Posts in news

Apple Planning Retail Store in Grand Central Terminal?

The New York Observer has a lengthy piece today on Apple’s rumored new location for a retail store in NYC: Grand Central Terminal. The Observer reports:

Sources tell The Observer that the maker of ubiquitous iGadgets—from computers to cell phones—hopes to open a store in the transportation and retail hub, though it has yet to begin the long approval process necessary for opening in a city landmark.

The publication also notes Apple and Grand Central’s leasing agent obviously declined to comment; Apple’s most popular stores in New York, the Fifth Avenue store and the one in Upper West Side, share a similar design approach with glass (Fifth Ave.) and stone walls (UWS). Recently, Apple has been rumored to be considering a revamp of the current Palo Alto retail store basing on the design guidelines from New York’s Upper West Side location.

As The Observer also notes, if the rumors are to be believed and Apple is indeed in the early planning stages of a Grand Central store, it will be interesting to see how Apple will manage to put a full-featured store in the famous retail hub. Although we think Apple’s shiny glass and minimal design philosophy would be a great fit for Grand Central.

BBC iPlayer App for iPad Coming This Week

In late January we reported the official BBC iPlayer app for iPad was rumored for a February release; it now appears that the app is real, it’s launching this Thursday and it will require an active WiFi internet connection for full browsing and playback experience.

As tweeted by Interactive Operations Engineer at BBC Geoff Marshall, iPlayer for iPad won’t allow you to stream videos over 3G. Marshall also confirms the UK Radio Player was set to launch this week, but it’s been pushed back to March. It is very likely that the initial version of iPlayer for iPad will be available to UK users only, although some rumors point to BBC Worldwide planning a subscription-based international version for all App Store. The native iPlayer app is expected to bring a much smoother and stable experience to iPad owners who have relied on Mobile Safari for months now.

We will keep you posted as soon as iPlayer for iPad shows up in the App Store.

Mac App Store Gets Purchase Confirmation Warning

When Apple launched the Mac App Store on January 6, one of the most notable missing features was the “purchase confirmation warning” when buying apps. We’re talking about the dialogue box that usually pops up in the iOS App Store when you’re logged in with your Apple ID and you hit the “Buy” button; the confirmation warning is an effective way to help users prevent accidental downloads (and thus credit card charges) when browsing the Store. It happened a few times in the past that I was scrolling a list of apps (usually the Top Paid chart) and accidentally clicked on the button to download a (paid) app.

The Mac App Store now displays an additional pop-up menu after clicking the “Buy” button in the Store. It appears that there is no option to disable the warning for now, unlike the iOS App Store. As you can see in the screenshot above, you’ll have to click on a second “Buy” button before start downloading an application.

The feature is a nice addition, although we would like to have it as an option, rather than enabled by default. Other features we’re still waiting for include a better uninstallation process (would be great to have an Uninstall tab in the Mac App Store’s window), possibility to gift apps and a Wish List, which is still surprisingly missing from the Mac App Store.

Turn Off Ping’s Annoying Email Notifications

Last week, I noticed Apple started sending me emails about people following me on Ping. Yes, Ping: remember it? Apple’s “interesting” attempt at doing social networking within the iTunes Store. Something that has received awards like worst product of 2010. Still, back to email notifications. It looks like Apple turned these on by default recently, without asking for user’s confirmation, apparently. Another little trick to remind us Ping exists, I guess. Indeed, the Ping homepage features these new notifications as “What’s New In Ping”. Read more

FUNDED: Kickstarter Project Adonit WRITER

Back on January 26, I posted about the Adonit’s WRITER, an iPad case + keyboard. At the time, they were trying to raise $10,000 to fund this project and had $7,000. Well, I was doing a checkup on the Kickstarter project a few days ago when it ended and the Adonit team ended up getting 268% of the funding that they needed, or over $26,000. I’m glad to see a great iPad accessory get the money it needed to move forward with production. Read more

Verizon iPhone Teardown: Dual GSM-CDMA Chip, iPhone 5 Likely To Be Worldphone

The folks over at iFixyouri and 9to5mac have taken a look at the internals of the Verizon iPhone and found out the device is running a dual-mode GSM-CDMA-capable Qualcomm Gobi chip. This Qualcomm’s chip enables worldphone capabilities with GSM and CDMA support on all carriers, but of course the Verizon iPhone won’t be able to accomplish this due to the lack of a SIM slot.

The Qualcomm Gobi MDM6600 modem supports GSM, GPRS, EDGE, CDMA, HSDPA, HSPA (up to 14.4 Mbps) and EV-DO (up to 14.7 Mbps), as well as GPS.

Rumors about integrated dual-mode Qualcomm chipsets in the next-generation iPhones and iPads have been floating around for a while now; at this point, it seems very likely that, at least the iPhone 5, will support multiple networks in a single device capable of switching from GSM to CDMA. Read more

Verizon iPhone Jailbroken

Well, that was fast. The Verizon iPhone has started arriving today to some people who pre-ordered it and it looks like the device has already been jailbroken. As you can see from the photo above, the iPhone is running Cydia and it clearly says “Verizon 3G” in the status bar. We guess the special iOS 4.2.6 version the iPhone is running was jailbroken through Greenpois0n, and a new version of the jailbreak tool with official CDMA iPhone support should come out soon.

So fear not, Verizon iPhone owners: you too can have Cydia. And by the way, here are some apps and tweaks you should install. [via]

Gmail’s Priority Inbox Comes To The iPhone

Great news from the Google Mobile team today: the Gmail webapp for iPhone has now Priority Inbox support built-in. Priority Inbox for mobile will import all the sections you have created on the desktop and it will also display the “important and read” or “important and unread” markers you’ve got used to see in Gmail.

Now, once you set up Priority Inbox in the desktop version of Gmail, you’ll see Priority Inbox sections when you visit gmail.com from your phone’s browser and click on the ‘Menu’ screen. You’ll also see importance markers in your inbox, so you can quickly identify which messages are important.

The new feature is available to Android and iOS devices. iOS 3 or later is required.

Fake iPhones and iPods Worth $10 Million Seized By L.A. Police

The Los Angeles Port police has seized thousands of fake iPhones and iPods coming from China in an operation that prevented these counterfeit models from ending up on the U.S. market and generate $10 million in revenue. The models, shipped from China as “replacement parts” and re-assembled to look like old Apple devices, were so similar to the original ones buyers could recognize the scam only when trying to sync them with iTunes.

Two brothers were charged for the sale of counterfeit goods and bank account records also revealed the operation had already generated $7 million in revenue. That’s quite a business for fake Chinese iPods. Apparently, the guys behind these devices thought it might be a good idea to replicate older iPods and iPhones rather than the most recent iterations.

We have seen lots of fake Apple products in the past, and it’s good to know police is always working to prevent them from ending up on customers’ hands. With the iPad 2 coming soon, I guess we’ll see several fake “used iPad 1” in 2012. [via Cult of Mac]