Jul 27

Apple Battery Charger gets official: a battery charger, only you know, better (update: hands-on)

Posted in: Apple, charging, Environment, hands-on, HandsOn, Today's Chili

Apple’s just slipped something into its iMac update press release that we didn’t want to go unnoticed: a battery charger. Apple’s AA battery-powered lineup now includes the wireless keyboard, the Magic Mouse (which seriously burns through the juice) and the Magic Trackpad, and for $29 you can score a dedicated charger for all that gear. The Apple Battery Charger comes with six long-lived NiMH rechargeable batteries which apparently have a lifetime of up to 10 years.

Update: We just had a chance to get a quick hands-on with the little guy, and well, it’s a battery charger. Apple tells us the charger has the lowest vampire power draw of any charger on the market — the idea is for users to keep two batteries in each of their peripherals and two in the charger, so they can quickly swap out as the cells run out. Interestingly, the batteries are some of the only Apple products in recent memory that don’t have an Apple logo on them — they’re just plain silver with “Rechargeable” printed on them. The charger itself has slightly nicer charging contacts than the usual spring-and-flap arrangement, and it features the same removable flippy-prong AC plug as Apple’s laptop and iPad power adapters, so you can theoretically swap it for a longer power cord if you like.

Gallery: Apple Battery Charger hands-on

Apple Battery Charger gets official: a battery charger, only you know, better (update: hands-on) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Jul 2010 09:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jul 27

New iMacs Add IPS Displays, Core ‘i’ Processors Across the Range

Posted in: Apple, desktops, imac, Mac, Today's Chili

The iMac just got a little bit faster, thanks to an update across the line. Processors, graphics and even the displays have been improved, although the prices have stayed the same.

All iMacs now have i-processors, as in Intel Core i3, i5, and i7 (the last an upgrade option), so the Core 2 Duo now exists only in the Mac Mini. Graphics are now discrete across the line, which means that every iMac has a separate graphics card inside, using its own dedicated memory.

The screens have been replaced, too, using the IPS (in-plane switching) technology found in the iPad. The advantage of IPS is its crazy-wide viewing angle, making the new iMac perfect for watching movies.

There is also a new high-end, small-screen option, letting you put a 3.2-GHz Intel Core i3 in the 21.5-inch iMac (the base chip runs at 3.06 GHz). It’ll cost $1,500 against $1,200, but you also double video memory to 512 MB and get a bigger, 1-TB hard drive.

The sweet spot is now the 3.2-GHz 27-incher, which has the i3 processor and still costs just $1,700. Sure, that’s not a cheap computer, but for what you actually get, it is a real bargain. Add to this redesigned, bassier speakers and an SD card slot that works with the new SDXC spec, and you’ve got almost everything you might want in a home-entertainment computer.

Finally, the iMac doesn’t come with the new Magic Trackpad. You’ll have to buy it for an extra $70. Thanks, Apple.

New iMac [Apple]




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Jul 27

Apple updates iMac line, intros Magic Trackpad

Posted in: Today's Chili

Besides bringing Intel’s Core i3, i5 and i7 processors to its iMacs, Apple also releases the Magic Trackpad, bringing the power of gestures to the Mac. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20011756-37.html” class=”origPostedBlog”News – Apple/a/p

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Jul 27

Apple’s Magic Trackpad Brings Multi-Touch to the Desktop

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, Apple, bluetooth, Mac, Today's Chili

Apple’s oft-leaked multi-touch trackpad is now on sale. The Magic Trackpad is a multi-touch tablet-style pad which is either a bigger version of the trackpad on the MacBook, or a smaller version of the iPad’s screen.

Like every other Apple touch-device, it is made from glass, and the panel is set into an aluminum base. The batteries that power it (the unit is Bluetooth) sit in a tube at the back, and it looks like nothing more than Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard, chopped in half and with the keys removed.

The pad works with swipe and pinch gestures, and even has the “momentum-scrolling” familiar to iOS users as well as owners of the latest MacBooks. It’s not going to replace your Wacom Tablet, as there is no pressure detection, but it will replace a mouse on a desktop Mac. The price? $70, and available now.

Magic Trackpad [Apple]

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Jul 27

Smart earplugs know when it’s too loud

Posted in: Today's Chili

Now in use by the military, intelligent earplugs that automatically filter out the clamor when it reaches dangerous levels are being adapted for offshore drilling and other noisy jobs.

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Jul 27

Microsoft partners with Blue Line Innovation for Hohm-compatible monitoring device, we go hands-on

Posted in: hands-on, Microsoft, Today's Chili
Microsoft partners with Blue Lines Innovation for Hohm-compatible monitoring device, we go hands-on

Microsoft’s Hohm service has been going wild on the internets for just over a year, letting people who have signed on with partner utility companies to track their usage straight from the source. But, if you didn’t find yourself in one of the 4.5 million homes currently covered by one of those utilities you were stuck counting electrons on your own. No more. Blue Line Innovations has launched its $249 Power Cost Monitor WiFi Edition with the ability to feed directly to Hohm, and we have all the details, plus some early impressions, after the break.

Gallery: Power Cost Monitor WiFi Edition

Continue reading Microsoft partners with Blue Line Innovation for Hohm-compatible monitoring device, we go hands-on

Microsoft partners with Blue Line Innovation for Hohm-compatible monitoring device, we go hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Jul 2010 09:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jul 27

Faster New iMacs Can Run Both SSD and HDDs at Once [Apple]

Posted in: Apple, imac, Today's Chili, top

Two sizes of iMac (21.5″ and 27″), both available in different processor configurations, landed today. With the base price being $1,199 for the 21.5″ 3.06GHz Core i3 model, all of the models are faster and more fine-tuned than before. More »

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Jul 27

ShutterSnitch and Eye-Fi: Wireless Camera Tethering for iPad

Posted in: ipad, tablets, Today's Chili, wi-fi

Back in May, we took a look at a ShutterSnitch, an iPad app that lets you receive photos wirelessly from your camera. Combined with an Eye-Fi wireless SD card, you can shoot away and have the photos pop up on the big screen in seconds. It’s like shooting tethered to a laptop, only about a zillion times more convenient.

So why are we revisiting the subject? Because it got a whole lot easier to use. Now, the tricky networking part has been simplified and you need only follow a few steps to get things up and running. The first time you do this, you’ll need to configure both the Eye-Fi card (using the Eye-Fi Center) if it is not already aware of your Wi-Fi network, and also the ShutterSnitch app (just enter the Eye-Fi username and password).

From there, you simply need to shoot, with one weird caveat: you need to create a “collection” in ShutterSnitch to receive the photos. That’s it. Now you can beam the photos across as you shoot.

There are plenty of things you can do within the application. As you shoot, the images are shown full-screen, with or without shutter-speed, aperture and histogram overlays. Once done, you can keep the photos in ShutterSnitch, mail them, organize them, upload to Flickr and pass them off to the iPad’s own photo-library, from where it can be sent off to any other photo-editing application you might have.

There is one big gotcha. You’ll need to have a Wi-Fi network running to make this all work: The Eye-Fi cannot beam direct to the iPad. That means you’ll need either a portable hotspot like the MiFi, be in a place where there is already a network, or create one using a laptop (which kind of defeats the point of this). I’m going to pick up an Eye-Fi card this afternoon and also investigate jailbreak solutions for ad-hoc network creation on the iPad. If it works, I’ll let you know.

From Eye-Fi to iPad [Eye-Fi blog]

Eye-Fi Card, iPad, and ShutterSnitch for Wireless Transfer [The Digital Story]

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Jul 27

Apple iMac line gets speedbumped, low-end gets a Core i3

Posted in: Apple, breaking news, BreakingNews, desktop, imac, Mac, os x, OsX, refresh, SSD, Today's Chili, update, upgrade

It’s not as if we haven’t heard the rumors building over the last few months, but Apple’s long-standing iMac line is seeing its first real update since the Fall of last year on this fine morning. As predicted, the refreshed family now contains Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 processor options, not to mention discrete ATI Radeon HD GPU options, IPS panels, an SD slot that understands the complexities of SDXC and an SSD option on the 27-inch machine. For whatever reason, Apple’s not throwing in its new Magic Trackpad with any iMac; instead, it’ll be a $69 accessory. One swank addition to this line, however, is the ability to order your new all-in-one with both an HDD and an SSD on the 27-inch model. Of course, it’ll cost you dearly (a 1TB HDD plus a 256GB SSD is a $750 CTO option, while the 2TB HDD in that combo makes it a $900 option), but at least there’s room inside for DIY adds. Here’s a look at the available configurations, with last Fall’s lineup saved here for reference:

  • The low-end $1,199 unit boasts a 21.5-inch display (1,920 x 1,080), a 3.06GHz Core i3 CPU, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, ATI’s Radeon HD 4670 GPU (256MB) and a 500GB hard drive. There’s also an 8x slot-loading SuperDrive with dual-layer support, Mini DisplayPort, AirPort Extreme 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, iSight webcam, gigabit Ethernet, a foursome of USB 2.0 sockets, a single FireWire 800 port and a bundled wireless Apple Keyboard and Magic Mouse.
  • There’s a new $1,499 21.5-inch model that includes a 3.20GHz Core i3, ATI Radeon HD 5670 GPU (512MB), a 1TB hard drive and 4GB of DDR3 memory (along with the usual suspects mentioned above).
  • The $1,699 model is a 27-incher with a 2,560 x 1,440 LED-backlit display, 3.20GHz Core i3 CPU, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, ATI’s Radeon HD 5670 (512MB), a 1TB hard drive and available CTO options that include a 3.6GHz Core i5, 2TB HDD, 256GB SSD and up to 16GB of RAM.
  • The flagship $1,999 flavor (27-inch) packs a 2.8GHz quad-core Core i5 with 8MB of shared L3 cache, 4GB of DDR3 memory, ATI’s Radeon HD 5750 GPU (1GB), a 1TB hard drive and available CTO options that include a 2.93GHz Core i7 CPU, 2TB hard drive, 256GB SSD and up to 16GB of memory.

Gallery: Apple iMac with Intel Core i3

Continue reading Apple iMac line gets speedbumped, low-end gets a Core i3

Apple iMac line gets speedbumped, low-end gets a Core i3 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jul 27

Apple Cinema Display goes to 27 inches, 16:9 aspect ratio

Posted in: Apple, breaking news, BreakingNews, refresh, Today's Chili, update, upgrade

Having reached a grand old age in the rapidly cycling tech world, Apple’s 24-inch LED Cinema Display is today getting itself a new sibling. The new 27-inch display clocks in at a 2560 x 1440 resolution, sports a 16:9 aspect ratio, and does it all for the (not so) low price of $999. That might not sound like a steal, but Dell’s similar U2711 (both offer IPS at the same resolution) actually retails for a hundie more at $1,099. For the price Apple includes a built-in iSight camera, a three port powered USB hub, and a universal MagSafe connector for charging up your MacBook. Like the 24-inch before it, Apple has really built this display to be the ultimate MacBook or MacBook Pro companion, since a single cable breaks out into the USB, Mini DisplayPort (with audio support), and MagSafe plug that are just about all your laptop requires when sitting down at a desk. PR is after the break, and the screen will start shipping in September.

Gallery: Apple LED Cinema Display 27-inch

Continue reading Apple Cinema Display goes to 27 inches, 16:9 aspect ratio

Apple Cinema Display goes to 27 inches, 16:9 aspect ratio originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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