Hasta La Gadget!

Apple on Wednesday morning released a minor update for its mobile operating system iOS 4, which includes bug fixes and a new photography mode.

Apple last week said iOS 4.1 would address a proximity-sensor issue in the iPhone 4 and sluggish performance on the iPhone 3G, among other flaws.

In terms of features, iOS 4.1 introduces Game Center, a social network for iOS gamers, as well as high dynamic range (HDR) photo processing, which Wired.com demonstrated last week.

The update is compatible with every iPhone and iPod Touch except for their first-generation models. A few iOS 4.1 features are not available on some of the older devices.

To download iOS 4.1, connect your iOS device to your computer’s USB port, then launch iTunes. Under the device menu, select your iPhone or iPod Touch and click “Check for Update” and follow the on-screen instructions to install the update. Make sure to back up your data first!

In the mean time, iPad owners can’t get iOS 4 just yet. Apple said it would release iOS 4.2 in November for the iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone, unifying the devices into one tidy OS.

See Also:

• Live Blog: Apple's iPod, Music Event
• Apple Announces New Versions of iOS

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

If you’re planning on showing off your awesome gaming skills with Apple’s new Game Center, you’d better have a nice new iOS device to play on. Apple has released compatibility details for the fancy high-score table, and you’ll need to have an iPhone 3GS or 4, and second-gen iPod Touch or better.

People who have the second-generation iPhone 3G can run iOS 4.1 (including HDR and bug fixes), but won’t get the Game Center. (Also, as with iOS 4.0, it won’t get the multitasking features newer phones have.) If you’re still rocking the original iPhone, you can’t have iOS 4.x at all — but you knew that already, and clearly you don’t care, you pathetic Luddite.

Game Center was demoed by Steve Jobs at last week’s iPod event. It’s kind of a social network for gaming, allowing you to compete against your friends and compare results on the leader-board, and even invite people to play multiplayer games head-to-head. Right now the most common way to taunt your friends is to share your results via Twitter or Facebook, but that requires a log-in for each and every game.

Of course, that old iPod might not have the guts to actually play some of the more demanding games available, but at least you can excuse yourself when you limp in at the bottom of the league-table by blaming your old, weak iPod’s stuttering frame-rate.

Game Center [Apple]

See Also:

• Apple Announces New Versions of iOS
• Apple Unveils Next-Gen, Multitasking iPhone OS

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

A journalist captured in Afghanistan told the world he was still alive by tweeting with a prison guard’s cellphone.

This remarkable tale about a tweet kicks off a new meme here at Gadget Lab that we’re calling Tweet of the Day, where we’ll post our favorite tweets from just about anybody in our orbit: gadget customers, pundits, analysts, journalists, Silicon Valley bigwigs and so on. Each Tuesday and Thursday, we’ll be handpicking tweets that we find especially fascinating, enlightening, hilarious, moving or sad — anything that really gets us buzzing.

Today’s tweet comes from Kosuke Tsuneoka, a Japanese freelance journalist who was released from five months of captivity in Afghanistan over the weekend. Since he was captured April 1, no one had heard a single word from Tsuneoka, but on Sept. 3 he managed to send out a tweet: “i am still allive, but in jail.”

Speaking at a press conference today in Tokyo, Tsuneoka recounted the story of how he managed to trick his captors into allowing him to tweet. A low-ranking soldier had just gotten a new cellphone, a Nokia N70, and was asking Tsuneoka how to use it.

The guard had heard of the internet but didn’t know what it was, so Tsuneoka called customer care to activate the phone and configure it for internet access. He showed the guard how to perform a Google search of “Al Jazeera,” and then he talked about Twitter.

“But if you are going to do anything, you should use Twitter,” he said he told the guard. “They asked what that was. And I told them that if you write something on it, then you can reach many Japanese journalists. So they said, ‘Try it.’”

And just like that, Tsuneoka was able to communicate to the world that he was still alive. This is a truly amazing story originally reported by IDG News that underscores the power of a web-connected gadget and social networking while telling us a bit about the disconnected culture of Afghanistan.

A hat tip to Mary H.K. Choi (@choitotheworld) for spotting and sharing this story.

Seen any especially awesome tweets you’d like us to feature? Share them with Gadget Lab by Twitter.

IBM/Apple PowerPC 750 350MHz G3 by David Lieberman/Flickr. Used gratefully under a Creative Commons license.

Apple ditched IBM’s PowerPC for Intel because the chip didn’t have a low-power roadmap for laptops. Then it passed up Intel in favor ARM on its iOS devices for similar reasons. So it’s no surprise that IBM and Intel are pumping up their R&D and acquisition efforts to get back in the game with tiny, low-power, low-heat speed demons for tomorrow’s mobile devices.

At a research conference last week, IBM engineer Michael Floyd presented a new deep-sleep mode, codenamed “Winkle” (after Rip Van). Along with a “nap” mode where the processor uses a fraction of full power but can return to full power quickly, “deep-sleep” reduces power to near-zero, but takes longer to wake up. It’s kind of like the “Hibernate” mode in Windows XP, but at the processor/controller level.

Floyd gave no specific indication of when IBM would actually be rolling out Winkle. It may be introduced for the company’s current line of Power 7 chips, but the Power 8, which doesn’t yet have a release schedule, could be more likely.

Intel, on the other hand, isn’t waiting. Instead of (or maybe in addition to) pushing its new Moorestown line of Atom processors for mobile phones, they’re buying the wireless-chip division of Germany’s Infineon Technologies AG for $1.4 billion, in a deal that should close in Q1 2011.

As R&D Magazine reports, buying Infineon would make Intel the fifth-biggest supplier of mobile-phone processors in a list topped by Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and STMicroelectronics.

It’s not a huge slice of the market, but it’s a solid foothold. Infineon’s most visible customer? Apple, who uses their chips for 3G. And now Intel/Infineon will be inside RIM, Samsung, and Nokia mobile devices too.

See Also:

• Qualcomm Ups the Game With Faster Smartphone Processor
• Intel Introduces Ultra-Low-Power Processor for Smartphones …
• Texas Instruments Embraces Next-Gen Mobile Processor
• Samsung Galaxy S Phone Processor Packs a Punch
• Droid 2 Teardown Reveals Beefed-Up Processor, Few Other Changes …
• Samsung Captivate Processor Overclocked to 1.2 GHz
• Wired 9.09: The Creative Processor

Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone 4's videoconferencing feature FaceTime at WWDC 2010. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Apple will hold a press conference Wednesday, where Steve Jobs is expected to announce the birth of new stars in his product galaxy, including (probably) new iPods and (possibly) a successor to Apple TV.

As is always the case, Apple has been careful to guard its announcements. The result has been the usual widespread guessing game among Apple worshippers and members of the press. But given the timing of the event, we can make some easy guesses: Apple’s annual September event has always revolved around iTunes and iPods.

Based on a handful of credible reports and some evidence, this time around we expect some interesting upgrades. A touchscreen iPod Nano and an iPod Touch with dual cameras are almost to be expected. It’s also possible that Apple will introduce a complete do-over of the Apple TV.

Wired.com will be attending the Apple event Wednesday, which begins 10 a.m. PT, so check back at Gadget Lab for live blog coverage. To stay plugged in 140 characters at a time, follow @bxchen or @gadgetlab on Twitter.

Meanwhile, if you’re eager to know what’s coming, here are our predictions for what’s likely (and unlikely) to debut at this week’s Apple presser.

New iPods

Let’s start with the obvious. Apple’s popular iPod Touch is due for its annual upgrade, and rumors suggest the next upgrade will gain most of the features of the iPhone 4 (minus the phone, of course): a high-resolution “retina” display, dual cameras and a faster A4 processor. Because it lacks phone hardware, we can expect it to be a wee bit smaller than the iPhone 4.

Additionally, the website iLounge, which has been spectacularly accurate with Apple rumors in the past, claims that the shape of the iPod Touch is changing: “Think of the top of a MacBook Pro, only smaller, which is to say flat rather than curved at the center—closer to the look of the first-generation iPod touch’s back, only with modifications.” In other words, it’ll be flat like an iPhone 4 instead of rounded like an earlier-generation iPhone.

And let’s not forget Apple sells other iPods, too. There’s been a flurry of rumors claiming the iPod Nano will gain a square-shaped body and a touch display to eliminate the traditional click wheel. Corroborating these rumors, a few photos of third-party cases designed for a square-shaped Nano have have been popping up on the web, and test files hidden in the latest iOS beta allude to an “unknown” device.

To us, a puny touchscreen is an odd design choice, and it’s difficult to imagine how it would make sense — or be very usable, given that the entire screen of a Nano is only a few times larger than the surface area of a typical fingerprint. But the iPod Nano has had somewhat of an identity crisis, as it’s gone through a myriad of major design changes in years past (with the latest model including a camera), so a major makeover is plausible. In light of the multiple reports and leaked case designs, we’ll file this under “probable.”

Oh, and remember the iPod Classic? Each year we wonder when Apple will discontinue this device, but because the current iPhone 4 maxes out at 32-GB of capacity, and the next iPod Nano will likely be sold in 32-GB and 64-GB models, there still seems to be a “need” for a massively capacious 160-GB iPod Classic. Apple still has to serve iTunes-addicted audiophiles, after all. We’re guessing the Classic is still sticking around , and if it gets an upgrade at all, it should only be a minor boost in hard-drive capacity.

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