Hasta La Gadget!

Okay, so maybe a new browser isn’t the first thing we’d like to see replaced with some fresh thinking out of the App Store — that honor probably goes to the email client, preferably with something that could rival the G1’s capabilities — but regardless, Apple’s infamous “duplication of functionality” argument has hamstrung iPhone developers from even coming close to stepping on the mothership’s toes from day one. Consistent application of policy is still at a premium when it comes to getting iPhone apps approved, it seems — it’s hit or miss, and as best as we can tell, a happy ending involves the crossing of fingers and getting a reviewer inside Apple who’s having a good day. It looks like Apple’s slowly and quietly tweaking its game in response to complaints, though, with MacRumors noting that a slew of browsers have gone on sale in the past day; some of these things have submission dates several months old, so it seems like they’ve been holding in some sort of purgatory while Steve and the gang debate the merits of letting programmers actually practice their trade in peace. Odds are none of these initial entries will hold up to Safari for good, old-fashioned browsing, but more importantly, this might just open up the door for Opera and others to get in on the game.

Update: As it turns out, all these new browsers are WebKit-based, so while things do appear to be changing, we wouldn’t hold out hope for an iPhone edition of Mobile IE just yet.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Apple suddenly approves a bunch of browsers for App Store; major policy shift in progress? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Jan 2009 06:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Anyone who has had the pleasure of seeing Apple’s 24-inch LED Cinema Display knows that it’s hard to lay off on the touching. No one knows that better than Troll Touch, who has just announced a touch panel integration kit for Apple’s freshest LCD. The touchscreen gets powered internally via USB, and the custom touchscreen overlay design doesn’t alter the panel’s form factor in any way. Those looking to dive in from scratch can order a touch-enabled version now for $2,299, but those looking to simply upgrade their own can ship it to Valencia, California along with $1,399 marked for integration. Talk about a steep price to pay for permission to touch.

Filed under: Displays

Apple’s 24-inch LED Cinema Display goes touchscreen courtesy of Troll Touch originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on April 15, 2008 by CyberNet.

I don’t know whether this was exactly a smart move, but Psystar has begun selling a PC dubbed the Open Computer. It rolls in at a budget-priced $399, but what really makes it unique is that fact that you can have Leopard preinstalled on it for an additional $155. So for about $550 you can get a PC with decent specs that also runs Mac OS X Leopard. They’re claiming that you can “run Mac Pro equivalent hardware at Mac Mini prices.”

There is also the OpenPro Computer that comes in with much higher specs and a $999 price tag, but how are they able to offer computers with Mac OS X Leopard? Interestingly enough Psystar has decided to ignore Apple’s EULA and install the operating system on non-Apple hardware. Their website says that they are able to do this using an EFI emulator:

With the EFI V8 emulator it is possible to install Leopard’s kernel straight from the DVD that you purchased at the Apple store barring the addition of a few drivers to ensure that everything boots and runs smoothly.

They aren’t stopping there either. InformationWeek posted an article today stating that Psystar is calling out Apple as being a monopoly. They say that it would be similar to Microsoft only allowing Dell to install Windows on their computers, or Honda telling you what roads you can drive on with your car. I’m all about Apple letting third-party vendors create Leopard-compatible PC’s, but are those comparisons really accurate?

In the end Apple’s computers are really just consumer devices with an operating system, and are people going to force Apple to offer the iPod/iPhone OS for other devices as well? You might be thinking that Mac OS X is different since Apple sells it separately from the computers, but what if they didn’t? They are really only offering the OS separately so that existing Mac users can easily (and cheaply) upgrade without having to purchase a new computer. Don’t give Apple a reason to stop selling standalone copies of OS X.

I would love to see Mac OS X running on nearly any PC, but I think Apple has found value in selling computers that they can ensure work flawlessly with their operating system. This will definitely be a story to follow, and I wonder whether Psystar will be able to hold their own against Apple’s big-shot lawyers?

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Related Posts:

• Psystar’s Mac Clones Merely a Scam?
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LAS VEGAS — Apple may be about to license a next-generation surround sound format for
iTunes that will deliver immersive audio files to cars, home
theater systems, computers and iPods.

Fraunhofer, the company behind the new MPEG Surround format, suggested that Apple would be one of its newest licensees.

"There is an unsigned contract with a well-known PC player application," said Robert Bleidt, general manager of Fraunhofer’s audio and multimedia division (pictured above), which would give the software the ability to "natively
support MPEG Surround."

Surround sound audio produces a deeply immersive listening experience by delivering 5, 7 or more separate channels of audio — plus an additional channel for the subwoofer — each of which can be delivered to a separate speaker by a compatible audio system. While surround sound is common in high-end home theater systems and is supported by the DVD and Blu-ray formats, it hasn’t been easy to get digital audio files that support surround sound. Now Fraunhofer, the inventor of the MP3 format and co-inventor of the AAC codec already used in the iTunes store, has a new format that encodes surround sound audio data for playback on compatible stereo systems, but is still playable on older, non-surround devices (like iPods).

There are a couple of reasons to think that the application Bleidt is referring to is iTunes.

Fraunhofer said it has already developed an MPEG Surround plug-in for iTunes and Quicktime: the first indication that iTunes is the store he was referring to. And clearly, iTunes, with its domination of the digital music scene, would be Fraunhofer’s first choice. Other than Windows Media Player, iTunes is the only "well-known PC player application" in existence, but the stores listed in Windows Media Player have nowhere near iTunes’ market share, and Fraunhofer’s stated goal is to sell MPEG Surround files online.

In light of all of this — and Fraunhofer’s booth demonstration of an iPod playing the surround-sound-enabled files (pictured below) — I’m more or less convinced that Apple is the company he was referring to.

If Apple signs this contract, its timing could be impeccable. Video upgrades are paving the way for a whole new class of consumers to embrace surround sound in the home, and some new cars already offer it too.

Fraunhofer has a number of factors in its
favor — mainly, that it’s backwards-compatible with anything that can
play an MP3, including the iPod and iPhone. If you play an MPEG Surround file on a plain old stereo MP3 player,
you’ll hear exactly what you would have if the file was a vanilla MP3.

But if you play the song on a device that supports Fraunhofer’s surround sound format, the 10 to 20 percent of the file containing the surround sound information kicks in to turn the stereo signal back into a discrete 5.1-channel signal.

The difference is palpable. Bleidt played songs for me from several genres, in DVD-A, MPEG Surround and stereo, on the stereo in the above-pictured car. The first two sounded nearly identical, meaning that MPEG Surround does a fine job of preserving channels discretely. By comparison, the stereo version sounded flat, canned and boring.

"Stereo music is like listening through a window, and the
performance is in the next room. With surround, you’re in the studio,
you’re in the concert hall — it’s an immersing, enveloping experience," said Bleidt, "a better experience than just two-channel stereo."

The above-mentioned contract would only add support for the format to iTunes but
commerce could be next. Apple was the first company to put together a
comprehensive online store for stereo music. It would only be fitting
if it was also first to start selling digital surround sound files,
whether with Fraunhofer’s technology or someone else’s. And thanks to the failed DVD-A and SACD high-end audio formats, the labels already have lots of music in surround, just waiting for the next promising format to come along. One major label has already agreed to use MPEG Surround, and Fraunhofer is in talks with the other three.

"MPEG Surround is our vision of the first practical way to get surround sound
music to mainstream consumers," said Bleidt. "Today, they are used to
hearing surround on films or digital TV, but they don’t have access to
surround sound music, even though the music industry has thousands of
hours of surround content mixed and sitting in their vaults, ready to
sell."

With MPEG Surround, record labels would have a nearly painless way to start offering
surround sound, and iTunes would be the natural place for them to sell it. The files would be
preferable to both the CD and the non-surround MP3s already
zinging around the world’s file sharing networks. This, as I’ve mentioned before, could give the labels something to sell to consumers that they don’t already have.

The next step would be to add surround sound simulation to the iPod. "Looking
forward," said Bleidt, "we think that new music players will eventually have binaural
playback mode that lets you experience a realistic simulation of
surround over ordinary earphones."

Photos: Eliot Van Buskirk/Wired.com

CES 2009 brought us a new player in the smartphone upper-echelon. Let’s drill down and see how the Palm Pre compares with the iPhone and Android’s G1.

1. Multitouch touchscreen/gesture control: All three are capacitive, only the Pre and iPhone have multitouch. The Pre’s glowy little “gesture area” has dropped the touchable real estate all the way down tto the bottom of the phone, which is great for being able to navigate with one hand and not interfere with the screen at all. The wavey dock you bring up from the bottom looks awesome, but can you use it out of the box without a second thought or page through the manual? That’s my question. Advantage: iPhone/Pre tossup.

2. Multitasking: One of the beefiest of our beefs with the iPhone SDK is its insistence on Apps running one at a time. The G1’s notifications drawer was definitely a step in the right direction, but the Pre’s interface is the first smartphone OS that was built with multitasking as a core design element. Resembling the Xbox’s old Blades, or a less-jarring OS X Expose even, the Pre’s “Cards” interface always places you in the context of every app running for fast switching, and notifications from other apps don’t pull you away completely from the task at hand. Multitasking is hugely important on a phone, and it’s a good sign that Palm recognizes. Advantage: Pre

3. Hardware: Adrian says:

While the hardware is definitely high quality, I’m not entirely blown away by the design. It looks really nice, and original, but it’s a little too cutesy in shape and kind of reminds me of an oversized pebble. A slightly larger screen could have definitely been put to good use, and I really don’t like the black space on the sides of the screen.

A phone with a built-in QWERTY still hasn’t touched the iPhone in terms of sleekness and pure sex. And it might still be a while. Advantage: iPhone

4. Development platform: The Pre’s “Web OS” sure sounds nice—all developers need to know is JavaScript, HTML and CSS? Sounds good in theory, but building a mobile app will never be as easy as cranking out a new theme for your Tumblr. Palm’s stressing ease of development, though, so it will be interesting to see how it stacks up against Apple’s solid, familiar-to-devs OS X-based SDK and Android’s fully open source approach. Advantage: Pre? If it’s straight-up JavaScript, that’s a lot of programmers ready to go. Note: we had iPhone here before, but we’ve switched with a qualification. Developer community still goes to iPhone for volume.

5. Web Integration: The Pre subtly integrates the internet into the phone at every opportunity, and it’s awesome. Contacts get pulled in from Facebook, Gmail, IM and and scanned for dupes; the messaging app shows your last several emails, IMs and SMS with that contact in a single window. Really, really smart stuff. Advantage: Pre

6. App Store/developer community: A smartphone is only as good as the software it runs. On the Pre, Palm is still keeping application delivery details like pricing behind the curtain, but they did say the app delivery will be entirely handled by the phone (without a desktop app), which is a shame. They’re saying that they’re not going to duplicate Apple’s Hobbesian app approval black box mistake, which Android has also hasn’t fallen for, but there will be an approval process based on “security and stability.” But as we know with Android, a dev community needs enough devices in the hands of consumers to reach critical mass, which the Pre will have to match. Advantage: iPhone, even with the black box, but Android and Pre’s more open stances are reassuring.

7. Wireless charger: We’ve seen wireless charger tech for years at CES, but it’s taken this long for a major consumer gadget to come bundled with its own wireless charger in the box. Whoops, it’s not in the box, sold separately for unknown $$. But still: Bravo. Advantage: Pre

8. The Network: Dan Hesse, Sprint’s CEO, gave our coast-to-coast 3G test a shout out in his press conference. Of course he did: Sprint won (in download speeds). Sprint was the only major carrier without a powerful, hype-catching smartphone choice, and now they have one. The Pre is a data-centric phone with a network we’ve proven to be strong in a large swatch of the country—that’s a good combo. But would you switch to Sprint for the Pre? Ugh. Advantage: Not cut and dry for everyone, but we stand by our numbers: Sprint is the best 3G network in our tests.

9. Physical keyboard: It’s preference, but one held by a large swathe of the gadget buying public: physical QWERTY keypads are still the mainstream input of choice. Touch is getting better all the time, but a lot of people still want physical keyboards. But better yet is the ability to choose; unfortunately, the Pre doesn’t have a soft onscreen keyboard, and its slide-out is the same meh QWERTY from the Treo Pro. Advantage: It’s preference, but on me, the iPhone’s soft keyboard can’t be beat.

10. Camera: The Pre has an LED Flash for its 3MP camera, something both the iPhone and G1 lack. Flash cellphone photos are ugly, but for a lot of people, they’re good enough. So credit for throwing it in. Advantage: Pre

11. Battery: Apple’s still an outlier with their non-removable battery; like the G1’s, the Pre’s comes out for a spare swap too. We’ve heard Apple’s reasons for this a million times, we know the drill, but removable batteries will never stop being handy. Advantage: Pre

12. Copy & Paste: Yep, Pre’s got it. iPhone still doesn’t. Advantage: Pre/G1

13. Browser: All three use a browser based on WebKit, which has become the standard for the mobile web. We couldn’t put it through our Mobile Browser Battlemodo ringer obviously, but what we saw looked great, and it’s the only other mobile browser besides the iPhone that supports multitouch zooming. Advantage: iPhone/Pre

So there you have it. We’re excited. Are you?