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
iPhone Nano To Have No Storage? Stream Media and Documents?
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.
Three UK + Ireland Block Cydia Servers
Customers of Three in Ireland and the UK might wake up today with a little bit of a shock when they hear that Cydia has seemingly been blocked by the carrier, leading those who jailbreak their iOS devices unable to access certain content from Cydia when on the Three network. The block seems to be for Cydia’s servers so whilst the main page is inaccessible, Three users in the UK and Ireland should still be able to access other repositories and download from them.
Manuals on Amazon Suggest Late July Launch for Lion
Several manuals for the upcoming Mac OS X 10.7 Lion have been spotted by 9to5 Mac on the Amazon.UK website and all are set to be released sometime around late July, hinting that the OS will also launch around that time. WWDC is expected to be from July 5 to July 9 and it would make sense for Lion to be released shortly after WWDC as these manuals seem to suggest.
Whilst the release date of these guidebooks don’t confirm a late July launch it makes a late July launch likely because there have been several previous cases of Amazon guidebooks effectively revealing a products launch date, such as Office 2011 last year.
Some of the manual covers include references to the already known features of Launchpad, Mission Control and changes to the dock, all of which were revealed in the ‘Back to the Mac’ event late last year.
[Via 9to5 Mac]
greenpois0n Reaches Release Candidate 6, Jailbreaks Apple TV
greenpois0n, the tool for jailbreaking your iOS devices on version 4.2.1, has been updated again, and now supports jailbreaking the second generation Apple TV. By jailbreaking the second generation Apple TV you will be able to install NitoTV without all the hassle and difficulty of using SSH and entering lines of code into terminal as was previously required.
Now at release candidate 6, this version of greenpois0n is also said to fix some issues that had occurred when using zodttd’s emulators. For those curious, NitoTV allows users to play more video formats, run emulators, view RSS feeds, view weather forecasts and more in what is essentially a more fully featured media center application.
greenpois0n RC6 is available for Windows and Mac.
[Via Engadget]
Nokia Borrows iMovie Loop For Microsoft Partnership Announcement
If Nokia’s recent announcement to partner with Microsoft wasn’t enough to stir up the #fail hashtags on Twitter, leave it to the Apple geeks to point out that Nokia is using their biggest competitor’s theme in their recent announcement. While Apple’s audio loops are royalty free, it’s still amusing to see a competitor using the Macbook theme (Pendulum) in their Microsoft get-together. Check out what Adrian Boioglu from Boio.ro has dug up after the break.