Hasta La Gadget!

The touchscreen Apple phone that you use to listen to music, text friends and play games could soon be used by the Army to track foes, train soldiers and plan attacks.

In a statement this week, the Army said that key members of its staff visited Apple headquarters on March 5 to take a tour of its laboratories and to discuss the use of Apple gear — including the iPad, iPhone, iPod, iMac, and MacBook — in Army business and battlefield operations.

“We’re continuing to leverage commercial technology for battlefield uses; we can’t ignore that kind of existing knowledge,” said Nick Justice, commanding general of the Army’s research, development and engineering command. “Our job, as stewards of the taxpayer’s dollar, is to adopt and adapt appropriate commercial technology and offer the best possible solution to the warfighter.”

The Army said the purpose of the meeting was to support an initiative titled “Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications,” to assess how handhelds and apps can be used in a tactical environment by a warfighter.

If the Army does implement Apple’s consumer products into its operations, it would be an interesting shift for the tech industry. Traditionally, the Army has exclusive access to cutting-edge technology years before a consumer rendition of it hits the commercial market. In this case, it would be the other way around.

In the past year, we’ve already seen a few examples of military apps for the iPhone. In December, for example, military contractor Raytheon announced an app that can be used to track the locations of friends and foes on real-time maps. Raytheon also previewed an air-traffic simulator to help train air-traffic controllers, which sounds an awful lot like the popular game Flight Control.

Press release [U.S. Army]

Via DaringFireball

See Also:

• Military Could Use iPhones to Track Friends, Enemies in War …
• Gun-Mount and Sniper Software for iPod Touch
• New Use for Your iPhone: Controlling Drones
• A Combat Zone iPhone? Soldiers Have an App for That

Photo: U.S. Army

Is it April 1st already or does Geohot actually have something real to show? There’s no way to be certain that what the self-promoting master of iPhone (and PS3) hacking is demoing is what he says:

“The jailbreak is all software based, and is as simple to use as blackra1n. It is completely untethered, works on all current tethered models(ipt2, 3gs, ipt3), and will probably work on iPad too.”

Given his track record, we’ll play along for now. The only thing we can say for sure is that the chosen music accompanying his iPod touch theatrics makes us want to break something, jailtime or not. See it go down after the break.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading Geohot teases untethered jailbreak that ‘will probably work on iPad’ (video)

Geohot teases untethered jailbreak that ‘will probably work on iPad’ (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Mar 2010 02:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Social news aggregator Digg.com has released its free iPhone app in the App Store. Packed with a slick, feature-rich interface, the app is a strong start for the popular website, though there’s plenty of room for it to grow.

Launching the app, you’ll be able to immediately browse popular stories on Digg. You can also view popular stories by topic (e.g., technology, business, science, etc.) or upcoming articles that are about to go popular. You can search through stories by typing a keyword in a search field.

The best part of the app is it makes it really easy to Digg or bury a submission. Tapping a link launches the story inside an in-app browser, and a bar below contains thumbs up and thumbs down buttons to cast your vote. There’s also a button to save a story for reading later. The entire interface is snappy; from my testing on an iPhone 3GS, stories loaded quickly inside Digg’s browser.

With that said, there are some features missing that I’d like to see in version 2. One major minus is you can’t comment on stories like you would on Digg.com. You can view comments, but you can’t actually write any. According to Tap Tap Tap, which developed the app with Digg, the public Digg API doesn’t support adding comments yet. So hopefully we can expect this feature in a later version.

Also, there’s limited interaction between the Digg app and other apps. For example, if you’re browsing your Twitter feed in Tweetie and you tap a Digg link, it doesn’t launch the Digg app. Instead, you’re stuck with viewing the Digg link in the Safari browser. To be fair, you can hit a button to share Digg links through Twitter, Facebook or e-mail, but the inability to use the app to view others’ shared Digg links is stifling.

The free Digg app is downloadable now in the App Store. A video demo of the app is below.

News release [Digg]

See Also:

• SXSW: Digg’s Big Redesign Taps Into Social Web
• Digg This URL Grey: Tea Is the New Coffee
• Digg Traffic Has Questionable Monetary Value

Soon after yesterday’s post on the PRS Guitarbud, an apparently noisy, badly made cable for connecting your guitar to your iPhone, I got a mail from Gadget Lab reader Paul Stidworthy. Paul makes RiotFX, a $5 “multi-effects processor app” for the iPhone, and is concerned that people using his application get the best sound possible. To this end, he has posted a guide to making your own cable. It may not be cheaper than the PRS cable, but it should be a lot better, and you may find you have almost everything you need lying around the house.

First, you need a cable that splits a jack to three RCA phono plugs. It needs to have the ground on the right ring of the jack, so the easiest thing to do is buy a good-quality iPod AV cable. Then you put on an RCA-to-mono jack adapter (for the guitar) and an RCA-to-female-minijack adapter for the headphones. If you like, you can stop there, and you’ll have something that will work great for around $10 to $15. Or you can fancy things up a little more with an impedance matcher. Paul explains:

Using an impedance matcher with your cable has a number of benefits. It presents the guitar with a higher impedance load than the iPhone does, which improves the sound and makes the tone and volume pots behave better (for example, you might notice that if you don’t use an impedance matcher, adjusting the tone pot has little effect).

It also isolates the guitar circuit from the iPhone input – the iPhone is sensitive to changes in the DC resistance of the circuit, and using an impedance matcher eliminates these problems.

In this case, you’ll be out around £25 ($37) for parts, but you’ll have the best setup you could get. Assembly is dead simple, involving daisy-chaining the pieces together (Paul has a full guide up on the RiotFX site). Paul recommends doing things this way as it “will give you a much better experience than the Guitarbud” He gives a few pointers to good brands to use, and you can pick up the RiotFX software to test your cable out for $5.

Building a Guitar Cable for your iPhone and iPod Touch [Riotmode. Thanks, Paul!]

RiotFX [Riotmode]

RiotFX [iTunes]

It’s a story tailor-made for the fear-mongering subset of news media. This week, a pair of gentlemen lured an unsuspecting virgin iPhone to a malicious website and — with no other input from the user — stole the phone’s entire database of sent, received and even deleted text messages in under 20 seconds, boasting that they could easily lift personal contacts, emails and your naughty, naughty photos as well. Thankfully for us level-headed souls, those gentlemen were Vincenzo Iozzo and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann, security researchers performing for the 2010 Pwn2Own hacking contest, and their $15,000 first prize ensures that the winning formula will go to Apple (and only Apple) for further study. Last year, smartphones emerged from Pwn2Own unscathed even as their desktop counterparts took a beating, but this makes the third year in a row that Safari’s gotten its host machines pwned. That said, there’s no need for fear — just a healthy reminder that the Apple logo doesn’t give you free license to click links in those oh-so-tempting “beta-test the new iPad!” emails.

iPhone SMS database hacked in 20 seconds, news at 11 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Mar 2010 02:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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