Sometimes I wonder how companies screen their marketing folks.
Sprint is about to launch a $100 million ad campaign for its upcoming Instinct phone -- an "iPod killer." The first ad video is fairly amusing. Poor Sprint.
The first video takes the iPhone to task for its crappy pseudo-GPS by pointing to a location "somewhere in this ginormous circle." Okay, problem the first is trying to be hip by using words Merriam-Webster added to its dictionary last year, and that's the second problem too: comparing the Instinct with last year's iPhone. Meanwhile, the 3G iPhone, which reportedly does have GPS, will be going up against an Instinct that reportedly:
doesn't have have an accelerometer
doesn't have pinching and pulling to resize
doesn't rotate between landscape and portrait for web browsing
doesn't have the iTunes Store
doesn't have thousands of developers and an App Store
Indeed. We think Sprint will definitely be able to hear a pin drop when that ad airs. Oy.
As MacRumors reports, a rather notable feature has been identified in the latest beta of iPhone Firmware 2.0. When Chinese is selected as the input language, the user is presented with an option to use handwriting recognition where character glyphs are stroked on the screen with a finger. After a portion of the character has been drawn, a suggestion menu presenting four possible, fully-formed characters appears to the right of the input pane.
The Chinese website Wretch.cc has posted a gallery of screenshots of this feature. MacRumors indicates that they have been able to confirm that this feature does exist in the latest beta of Firmware 2.0, available to registered iPhone developers.
At present, there is no support for English handwriting.
Many of the Apple faithful may remember that Apple was a pioneer on the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) field with its Newton family of handheld computers. The Newton relied upon handwriting recognition (stylus-based) and was criticized for shoddy recognition in the early units utilizing a third-party recognizer. Later models, however, use "Rosetta," a handwriting recognition system developed in-house at Apple. [See a demonstration video of Rosetta in action here.] Rosetta lives on in Mac OS X as a feature called "Inkwell." Many consider Rosetta / Inkwell to be the most advanced handwriting recognition technology yet developed.
It seems very likely that an Inkwell-based English recognizer will make it into the iPhone - hopefully in time for the June launch of iPhone 2.0. Newton Poetry points out that Apple has recently started looking for a Handwriting Recognition Engineer on its job site. Apple is obviously striving to keep this technology on the leading edge for its future mobile devices. Stay tuned...
MacRumors reports that certain third party iPhone accessory makers have received information regarding the physical dimensions of the upcoming 3G capable iPhone. Their reports gives us a glimpse of what to expect from the upcoming unit.
Rumors of the new iPhone, however, are being published almost daily now, with several conflicting claims. This latest report claims that the new iPhone will carry a tapered design along the edges, replacing the aluminum backing with a glossy plastic back that approximates the look of metal. The iPhone's front silver metallic bezel will remain though it is expected to be much thinner. Meanwhile, the overall form factor and screen size is expected to be comparable to the current iPhone, though the possibility of black, white and even red backings is being considered.
The most interesting information in the report is the addition of an 3rd sensor near the ear piece of the iPhone. The existing iPhone houses two sensors (ambient light and proximity sensor) adjacent to the phone's earpiece speaker. The upcoming design is said to have a 3rd sensor in the same location. iLounge speculates that it could represent a small camera, which would fulfill circulating iPhone video-chat rumors, but they also concede it may be something far less glamorous.
The 3G capable iPhone is expected to debut on June 9th and Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC).
Hikers, joggers, and active folk in general should have a look at Berbie's TrailRunner 1.6 (v223) for Mac OS X. TrailRunner is a route planning software for all kinds of long distance sports like running, biking, hiking, inline-skating, skiing and more. If you ever asked yourself how long your workout routes are and what route you should choose for this evening - then TrailRunner should be your training-partner.
Import and export GPX-Tracklists. Export KML files for GoogleEarth.
Plan routes interactively.
Collect routes.
Route description and direction signs at crossings.
Timed-checkpoints according to your pace.
Rate your favorite tracks.
Plan routes automatically with target distance and as many favorite tracks as possible.
Export route directions onto your iPod or cellphone as iPod-Notes or NanoMap-Photos.
Collect your workout data in a Diary.
Send to and exchange routes with friends and workout partners.
Import GPX-Tracklists from GPS-units.
New in this release:
Updated the open street map source to another map renderer that looks much more vivid than the old one. To update your cache, remove the Library/Application Support/TrailRunner/GeoTiles/openstreetmap.org folder.
Engadget reports that reliable sources indicate that the second-generation iPhone, with 3G data connectivity, is well into testing and a number of lucky individuals are carrying this phone around day-to-day.
The list of what they've heard:
The first thing people will notice: the 2nd gen iPhone will be about the same size and shape as the first gen.
It will, of course, have 3G. And proper GPS!
The most noticeable physical difference is back of the phone is no longer metal -- the whole thing is glossy black, from top to bottom. The volume buttons are now chrome.
Because it's got a little less metal to deal with, it doesn't have quite as many angular edges. The battery is (still) not removable.
The phone itself will be slightly thicker than the first gen device.
The headphone jack will no longer be recessed, and will finally be flush with the body.
The device itself uses roughly the same size and resolution screen as the first generation product.
No solid word on battery life or storage capacity.
Engadget suggests that it may ship "as early as July," but analysts suggest that it will be released at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference in July (9-13th).
As reported on Touch Arcade, Apple released the fourth beta of the iPhone SDK today, featuring full support for OpenGL ES, including iPhone simulator support for easy code debugging and tweaking.
OpenGL ES is a royalty-free, cross-platform API for full-function 2D and 3D graphics on embedded systems - including consoles, phones, appliances and vehicles. It consists of well-defined subsets of desktop OpenGL, creating a flexible and powerful low-level interface between software and graphics acceleration. OpenGL ES includes profiles for floating-point and fixed-point systems and the EGL specification for portably binding to native windowing systems. OpenGL ES 1.X is for fixed function hardware and offers acceleration, image quality and performance. OpenGL ES 2.X enables full programmable 3D graphics.
Every improvement Apple makes to the iPhone SDK translates to more and higher quality games on iPhone App Store launch day in June. We can't wait.
DVD-Cloner Inc. has released iPod-Cloner v1.13 for Windows 2000/20003/XP/Vista. As the company describes it,
iPod-Cloner is a one-click solution to convert all kinds of DVD to iPod compatible format. The conversion process is fast and easy. Its built-in iPod Files Manager allows you to transport all files, including music, video, movies and TV shows directly from PC to iPod.
iPod-Cloner key features:
Directly transports DVD files from PC to iPod without iTunes!
Supports the conversion of latest DVD movies
Supports iPod Nano and Classic
Faster and easier to use.( up to 400%)
New in this release:
Fixed the bug of unable to transport video files to some models of iPod
A post over at ModMyiFone reveals a new handwriting recognition application for jailbroken iPhones called HWPen that allows for text entry by way of stroking character shapes as an alternative to the standard on-screen keyboard method of text entry.
The application is currently in beta and is also available for the Palm OS platform.
Apple's recent release of the iPhone SDK and announcement of the upcoming "iPhone 2.0" upgrade and iTunes App Store has the company poised to revolutionize the mobile gaming experience. And thanks to the impressive iPhone game demos from SEGA, Electronic Arts, and others, the industry sees this for what it is and is clamoring to get on board.
We here at iPod Hacks are very excited by all that is happening with Apple's mobile platform right now and see this as a pivotal time for mobile gaming and mobile computing in general. And so, we are proud to announce the launch of a new website dedicated exclusively to gaming on the iPhone and iPod touch:
Touch Arcade "Keeping you in touch with the latest in iPhone gaming."
This new site is a collaboration between myself and Arnold Kim of MacRumors. We are very excited to be involved in this project and are striving earnestly to become the fun and exciting nexus of the Apple mobile gaming community. We hope that readers come to Touch Arcade to get their daily fix of iPhone gaming news and reviews, both leading up to and well beyond the landmark arrival of iPhone 2.0 in June.
As we've said before, Apple has just made all other mobile platforms irrelevant. The iPhone platform is the future. And what an exciting future it's shaping up to be.
Syncopation provides a hands-free solution to keep your iTunes music collection synchronized across multiple computers running Mac OS X. Once installed on two or more Macs, Syncopation will find music that is on one computer but not the others and automatically transfer the songs between them so that they all contain your complete music collection. Leave it running in the background and it will keep your iTunes libraries up-to-date as you add music.
New in this release:
Fixes bugs in the Import wihout Copying feature, and the Block/Pin feature.
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