Quality Productivity & Utility Apps, Ready for OS 26, from Agile Tortoise
Steve Jobs is back in the air. Well not the Air (which apparently is doing great), but literally in the air with his private jet. Taking a look at Apple’s 10K form for fiscal year 2010, Fortune noticed a $93,000 reimbursement to Steve Jobs for private jet expenses in Q4 2010, namely fuel and pilot salaries.
Private jet expenses accounted to only $12,000 in Q3. Clearly Steve traveled a lot during the last quarter, and we can only speculate about the people he met and the deals he closed.
The iPad may soon be sold in China at an additional cost, the Financial Times reports. Taiwnese-owned company Proview is, in fact, threatening Apple to sue them over trademark infringement for the “iPad” name.
The company, not so popular but apparently strong on trademarks, almost a decade ago tried to sell a tablet computer called “I-Pad”.
Here’s a new version of a rumor we reported in August: Hon Hai, parent company of Foxconn, won a share of the production contract with Apple for the release of the CDMA iPhone 4 in early 2011. Together with Hon Hai, Taiwanese company Pegatron will manufacture the device and it plans to ship 10 million units during 2011.
We knew they were working on it, and here it is: proof of an iPad running iOS 4.2 beta 3, and MobileTerminal app installed on it. The iPad is, consequently, jailbroken.
Clever.
If you use Gmail as your default email client and you happen to use it on your iPhone browser as well (because quite frankly, it’s just better than Mail.app) you may have noticed that Google rolled out a few changes in the past weeks.
The Google Mobile team made Gmail snappier with a much smoother scrolling on iOS 4 and managed to fix that weird issue with scrollbars continuously moving when scrolling the page. Gmail mobile has fixed scrollbars now. Yay. Read more
Four months ago, in my review of The Early Edition for iPad:
The concept behind The Early Edition is simple and effective: it’s up to you to build your personal newspaper, which unlike every RSS application out there doesn’t just give you a list of the latest news on the Internet. It really resembles a real newspaper, with titles, subtitles, summaries, pages and the layout you’d expect from a paper edition. The app comes with a set of built-in sources (ranging from Politics and Business to Technology and Apple) but you can specify the websites you want to read by importing feeds from Google Reader, single sources and OPML files.
The app hasn’t changed much since then, but it’s going to be a lot better soon. The Glasshouse Apps developers have been working hard on making The Early Edition a reading app capable of staying up to the game stepped up by Flipboard and Pulse, even though The Early Edition came out first. There’s no doubt Flipboard changed the landscape of reading apps on the iPad, and users’ expectations as well. Read more
When I bought my first iPhone, I didn’t realize I would need the cloud someday.
By “cloud” we usually mean “online sync” nowadays. The possibility to keep different devices’ settings, email accounts, app databases in persistent synchronization. OmniFocus uses the cloud, for example. Simplenote is a cloud-based note taking application. Dropbox is the non-plus ultra of cloud-connected setups.
Then there’s MobileMe. Apple’s own sync infrastructure / online drive / web-based app suite that has managed to gain quite a few users over the years but, according to many, is still struggling to find an identity. What is MobileMe? Why does Apple keep on redesigning its web interface and doesn’t ship a major overhaul of the underlying engine instead?
OS X left the desktop and landed on the iPhone to gave birth to iPhone OS. Years later, iPhone OS evolved into the 2.0 version of Apple’s original mobile vision, iOS for iPhone and iPad. The once-OSX-now-iOS is going back to the Mac with Lion.
.Mac and iTools were tied to the Mac. The newly renamed MobileMe later approached the web and iPhone as lovechilds to keep safe and constantly connected. Two years after the introduction of MobileMe, it is time for Apple to go back to the cloud. Read more
Interesting rumor posted on GigaOM: according to “sources inside European carriers”, Apple has been working with SIM-manufacturer Gemalto to create a “special SIM card” to integrate into every iPhone in order to cut carriers out of the iPhone retail game.
The SIM would still require the device to operate on a carrier’s network, but users wouldn’t be required to go to a carrier retail store to buy and activate an iPhone. Users would be able to buy the iPhone via web or local Apple Store and activate it with the App Store system. It would be a major shift in the mobile eco-system.
