A number of reports last week from Bloomberg, TechCrunch and the Wall Street Journal suggested Apple has been working on a smaller and cheaper model of the iPhone 4, which is set for a summer release and will be available alongside the current line of iPhones. The WSJ also reported that, according to their sources, MobileMe will go under a major overhaul this summer to introduce streaming for music stored in iTunes in the cloud. The new MobileMe will be free, and Apple was planning a launch last year. Read more
Friends 1.5 Released, Adds Read It Later Support and Improves Notifications
Friends, the “social contact manager” by Taptivate we reviewed a few months ago, was updated today to version 1.5, which includes a number of highly requested features from users and several optimizations and design improvements to make the app faster and easier to use. Friends, in case you haven’t heard, is an app that aggregates contacts from your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts and matches them with your existing Address Book to allow you to always stay in touch with your friends, and find who’s online instantly. The app can serve as a Twitter client and Facebook application, also allowing you to place calls through a custom dialpad UI and organize your contacts in groups and favorites. Friends, overall, is an app built on top of various social networks that’s compatible with your iPhone’s Address Book and doubles as a lightweight client.
The 1.5 update lets you view all your Facebook and Twitter notifications in the main menu – something that was among the top requests from users and that now simplifies the way you can be notified of your friends’ activity in a single place. To streamline the experience, some parts of the UI have been redesigned and a new “mode switcher” in the top toolbar lets you easily navigate across the multiple sections of the app.
Other features in Friends 1.5 include Read It Later support, sync for LinkedIn contacts and “sort by first name”. Lots of bugs have been fixed and the underlying engine improved to be faster and more reliable. Friends is available at $0.99 in the App Store.
This Is The iPhone 4 Like You’ve Never Seen It Before
Italian photographer Paolo Rossi realized a series of macro shots with his Canon cameras that show the details of the iPhone 4 as close as possible. The photos show the rear and front facing cameras, the speaker, the amazing design of the iPhone’s flashlight. On Rossi’s website, you can also check out some 3D views of the shots.
The flash and front-facing camera macro shots are simply incredible. It’s hard to believe we actually hold these things in our hands every day, unable to take a look at these (beautiful) details.
Walmart Gives Man A Fake iPad
An Atlanta man is filing a lawsuit against his local Walmart store over an iPad he purchased, and turned out to be fake. The iPad, which you can see in the video above, presents the typical aluminum case with Apple logo, however it’s got fake glass on the front (I don’t even know if that’s glass at all) and a paper homescreen below it. It’s a store display unit that definitely shouldn’t have ended up into a retail box.
For this reason, the man is suing Walmart but the retail chain is blaming Apple as, apparently, they’re the ones who handle operations with store demo units and actual devices. Some speculate a customer bought a real iPad, swapped it with the fake and returned it to Walmart. But then again, how come employees didn’t notice that? Anyway, Walmart is refusing to give the man a refund over the fake iPad he got, and can’t use in any way.
Well, at least he can eat off of it. [via 9to5mac]
WSJ: New MobileMe, Cheaper and Smaller iPhone This Summer
Following last week’s Bloomberg’s report about Apple working on a smaller iPhone with a 2.3” screen and sold off-contract, the Wall Street Journal weighed in earlier today to confirm that Apple has indeed prototyped a phone about “about half the size” of the current iPhone 4. The codename of the new unit should be N97 (not spotted in the iOS SDK yet) and should be cheaper than the “main line” of iPhones.
One of the people, who saw a prototype of a new iPhone several months ago, said the new device is intended to be sold alongside the current line of iPhones and would be about half the size of the iPhone 4. The phone, one of its codenames is N97, would be available to mobile carriers at about half the price of Apple’s main line of iPhones, the person said.
The WSJ also reports among Steve Jobs’ top priorities there is a MobileMe overhaul for 2011, just like the CEO said in an email to a customer a few months ago. The new MobileMe will be free and used as a “locker” for personal media like photos and videos. This would allow Apple to produce iPhones with less storage, and do everything through the cloud, possibly relying on the data center they have been building in North Carolina.
Apple also is exploring a major overhaul of its MobileMe online storage service, the people familiar with the matter said. The service currently requires an annual subscription payment of $99 to $149. Apple is considering making Mobile Me a free service that would serve as a “locker” for personal memorabilia like photos and videos, eliminating the need for consumers’ devices to carry a lot of memory, the people familiar with the situation said.
According to the WSJ, both the smaller iPhone and the new MobileMe are on track for a summer release.
Update: The WSJ is now giving out more details about the new iPhone and MobileMe in their report. The device is “significantly lighter” and has an edge-to-edge screen, which might as well mean the rumors about the lack of a Home button were true. The smaller iPhone should also have voice navigation, although we think that will be a feature of iOS 5 anyway. As for MobileMe, the WSJ mentions streaming of iTunes libraries through the cloud and that Apple was planning a release last year. [via]
The person who saw the prototype of the new iPhone said the device was significantly lighter than the iPhone 4 and had an edge-to-edge screen that could be manipulated by touch, as well as a virtual keyboard and voice-based navigation. The person said Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., also plans to upgrade the iPhone 4.
The new service would give users access to their iTunes libraries from, say an iPhone or iPad, instead of requiring that the devices be synced by cable with a computer and use space to store the actual files, the people said. The new service likely would be compatible with the iPhone 4, one of the people said.
Lady Gaga’s New Single Becomes Fastest Selling iTunes Song Ever
We at MacStories aren’t exactly “fans” of Lady Gaga’s music, but the results achieved by her latest single “Born This Way” are noteworthy: in five hours, the song has become the fastest selling iTunes single of all time, jumping to the #1 in the iTunes Store in 21 countries. The song was released yesterday and it’s also available for listening on VEVO’s Youtube channel.
Lady Gaga isn’t new to Apple-related coverage. In September, for instance, Steve Jobs featured a video on stage during the new iPods / Ping introduction showing Lady Gaga giving her support to the new social network. Video is embedded below.
Oh, and apparently she also likes Infinite Loop. [via Music News Daily] Read more
Super Mega Worm Goes Free To Celebrate Verizon iPhone, Mac App Store Release
Super Mega Worm! The game that lets you control the Death Worm Wojira to save the Earth from extinction. The iOS game packed with retro graphics and awesome pixel art. One of the most successful iPhone and iPad games to date thanks to its humour and Game Center support. Well, to celebrate the release of the Verizon iPhone and the availability of the app in the Mac App Store, Super Mega Worm for iOS (universal for iPhone and iPad) has gone free. Free, as in “free for a limited time before it goes up again”.
Go download it here.
Barclays: 33 Million iPads This Year, Apple “Far Ahead” Of Its Competition In Enterprise
In spite of Microsoft’s attempts to convince the enterprise folks that the iPad is inadequate, iOS devices, and especially the iPad, are doing well in the enterprise market segment. Apparently, they’re doing so well that RIM itself has fallen behind and SAP rolled out 1,000 iPads to its employees a few months ago. The recent additions in iOS 4 and 4.2 for business users surely helped along the way in getting iPhones and iPads into offices and large companies. But the iPad, thanks to its larger screen and notebook-like features, is set to produce even bigger results in 2011.
According to Barclays Capital analyst Ben Reitzes, the iPad is “far ahead” of competitors in the tablet market; without setting up a salesforce, Apple is “listening to enterprise customers”. More and more corporate users are quickly shifting to the iOS environment and, most of all, they are bringing these devices to work. The popularity of the App Store and the fact that thousands of applications are available and continually updated in the Business category helps these users install work-related software on their devices, which are also used for personal purposes. As Reitzes notes, this is “the consumerization of IT”. And when the App Store doesn’t provide the right tools to deploy applications on a large scale, wireless app distribution introduced in iOS 4.2 allows enterprises to host and wirelessly distribute their own in-house apps, both on WiFi and 3G.
Last, Reitzes believes 47 million tablets will be sold in 2011, including 33.7 million iPads. Similar numbers were shared by analysts Wolf and Fidacaro earlier this week.
Bejeweled 3 for iPhone and iPad Coming, Eventually
If you’re a loyal Bejeweled fan (dare we say “addicted”), then you must be happy to know that, eventually, Bejeweled 3 will “probably” come to the iPhone and iPad. Why the “eventually” and “probably”? The game, developed by PopCap Games, was released as a digital download for Windows and Mac last December and, especially on the Mac side of things, several gamers decided to put the download on hold, waiting for a mobile iOS counterpart. Good news is, hope isn’t lost as PopCap Games’ Garth Chouteau hints at the porting in a recent interview with Pocketful of Megabytes, which you can read here.
When asked about an iOS version, Chouteau says:
As mentioned above, we’re traditionally somewhat slow to adapt our games to other platforms after launching them on PC/Mac… Bejeweled 3 for iPhone/iPad is probably something we’ll do…eventually…!
Bejeweled 3 for iOS, if priced correctly and made universal in the App Store, would undoubtedly jump the charts in a matter of a few days. The game is popular, people want to play, PopCap wants as many downloads as possible – sounds like a plan, right? Yes, but we have to wait. Eventually, it will come. Hopefully sooner than later. [via TUAW]