Hasta La Gadget!

Apple confirmed Lion’s big day during the company’s Q3 earnings call this week, and Mac OS 10.7 hit the App Store right on schedule yesterday morning, allowing us to give Snow Leopard the boot and make room for the king of the jungle. We’ve already installed Lion on a half-dozen of our own systems, testing the new operating system with a variety of configurations for our review. But we want to know about your experience. Did you pull an all-nighter on Tuesday, backing up files, reformatting drives, and updating to 10.6.8? Are you still rockin’ dial-up and waiting for the $69 flash drive version to ship next month? Or perhaps you’re a PC user, holding out for Windows 8? Let us know in the poll below, and feel free to expand on your decision in the comments as well.

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Poll: Did you download Mac OS X Lion (10.7)? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Jul 2011 14:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The new MacBook Airs' i5 processor and backlit keyboard make it a speedy, slick machine

If you bought a MacBook Pro last year, tough beans: It just got outflanked by its slimmer, smaller cousin, the MacBook Air.

According to benchmark tests, the 2011 MacBook Air outperforms every 2010 MacBook Pro.

Laptop magazine reports that the 13-inch Air had a performance boost of 100 percent over last year’s Air, scoring 5,860 on the Geekbench test. It boots in 17 seconds, and has a 6.25-hour battery life. The 11-inch Air jumped 149 percent, for a Geekbench score of 5,040, compared to 2,024 for last year’s model. It took 19 seconds to boot up, and its battery lasted a little longer than 4.75 hours.

As a direct comparison, the 2010 17-inch MacBook Pro scored 5,423 on its benchmark test — so the new 13-inch Mac Book Air is more powerful than the 17-inch Pro, and the 11-inch Air is on par with it. Kind of mind blowing.

The MacBook Pro line, particularly the 2010 MacBook Pros, have been a big target audience for Apple. Available in 13-inch, 15-inch and 17-inch sizes, they featured the most powerful processors in Apple’s line of portables (the 15- and 17-inchers came standard with a 2.6-GHz Intel Core i5 Chip).

Apple’s big performance boost for the MacBook Air illustrates its larger plan. The company in recent years has invested less on products for the professional marketplace to focus on hardware for general consumers, including iPhones, iPads and now, the MacBook Air.

Apple’s steady strides away from the professional marketplace are exemplified by the recent release of Final Cut Pro X, a dumbed-down version of the video-editing tool, which angered many professional video editors. Also, Apple in recent years has been slower with releasing upgrades for the Mac Pro.

And here’s an obvious tell: Apple hasn’t updated its Pro webpage in two years.

Last year’s MacBook Airs were lauded for their super-slim .76-inch thickness and less than 3-pound heft. That frame came at a price, though: They housed less impressive Core 2 Duo processors, relegating the Air to niche markets like frequent travelers who were looking for just a decently performing ultra-portable notebook.

Since Apple unveiled its newer, faster MacBook Airs yesterday, it seems the MacBook Air will be taking the front seat from the Pro.

It looks like size doesn’t matter. Well, when it comes to Apple notebooks, at least.

Never one to shy away from dramatic hyperbole, Steve Jobs declared ours a “post-PC world” about this time last year, acknowledging a move away from personal computers as smartphones and tablets become even more ubiquitous. And while Jobs might happily look on as iPhones and iPads become our primarily tie to the outside world, the question remains: what happens to the PC during this grand transition? To a large extent, the answer lies in the OS, which brings us to OS X Lion. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to post-PC computing.

In typically grandiose fashion, the company has declared OS X 10.7 “the world’s most advanced desktop operating system,” touting the addition of over 250 new features. The list is pretty uneven on the game-changing scale, with updates running the gamut from Airdrop (file-sharing over WiFi) to a full-screen version of the bundled chess game. If there’s one thing tying it all together, though, it’s something that Jobs touched on when he first unveiled the OS back in October: the unmistakable influence of iOS. Now it’s true, we already got a taste of that with gesture-based trackpads and the Mac App Store, but those were merely glimpses of things to come. Apple borrows so heavily from iOS that at times, cycling through features makes the whole thing feel like you’re merely operating an iPad with a keyboard attached.

There are plenty of welcome additions here, including aesthetic tweaks and attention to mounting privacy concerns. Like Snow Leopard before it, however, Lion is hardly an explosive upgrade. And like Snow Leopard, it comes in at a reasonable $29 (or a decidedly more pricey $69 as an upcoming flash drive install), making it a worthy upgrade for current Mac owners. But does a boatload of evolutionary features add up to a revolutionary upgrade? Let’s find out.

Continue reading Apple OS X Lion (10.7) review

Apple OS X Lion (10.7) review originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jul 2011 17:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung's Galaxy S2 will make its U.S. debut soon. (Photo courtesy Samsung)

Samsung plans a U.S. release for the sequel to its most successful Android smartphone by the end of the summer, according to a senior executive of the company.

“We expect to release the Galaxy S2 in the U.S. market sometime in August,” said Shin Jong-kyun, Samsung president of mobile business and digital imaging, in a briefing with reporters in South Korea on Wednesday. The story was first reported by Yonhap News.

The phone was initially released in South Korea — Samsung’s global headquarters — in April, subsequently rolling out to Europe and southern Asian countries in the months that followed.

The release of the Galaxy S2 comes at a particularly contentious time for Samsung, one of the largest manufacturers of Android-powered smartphones. The company is embroiled in a bitter patent dispute with Apple, the latter claiming Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and Galaxy S products were utter rip-offs of Apple’s iPad and iPhone devices.

“We love competition, but we want people to invent their own stuff, and we are going to make sure we defend our intellectual property,” Apple COO Tim Cook said on the company’s earnings report conference call on Tuesday.

Samsung’s first Galaxy smartphone model — which admittedly looks a lot like the first iPhone — was hugely successful for the company. In its first six months after release, Samsung sold 10 million Galaxy S smartphones worldwide. Total sales of the Galaxy S2 from the countries it has already been released in amount to approximately 3 million devices thus far.

Considering the patent dispute with Apple, Samsung’s sales figures beg for comparison to the iPhone’s success. Apple reported record sales of its iPhone devices in its earnings report on Tuesday, with 20 million iPhones sold in a period of only three months.

But Shin has the company’s sights set high. Samsung is heavily promoting its latest tablet offering, the Galaxy Tab 10.1. And Shin expects the company to sell over 60 million smartphones by the end of this year.

Whether that number is realistic or not remains to be seen. If customers love the phone as much as our sister site Wired.co.uk does, Shin’s expectations may not be far off base.

Okay, so OS X Lion isn’t perfect. But chances are that probably isn’t going to stop you from picking it up. With that in mind, here’s our guide to help you make the most of Apple’s new OS. More »