Hasta La Gadget!

The unthinkable has happened. After spending 99 percent of their recent marketing budgets figuring out ways to sling mud at each other, AT&T and Verizon have now come together to dance a merry waltz — all in the name of Apple’s hallowed iPhone. The latest commercial for the phone that really doesn’t need advertising shows that you can FaceTime, read iBooks, navigate maps, and do everything else on the Verizon iPhone just as well as you could do it on the AT&T-friendly GSM variant of the device. As if you didn’t already know. Still, it’s fun to see these guys trying to turn their lack of competitive diversity into some sort of an advantage. Video after the break.

Update: Now in HD!

Continue reading Apple brings AT&T and Verizon together for a happy dance in latest iPhone commercial (update: HD video)

Apple brings AT&T and Verizon together for a happy dance in latest iPhone commercial (update: HD video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 22 Jan 2011 19:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink 9to5Mac, Apple Headlines  |  dalemcbroom (YouTube), Canamerica6776 (YouTube)  | Email this | Comments

We’re a little short-staffed on Qualcomm chipset engineers at the moment, so forgive us if we can’t immediately confirm this tale, but we’re hearing iPhone hacker Zibri has discovered proof of the Apple / Qualcomm collaboration in his very own build of iTunes. Zibri claims that by tearing apart the latest version, he found the chunk of code above, which contains files that are allegedly the exclusive “building blocks” of Qualcomm radio firmware. That doesn’t tell us anything about a supposed iPhone 5 or iPad 2, unfortunately, as it’s probably just referring to that CDMA chipset in the Verizon iPhone 4… but with the right building blocks, one can craft any number of wonders.

Apple hacker digs up Qualcomm baseband proof by decompiling iTunes? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 22 Jan 2011 13:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Apple Insider  |  Zibri’s Blog  | Email this | Comments

Now that the number of App Store downloads to iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads around the world has handily exceeded the population of Planet Earth, we can hopefully put this story to bed until they hit another factor of ten — and as unreasonable as 100 billion downloads sounds, we’ll bet it actually won’t take that long. That’s right: just a few days after kicking off its online counter, Apple’s officially hit the 10 billion mark, which is a whole lot of software any way you slice it. So, Android Market, you’re next?

Update: The lucky winner was Gail Davis of Orpington, Kent, UK, who downloaded Paper Glider. PR after the break.

Continue reading Apple’s App Store hits 10 billion downloads (update: we have a winner)

Apple’s App Store hits 10 billion downloads (update: we have a winner) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 22 Jan 2011 05:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  iTunes  | Email this | Comments

The Gadget Lab crew jams into this week’s podcast with an awesomely loud boombox made by TDK. It’s called the Radio Raheem, and it hooks straight into an iPod or any line-in accessory. You can even use it as a guitar amplifier. What a mean machine.

I show off what’s easily one of the dumbest iPad accessories I’ve ever seen: The Padlette is a weird rubber grip that stretches across your tablet so you can cling it to one hand.

Dylan found something cooler at CES: The Victorinox is a flash drive that’s disguised as a Swiss Army knife. (Surprisingly, Dylan managed to get it past airport security without getting groped.)

I close the podcast with a silly rant about iPhone screws, which Apple recently changed to make it harder to repair by yourself.

Like the show? You can also get the Gadget Lab video podcast via iTunes, or if you don’t want to be distracted by our unholy on-camera talent, check out the Gadget Lab audio podcast. Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Lab video or audio podcast feeds

Or listen to the audio here:

Gadget Lab audio podcast No. 100

http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gadgetlabaudio/GadgetLabAudio00100.mp3

Your Apple TV just got a lot less boring with the help of nifty new tools that override its restrictions and add powerful capabilities.

Launched Friday morning, the XBMC app for Apple TV 2 — which requires jailbreaking — expands the set-top box’s multimedia playback to support almost every type of audio or video format, including 1080p HD content. By default, the Apple TV can only play a few formats compatible with iTunes, and only supports 720p video.

Most interestingly, you’ll be able to install plug-ins to add new features to the XBMC media player that have yet to be released (similar to the add-ons or extensions found in modern browsers like Firefox and Chrome). That could open the door to additional tools, such as support for Bluetooth keyboards and mice, widgets to display additional web information, new codecs and the like.

The XBMC player also launched today for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, giving these devices similar capabilities to play different kinds of media formats. Installation requires jailbreaking the devices.

“With what we’ve done under XBMC and iOS, we’re going to see very shortly a huge jump from what people start offering under the Apple TV,” said Scott Davilla, maker of XBMC.

The XBMC app is part of a renewed communal effort to hack the Apple TV, as Wired.com reported late last year. Shortly after Apple released the Apple TV 2, coders realized it ran iOS, the same operating system as the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Some key programmers in the iOS community and a few hackers of the original Apple TV have turned their attention to tinkering with the new $100 set-top box.

“Now you have all the people who have done amazing stuff on the iPhone working with us, and it’s made our jobs for the Apple TV a thousand times easier,” said Kevin Bradley, an Apple TV programmer who works under the handle [bile], in a previous interview with Wired.com. “I think some really amazing things could come out of this.”

The first new Apple TV hacks have been promising. Prior to the release of XBMC, programmer Erica Sadun released a utility called AirFlick to stream non-iTunes-supported video from a Mac to the Apple TV. She also released an app called AirPlayer to stream video from the Apple TV to the Mac, which you can’t normally do with the Apple TV alone.

So far, Apple TV has been jailbroken and a few apps, like XBMC, are available for the jailbroken platform. But there is no equivalent to Cydia, the underground marketplace for apps available for jailbroken iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches.

Apple TV hackers are working on that, as adding Cydia support would allow people to add a wide variety of apps to the device’s main menu. For now, you’re limited to adding plug-ins to the XBMC media player, or manually installing a handful of other apps.

XBMC has not yet announced what plug-ins will be available, but stay tuned on the XBMC plug-ins page for any new releases.

To install the XBMC software on your Apple TV 2, you must connect it by USB to a computer and jailbreak it with Season Pass, which will automatically install XBMC.

Photo: _zand/Flickr