Hasta La Gadget!

Slacker Radio 2.0 for iPhone to feature station caching, out ‘soonish’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 May 2010 11:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Stanza, our favorite iPhone e-reader application, has not yet been updated for the iPad. Maybe it’s coming soon and will be awesome, or maybe the current owner, Amazon, has killed it to reduce competition for its money-making Kindle app.

Either way, unless you want to read your e-book collection on a blocky, pixel-doubled screen, you’ll have to switch readers.

But what about all the books you already have in your Stanza library? Here we show you how to extract you books from Stanza, pretty them up and put them into iBooks on your iPad.

Getting books into Stanza is easy. You can beam them across your Wi-Fi network using the companion desktop application or with the clunky but powerful e-book manager Calibre. You can buy them from within the application itself, or you can add online repositories of varying legitimacy.

Once the books are on there, though, they’re stuck. You can jailbreak your iPhone and go fishing around in the file system, looking for the books. Or you can download a Java app that will churn through the iPhone backups on your computer and sift out the books within.

Download the app, called “Stanza Book Restore Tool”, from Lexcycle, the developers of Stanza. Point it at your backup folder (on the Mac you’ll find it in Users/yourname/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup), choose a destination and hit “Recover Books”. All the books will be copied to your computer.

But what then? Now you have a bunch of EPUB files littering your desktop. You could drag them straight into iTunes, where they’ll be imported into your book collection, but the lovely cover artwork you enjoyed in Stanza will be gone, replaced by text on a generic, plain book cover. What you need is the aforementioned Calibre, previously seen on Gadget Lab in the service of adding Instapaper and other newspapers to your Kindle.

Download the free Calibre app for Mac or Windows, drag in the EPUB files and then go to work. Your books’ title and author data should be cleanly filled out already, but if you right-click on a book (or hit the e key) you can edit the metadata. The easiest way is to let Calibre pull the info down from the internet.

Once this is done, click the “Download cover” button to do just that. Calibre gets it right 99 percent of the time. If you don’t like the cover, you can add your own from an image file.

The next step is essential if you want to import all the new keywords and cover art along with the books into iTunes. You need to convert the books to EPUB.

But wait. They’re already EPUB files, right? Yes, but right now the newly added metadata isn’t baked into the files. Running an export won’t create new files, but it will replace the old one with the newly enriched versions.

Do this as a bulk action and go make a coffee. If you’re using a Mac, don’t get too scared when its fans start to spin like a leaf-blower.

Next, you need to separate out all the EPUB files and just drag them into iTunes. The problem is that they’re stuck inside subfolders. On a Mac, the best way is to run a spotlight search on the Calibre catalog folder, choosing “file extension=epub” as your search term. Drag those files onto the iTunes icon and wait.

Once the import is done, you’ll see a beautiful library of e=books ready to sync to iBooks on the iPad.

Restoring Stanza books from iTunes backup [Lexcycle]

Calibre [Calibre-ebook]

Stanza [Lexcycle]

See Also:

• Stanza v2.0: The iPhone's Best E-Reader Just Got Better
• IPhone Stanza Downloads May Top Kindle Sales
• Gadget Lab Guide: How to Un-Cripple Your International Kindle
• iBooks Store Loaded with Project Gutenberg Titles at Launch
• Apple's Tablet E-Book App Rips off Indie Dev's Creation

Visa has announced a contactless payment system for the iPhone which allows you to use the phone as a credit card. It works using RFID tech, and is as kludgy as hell.

Called In2Pay, the payment method uses a modified microSD card with a near-field communications (NFC) chip inside. Because the iPhone doesn’t yet sport a microSD slot, the card sits in a case which powers the chip and allows contactless payments, just like those used to pay for toll booths or public transport. You would be able to hold your iPhone up to a compatible reader and make a transaction. It would work even if there were no clerk present, for instance at a vending machine.

The idea of schemes like In2Pay is to free you from carrying a wallet, allowing you to do everything with your cellphone. But this implementation, which requires carrying a cellphone case, is not much different from just taping your credit card to the back of your phone. (Or slipping it into a credit card-holding iPhone cover.)

It also requires a compatible card reader. What, the neighborhood restaurant doesn’t accept contactless payments? Sorry, there are only 100,000 merchants in the U.S. that have NFC payment readers, compared to millions that accept old-style credit cards.

However, it does come direct from Visa, lending a certain weight to the scheme, and when more phones accept the microSD it will be essentially invisible. Add to that the fact that iPhone users tend to be more disposed to trying out new tech and you can easily see that this is a pilot scheme from Visa designed to grow the infrastructure of contactless payments, which have so far failed to meet Visa’s inflated expectations.

In2Pay joins several methods for receiving credit card payments, including Square, a little white cube that slots into the iPhone’s headphone jack and allows you to swipe regular old credit cards. Soon, it seems clear, almost all payments will be made using cellphones, even the ones that involve paying your friend back that dollar he owes you. Just don’t lose that phone.

DeviceFidelity Announces Mobile Contactless Payment Solution for iPhone [Visa via MobileCrunch]

See Also:

• PayPal Fist Bumps Square
• Square Mobile Credit Card System (Beta)
• Swipe Credit Cards With Your iPhone

We just got our hands on Wi-FI Sync and guess what? It actually works — fancy that! For those of you out of the loop, Apple recently rejected this gem of an app (go figure), but thanks to the magic of jailbreaking, that was hardly the end of the road. Days later, Wi-Fi Sync ended up on Cydia (Mac-only, for now) with a completely-affordable price tag of $9.99, promising iPhone and iPod touch users the ability to sync their device with iTunes sans any cabling whatsoever. Since we’re notoriously lazy when it comes to actually plugging in our phones and syncing, we fired up the program on our jailbroken 3GS in order to see exactly what the law-abiders in attendance were missing out on.

Installation couldn’t have been easier. We parted ways with our Hamilton, downloaded the necessary companion software for our laptop, and fired up the application. The iPhone was immediately recognized, and after a few prompts we were ready for action. Syncing was just as easy as it normally is (with “easy” being a relative term here), just without that iPod wire hanging around and bumming everyone out. We will say, however, that things weren’t as snappy OTA as a standard hardwired connection. It was a bit sluggish on the first couple of runs, and although iTunes crashed a few times (boo), we’re fairly confident in saying that a poor WiFi connection was to blame for the jankiness. Once we migrated closer to the router, things went much smoother. Still unsure if it’s worth the investment? Then give the video past the break a look.

Continue reading Wi-Fi Sync for iPhone video hands-on: it works!

Wi-Fi Sync for iPhone video hands-on: it works! originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 May 2010 10:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Chinese workers are planning to sue a Taiwan-based manufacturer who makes iPhone components for Apple. They say they were poisoned by a chemical used to clean LCD screens.

The 44 workers of Wintek in Suzhou, China, are alleging they were poisoned by n-hexane, a chemical that can cause damage to the peripheral nervous system and the spinal cord, according to Stratfor, a global intelligence agency.

Stratfor’s report said that since August 2009, 62 Wintek workers have been hospitalized due to n-hexane poisoning.

Wintek, which makes LCD and touch panels for consumer devices, began using n-hexane instead of alcohol sometime last year to clean screens, because apparently it dried more quickly and reduced streaks. Stratfor notes that the manager who decided to use n-hexane has since been fired.

The Guardian reported that after the chemical switch, workers immediately noticed the pungent smell of n-hexane but did not know it would affect their health.

“We hadn’t even heard of occupational illnesses before,” Wintek worker Xiao Ling said in an interview with The Guardian.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding Wintek.

Apple works with several Asian suppliers who provide components for its iPhones, iPads, iPods and Macs. The company earlier this year published its supplier responsibility report, describing the company’s efforts to ensure its partners around the world comply with responsible business practices.

In its report (.pdf), Apple said it audited 102 facilities in 2009, up from only 39 just two years ago. The company also claimed it trained 133,000 supervisors and workers on workers’ rights and management responsibility.

Global Post ran an extensive report late last year detailing the labor violations committed at supply chains all over Asia. The report based its findings on six months of interviews with workers and activists. Some claimed they worked in sweatshop-like conditions, such as hourly wages below a dollar and firings with no notice.

From Barron’s

See Also:

• Chinese Supplier Already Selling Third Gen iPhone Bezel
• Apple Launches China Labor Probe
• Silicon Sweatshops: Gadget Factories Take a Toll on Workers …

Photo: dschulian/Flickr