Looks like Apple will be adding a new “Find My Friends” feature to its MobileMe service in the not too distant future. The settings pictured above were unearthed in the latest iOS 4.3 developer build that’s already yielding a healthy list of new devices and functionality including in-app AirPlay video support, a carrier-dependent personal WiFi hotspot, the return of the physical orientation lock switch, and a host of new multitouch gestures. Presumably Find My Friends will offer functionality akin to the free Google Latitude app doing little to justify Apple’s $99 MobileMe annual cost.
Update: Remember Apple’s iGroups location-based social networking patent application? We just did.
We do love to hear from loquacious execs, and HP’s Todd Bradley has been the very definition of one in an interview conducted with CNBC during CES. In a discussion revolving around webOS, Bradley was asked how HP intends to differentiate itself from the iPad and improve upon it, to which he quipped, “you and I will talk about that on the 9th.” If that’s not a confirmation that we’ll finally have our unicorn of a webOS tablet next month, we don’t know what is. Even more encouraging is the implication further on in the interview that HP could have debuted this slate at CES, but opted to do an unveiling at a separate event so as to properly highlight just how awesome it is. But wait, there’s yet more good news for webOS fans: Bradley’s crew sees its upcoming tablet as just “one piece” of the connected experience that is the company’s goal and we’re promised to be enlightened about a broad range of webOS devices at the February 9th event in San Francisco, though the lack of any Palm namedrops seems to suggest they might not bear the name of their maker. Even if they’re called iPaqs, we just want to see them already!
Imagine a retro-styled, Micro Four Thirds-sized compact camera with an optical viewfinder. Now, imagine that same camera having a switch that throws all sorts of useful data into your line of sight. That camera is Fujifilm’s Finepix X100, and that viewfinder is real. Back at Photokina, the mockup we ran into didn’t have a functioning viewfinder, but with just two months until the $1,000 beaut is released into the wilds of America, it’s not too shocking that our brethren over at Engadget Spanish managed to come across a (mostly) functional one at CES last week. Eager to show the world exactly what a hybrid viewfinder looks like when being flipped on and off, they shoved a camera up against the OVF and toggled the new mechanism — it’s downright luscious, and it’s waiting for you in the video just past the break.
The 1394 Trade Association has announced that over two billion FireWire ports have shipped worldwide, which is most impressive for a largely forgotten interface. Going forward, the Association expects to see “steady, stable growth” in 2011 as more products with FireWire S1600 go to market, though a dearth of such devices at CES makes us think you can add the word ‘slow’ to that projection. Given that the standard’s promised 1.6 Gb/s bandwidth is less than a third of the 5 Gb/s offered by USB 3.0 (even with USB’s larger overhead, 3.0 still provides a bigger pipe), and the fact that Intel may finally get on board with Superspeed, it may be awhile before FireWire celebrates another such milestone.
To take John McEnroe’s famous quote badly out of context, you cannot be serious about video recording without giving your devices a nice big display for videographers to monitor their recordings through. Sony’s clearly in agreement and has today revealed the CLM-V55, a 5-inch clip-on unit for its interchangeable lens cameras, that provides WVGA resolution, tilt / swivel adjustments, and color peaking plus pixel magnification to make sure focus is just how you like it. The primary beneficiaries of this would be those delightful A33 and A55 siblings, which strive to combine the fast autofocus of a camcorder with the image quality of a DSLR, along with the NEX-VG10, an all-out camcorder that can nonetheless exchange its lenses and even exploit Alpha-mount glass via an adapter. You can see it outfitted with the V55 after the break, right next to the full press release. Launch is expected in March at an as yet unannounced price.
OCZ, a company that started life a decade ago by churning out DRAM modules for enthusiasts to throw into their towering rigs, has now announced it’s abandoning that market entirely. As PC Perspective points out, it’s grown increasingly difficult for companies to differentiate their products when it comes to memory — most of it just works and most of it is pretty fast — and continually declining prices have apparently forced OCZ’s hand. The San Jose-based company’s new primary breadwinner will be solid state drives, which already account for a substantial proportion of revenues and look set to grow exponentially as their own prices dip a little further into the range of the affordable. It’s a shame we’ll no longer have that bold Z to look at when picking out memory sticks for our next self-built machine, but maybe it’s all for the best. Check out an interview with an OCZ VP at the source link below.
Crunch Fitness unveils its first app, created with IdeaWork Studios, enabling iPhone and Android users to find locations, see class schedules, and check in.
This article was written on February 02, 2007 by CyberNet.
A few weeks ago there was a conversation going on within our comments regarding the use of solid state drives (SSD) versus hard disk drives (HDD). The big thing about using SSD’s is that they are faster and more energy efficient, especially in the case of the iPhone which is what the comments pertained to. Earlier today I was flipping through YouTube videos (like I do almost everyday) and I came across one that actually demonstrated two systems side-by-side that compared the speed of a SSD and HDD drive:
The solid state drives are still very expensive, and according to the price comparison I have below it would cost $2500 for a 100GB SSD. Distributing these drives with PC’s is still a little out of the question, but we keep inching closer and closer to being able to reap the benefits of solid state drives:
Faster startup – Since no spin-up required.
Faster boot and application launch time – Result of the faster read and especially seek time.
Lower power consumption and heat production – no mechanical parts result in less power consumption.
No noise – Lack of mechanical parts makes the SSD completely silent.
Better mechanical reliability – Lack of mechanical parts result in less wear and tear as well as the ability to endure extreme shock, vibration and temperatures.
Security – Quickly “wipe” of all data stored.
Deterministic performance – “Seek” time is constant, and performance does not deteriorate as the media fills up.
Lighter and smaller (typically)
While all of that seems too good to be true, it is in some cases. Here are some of the things that may not be so lovable about solid state drives.
Price – Currently around $25 per GB compared to about $0.25 per GB for mechanical drives.
Slower write time – Around 18 MB/s compared to over 50 MB/s for hard drives.
Lower recoverability – After an SSD fails it is nearly impossible to recover any of the data.
Vulnerable – An abrupt powerloss, magnetic fields and electric/static charges could have more of an effect on an SSD compared to normal HDD’s.
I’m curious how long it will take for PC hard drives to start the transition over to solid state drives, but as limitations become more of a factor I think manufacturers will be looking for alternatives. One of the biggest upsides that I see to having the SSD’s is the extended battery life due to the lack of mechanical parts, but as seen above there are also several other advantages.
The other thing that I’ve been wrestling with in my mind is whether operating systems will ever be shipped directly on computer chips rather than software that gets stored on a drive. All of the necessary configuration files could stored on a drive that is read from, but if the operating system was closer to the processor I think the speed increase would be remarkable. I’ve heard talk about this sort of thing before but it has only been rumors.
It’s always interesting to think about what the future holds for technology…
The first time we laid eyes on iGUGU’s InterneTV marketing materials, we sensed something was strange in the neighborhood. After seeing the unique product in action though, we’ve decided to give it a bit more credit. Unlike most internet TV solutions that rely on set-top boxes to stream content, iGUGU’s product attempts to make connecting an existing computer to a TV easier using software, a wireless or wired TV connector, and a special QWERTY keyboard remote. The software then provides a not-so-pretty TV interface for browsing through any type of content a computer could normally access online. True to its word, we watched the system play videos on ABC.com and other blocked sites devices like a Roku box or AppleTV can’t access. The application also allows users to play local content stored on the computer and aggregates content in pre-populated “channels” like local news, movies, and TV shows. That’s all gravy, but we’re not sure its worth $99 considering it still requires a computer to work. For more shots of the UI and included components browse through the gallery below.
History lesson, folks. If you dig far enough into iOS’s code, you’ll eventually come across iPhone3,1, which is the AT&T iPhone 4, and the analogous iPhone3,2 (i.e. Verizon iPhone). It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but then along comes iOS 4.3 with a handful of new mystery identifiers to spurn speculation — namely, two new-generation iPhones (4,1 and 4,2) and three iPads (2,1; 2,2; and 2,3). Speculate all you want, but there isn’t much else at all we can say definitively here, but if we had to take a guess, it’s the GSM and CDMA variants of the next-gen models (plus a WiFi-only iPad). It is interesting to note the lack of an “iPhone4,3” given the yet-to-be-revealed iPhone3,3 is still there — will the last member ever see the light of day? Outside of iOS 4.3 but still very much related, BGR is claiming it’s heard from sources that the next iPhone / iPad models will eschew the physical home button altogether in lieu of the new multi-finger gestures and that employees at Cupertino are already testing such devices. That seems a little more out there to us; five-finger pinch to home feels extremely clunky. The real takeaway here? We can finally have an iPhone rumor that doesn’t involve wondering if it’ll head to a new US carrier.
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