Hasta La Gadget!

When you think of manufacturers that create products to go hand-in-hand with the Apple iPhone, Leica probably wouldn’t come to mind. The seemingly brilliant minds at Black Design Associates hope to change that, however. The Leica i9 concept pairs an iPhone 4 with a fixed-lens rangefinder camera, and the result is nothing short of extraordinary. Slipping your iPhone 4 — black or white — into the back of the i9 brings the camera to life, activating the compact optical zoom, dedicated aperture and shutter dials, flash and light meter. Images are instantly viewable on the iPhone, where it’s safe to assume they’re stored as well. The camera back doubles as a case, but you’re probably going to want to use it with a headset, unless you like talking to a camera. There’s no sign that the i9 will even reach the prototype phase, but nobody is going to stop the high-end camera’s designer from dreaming — especially when said dreams make us weak at the knees.

Continue reading Leica i9 concept pairs $1,000 camera with $200 iPhone

Leica i9 concept pairs $1,000 camera with $200 iPhone originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Apr 2011 20:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well, would you have a gander at that? That, friends, is Apple’s long-awaited, hardly-forgotten white iPhone 4, and so far as we can tell, this is actually the real deal. We’ve seen retailers making space for the elusive handset over the past few months, and earlier today, we heard that Vodafone UK’s inventory systems were showing the white iPhone 4 as shipping in. Now, we’ve secured a few images of a 16GB model from a separate source that has seemingly made its way into the hands of one lucky customer (read: bloke) over in Britain.

As the story goes, the salesperson rang it up as a black iPhone to help facilitate the transaction, and shortly after the sale went down, Voda sent out a notice to halt sale of these gems “until next week.” Just so you know, the MC604B/A model number shown here is particularly interesting when compared to our own in-house UK iPhone 4; the latter, which is also a 16GB edition, sports a model number of MC603B/A. We suspect we aren’t going too far out on a limb by suggesting that the “3” and “4” are there to represent hue variations, and if you’d like to stretch the theory one step further, MC605B/A represents the 32GB black iPhone 4. In other words, don’t be shocked when the white 32 gigger rolls in as MC606B/A. So, is this the first legitimate sign that a white iPhone 4 is but days away from going on sale? We’re hardly experts in meteorology, but it sure felt like spring in Londontown today.

P.S. – 9 to 5 Mac suggests that it’ll be landing on April 27th, at least in the Netherlands.

[Thanks, Anonymii]

Exclusive: White iPhone 4 lands at Vodafone UK originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 22 Apr 2011 15:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yesterday was AT&T’s turn, and today it’s Verizon revealing its earnings for the first quarter of 2011. The company has reported $27 billion in consolidated revenue from its wireless and wireline businesses, which is up 5.3 percent year over year (on a non-GAAP basis), while profits rose to $1.4 billion. Fueling that growth was 1.8 million net additions to its wireless customer base, which now totals 88.4 million customers (and 104 million connections). It also saw 207,000 net additions to its FiOS internet business and 192,000 net additions to FiOS TV, which bring those total customer bases to 4.3 million and 3.7 million, respectively. As for that little iPhone 4 launch, Verizon says it’s resulted in 2.2 million activations — that’s quite a bit less that AT&T’s 3.6 million iPhone activations for the same quarter, as you’ve no doubt noticed, although it does also have the benefit of a much cheaper iPhone 3GS in addition to the iPhone 4. Verizon also said that demand was “strong” for its new LTE devices (including 260,000 HTC Thunderbolt activations), and that deployment of its LTE network remains on track, with it expected to be available in more than 175 markets by the end of the year — in fact, that’s actually up a bit from the 147 figure we last heard. Head on past the break for the company’s full earnings report.

Continue reading Verizon reports ‘strong’ Q1 earnings: $27 billion revenue, 2.2 million iPhone activations

Verizon reports ‘strong’ Q1 earnings: $27 billion revenue, 2.2 million iPhone activations originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Apr 2011 10:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you didn’t already think your smartphone knows too much about you, here’s a handy reminder. A duo of UK researchers have uncovered a potentially worrying (and oddly enough, undocumented) feature in iOS 4: it asks your iPhone to record your location constantly, then timestamps that data and records it for posterity. The trouble with this unsolicited location tracking is that the hidden file that holds the data — consolidated.db — is relatively easy to uncover and read, making any desktops you’ve backed your phone up to and the phone itself even bigger privacy dangers than they would usually be. Some extra digging revealed this behavior has been known about for a good while (see Courbis and Alex Levinson links below), though mostly by people involved in computer forensics. Additionally, restoring a backup or migrating to a new device keeps the data logging going, which the researchers point to as evidence that what’s happening isn’t accidental. See a couple of visualizations of the extracted results on video after the break.

[Thanks, Tom]

Update: The original text of this article was updated to reflect that this was already a known issue, albeit in limited circles. The ability to easily visualize the data is new.

Continue reading Researchers display evidence that iOS 4 records all your travels, again (updated)

Researchers display evidence that iOS 4 records all your travels, again (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Apr 2011 11:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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