Tag: iphone4

DigitalOutbox Episode 53

DigitalOutbox Episode 53
In this episode the team discuss the iPhone 4 – don’t hold it that way.

Playback
Listen via iTunes
Listen via M4A
Listen via MP3

Shownotes
0:53 – Google Investigated by UK Police
– UK’s Metropolitan Police is to investigate Google over its capture of data from unsecured wi-fi networks, following a complaint from human rights group Privacy International.
– The data, scooped up by Google’s Street View cars, may put the firm in breach of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa).
– It is likely that the police will interview Google staff in the UK.
– Joins German, French and USA authorities in investigating breach
– Surely stuff and nonsense – won’t come to anything
3:03 – Police don’t need a law to stop a photographer
– Two police officers stopped a teenage photographer from taking pictures of an Armed Forces Day parade – and then claimed they did not need a law to detain him.
– photographing police cadets on Saturday when he was ordered to stop and give his personal details by an adult cadet officer who claimed he needed parental permission to capture images of the cadets.
– After arguing his rights in a series of protracted legal debates with officers, the sixth former says he was pushed down a set of stairs and detained for breaching the peace until the parade passed.
http://www.met.police.uk/about/photography.htm
6:31 – Flickr Refresh
– Photo’s bigger, page cleaner and wider
– More info about photo – location, dates, camera
– Navigation controls better
– Actions menu – less distraction on the screen
– Lightbox – nice black background for viewing
– Favourites now integrated with comments
8:23 – British IP Streaming Record
– Breaking – BBC streams of England match peaked at 800,000 – breaks previous record of 350,000 set yesterday with budget,world cup, wimbledon
– 800,000 concurrent viewers is a pretty massive figure for online streaming.
– The difference between broadcast and IP is that if two people watch on their laptop in my home network, then that means my network has to cope with two sets of 896kbps streams. If four people watch, that’s four sets of 896kbps streams, or 3.5 meg. And if all 800,000 viewers were given the same bitrate, that meant a total of 716,800Mbps – or 716.8Gbps if you like it better that way.
15:06 – Virgin to launch 400Mbps
– Virgin already offer 50meg broadband and they will be upgrading this to 100meg broadband by the end of the year, speeds which already offer some of the fastest in the UK.
– Virgin aren’t standing still though, they are preparing their network to launch 400Mbps broadband with modems and routers which support this available at the end of the year, although no launch date for products of these speeds is in sight.
– Do gen public need that speed?
– Would increased upload speeds make a difference?
– What about focusing on latency, lag and reducing the throttling rather than casing speed headlines
18:28 – XXX Domain Name Approved
– The .xxx domain name has been approved
– Split opinions on whether this is a good thing or bad
– Easier to identify porn – filter it out etc
– But porn companies don’t want to use it for those reasons…
19:53 – Apple Storing and Sharing Location Info
– Apple’s new privacy policy contains a small new paragraph of big importance: it gives the company license to store “the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device” and share it with “partners and licensees.”
– there seems to be no effective method of opting out of the data storage and sharing, as you’ll need to agree to the new terms and conditions before downloading new apps or any media from the iTunes store.
– However you can opt out of iAd’s
– http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100621/apple-heres-how-to-opt-out-of-our-targeted-ads-but-not-our-location-tracking/
– Apple and its partners use cookies and other technologies in mobile advertising services to control the number of times you see a given ad, deliver ads that relate to your interests, and measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns. If you do not want to receive ads with this level of relevance on your mobile device, you can opt out by accessing the following link on your device: http://oo.apple.com. If you opt out, you will continue to receive the same number of mobile ads, but they may be less relevant because they will not be based on your interests. You may still see ads related to the content on a web page or in an application or based on other non-personal information. This opt-out applies only to Apple advertising services and does not affect interest-based advertising from other advertising networks.
– Google and Yahoo also allow you to opt out of ad’s. Facebook doesn’t.
24:22 – Bing for iPhone Updated
– Visual Scanning – like Google goggles
– lets you scan barcodes and cover art on the fly using your iPhone camera. Users can thus scan the barcode of any product or the cover art of books, CDs, DVDs, or video games, after which they will see descriptions and occasionally also reviews, prices and links to merchant websites.
– You can now connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts and see combined status updates from your friends from within the Bing app. For any type of search from the free Bing app for iPhone and iPod touch, you will also be able to see both Web results and relevant results from your contacts across social networks.
– Only available, for free, in US store
– Just like BBC app, paid for by UK licence fee payers, but only available in US store
28:07 – iPad Sales
– 1 million in 24
– 2 million in 60
– Now 3 million in 80
– 11,000 iPad app’s, over 225,000 apps in total
– Magical
34:16 – iPhone 4
– 1.7 million sold in three days
– http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/06/28iphone.html
– How many are still waiting, how many were turned away
– Queue
– Costs
– Death grip!
– http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/24/apple-responds-over-iphone-4-reception-issues-youre-holding-th/
– http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/25/hey-apple-youre-holding-it-wrong/
– http://mashable.com/2010/06/25/apple-iphone-4
– All phone’s have antenna at bottom – regulatory requirements
– http://twitpic.com/1zwoun – Nokia 6126 manual advises not to hold at bottom
– Tape fix – http://www.marco.org/733115343
– Connection and network better, quality better
– Screen – incredible
– Camera
– Performance – so fast
– Battery life
– Facetime
– Anything else? Grr…bumper
1:04:02 – Daily Mail Makes Stuff Up
– Quotes a fake twitter account @ceostevejobs
– Says Steve Jobs reveals that iPhone 4 may be recalled
– Lazy journalism but how many will know it’s wrong?
– Story now removed

Picks
Ian
Live Train Map for London Underground
– http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/jun/22/underground-live-map-possibilities
– Built by Matthew Somerville of MySociety at Science Hack Day over the weekend
– uses the new Transport for London API
– Somerville has also built a similar live-updating map for network trains from all the major termini (it defaults to Birmingham New Street, but there’s a menu offering all the choices). Again, splendid stuff, using data pulled – scraped, actually – from the National Rail website. (National Rail doesn’t offer an API.)
– http://traintimes.org.uk/map/
also

DigitalOutbox Episode 52

DigitalOutbox Episode 52
In this episode the team discuss the new iPhone 4 and E3 keynotes.

Playback
Listen via iTunes
Listen via M4A
Listen via MP3

Shownotes
2:00 – iPhone 4
– 16GB – £499, 32GB – £599
– Unlocked, no white
– Bumper – £25 !!!!!!!!
– Apple online store swamped – much demand then?
– 600,000 pre-orders – http://mashable.com/2010/06/16/iphone-4-pre-order-stats
– Vodafone looking good option
– O2 not accepting new customers until end of July – existing customers only although that includes broadband customers
– iOS now out
– Same as gold master released on day of WWDC keynote
25:45 – New Mac Mini
– Gorgeous design. Tiny. Still no blu-ray. Unibody – No need for spatula’s
– Fast
– Expensive!
– If you’ve got the cash it’s a great HDTV device
– End of Apple TV?
– http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/15/apple-tv-mac-mini
– Rebadged to cheaper cloud solution maybe as per rumours?
29:09 – E3 Microsoft Keynote
– Call of Duty Black Ops
– 9/11/10
– Downloads first on 360 for 3 years
– Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear Solid)
– MGS Rising
– Sword action – cut what you like
– Gears of War 3
– 4 player co-op
– More of the same
– Fable 3
– Oct 26th
– Mmm…more of the same but a revolution
– Halo Reach
– September
– Niiiice
– Kinect – Brand name for Project Natal
– Sign in by waving 🙂
– Voice recognition
– Looks to work well
– Video Kinect – video chat
– Tracks you as you move around
– ESPN – gold members for free
– Kinectimals – virtual pet
– Kinect Sports – from Rare? Hurdles (track and field), football, bowling, boxing, table tennis, volleyball
– Kinect joyride – racing but shit racing
– Kinect adventures – use entire body to play – hole in the wall – piss
– Your Shape from Ubisoft – fitness game
– measures physical dimensions
– looks interesting
– Dance Central – match dance moves to onscreen characters – new Rock Band?
– Kinect For Xbox 360
– Brand name for Project Natal
– Launched this year – Nov 4th in USA
– Star Wars next year – we can all be the fat kid being a jedi 🙂
– Pre-order via Game for £20 – no pricing this week!!
– Forza with kinect – virtual steering wheel, head turns camera
– Walk up to an around car – why couldn’t I do that with a joypad
– Coming 2011 – assuming thats Forza 4
– New Xbox 360
– Built in wifi N
– 250GB
– Same price – £199
– Whisper quiet allegedly
– 5 usb, hdmi, port for kinect
– Shipping to retailers today
– Available later this week
– Everyone in audience gets a new console
– First reports – it is quiet and it’s a good redesign
– July 16th in UK
40:54 – E3 Nintendo Keynote
– Goldeneye – Wii exclusive
– The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword – 2011
– Nintendo 3DS
– 3D screen on top
– No glasses required
– Verdict – gives a good illusion of depth – stare at the screen, don’t more head or effect is gone
– Touch screen on the bottom – touch and 3D don’t get along
– There’s a motion sensor and a gyro sensor in the 3DS. There’s one camera on the inside, and two camera lenses on the outside, so you can take 3D photos.
– Will show 3D Hollywood movies
– Kid Icarus demo’d – looks like a Wii game…on a 3DS
45:54 – E3 Sony Keynote
– 3D is the big push
– Wipeout looks amazing, other games not so – too much happening
– Move
– 40 devs working on Move games
– Sep 19th launch, $50, nv controller – $30, move+eye – $99
– Demo with Tiger Woods – looks very accurate
– Playstation Plus
– Exclusive in-game DLC and other content
– Free full games, changing each month
– Early access to demos and betas
– Auto-patching feature, which will detect, download and install updates
– $49 a year
– Also includes Qore
– Allows chatting across games
– Will work if only one person is a plus member
– GT5 – Nov 2nd……………2010
– Killzone 3 next year – 3D and Move support
– 3D looks amazing
– http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/06/killzone-3-in-3d-incredible-but-who-will-get-to-enjoy-it.ars
– Portal 2
– Next year and also steam cloud support
– PS3 will have ‘best version’ according to Valve
– steam provides the game with “auto updates, community features, downloadable content, and more.”

E3 Wrapup
– Meh unless you like gimmicky add-ons
– Missing titles – Last Guardian? Nothing from Valve apart from Portal…next year
– Lot’s of remakes and this year editions
– one more thing…
– Secret of Mana on the iPhone in 2010 – http://www.joystiq.com/2010/06/15/secret-of-mana-coming-to-iphone-this-year/
– Go on, one more – Crackdown 2 demo out today
54:59 – On Live Finally launches
– June 17 in US
– Free for first year thanks to AT&T partnership
– Then $4.95 a month after that
– First tests
– http://gizmodo.com/5567770/onlive-streaming-game-service-tested-at-home-finally
– Fast, less laggy than expected
– Fuzzy graphics
– Compressed – PS2 like
– Provided your internet is fast enough and you can deal with the fact that the graphical quality isn’t as good as it could be, this is quite a tempting offer. You gain the ability to able to play stuff on lousy hardware (and Macs!), spectate your friends and rent games instead of buy them, but lose a little bit of visual sheen. I think that’s fair.
58:05 – HP and Yahoo Printer Ad deal
– We did warm about this
– Yahoo and HP tie up to print ad’s directly to printers
– So not only do I pay extra for this printer, you then use up my expensive ink printing an ad I might not want
– SHITE!

Picks
Chris
Little Master
– Flash game.
– Actually has an element of cricket about it.
– Lovin the fact that they’ve put the flash game inside an iPad graphic!
– Bowlers start spinning / vary the pace. Hit different areas of the screen to score runs.

Henry
Todays Guardian
– not tried it on the ipad but keyboard navigation on a laptop/desktop is great.

Ian
Reeder for iPad
– best way to review and manage Google Reader content on the iPad
– fast, minimal graphics
– offline reading as well

DigitalOutbox Episode 51

DigitalOutbox Episode 51
In this episode the team discuss WWDC – iPhone 4.

Playback
Listen via iTunes
Listen via M4A
Listen via MP3

Shownotes
2:33 – Government to publish entire spending database
– The government will today give the public free access to its accounting books for the first time, publishing the entire contents of its spending database – a total of 24m individual entries documenting where public money comes from, what it is spent on and whose pocket it ends up in.
– The complex, 120GB Combined Online Information System (Coins) database won’t, however, be accessible to the public until an industry has emerged to analyse and digest the information.
– Tom Steinberg, the founder of mySociety, a non-profit organisation that runs several democracy websites in the UK, was this week appointed to a new government committee chaired by the cabinet minister Francis Maude to look at how to open up government data further.
– Also publishing rates of hospital-acquired infections such as MRSA on a weekly basis.

– http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/jun/02/hospital-infections-mrsa-cdiff-data
– Already, shows the government spent £1.8bn on consultants last year
– Guardian already has a database up and running – http://coins.guardian.co.uk/coins-explorer/search
– Also, it was published via bittorrent
4:17 – Sky and Virgin
– Sky buys Virgin TV channels
– At the same time, Virgin for an increased fee, will be able to show Sky Sports and Movies in HD and will also get access to Sky’s basic HD channels
– http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/digitaltv/news/a223210/sky-unveils-anytime-vod-service.html
– Sky announce Anytime +, their VOD service
– When it launches later in the year, Anytime+ will offer around 1,000 hours of content from Sky Arts, Sky Movies, Sky1 and Sky Sports, along with material from other broadcasters, such as ESPN and National Geographic. A “key focus” for the service will be movies, with around 500 being made available at launch.
– Anytime+ will be offered without charge to all Sky customers with IP-enabled Sky+ HD boxes. However, access to premium content such as sport and movies will depend on the subscriber’s package.
– initially only be made available to Sky customers with a Sky Broadband connection, meaning anyone on another internet service provider will miss out
– Allegedly until service is stable
10:26 – Intel Dealys USB 3
– Intel is holding up USB 3.0 adoption by delaying its motherboard chipset until 2012.
– The USB 3.0 spec was introduced in November 2008 and it looks like it’s going to be another two years before the mightiest computing chip-maker on the planet gets the trivial-to-design-and-build chipsets needed out of its fabs.
– Anyone think Intel had a hidden agenda here? Is the company trying to make the market more receptive to Light Peak, its new optical connect?
11:15 – Office Web Apps Now Live
– Word, Excel and Powerpoint with 25gb of storage
– Basic but probably more functional than Google equivalents
– Real time collaboration
12:06 – HP and Google Tackle Cloud Printing
– Handy for printing from your phone or iPad.
– I just see a massive opportunity for spam. Just now, the pile of spam faxes to be binned in the office every day is bad enough, but can you imagine how annoyed you’ll be when your expensive photo paper is defaced by images from the murkier recesses of the internet.
13:11 – Google Phasing Out Windows
– search giant is abandoning Windows due to concerns over security
– slowly phasing out the use of Windows internally since January
– new hires are no longer offered Windows PCs — the choices are now an Apple Mac computer or a PC loaded with Linux
– Most are moving to Mac
– Change with Chrome OS coming?
– Important to state that this hasn’t been officially confirmed by Google (although it is coming from a number of internal sources apparently.) Stems from vulnerabilities in operating system/IE uncovered in the China hacking.
– It’s happening – Leo Laporte’s ex engineer who went to Google was offered Mac or Linux only
– Microsoft responded “Google’s not so secure either”
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20006509-265.html and http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2010/06/01/windows-and-security-setting-the-record-straight.aspx
15:06 – iPhone 4
– iPad –
– http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/05/31ipad.html
– Pretty amazing sales figures
– Thats one every 3 seconds
– Thats a lot of fanboys 😉
– It’s like the opposite of what normally happens. If you ask people ahead of time, they say they would buy a product when in fact they won’t. This time, everyone said they wouldn’t get one, couldn’t see what it was good for (even after the keynote) and that they wouldn’t pay any more than £400 for one… then they go and get one, at launch, for £800.
– and when we say “people”, it’s obviously not just Ian and Shak.
– iBook minor updates (notes, PDF’s, 1 click bookmark) + coming to iPhone
– 22% of ebook sales
– Farmville on iPhone
– over 225,000 apps in the App Store , 15,000 apps submitted every week, 95% of all apps are approved in 7 days
– iPhone 4
– Thinnest design – as per Gizmodo phone – glass and stainless steel
– Retina Display – at 326 pixels per inch, it’s more pixels than the human retina can see (when the device is held 10 to 12 inches from your face), 960×640, giving it four times as many pixel as the iPhone 3GS. The 800:1 contrast ratio is also four times better than the iPhone 3GS
– A4 chip, better battery life
– gyroscope
– 5mp camera, LED flash, 720p 30 fps recording, $4.99 for iMovie
– iOS 4 (renamed and out on June 21st for current users, gold master today)
– Bing added to iPhone search
– iAds (from 1st July)
– Facetime – wifi only video chat, Open standard
– Launches 24 Jun, 16GB $199, 32GB $299 – good price
– More notable for what wasn’t announced
– Safari 5 came out after keynote – fast, reader view, signed extensions
– xCode 4 also demo’d at WWDC
– All Things D D8 Conference video – full length Steve Jobs vid
46:56 – Adobe Digital Publishing Platform
– magazine viewer technology is but one step in Adobe’s overarching Digital Publishing Platform effort, which will eventually extend to cross-platform app delivery of magazines, books, newpapers, and retail catalogs, but which for now is limited to one magazine on the iPad.
– We expect to use this technology to deliver more of our publications over the coming months,” said Thomas Wallace, editorial director of Condé Nast, Wired’s parent company
– Adobe says that the Digital Publishing Platform will be based on a combination of its Creative Suite 5, which it launched in April of this year, and technologies from the “web analytics and online business optimization software and services” company Omniture, which it acquired for $1.8bn last October. At its creative core is Adobe’s latest version of its QuarkXPress-killer, InDesign CS5.
– The magazine viewer software has not yet been released to developers, but according to Adobe’s Digital Publishing Platform roadmap (PDF), it’s due this summer at Adobe Labs.
– And, no, Apple isn’t making a Flash exception by allowing the Wired app into its App Store store. The Digital Publishing Platform generates applications in Objective C, as per Apple’s demands.
– Ambitious and potentially market grabbing move by Adobe – should Apple not have been doing this alongside announcement of iPad – everyone expected it
50:20 – Green Tech
– No note on pricing but should be available by the end of the year.
– Is this an improvement on existing dynamo/chargers already on the market?
– Orange Power Wellies
– http://newsroom.orange.co.uk/2010/06/06/here-comes-the-hot-stepper-orange-unveils-the-orange-power-wellies/
– Coverts heat from your feet into electricity
– Ideal for Glastonbury

Picks
Chris
Lego Printer
– A fully functioning lego printer! Superb. Complete with lego foremen sitting at control stations and lego horses turning cogs!
– Henry – http://prezi.com/ online Flash based presentation tool. A way to put an end to death by powerpoint?

Ian
iPad Walls
– Great site for iPad wallpapers