Energy saving light bulbs can interfere with televisions causing them to randomly change channel and switch on and off, a leading manufacturer has admitted. [From Energy saving light bulbs can effect television sets]
I observed this myself fifteen years ago or so.
The iPhone OS 4.0 event just wrapped up and the faithful are filing out of the Apple venue with a slightly shell-shocked look. What happened? Oh nothing, just multi-tasking, iAd, a huge Mail update and a bunch of other stuff. Yes, the long-awaited OS update for the iPhone has just been run down and we’ve got all the details. Here, in handy bullet point form, are all the things you need to know about iPhone OS 4.0… Continue reading[From Everything You Need To Know About iPhone OS 4.0]
I suppose I’ll be downloading the beta on Sunday.
The iPad isn’t a big iPod touch—an iPod touch is a miniature iPad that restricts the full multitouch experience in exchange for offering greater portability. With the iPad, in contrast, you get multitouch the way it was meant to be done.
That’s one of our many take-aways after having submerged ourselves in iPad land since launch. The larger screen doesn’t just offer more space to work with—it opens up a different and more immersive user experience. Because of this different experience, though, the closed nature of the platform can get under some users’ skin in ways the iPhone and iPod touch do not.
Still, the iPad is likely to just be a starting point for Apple and for multitouch computing in general. There are obvious downsides to the device—we’ll tell you what those are—but it’s clear that it does sit in its own category that floats somewhere between a smartphone and a laptop, and it serves different purposes than either its smaller or bigger siblings. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
A large chunk of the Ars staff contributed to this review, either in the form of writing full sections or by offering feedback and insights based on their own experiences. Because the 3G + WiFi version is not yet on the market, we all tested a WiFi-only iPad. We think it’s worth noting up front that the WiFi-only version is probably best if you only plan to use it at home or at Starbucks—you’ll definitely miss not having an Internet connection while out and about, and the (non-contract) 3G data plans are not bad at all, so long as you can stomach the extra $130 you’ll have to fork over for the privilege.
It’s also the case that there are some parts of the iPad “experience” that we didn’t get to cover here, but we think the next several pages will convey more about what using the iPad is like than you ever thought you wanted to know. So let’s get on with it!Read the comments on this post
Pretty comprehensive review. Clearly a hands-on is needed to ‘get’ this. Still not clear if it is going to break out of being a niche product though.
Up until now, a shroud of mystery has surrounded Apple’s custom engineered A4 system-on-chip; we know it’s clocked at 1GHz, likely tied to Apple’s prior acquisition of P.A. Semi and manufactured by Samsung. Outside of that, the only other knowledge we’ve gained has come not from the mouth of Cupertino, but from the extracting wizards over at iFixit. The A4 contains at least three layers of circuitry layered on top of each other, though it’s packaged just like the iPhone processor: microprocessor in one package and two memory modules in the other package. We also learned that the iPad RAM is actually inside of the A4 processor package, and we’re expecting to learn even more from those folks in the coming days. All that said, there’s still much debate on whether Apple’s own silicon can stand up to Qualcomm’s heralded 1GHz Snapdragon, the chip powering Google’s Nexus One among other things. AnandTech pitted their iPad against the iPhone 3GS (600MHz ARM Cortex A8) and the aforesaid Nexus One (1GHz Snapdragon QSD8250), using a number of website loads as the primary benchmark. Overall, the A4 proved to be around 10 to 30 percent faster, though it’s impossible to say what effect the operating system has on things. Have a gander at that source link for more — we get the feeling the competitions have just begun.Apple’s A4 SoC faces Qualcomm Snapdragon in knock-down-drag-out benchmarking test originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 04 Apr 2010 01:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | AnandTech | Email this | Comments [From Apple’s A4 SoC faces Qualcomm Snapdragon in knock-down-drag-out benchmarking test]
That’s very interesting. How custom is this chip? Apple does have an architecture license for ARM that allows them to tweak the chip design.
As expected, Apple gave the New York Times’ David Pogue , USA Today’s Ed Baig and the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg an early crack at the iPad for reviews that just appeared. [From First iPad reviews appear, mostly thumbs up]
It only remains to be seen how well it actually sells.
Harry McCracken, looking back at Microsoft Bob, 15 years after its release:
Analyst Charles Finnie of Volpe, Welty & Co. called Microsoft’s product a threat to the very existence of Microsoft’s competitor in Cupertino. “Bob is going to be another nail in Apple’s coffin unless Apple can somehow raise the standard yet again on the ease-of-use front,” he told the AP.
★
We know how that turned out 🙂
Shipping for pre-orders has been pushed back more than a week, to April 12 The demand curve for Apple’s (AAPL) new tablet computer crossed the supply curve sometime overnight Friday. By Saturday morning, the ship date for iPad pre-orders, originally set to guarantee delivery by April 3, had been pushed back to Tuesday April 12. Customers who had already pre-ordered are still scheduled to get their iPads next Saturday. Meanwhile, the option to reserve an iPad for pick-up at an Apple Store has disappeared from Apple.com entirely. That does not mean that there will no iPads available for sale next Saturday. Customers who reserved them over the past two weeks were told at the time that their iPads could be picked up between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. Saturday April 3. After 3 p.m., any iPads that haven’t been collected may be made available, while supplies last, on a first-come, first-served basis. It’s not clear whether the shortfall is due to strong demand, short supply or both. Published estimates of the number of iPads Apple was expected to have on hand by April 3 range from a high of 1 million to a low of 300,000. By Friday, according to the best available estimate, 240,000 iPads had been pre-ordered online. The only published report on reservations suggests that they’ve been coming in at roughly the same rate. Kudos to the folks at Planet iPad, who were the first to spot the change in ship dates. See also:
iPad week two: 240,000 pre-orders
iPad week one: 190,000 pre-orders
Day 1 estimate: 120,000 iPad sales
Apple sells 50,000 iPads in two hours
The wild iPad Ruckus begins
How many iPads will Apple sell?[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]
[From Apple has run out of iPads]
I wonder how this affects the UK launch? No impulse buy for me I guess 🙂
Saw Kick-Ass today. Very amusing. A sequel couldn’t be as good, but on the other hand it might be better than most of the other stuff that comes out. And it’s out in the UK before the USA 🙂
The high profile failure of Palm’s efforts to revitalize its flagging smartphone business with the Pre’s new webOS has analysts casting doubt over parallel phone platform reinvention efforts by others, including Nokia’s Symbian and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.[From Palm’s failure to take on iPhone casts doubt on Nokia, Microsoft]
They’re all doomed! Doomed I say!
oDDmON oUT writes “MSNBC is reporting that a Columbia Business School study shows those who hold power over others make better liars. According to one of the study’s coauthors, ‘It just doesn’t hurt them as much to do it.’ For the average liar, she said, the act of lying elicits negative emotions, physiological stress and the fear of getting caught in a lie. As a result, she added, liars will often send out cues that they are lying by doing things like fidgeting in a chair or changing the rate of their speech. But for the powerful, the impact is very different: ‘Power, it seems, enhances the same emotional, cognitive, and physiological systems that lie-telling depletes. People with power enjoy positive emotions, increases in cognitive function, and physiological resilience such as lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Thus, holding power over others might make it easier for people to tell lies.'”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Or maybe liars are better at gaining positions of power. Fake degree on the wall and such.
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