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Here’s some speculation that definitely came from the House of Crackpot Theories, but since it’s kind of a slow day with the holiday today, feel free to let your imagination run wild. This video suggests that the next iPod touch could use its internal gyroscope and the FaceTime camera for a sort of pseudo glasses-free 3D. Icons on the home screen could tilt and shift according to how you’re looking at the phone, and games could bend and shift around as you move the phone and your own head in the camera.

It’s highly unlikely that we’ll ever see this in the official iOS, however. Nintendo is set to release its glasses-free 3DS system in Japan this week, but Apple has never really shown an interest in the technology, outside of various random patents and some compatibility features for OS X.

Still, it’s definitely possible to create this kind of visual with an iOS device, and while I’ve never seen an app use the FaceTime camera for head-tracking, it certainly seems like it wouldn’t be a tough thing for a talented developer to do. Maybe as the 3DS gains some popularity, we’ll see some developers try more of this on Apple’s iOS platform.

Video: Glasses-free 3D using iOS accelerometer and camera originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Reuters is reporting that, at an initial cost of S$135,000 (about US$100,000), a pilot program handing out iPads to 140 students and 10 teachers at Nanyang Girls High School, Tampines Secondary School, Nanhua Primary School and Dunman Secondary School in Singapore aims to replace textbooks and increase interactivity in the classroom.

Students can connect to the internet, download books and notes, share workbooks and access course materials all from their iPads. In talking to Reuters, 14-year-old student Chloe Chen said, “It’s much more convenient. Teachers can just tell us to go a website, and we can immediately go and do our work.”

While the iPad has been used to help feed the hungry and by doctors in surgery, the education world seems to be where it is destined to have the biggest impact. So far, we have seen examples of colleges in the US handing out iPads to students and of textbook publishers like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt testing a full year Algebra course app, so one can imagine just how many places tablet computers will show up once they become even more popular than they already are.

I have heard from two teacher friends that they would love to have an iPad in their classroom, saying that it would help them stay up-to-date and organized, but neither one of them said they would want the students to have them because it would just be a distraction. However, if for no other reason, iPads in the classroom would help them facilitate paperless courses for students, and that alone could save them a lot of headaches.

[via MacStories and 9to5 Mac]

Schools in Singapore issuing iPads to teachers and students originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sure, you may have already picked up your Steve Jobs mosaic print made from Apple products, but do you have a font made entirely from 540 iPhone apps? I didn’t think so! Tumblr We Love Apple posted about this font made by Oriol Fernandez Tur, a catalan art director from Barcelona with “too much free time” — his own words. Organizing iPhone apps by color, Tur invented his own typeface font, with each page of apps being a different letter of the alphabet.

While some Apple fans may just want to change the note-taking font on their iPad to Helvetica or make their own custom signature in the Mail.app, truly dedicated fanboys and fangirls everywhere might want to check out Tur’s custom iPhone app font and try to make it their own. The font is a little tough to read, but at the very least, it could be used to leave secret messages on friends’ iPhones or iPads.

Click Read More to check out video of the font in action.

Continue reading Font made out of 540 iPhone apps

Font made out of 540 iPhone apps originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Bump, the folks behind that iPhone app that allows you to quickly and easily exchange contacts, released a set of stats about its users that says almost 90% of iOS device owners are already running some version of iOS 4.0 or above. Bump reportedly has over 25 million downloads, so we are talking about a decent sample of the iOS user population (though I’d argue that it’s not quite as widespread as the stats might be on an app like Angry Birds — still, we’ll take what we can get). According to their figures, over 89% of users are running iOS 4.0, a number that’s a little higher than what I’ve heard from developers in the past.

Bump says that 10% of its users are still running some form of iOS 3.0, and just 2% of users are stuck back on iOS 2.0. Within the 4.0 crowd, 52.89% are running the latest version of 4.2.1, with 27.5% still running 4.1.

Why’s everybody so caught up? In addition to the press around each update, I’d suggest that the holidays were probably a big equalizer, with new iPhones and iPod touches smoothing out the playing field (since they come updated with the latest version automatically). With so many people all caught up to iOS 4.0 on the same hardware, Apple has a nice solid platform to build on, something that Android phones have been struggling with on both the hardware and software fronts.

[via 9to5Mac]

Bump study: 90% of iOS users run 4.X originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Independent financial bloggers have traditionally been closer to the mark in predicting AAPL revenue and earnings than professional analysts, and one day away from the Apple earnings call, the differences are quite large — about $2 billion dollars large. The professional analyst word on the street expects Apple to report earnings of US$5.38 per share for the first fiscal quarter of 2011, up from $3.67 per share for the same quarter last year. Revenue is expected to increase by a whopping 55 percent to $24.3 billion, with an increase in growth across the board on all Apple products except the iPod.

This time the gap is the largest difference on record according to Fortune’s Apple 2.0. In a survey of 10 amateurs and 44 professional analysts, the difference is quite dramatic. The consensus of the amateurs prognosticates that Apple will come in with revenues of $26.4 billion, a gap of $2.1 billion dollars or 8.6 percent. The difference in earnings per share (EPS) is even larger; it’s forecasted by the bloggers as $1, or a full 18 percent higher than street estimates.

Our old friend Gene Munster, senior analyst for Piper Jaffray, comes in on the low end, predicting that revenue will be reported to be $23.3 billion with an EPS of $5.06. It’s not inconsequential to note: in light of Steve Jobs’ medical leave of absence (get well soon, Steve), none of this has anything to do with Apple stock price tomorrow since I would expect the price to jump all over the place. This is despite German AAPL trading down 6 percent on the unfortunate news. A down opening of AAPL is expected by all, but by how much is anyone’s guess.

Please join us tomorrow at 5 PM Eastern for our live blog of the earnings call.

Note: The author is an Apple shareholder, and this post should not be construed as financial advice.

Bloggers and analysts predict Apple’s Q1 2011 performance originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Last night on the TUAW talkcast, Kelly asked me to speculate about what the mythical upcoming iPad 2 might look like. This was, of course, before preliminary details from Engadget apparently rolled in. In response, I ended up going on a little more in depth than I initially expected. Turns out that while I am completely unspoiled for the next iPad and have no inside information, I did have quite a bunch of strong opinions about what I’d like to see.

After the leak today, I decided to revisit what I had discussed on the talkcast last night. I put together this compilation of my iPad wishlist, matching my wishes to the rumored feature list. Now, we don’t know for sure that what we posted about earlier today are the true specs, but they are a terrific jumping off point for discussing what features the iPad 2 should be introducing.

Continue reading Dreaming of the iPad 2: One geek’s wishlist

Dreaming of the iPad 2: One geek’s wishlist originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AppleInsider is reporting that both the iPad 2 and the next generation of the iPhone, both rumored to be released later on this year, will feature the next generation of chips designed by Apple. The A5 (named after the A4, the current chip in most iOS devices) is rumored to have two cores, making for faster graphics performance, and enabling things like the iPad 2’s rumored Retina Display and HDTV out of the next version of the Apple TV.

There’s a lot of technical information out about the new chip (it will likely include the new SGX543 graphics core, an upgrade from the current model used by Apple), but with two cores running, the new chip model is supposed to offer around four times the processing power of the current generation. That allows for both the mentioned graphics upgrades, as well as faster computing tasks straight off of the processor with OpenCL.

Apple’s Intrinsity and P.A. Semi are likely to be the companies behind development, while Samsung is likely working on actual production. We can look for faster, better, stronger Apple chips later on this year.

[via Engadget]

Apple’s A5 chip rumored to have 4X the power of A4 originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The University of Michigan’s Project HiJack harnesses power by using bandwidth from the iPhone’s headphone port. There are actually some peripherals that do this already — think Square’s credit card reader — but Project HiJack sees this expanding to produce sensors for blood pressure, glucose, carbon monoxide and more. Right now, their work is very basic, but they are producing data transfer results through the headphone jack.

Check out Project HiJack’s work in action after the cut.

[via Engadget]

Continue reading University team is perfecting the art of hijacking power from the iPhone’s headphone jack

University team is perfecting the art of hijacking power from the iPhone’s headphone jack originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 14:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Reuters is reporting that brisk holiday sales of Apple’s iPhone 4 and Samsung’s Galaxy S smartphone may have pushed the two manufacturers to become the only two major phone makers to increase their market share during the season. All other manufacturers, including industry giants Motorola, LG, Sony Ericsson and Nokia are expected to lose ground in the market share race.

None of the manufacturers have reported the results of holiday sales yet; Apple will announce its first-quarter (Oct – Dec) results tomorrow, and Samsung won’t be announcing until January 28, with the other manufacturers reporting in between these two dates.

CCS Insight analyst Geoff Blaber was quoted by Reuters as saying that 2010 saw a gulf emerge between the winners and losers in the smartphone wars that will only widen in 2011. One of the losers over the holiday season could be BlackBerry manufacturer RIM, not due to lower sales, but because sales of their devices may not have grown as quickly as those from Apple and Samsung.

Apple and Samsung won’t have it easy in 2011. LG will be pushing out the Optimus 2X and Revolution, Motorola seeks to grab users at AT&T with the Atrix 4G and Droid Bionic, and the Xperia Arc from Sony Ericsson will be released.

[via Electronista]

Apple, Samsung holiday phone sales bring cheer to the new year originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MacNN cites two tips they received noting changes made to Boot Camp in Mac OS X 10.6.6. The first suggests that Apple has dropped support for Windows XP. When setting up a Windows partition, Boot Camp requests an “…authentic installation disc of Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional or Ultimate.” XP isn’t mentioned.

Also, users are discouraged from using software from a Mac OS X install disc or another computer in an attempt to find drivers and the like. Instead, Boot Camp will prompt you to download “additional software designed specifically for each Mac” to get your keyboards, etc. working. Just as MacNN speculates, we agree that this measure is meant to ensure that users have the latest software, helping to eliminate future troubleshooting.

Mac OS X 10.6.6 introduces subtle changes to Boot Camp originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We love mods of older Apple hardware and the resurgence of this oldie but goodie is no exception. Spotted and photographed in the Te Atatu suburb of Auckland, New Zealand, this classic mailbox features a gutted G4 that has been modified into a mailbox, complete with a front flap and address numbers. Stuck waist-high on a post, this novel use of non-functional Apple products brings new meaning to the words “You’ve got mail.”

We have seen several other G4 and G5s used creatively in the past, including our favorite G4 cube aquarium, which turned a gutted and cleaned G4 cube into a stunning Maquarium. We also have the defunct G5 that was morphed into a clock and the simplistic, yet practical G4 tower table that was lovingly placed outside as a stylish shelf. Any other mods you have seen, or perhaps even done yourself, that are worthy of a shout out?

[Via WeLoveApple]

Apple G4 turned into a mailbox originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Anyone who has visited the Apple website in the past few days knows that sometime in the very near future, the total number of apps sold through the iTunes App Store will go over 10 billion. After all, Apple is conducting a contest in which the person who buys that magic 10 billionth app will win a US$10,000 iTunes gift card, so many of us are taking a frequent peek at the numbers.

What most people might not realize is that the iTunes App Store is poised to reach the 10 billion app mark in less than half the time it took for iTunes to sell 10 billion songs. An insightful analysis by Asymco published yesterday shows that while it took approximately 67 months from the opening of the iTunes Store for the number of music downloads to hit 10 billion, only 31 months will have elapsed between the day the App Store opened and the point where 10 billion apps have been sold.

The article, by analyst Horace Dediu, supplies another fascinating statistic: more than 60 apps have been downloaded for every iOS device sold — iPhone, iPod touch or iPad. Dediu points out that not only are more than 30 million apps being downloaded each day, but that rate is accelerating quickly. By March, the number of app sales should exceed the cumulative number of music sales.

Dediu ends the article by pointing out three conclusions: apps are a new medium that will impact all other media; as the number of apps on a device increases, apps create increasingly higher switching costs for users, and; app consumption is increasing so rapidly that the market will soon overshadow the PC software market.

It looks like it’s a great time to be in the app market as a developer.

[via AppleInsider]

App Store could surpass total iTunes music sales by March originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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With the US Stock Exchange closed for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day observance, the overseas exchanges will be the venue for reaction and reflection on the announcement this morning of Steve Jobs’ medical leave.

Some analyst predictions have forecast Apple’s stock to reach the $450-500 level, but that may need to be reconsidered in light of the news today. Apple’s most recent stock price was $348.48. Apple shares fell more than 6 percent in German trading today, according to a CNBC tweet (most US financial networks are dark for the holiday, although the gang at Fox Business News are live all day; our own Victor Agreda is scheduled to be on at 1 PM ET to discuss the story).

Apple has been criticized in the past for failing to have a clear and public plan of succession should Jobs leave the company or be incapacitated for health problems (although, in fairness, few public companies make their succession plans a matter of record). During Jobs’ leave for his liver transplant, Tim Cook was in charge and was generally considered to have steered a smooth course for the multi-billion dollar enterprise.

Those succession discussions are sure to be renewed in the days to come; at the same time, everyone joins us in wishing Steve Jobs good luck and a rapid recovery.

AAPL down on foreign exchanges after Jobs announcement originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 10:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Apple iPad kicked off a tablet revolution in 2010 that promises to explode in 2011. Global tablet shipments are expected to triple in this upcoming year as competing manufacturers rush to produce a variety of slate devices to compete with the iPad. According to IHS iSuppli, this plethora of tablets will disrupt the global display industry, leading to both shortages and excess inventories over the next 12 months. In an attempt to meet anticipated demand, display manufacturers will produce a variety of screens in different configurations. Market forces will cause some displays to sell briskly, while others will sell poorly. Inventory that is leftover will be scrapped or sold at a heavy discount.

The tablet market in 2011 will be comprised of a wide variety of devices from large manufacturers (like HP and Dell) as well small manufacturers (like Viliv and Notion Ink). The total volume produced is expected to reach a staggering 57.6 million units, up from 17.1 million in 2010. The bulk of these devices will be powered by some flavor of Android including the tablet-optimized Android 3.0 Honeycomb. RIM is also expected to jump on the tablet bandwagon with its QNX-powered BlackBerry PlayBook, and HP reportedly has a webOS tablet in the works. In the face of this growing competition, Apple should remain confident as the iPad is projected to retain its title as market leader for at least the next two years.

iPad competitors place strain on parts suppliers originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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According to wire reports, Steve Jobs sent out an email to Apple staff stating that he is taking a medical leave of absence. In the email, reproduced by BusinessWire here, Tim Cook is named as being in charge of Apple’s day to day operations for an indeterminate amount of time; Steve will remain CEO and weigh in on strategic decisions. The text of the note is below:

Team,
At my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health. I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for all of Apple’s day to day operations. I have great confidence that Tim and the rest of the executive management team will do a terrific job executing the exciting plans we have in place for 2011.

I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can. In the meantime, my family and I would deeply appreciate respect for our privacy.

Steve

Jobs had a liver transplant in 2009 to treat complications from pancreatic cancer.

All of us at TUAW extend our best wishes for a rapid recovery to Steve and our support to his family, friends and colleagues at Apple.

Steve Jobs to take a medical leave of absence originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 09:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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