. .

Enter Clear’s latest 4G puck of WiFi goodness, called the iSpot. With the “i” inside the front of the name, everyone naturally assumes it has something to do with Apple. Whenever you assumed this, you’d be absolutely correct! The iSpot differs from all of its predecessors in that it’s only speculated to connect with devices running iOS: iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch (note I used the word “supposed”, but I’ll get to that later).

What’s the large deal? Wouldn’t a 4G hotspot be greater if it may hook up with any device in a position to using WiFi? Only if price isn’t a factor. Restricting WiFi access just to iOS devices actually enables the full cost of the service to be so much below other related products. For instance, the iSpot costs $99 up front for the device and $25 for Unlimited 4G data access. Compare this with other 4G hotspots from Clear that require contract and price upwards of $40/month.

Here’s why this can be so appealing to me. If I’m considering an iPad purchase, normally I might prefer to get one with 3G. Using 3G off of AT&T’s network would cost $25 per 30 days and be limited simply to 2 GB monthly data usage. With the aid of the iSpot, however, it makes more fiscal sense to buy the WiFi-only version for less, get the iSpot for a lower price than an upgrade to iPad 3G would, and pay an analogous $25 monthly but instead get unlimited access to an excellent faster 4G network. Now you will discover why iSpot is this kind of big deal.

So in theory the iSpot 4G is a clear winner (forgive the pun) whenever you only need it to connect with iDevices. Certainly if you would like 4G access to your laptop or other device, it is crucial to search around for other products that profit from a similar network. But how does the iSpot hold up in real life?

Design of the Clear iSpot 4G

Upon watching the iSpot, I am immediately reminded of an Apple Mighty Mouse. It’s all white apart from some writing on the front for the Clear logo in addition as some LED lights that indicate if WiFi is turned on and how good your reception is to the nearest 4G tower. These lights are in 3 different color settings as a method of more accurately describing how good the service is to your area. After I turned it on at home, the 4G light kept flashing red to signify it was still looking for 4G because I live only some miles outside 4G coverage. Naturally this changed once I drove closer into town, when abruptly the 4G indicator lit up yellow and then green (the strongest setting).

The iSpot maintains an overly minimalistic design. There’s only 1 button on the device, located on the correct side, which powers it on and rancid. On the bottom there is a Mini-USB charging port, which took me abruptly considering the fact that Micro-USB is the charging standard for most new devices coming to market now. This tells me that this product has been within the works for quite it slow before actually hitting store shelves.

On the back we find instuctions on what the various LED lights mean, and provides the default WiFi password in your device. This made the WiFi setup on my iPhone incredibly easy. I was relieved to work out this data directly on the iSpot just because I originally wasn’t sure of where to seek out it.

The battery can also be taken out — ironic, given its target devices don’t have removable batteries — and is guarded by a typical battery cover that just blends in quite well with the remainder of the device.

Performance of the iSpot

Battery life on any 4G device gets sucked up very quickly, and the iSpot isn’t any exception to that. We did happen to get the promised battery life of 4.5 hours, but barely. Clear wasn’t joking around on its battery life estimate. The crazy thing about that? It’s a 2700 mAh battery, twice the scale of one of the crucial largest smartphone batteries available on the market today.

I had no problem connecting my iPhone to the iSpot, and enjoyed using it once I was out and about. After performing some speed tests, however, I couldn’t determine any consistency concerning the internet speed besides the fact that I was in a green area the complete time. The ideal speed test I ever saw from the iSpot’s influence is a download speed of 4.3 Mbps, but typically averaged around 2-3 Mbps. Not plenty for a 4G network, especially in comparison to the forthcoming LTE networks that are meant to consume that at a miles faster rate, but still marginally better than the typical 3G speeds. Upload times were laughable, though — I averaged around 500 kbps, seeing only a max upload speed of 829 kbps. I do find it somewhat unusual for there to be this kind of wide variety of differing speeds, especially given the undeniable fact that I hadn’t moved anywhere, and some of my tests were all within a couple of minutes of each other.

The iSpot may hook up with up to 8 different devices simultaneously. Not owning eight iOS devices, I couldn’t check it out easily enough. But I didn’t have any problem hooking it up to both mine and my wife’s iPhones collectively, a minimum of.

Also of note is that you should interface with the iSpot via your web browser. You possibly can change the default passwords and settings through this website; you too can adjust power settings to preserve battery life (you are able to trim down the gap the iSpot might be picked up from)

Earlier I mentioned that I don’t live in a 4G coverage zone. This can be a deal breaker for me, as the iSpot shouldn’t be in a position to falling back onto 3G speeds within the absence of 4G. If I need to travel 5 miles to only be in a 4G zone, I will’t justify paying $25 per 30 days for that privilege, notwithstanding how good a deal this is. With that said, it doesn’t work for me in my unique situation but if you find yourself consistently staying throughout the bounds of your local 4G network and not straying too faraway from the beaten path, the iSpot 4G will work great for you.

I love the concept of the iSpot and I like the fee. Provided that you’re in a area of fine 4G coverage and are constantly using iPads and iPod Touches, it is a will need to have accessory. For the iPhone, it’s still a very good add-on nevertheless it is a good deal harder to justify the extra monthly cost once you’re already paying between $15 and $30 per 30 days to exploit it on 3G. It just depends upon if 4G access is vital on your iPhone or not.

(There is one side note to the iSpot restrictions: they’ll be hacked. It’s miles technically possible to spoof your other wireless devices to lead them to look like iOS. Doing so does void your warranty with Clear, and there’s always a small amount of risk of malicious content being involved, so unless you know exactly what you’re doing and are willing to get on Clear’s naughty list, I’d recommend to opt instead for the Spot 4G service which fits for all WiFi-accessible devices.)

The South Korean mobile market is very different from the ecu and North American ones, but a minimum of some thing isn’t changed there: Apple\’s new iPhone 4 is successful.

KT, the single South Korean carrier to give the iPhone 4, said today it has received more than 100,000 reservations for the hot handset within the first day of pre-orders.

KT hasn\’t announced the exact date when the iPhone 4 can be available – this should happen sometime next month (September) anyway. The carrier can be in talks to introduce the iPad in South Korea, too, but there\’s nothing official about this at the present.

The older iPhone model (3GS), introduced by KT in South Korea in late 2009, was sold in more than 850,000 units in eight months. The iPhone 4 is often sold in more units in less time.

Via Yonhap News