TechPatio » Apple

iPhone 4 Antenna Issue Confirmed in France and Germany

Klaus — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 20:45:50 +0000

Consumer Reports in the United States already published their “not recommended”-report on iPhone 4 some weeks ago, and now similar organizations in France and Germany confirms the antenna problem.

German consumer organization, Stiftung Warentest, and French Que Choisir, has now conducted their own iPhone 4 antenna tests – and their conclusion is basically the same as Consumer Reports in the US.

Stiftung Warentest found that, with just one finger placed on “the spot”, the signal would drop with 90%. They also tested two other smartphones (unknown models) and found the signal to drop only 25%.

Que Choisir gives iPhone 4 good rankings in pretty much all tests, but like Consumer Reports, they cannot recommend the phone because of antenna issues. They don’t believe the free bumpers/cases from Apple are enough to rectify the problem.

I expect my iPhone 4 to arrive on Monday or Tuesday.
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Product Updates & News From Apple: Magic Trackpad, iMac, Mac Pro, Battery Charger

Klaus — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:54:58 +0000

Apple has updated their Apple Stores today by presenting two brand new products and a few updates to existing products:

1) Magic Trackpad

The most exciting new product, without doubt. This takes your laptop trackpad, blows it up bigger and separates it from the computer. It’s like a mouse pad – but without the mouse. Apple says the Magic Trackpad is more gentle for your hand rather than using a mouse. I guess we’ll have to see about that – I’ll try to get my hands on one of them. It sells for $69 in the US Apple Stores.

More about Magic Trackpad.

2) Apple Battery Charger

For some reason, Apple felt that they needed to make a battery charger. Hey, it looks a lot better than the chargers I currently own. It only takes two AA batteries at a time though. It sells for $29 and comes with six AA batteries, two for your keyboard, two for your mouse or your trackpad and two for charging. The batteries have up to a year 10-year lifespan and hold a charge for an incredibly long time – they say.

More about Apple Battery Charger.

Updated: iMac

Apple also updated the iMac today. CPU has been upgraded to i3, i5 and i7. The biggest begin 2.93 GHz for the quad core i7 iMac. The built-in SD card readers can now also read SDXC cards (should support up to 2TB).

More about iMac.

Updated: Mac Pro

Mac Pro, the biggest beast of all Macs, also saw an update today. It now boasts up to 12 processing cores and up to 50% greater performance than previous generations.

More about Mac Pro.
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Recommended: Flipboard – iPad Social Media Magazine & RSS Feeds

Klaus — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 09:04:39 +0000

Robert Scoble (scobleizer) calls Flipboard a “killer app” for the iPad. I think killer app is relative. What may be a killer app for him and some thousands of other users, might be pretty boring to users like, say, my mum. Never the less, I gave Flipboard a chance, partly because it’s free and still without ads (enjoy it while it lasts).

Flipboard is like a magazine-styled app for your iPad where you flip through feeds in a rather cool way. This can be ordinary RSS feeds from sites such as Engadget or New York Times, whatever you like. This is nothing new, we already have great RSS readers such as Pulse (paid app – but I like it a lot!). The power of Flipboard is how it integrates with your social media networks, mainly Facebook and Twitter – and being a free iPad app.

It’s not going to show you a timeline of real-time status updates, instead it shows you what it thinks you are most likely to find interesting because it knows you – through your friends. I don’t know how it does it or if it’s mostly hot marketing air blowing out from the company behind the app. But no matter what, I found it to be a very interesting approach to catching up with your social media networks.

Flipboard doesn’t only show you the (max) 140 characters tweets from Twitter. If there’s a link in the tweet, it’ll show you the page and let you know who shared it. Awesome! You can then retweet it – or “like” it, if it was shared through Facebook. Obviously the app also supports video playback and in fullscreen as well.

For now, Flipboard is free but it’ll probably be ad supported in the future or maybe some kind of subscription based fees will find its way to the app. I honestly think it’s too bad this app is free, it deserves more. But hey, if it was a paid app, I doubt it would have gotten so much blogging coverage over the last day or so.

One of the bigger downsides, and I’m not going to pay for anything until this is added (I think), is the lack of Google Reader integration. I have hundreds of RSS feeds in my Google Reader from various blogs and websites. I don’t want to add the RSS feeds individually to Flipboard, I just want Flipboard to be able to pull, like, the latest feed updates from all my Google Reader feeds and show them to me in a really cool way, like it shows all the other feeds.

For now, if you’re lucky enough to own an iPad, you should check it out. Search for “Flipboard” in an App Store near you.

Here’s a video showing off Flipboard:

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Wrap-up: Apple’s Record Earnings Q3 Fiscal Results 2010

Klaus — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 09:52:54 +0000

Last night (for Europeans), Apple posted its Q3 earnings for fiscal year 2010. And, I know this might sound as an old record going in loop, but Apple once again beat its own records with an amazing $15.7 billion in revenue and a profit of $3.35 billion.

Apple was already the second most valuable company in the United States (and most valuable in technology), so the Q3 result certainly didn’t do them any bad favors in that area.

Apple sold 3.47 million Macs (another new record), 8.4 million iPhones (up 61% year-over-year) and 3.21 million iPads.

Considering that iPad didn’t even exist until just months ago, it’s pretty amazing that selling 3.27 million iPads translates into more than $2 billion in revenue for Apple, that’s more than the $1.5 billion revenue for iPods, still less than the $5.3 billion revenue on iPhones.

“It was a phenomenal quarter that exceeded our expectations all around, including the most successful product launch in Apple’s history with iPhone 4. iPad is off to a terrific start, more people are buying Macs than ever before, and we have amazing new products still to come this year.” - Steve Jobs

As for the free iPhone 4 bumper cases, these are expected to cost Apple $175 million in revenue on their Q4 results.
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Apple: Free Bumpers for Everyone & Antenna Problem Blown out of Proportion

Klaus — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 18:02:18 +0000

Apple just wrapped up a press conference in Cupertino a few minutes ago, where they went through a bunch of data on the antenna issue which has become known as “the antennagate”.

Steve Jobs doesn’t believe the issues with the iPhone 4 antenna are any bigger than what other smartphones are experiencing. Only 0.55% of all iPhone 4 users called about antenna or reception issues and only 1.7% returned their iPhone 4 compared to the 6% of iPhone 3GS returns for early shipments. He also claims that iPhone 4 has the highest customer satisfaction of any smartphone today.

As for dropped calles, AT&T does log it but will not give out the data due to competitive issues, but they did say that the iPhone 4 drops “less than 1 out of 100″ calls more than the 3GS.

On stage, Steve also showed videos where they demonstrated how other phones suffer from the “death grip” as well. Blackberry Bold 9700 went from 5 bars to 1, HTC Droid Eris from 4 to 0 and Samsung Omnia II from 4 to 1 bar.

“But it’s important to understand the scope of the issue — the data says the issue has been blown so far out of proportion, it’s incredible.” – Steve Jobs

Apple invested $100 million in state of the art testing facilities and they have 17 anechoic chambers and 18 PhD scientists and engineers working for them.

Steve Jobs and Apple wants to make sure every user is happy, so they’re giving away a free bumper/case, one for each iPhone 4 or a refund if you already paid for one. They also offer a full refund for your undamaged iPhone 4. The free bumper/case promotion goes through September 30th and since they can’t make enough bumpers for everyone, they are going to offer you the case that you want and they’ll send it to you. There’s really no reason now to whine about whatever antenna issue there might be…

“It’s fun to have a story, but it’s less fun to be on the other end of it. So here’s what we’re going to do. Yesterday we released iOS 4.0.1 that fixes some of these bugs with our algorithm. We recommend every iPhone owner update to it.

Secondly: a lot of people have told us the bumper solves the signal strength problem. Okay. Great. Let’s give everyone a case. We want to give everyone is going to get a free case.

One for every iPhone 4, if you’ve bought one we’ll give you a refund, and we’ll keep this going through September 30th.

Now, everything in life is more complicated than it seems on the surface. We’ll send you a free case. But we can’t make enough bumpers. So what we’re going to do is source some other cases — you’ll pick a case, and we’ll send it off to you.” – Steve Jobs

Finally, Steve confirmed that 17 more countries will get iPhone 4 on July 30th and the white iPhone will start shipping end of July in limited quantities.

UPDATE: Apple launched a new section at their website that explains more about the antenna: apple.com/antenna – they also made a video from the press conference available online.

Pictures from engadget live blog.
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iPad Mini Later This Year? [Rumors]

Klaus — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 09:05:31 +0000

Taiwanese newspaper, Digitimes, is reporting about a source that believes Apple will release two smaller versions of the iPad already later this year or perhaps in the beginning of 2011.

The two iPad mini’s will have 5.6″ and 7″ touchscreens and is said to be more an e-book reader’ish alternative to the bigger 10″ iPad that we have now, which is more like an all-round tablet computer for not only e-reading but also video, music, games etc.

The Digitimes source claims that iPad Mini’s will have the thinner OLED screen technology, which makes PC World (US) wonder about this rumor since Samsung Electronics is the biggest producer of OLED at the moment and they can hardly keep up with demand with their current production capacity. And wouldn’t Apple maybe prefer to put their Retina display on the iPad’s instead?

Obviously nobody from Apple or Compal (which according to Digitimes should have received the iPad order from Apple) wants to comment on this rumor – as usual.

The next wave of releasing the current iPad should hit, sometime this month, the following countries: Luxembourg, Ireland, Belgium, Austria, Holland, Hong Kong, Mexico, New Zealand and Singapore.
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iPhone 4 Not Recommended by Consumer Reports & Apple Removing Forum Threads

Klaus — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 17:31:48 +0000

Apple is really screwing things up when it comes to the iPhone 4 and its antenna issues. First, Steve Jobs sends an e-mail to an iPhone 4 user telling him to just don’t hold it that way (the way that causes the reception to drop). Really bad customer service, Steve! Well, shortly after he writes to another iPhone 4 user telling him to “stay tuned”, indicating that they’re working on something to fix it.

A few days after that, Apple released a letter on their website, telling us they just found out that the signal bars are displayed wrongly due to a bad formula for calculating how many bars to display. A software update will fix this. Which, as of July 13th, has still not showed up and the letter was posted July 2nd. You would think that wich such a big issue like this one, they would release the software update already.

Finally, Consumer Reports (USA) is now “not recommending” the iPhone 4 due to the antenna problems. Having tested three iPhone 4’s in a laboratory they concluded that it does in fact have a design flaw when it comes to the antenna. Their suggested fix? Well, watch the video below…

We think either Apple should supply free cases for the phone or come up with another solution. That’s why we are not recommending the iPhone 4.
Michael Gikas, Consumer Reports

I’m still waiting for Apple to release the software update, I wonder what exactly it will does. It doesn’t do much good if the only thing it fixes is how the signal bars are displayed, the signal will still suffer a lot when touching the antenna at its sensitive area.

Apparently Apple didn’t think the antenna problem is bad enough, so they have also started deleting threads on Apple Discussion boards that mentions the test done by Consumer Reports. I know the boards are Apple’s and they can moderate it as they want, I just don’t think it’s appropriate to “silence” their way out of this problem and the only thing they have accomplished are for all tech blogs (and maybe some media as well) to mention how they are removing several threads on the topic. Here’s one that Bing managed to cache before Apple moderators removed it.

Could we perhaps see an iPhone 4 recall being issued by Apple…?

I’m still getting an iPhone 4 though Hopefully by the end of July.

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Review: $10 iPad Case From eBay

Klaus — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:11:40 +0000

Got your shiny new iPad and want to protect it just a little bit? That’s what I wanted, plus I felt that the back of the iPad was too slippery for me to feel comfortable when using it as an e-reader. Putting the iPad into some kind of leather’ish case not only protects it, but also adds a better grip when handling the iPad with just one hand.
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You can either pay top dollar for a Snugg case or similar (I’ll get one of those in a few weeks so I’ll post another review then) or you can opt for a $10 synthetic leather case from eBay like this one (if the auction is no longer available, try to do an eBay search for “Leather Stand Up Case Cover Wallet for Apple iPad” or look at the seller i-saver).
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On this particular iPad case, the auction does say it’s PU leather meaning it’s synthetic leather and you shouldn’t expect real leather for the price of just $10 anyway. However, the price taken into consideration, I think this is a pretty good case.

It has built-in magnets in certain places so that it closes quite easily and will stay closed. The backside has a flap, also with magnets, under which you can put the front of the case to use it as a stand in two different angels, like you can see on the pictures.

This cheap case has two downsides. One is that it’s synthethic leather and it shows, as you can see on the picture below of the corner, it has already started to come off after just a few weeks worth of use. I don’t expect it to become a huge problem and I might just have been unlucky. Second, when you open up the case and put the front side under the flap, it creates a few pleats, shown on the other picture below. I don’t know for how long this fake leather will be able to last, but I’ll be sure to let you know if this becomes a problem anytime soon – after all, I open and close my iPad case many times throughout the day.

Other than that, I think it’s a decent case because of its low price. You get easy access to all connectors and switches so you have full functionality of the iPad even when it’s in the case.

If you prefer to buy quality at first and get it over with, you might need to look at some of the bigger brands and not “made in China”-eBay products. I prefer a case, like this one, over a sleeve, since I’d get instantly annoyed by having to pull the iPad out of a sleeve each time I want to use it. So, to sum up, this is a rather cheap iPad case that does what it promises and also protects the screen quite well (yes you can put a glass of water on it, but who would wanna do that…). I’m a bit worried about the “leather” that seems to be falling off one of the corners already and whether or not the pleats will cause cracks in the leather eventually. Rating (3 out of 5 apples):

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iFlicks: Easy Video Conversion on Mac with Metadata Support [Review]

Klaus — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 15:59:09 +0000

iFlicks is a neat little application that I found while searching for an alternative to VideoMonkey which is still a bit too buggy for my taste. Basically, I’ve had it with the monkey and I wouldn’t mind paying a small fee for an app that just works.

iFlicks is such an app. It was designed to make it easy for end-users to convert videos for playback on their Apple equipment and in iTunes, so advanced users might miss a few features here and there. iFlicks is €19.95 for a single user license or €49.95 for a family license – I think that’s fair pricing, considering what you’re getting and how easy it works – including the complete metadata support which I really like.

Intro Video by iFlicks

Features

The headline features of iFlicks are as follows:

Tight iTunes integration
themoviedb.org integration
TheTVDB.com integration
Complete metadata support
Manage your video collection with iTunes
Comfortable scriptable
Video conversion (iTunes/Front Row, Apple TV, iPad, iPod, iPhone)
Supports Elgato Turbo.264 (HD)

How To Use

iFlicks was designed to be easy – and it is. The interface has four buttons at the top row which you simply toggle depending on what you want to happen. The first button lets you select which encoding preset to use, ie. are you converting for iPhone, Apple TV, etc.? The next is destination and lets you select where to save the encoded file. The third button is enabled by default and will move your encoded file directly into iTunes. And finally, the fourth button is to move the original file to trash – so it does a little bit of cleaning up after itself as well.

Since I got my iPad a few weeks ago, I got this idea that I wanted to get some of my Knight Rider episodes onto it, so I could finally get around to watching them. Hey, don’t judge me, The Hoff was great back then Anyway, I had already ripped the DVD’s a long time ago so I had them only in a non-iTunes friendly format and I certainly couldn’t get them to play on the iPad without converting them first.

Luckily I had them named properly, ie. “Knight Rider 1×05″ for episode 5 in season 1. This naming format makes it really easy for iFlicks to pull metadata from its sources. Just by dragging in the file and iFlicks will instantly go and search for coverart, episode description, title etc. All you need is there. It also supports the “s01e05″ naming, meaning the same thing as “1×05″.

If, for some reason, iFlicks fails to find your TV show, you can click the “search for details” button to make sure that the show name is correct and update if it’s not. Simply enter the show name and it will rank results based on similarity. Here I miss being able to simply double click on the result I want, rather than first clicking a result to select it and then click the “Ok”-button. It’s a minor thing but it still annoyed me a few times.

Bugs

I found only one bug within iFlicks, which didn’t occur too often and wasn’t annoying in the same way as VideoMonkey bugs. It happened to me a few times when I dragged over another batch of files to be converted, that the four buttons on top were all grayed out, so I couldn’t click on any of them. Had to restart the application for the buttons to work again.

This might not be a bug, it could be a feature, depending on how you look at it. But I would really like iFlicks to remember the last used preset and select it for me upon next launch.

Missing Features

As already mentioned, iFlicks was designed to be easy to use – and it really is. This unfortunately also means that you can’t modify presets or create your own, if you want just a little bit more bitrate for an iPad conversion, for example. In most cases, if not all cases, the built-in presets will be just fine. But it’s nice to have the ability to modify or create your own, I think. I’m using the “Apple TV” preset to convert my Knight Rider episodes by the way, they play back great on both Apple TV and iPad – and even with the embedded subtitles from when I ripped the DVD’s.

The developer says that more advanced features will be coming sometime, but it will be a while.

Speed

As for speed of conversion, iFlicks is slightly slower than VideoMonkey but nothing I would even care to mention if it wasn’t because I deliberately timed a few conversions in both applications. This is due to the fact that iFlicks use QuickTime and VideoMonkey use FFmpeg for conversion. iFlicks is looking into moving to FFmpeg as well, but even at its current speed, I wouldn’t worry about it.

iFlicks also supports Elgato Turbo.264 (HD) which is a device you can connect to your USB port and get even faster conversion speeds – how iFlicks and QuickTime with Turbo.264 measures up against FFmpeg, I don’t know, but I imagine it’ll be faster.

You can download a free 14 day trial of iFlicks at iflicksapp.com and try it out for yourself.
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That Apple 3×3cm Touch Display Rumor? I Know What It Is!

Klaus — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:04:43 +0000

Now that the iPad has been been announced, launched and sold in millions, the tablet rumors have ended. But a new thing is under way, since Taiwanese site Apple.pro posted two photos of what seems to be a 3×3cm Apple touch sensitive display. Engadget seems believe this is real and not fake. Obviously it’s real – we’re seeing it on the pictures. The question is, what is it? Is it really something Apple’ish? If it is, what is it?

Well, if it is actually Apple, then I know exactly what this is going to be and what they’ll call it.

They’re going to call it an iWant. It’s a simple device that can be worn anyway you like, as a wrist watch, as a piece of jewellery or even be stuck to the bathroom walls or mounted on the dashboard in your car. What does iWant do? Well, it gives you instant access to the Apple Store by displaying a slideshow of all Apple products. Then all you have to do is tap on the product being showed to you on the display and Apple will automatically charge your iTunes account for your purchase and your Apple gear will be delivered to you the next day. It’s like the App Store – only with real products.

After getting the iWant, there’s no longer a need to stand in lines waiting for the next release of iPhone or iPad. Just order it from your iWant. Of course, you’ll still have to queue up to actually get the iWant…
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