Hasta La Gadget!

Welcome to Tuesday evening, folks. Apple and Samsung’s patent suit is still going on, but today we didn’t get too much news about it. Samsung said that the high return rates of the Galaxy Tab had to with the devices malfunctioning, and not because customers were confusing it for the iPad like Apple claimed Apple’s expert witness, Peter Bressler, said today that the iPhone brought on a “crisis of design” over at Samsung headquarters, and we found out just how much Mr. Bressler is getting paid to sit on the stand and testify for Apple. Spoiler alert: it’s a lot of money, and now we’re on the lookout for “expert witness” job openings.

Just as Acer told Microsoft that launching Surface was a bad idea, we caught wind of some Microsoft job listings that point to next generation Surface devices. We also received reports that Windows 8 can’t boot directly to the desktop, which is going to be annoying for those who were hoping to bypass the tile-based start screen entirely. More bad news for HTC today, as it reported that July revenues dropped 45%, and Motorola has started teasing a new 4G LTE capable smartphone, so be sure to keep an eye out for that one.

Some developers are thinking that we might be getting an increased screen resolution with the next iPhone, and it looks like Apple is at least somewhat partially stuck in 2008, as it decided to Rickroll developers in the iOS 6 beta 4 changelog. Apple has also opted to pull its Genius ads, so if you liked the exploits of the Apple Genius as he tried to turn consumers into Apple fans, you’re going to have to resort to YouTube to watch. Facebook has rolled out real-money gambling games in the UK, and Amazon has apparently fixed the security hole that led to a massive breach for one unfortunate journalist.

We’ve got quite a bit of gaming news today, as OUYA gave us some new renders of the Android-based console and announced a partnership with the team behind the open source XBMC media player. ArmA 2 mod DayZ is getting a full release soon, and today Activision and Treyarch gave us our first look at Call of Duty: Black Ops II multiplayer. NASA has revealed the Curiosity rover’s landing video and let loose some more pictures from the surface of Mars, and if you’re the mood for a show this weekend, you might want to look to the Northeast sky after the Sun sets on Saturday – it’s there that you’ll see the Perseid meteor shower at its peak.

That does it for the news, but we’ve also got a couple SlashGear originals you should have a peek at. With the Nexus 7 still selling like hotcakes, we ask if Android has it’s first tablet hit in the 7-inch slate, and Chris Burns has a review of the Olympus LS-100 Sound Recorder. Enjoy the rest of your evening!

SlashGear Evening Wrap-Up: August 7, 2012 is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Well damn. If there wasn’t already enough fuel on the “new iPhone will have a taller screen” fire, 9to5Mac happened to discover something terribly interesting after playing with the iOS 6 simulator.

The full explanation can be found here, but in short they found when setting a simulated device’s screen resolution to 1136 x 640, iOS 6 would neatly arrange apps on the homescreen into five rows — a homescreen layout that the iPhone rumor mill has pointed to for the past few months.

Suffice it to say that wasn’t the case when they did the same thing in iOS 5.1 — all the app icons remained in four rows, though they were set further apart from each other to fill up that additional space. What’s more, changing the resolution in the iOS 6 simulator to anything but 1136 x 640 (and the standard 960 by 640, naturally) yields a sort of “iPad-like” layout with peculiar proportions.

It’s not exactly a smoking gun (finding a prototype unit a la Gizmodo would be ideal) but it’s pretty damning stuff nonetheless. Rumors of an iPhone with a taller screen have been circulating for what seems like ages now, and if that particular screen resolution sounds familiar, that’s because 9to5mac pointed to it as a likely suspect for the new iPhone back in May.

At the time, they (along with quite a few others) reported that a 4-inch screen would be doing all that pixel pushing, yet another bit of iPhone scuttlebutt that seems like a lock as we head into the final stretch. With a grand unveiling reportedly taking place just over a month from now, it’s little wonder that these juicy new tidbits are coming hard and fast — here’s hoping the suspense ends sooner rather than later.

Yes, more and more information about iOS 6 has started to make their way to the Internet and for good reason too, this is the next generation of Apple’s mobile operating system, and if they want to remain ahead of the smartphone curve, they would do well to ensure their operating system is up to par. What we have here is an image from 9to5Mac that strongly suggests an increased resolution count on the iPhone 5′s display – after all, they ran the iOS Simulator at the next generation iPhone’s rumored resolution of 1136 x 640 pixels, claiming that iOS 6 is “completely scalable to a larger display.” This seems to be the only resolution which is capable of supporting scaling, and once it has been scaled, iOS 6 will show an added bit of innovation by opening up an extra row of app icons right there on the home screen itself.

When trying it out in other resolutions, the extra row of apps failed to materialize before our very eyes. Of course, do take this bit of news with a pinch of salt, and having some patience would also help as the next generation iPhone is tipped to arrive only sometime in September.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: 9-pin dock connector revealed in iOS 6 beta?, Apple zooms in on iOS 6 in-app purchase bug,

Following the release of iOS 6 beta 4 version to its developers and announcing that it will discontinue Google’s YouTube app on iOS 6, Apple seems to have update its iOS 6 3D Maps app as well. We just learned that Apple has added new 3D views to a few major cities in the U.S. and Europe, with one city in Canada. In the U.S., 9to5Mac notes the following cities that can now enjoy the new 3D views: Boston, Atlanta, Portland, Phoenix, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Houston, Dallas.

In Canada, folks living in Toronto can also enjoy the updated 3D Maps. Birmingham and Manchester in the U.K. as well in Lyon, France are among the major cities in the Europe covered. Previous beta versions of iOS 6 have already listed other cities including Los Angeles, San Diego, Memphis, Denver, Copenhagen, Montreal, San Francisco and the Bay Area, Las Vegas, Sydney, Melbourne, Chicago, Miami, Seattle, and Sacramento. It seems that Apple’s decision to acquire C3 Technologies last year is starting to pay off.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: iOS 6 Maps will reportedly feature Yelp’s check-in services, Mockup of Apple’s rumored Maps app is reportedly based on actual screenshots,

Apple has been filing more than its fair share of NFC-related patents, but it was just granted what could be one of its more important wins at the USPTO. The design for an “on-the-go shopping list” app would help buyers find and pull the trigger on deals through every tool an iPhone has at its disposal, whether it’s taking a snapshot of goods with the camera, punching in the UPC code by hand or tapping an item for an NFC-based “touch scan.” We’ll admit that we’re a bit disappointed at how NFC is used, however. As with an earlier filing, the very short range wireless is kept largely to price comparisons and adding products to a list for a purchase from a store clerk later on, rather than closing the deal outright as we’ve seen with Google Wallet. The original 2008 filing date will also have seen a lot of water flowing under the bridge; there’s no guarantee that any enthusiasm for NFC from the iPhone 3G era will have transferred to the present day. Accordingly, we would be careful about drawing any connections between iOS 6’s Passbook and Apple’s ideas from four years ago — even if Apple has regularly been a never–say–never sort of company.

Filed under: Cellphones

Apple lands patent for NFC-ready shopping app, could make impulse spending an iPhone tap away originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Aug 2012 12:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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