Category: I-phone

My favorite way to get around in London is cycling. And everyone knows that an iPhone with its GPS is a cyclist’s best friend while navigating a city. But the drawback to cycling with an iPhone is obvious: if it’s held in your hand you’re going to A.) drop it eventually, or B.) fall off your bike trying to catch your iPhone when you drop it eventually. That’s where Horn Bike comes in. The all-silicon device lets you ride in style like it’s 1899.

Horn Bike is multi-purpose. Its primary feature is that it allows you to mount your iPhone on your bike and amplify your iPhone’s speakers by about 13 dB, which allows for earbud-free riding (riding a bike with headphones in your ears in London — and most other places — will get you pulled over by mounted police). Yeah, the horn part looks really retro, but the design works. Unlike other bicycle speaker and mounting systems, the Horn Bike has no moving parts, has no electronics, and requires no power. If it gets dirty, run it under water to clean it off. Best of all, because the Horn Bike uses a phonograph-like passive amplifier system, the amplified sound is directed towards you and not blasted into the ears of other pedestrians.

But playing music isn’t why I’m excited about the Horn Bike. I’m excited about it because it’s going to make riding with my iPhone and using it for navigation that much easier because I’ll be able to hear Siri speak while I’m cruising down Regent Street. The Horn Bike is available in a number of retail stores in the US, Asia, and Europe and is also available at Fruitshop.com. It comes in white, black, or blue and costs US$29.99.

[via Wired]

Horn Bike: the bike-mounted passive amplifier for iPhone 4 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 13 Oct 2011 18:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s official.

We kept hearing that the iPhone 4S has “only” 512 MB of RAM, not the 1 GB that everyone was hoping for. But we wouldn’t believe it until iFixit finished their teardown today. Their results are official — the iPhone 4S contains 512 MB of RAM.

How could they tell? The code on the A5 processor highlighted in red by iFixit in the photo at the top of this post has a string denoting “E4E4”. According to Anandtech, each E4 indicates a separate 2 Gb LPDDR2 die. That’s 4 Gb altogether, or 512 MB of LPDDR2 RAM.

Before you get too upset, note that Anandtech posits that faster and/or more RAM would have affected the iPhone 4S battery life, and that it may take a year for processor technology to progress to the point that iPhone users can have speed, RAM, and the battery life they desire.

iPhone 4S has 512 MB RAM, iFixit and Anandtech verify originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 13 Oct 2011 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The folks at CanvasPop do a lot of photo printing, so they wanted to see how well the camera on the new iPhone 4S worked with their large-format canvas printing service. The results were great!

One of their in-house printing experts grabbed a sample image from the gallery that Apple posted last week, then wrote a review of the 8-megapixel camera based on the quality of a print that was made. How did he like the quality?

Lo and behold, the printed image came out stellar. Even enlarged to a final size of 18″ x 24″, it retained all of its detail with not even a hint of a pixel showing in the finished print.

The reviewer chalks up the quality of the original and printed images to the new optics, stating:

The 4S includes a better sensor along with a wider aperture. A wider aperture means the camera is more capable of receiving light. More light means – once again – more detail.

The bottom line? “It’s entirely possible that the iPhone 4S comes loaded with one of the highest quality onboard cameras in any smartphone to date. Imagine the endless possibilities.”

CanvasPop: iPhone 4S has ‘highest quality on board cameras on any smart phone’ originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 13 Oct 2011 18:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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My nomination for the most underwhelming feature in iOS 5 goes to Newsstand. Touted by Apple as a one-stop shop for getting newspaper and magazine subscriptions in iOS, it has a lackluster selection, and its organization approach is baffling a lot of people.

Newsstand is a homescreen folder much like any other folder you can create in iOS. However, it’s got some magical properties; you can’t add apps to it, nor can you delete it. It’s the bucket where Apple slots periodicals apps that live in the Newsstand section of the App Store. You’re not browsing a separate store when you’re in Newsstand. For proof, click on one of the bottom buttons and you can navigate to other parts of the App Store.

If you ask me, Newsstand is pointless and irrelevant. It would have been better for Apple to take a cue from Amazon and made Newsstand a ‘shopping section’ in iBooks, which would add value to that app. Having the newspaper and magazine subscriptions handled through iBooks would get added eyeballs into the app, which has always felt like the black sheep of iOS store followings to me; it would also help iBooks stake its claim as the ‘reading hub’ of the iPhone or iPad, versus the Kindle or Nook apps.

However, as my colleague Michael Grothaus points out, magazine publishers definitely want a say over how their products look and act on the iPad. They’d lose most of that control if they went with an EPUB format for Newsstand items (iBooks’ native format), and if you had magazine applications mixed into iBooks alongside true ebooks in EPUB and PDF format it could be somewhat confusing for users. (“Why did that ebook launch a separate app? What happened to my library shelves?!?”)

Your mileage with Newsstand may vary. The offerings are slim at this point, with the most interesting one to me being the New York Times. There’s Good Housekeeping, the New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar UK and a few smaller magazines. E-publishing integrator PixelMags tells us that there’s a slew of titles on the way from its clients, including Crain Communications’ AutoWeek, Dennis Publishing’s UK titles (PC Pro, iGizmo, The Week), 29 titles from Imagine Media, Factory Media’s extreme sports magazines, and Grind Media’s Bike and Powder.

Once there’s a better offering of newspapers and magazines, I might use it more. But for now, it’s being moved to the last page of apps I have on the iPhone and I’ll save space on the front for something else. Oh, yes, there’s the other annoyance; you can’t legitimately move Newsstand into an app folder, since it already is a folder! Dave Caolo let us know about a trick for that; make a folder with two normal apps, then just as the folder is animating together drag the Newsstand icon into it. This is actually a bug, and may make it impossible for you to open Newsstand later on.

iOS 5 features: Newsstand originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 13 Oct 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re unabashed fans of the folks at Blue Mango Learning Systems; in fact, we did a video introduction to their flagship product, ScreenSteps, after we met with them at Macworld Expo 2008. ScreenSteps has saved countless hours of effort in quickly developing software documentation, but the Blue Mango team realized that it may be overkill for streamlined communications aimed at reducing the frequency of roundtrip email exchanges.

That’s the origin story of the new Clarify, a simplified take on screenshot-driven document creation that’s meant to help everyone deliver clear and easy-to-understand instructions with a minimum of effort. The app is about as simple as can be: take a screenshot or series of screenshots as you walk through your process, then document them with as little or as much detail as you need. You can export to PDF with a single click, save your instructions to Dropbox for third-party review, or upload to the free Clarify-It web service.

If you’re already a ScreenSteps user, you’ll be pretty comfortable with Clarify. It adds a few niceties (a menu-bar screenshot tool, highlight and border controls) while dispensing with the document library and workgroup editing features. It also drops the automatic capture of clipboard screenshots, which I regret; that’s one of my favorite ScreenSteps tricks.

Still, the Clarify UI is nice and clean, and it’s easy to create solid documents in very short order. You can copy and paste your instructions as RTF for use with Word, Evernote or other destinations. If you need to include real-world images (versus screenshots) in your instructions — say, to help rental tenants find climate controls or light switches in an apartment — drag the pictures from the Finder, iPhoto or Aperture right into your Clarify document.

Clarify is available as a 14-day trial and can be purchased direct or via the Mac App Store. Normal pricing is $29.99 for a single-platform license (Mac or PC), $39.99 for both platforms; however, through October 19 there’s a $10 discount offer available.

It’s true, you could certainly make similar screenshot-driven instructions with Word or Pages, but if you spend any substantial fraction of your time describing tasks step-by-step you can save yourself aggravation and effort by giving Clarify a shot. If you think you need the power of ScreenSteps instead, the base license is $39.95.

Daily Mac App: Clarify originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 13 Oct 2011 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple is on a roll. Mac sales are higher than ever, the iPad owns the tablet market, and the company just sold one million iPhones in 24 hours. In honor of all that Apple has achieved this year, the company is giving its employees some extra time off this upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. As first published by MacGeneration, Tim Cook sent the following email to all Apple employees this week:

Team,

I consider it an honor to come to work every day alongside the most innovative and most dedicated people on earth. This is an extraordinary time to be at Apple, and it’s all made possible by your incredible efforts.

We’ve had a record-setting year so far and we’re heading into the holidays with the strongest product lineup in our history. Customers are absolutely in love with the iPad 2, and the amazing new iPhone 4S is off to the best start of any iPhone we’ve ever made. The Mac is soaring to new heights with OS X Lion, and on the eve of its 10th birthday, the iPod is still the world’s most popular music player.

In recognition of the hard work you’ve put in this year, we’re going to take some extra time off for Thanksgiving. We will shut down with pay on November 21, 22 and 23 so our teams can spend the entire week with their families and friends.

Of course, Retail and some other groups will need to work that week so we can continue to serve our customers. If you’re in one of these groups, please check with your manager about taking time off at a later date. Our international teams will schedule their three-day shutdowns this quarter at a time that’s best for them. Details will be available on AppleWeb.

I hope everyone enjoys this much deserved break.

Tim

As noted in the email, retail workers will not get the same days off (they need to be in the stores to continue to sell products during the busy shopping season); however, they will all receive three extra days of paid time off after the holidays. Apple employees in other countries will also get an extra three days of paid time off.

Contrary to some reports, this is actually not the first time Apple has done this. When I worked for the company, the same extra Thanksgiving time off was given twice during my stint. Also, for those of you wondering, “AppleWeb” isn’t some new Apple Internet product. It’s Apple’s name for the company-wide intranet.

Apple giving employees extra paid time off this Thanksgiving for a job well done originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You’ll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what’s happening in the Apple world.

You can listen to today’s Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here.

No Flash? Click here to listen.

Daily Update for October 13, 2011 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The updated version of Magellan RoadMate (2.2) includes new features such as the most current maps available, red light camera and fixed speed camera alerts. The Junction View feature guides users through complicated freeway interchanges.

A premium upgrade via an in-app purchase gives you live camera feeds and warnings about dangerous curves and school zones. You can also purchase additional voices for turn-by-turn directions.

Magellan was an early provider of navigation software for the iPhone. The Magellan app has all the maps on board, so you will not use your data plan for basic navigation, although business searches and other special services will require an Internet connection.

The app is available from the App Store at US$39.99 for the USA version, and $49.99 for the USA/Canada version. All existing RoadMate App users will receive a FREE update to the new version.

Magellan updates RoadMate USA with enhanced maps originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One of the least publicized features in iOS 5 is the ability of the iPad 2 (and, apparently, the iPhone 4S) to wirelessly mirror its screen to a second-generation Apple TV. If both your iPad and your Apple TV are fully up-to-date, here’s how you activate mirror mode.

Don’t look for the controls in the Settings app on your iPad. Instead, they are snuggled next to the iPod controls. Double-press your home button to see the multitasking bar, showing all your recent apps. Swipe your finger from right to left; you’ll see the AirPlay icon. Tap on that, select your Apple TV and toggle the mirror button to ‘on’.

If everything is on the same Wi-Fi network, your iPad screen will appear on your Apple TV. It works well, and with a minimum of lag between the 2 devices. I checked dozens of apps, particularly games, and both sound and video made it just fine. Angry Birds looked great. So did Real Racing HD. Of course, the iPad doesn’t sport a 16×9 aspect ratio, so there was black on either side of the video. On the other hand, Netflix ran in full 16×9 mode, fully sensing my wider TV screen. Of course, you can already run Netflix movies natively from the Apple TV, so there isn’t much point in that exercise.

Another video app, Movie Vault also worked well. Any movies I ripped to the iPad also played just fine. The science app Solar Walk looked great. When mirroring, the renderings move to the big screen, while the controls stay on the iPad. Impressive.

Apple also sells an HDMI adapter cable to provide the iPad-to-TV link, but the wireless method is quick and easy, although the video doesn’t look quite as crisp as the wired method.

iPad mirroring is not a mind-blowing feature, but it’s a handy way to demo something on your iPad to a group of people, or play some games using the iPad as a controller. Slide shows and quick video replays are also made easier… and certain apps (iMovie, GarageBand) may really shine on the bigger screen.

It isn’t obvious how to turn it on, but now you know; tell your friends. Give mirror mode a try and let us know how you like it.

iPad mirroring mode on your AppleTV 2: How to do it originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Digitimes is reporting that due to defective Lithium-polymer battery packs in some iPad 2s, Apple has shifted some orders for the battery packs from Simplo Technology to another producer, Dynapack International Technology.

The defective batteries may have leakage problems. Digitimes notes that these problems can cause short circuits in the batteries, which can cause problems with recharging. Lithium-polymer batteries use very stable chemical materials, so the leakage cannot cause explosion or fire hazards.

Simplo has been supplying Apple with batteries for a number of devices for years, including the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. It is believed that the problem with defective batteries has now made Dynapack the predominant supplier for the iPad 2 batteries.

Apple reportedly moves iPad battery orders from Simplo to Dynapack originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One of the most welcomed features in iOS 5 is the addition of a notification center. It’s one of the things I found myself jailbreaking older iPhones in order to have. The notification center finally makes push notifications worth utilizing.

There are three flavors of notifications: Banner-style messages strip across any app you’re using, including the phone’s lock screen. You can also make a downward swipe from the menu bar to reveal full list of notifications. Finally, alerts are the familiar, large blue screens that pop up and demand action before being dismissed.

The banner-style notification is the one that I used the most in my testing. It was set up to push new mail messages, texts and BeeJive messages to me. If you tap the notification in the banner, it’ll switch you to the app that sent it. They go away after about five seconds or so. Sometimes, you’ll see several notifications at once if you’re reconnecting to the Internet after being away for a while.

The notification center itself contains all these notifications and more, including widgets for stocks and weather. There are no third-party widgets supported at this time, and I hope that Apple opens up the Notification Center’s API in the future to foster development.

You can customize a good deal of your apps to appear in the notification center as well as the style of notification each app uses. You also can get rid of the stocks or weather widget if you don’t care to see then. Go into Settings, then Notifications and turn them off. This is where you can customize notifications for other apps and the style of notification that is received. You can also set sounds and whether or not the notification appears on the phone’s lock screen.

Notifications are among the best of the new features in iOS 5, and it’s worth taking about 15 minutes to fiddle with the settings to get them to your liking.

iOS 5 features: Notification Center originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For some of us, the addition of fully customizable SMS/alert tones in iOS 5 is the biggest improvement in the feature list. (Well, maybe not the biggest, but certainly one of the biggest.) Since alerts can be linked directly to contacts for incoming iMessages or SMS receipts, having a larger library of custom sounds means you can personalize your iPhone to deliver more context in less time — and without having to look at it to know if that text message is from the spouse or the boss.

As iOS 5 has rolled out, the iTunes store (the iPhone version) has added a new section for Alert Tones — you can find it by scrolling down in the Tones section, or from Settings –> Sounds by tapping the ‘Buy More Tones’ button. Once you get over the idea of paying US$0.99 for a tiny snippet of audio, you can shop to your heart’s content among the sound effects; the Star Wars lineup is particularly popular at launch.

Of course, it’s easy enough to use your own sound library or recorded audio to create your own custom ringtones and alerts with iTunes.

Thanks Chuck.

iOS 5 iPhones can now shop for alert/text tones originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iFixit published an early teardown analysis of the iPhone 4S. This initial report suggests the iPhone 4S closely resembles the iPhone 4 on the outside and the inside. The form factor is the same, the pentalobe screws are the same, and even the logic board looks similar to the CDMA iPhone.

Besides the A5 processor, the biggest difference between the 4S and the 4 is the battery, which has an extra .05 WHrs. It also has a slightly different connector which prevents you from taking the 4S battery and popping it in the iPhone 4. Hopefully, iFixit will pry off the logic board’s EMI shields and discover what other exciting hardware components lurk underneath.

iFixit tears down an iPhone 4S originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dear Great-Aunt TUAW,

Hello. I will be 16 on the 15th of October and am getting an iPhone 4S for my birthday. I’m worried that the shops in London won’t have any, so I was wondering if you know if they will. Do they sell a certain amount on Friday and then save some for the rest of the weekend, until a new batch arrives? Please help.

Your loving nephew,

Oliver G

Dear Oliver G,

Would your parents seriously consider adopting Auntie? She doesn’t make a lot of mess and takes up very little space.

That aside, Auntie suspects that stores will continue getting stock. However, if you can’t line-wait at the store, you should pre-order from the website or add yourself to the reserve list, which typically appears a week or so after launch.

Remember the iPad 2’s introduction? Customers lined up week after week, hoping for available stock. Banking on a weekend reserve isn’t very practical.

Finally, Auntie would like to remind you about wearing warm sweaters and cleaning your room. Please do both.

Hugs to your folks,

Auntie T.

Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me snag a 4S originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple’s iPhone 4S press event showcased the talents and personalities of Apple’s executive leadership including CEO Tim Cook and Phil Schiller. One standout was vice-president Scott Forstall who, in the absence of Steve Jobs, is expected to take a bigger role at Apple. In a lengthy article, Business Week takes a closer look at this up and coming executive.

Forstall’s in charge of Apple’s mobile software division and oversees the development of iOS. At the tender age of 42, he is Apple’s youngest senior executive. He’s also the most like Steve Jobs and the executive most likely to preserve Jobs’s vision.

If you want to learn more about Forstall and his role at Apple, then you should take some time to read Business Week’s six page profile.

Businessweek profiles Scott Forstall originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 13 Oct 2011 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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