Need to keep track of invoices or log your mileage? “Yep, there’s an app for that!” After consulting with experts, we collected the best business apps that the iPhone has to offer.
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Apple’s iPhone will go on sale later this year in China, the world’s largest mobile market, but its partner China Unicom may find selling the phone carries its own burdens.
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Do Americans overpay for cellular service? Consumer-oriented organizations answered a forceful “yes” in a July federal filing with the FCC.
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Nokia Oyj will try again to tackle Apple Inc’s iPhone in the top-end of the handset market with a bet on Linux software, several industry sources told Reuters.
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Sony says it is going to offer an e-book reader with the ability to wirelessly download books. That adopts a key feature of the Kindle from Amazon.com and enhances the competition in a small but fast-growing market.
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Microsoft Corp. is giving people with regular cell phones access to the same kinds of programs that smart phone owners have embraced.
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Nokia Corp., the world’s largest maker of cell phones, said Monday that it will start making a small, light laptop, similar to ones PC manufacturers are already selling through wireless carriers around the world.
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Our favorite apps work with or without Internet access. Because, chances are, Wi-Fi hotspots aren’t the only places you’ll need help with the local lingo.
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American Airlines has expanded its in-flight internet service to more aircraft.
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Blockbuster Inc. says it will start offering movies that can be watched on certain Motorola Inc. cell phones, a first for the struggling rental company.
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Software developers will be able to start charging for applications downloads to Palm Inc’s high-profile Pre smartphone with the company’s launch of an e-commerce beta program set to start in mid-September.
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Late last week, analyst Ilya Grozovsky at Morgan Joseph downgraded Palm from “hold” to “sell” because he now estimates that Palm has shipped 50,000 fewer units than he had previously estimated they should have. His note was followed by a similar one from Ashok Kumar at Collins Stewart, who alleges that Palm has cut production of Pres because of weakening demand, and who is also bearish on the smartphone maker. Palm’s stock dipped a bit on the earlier report’s release, but the rest of the market saw the dip as a buying opportunity and rushed back in, driving the stock even higher. Clearly, this was vote of “no confidence”—not in Palm, but in Grozovsky and Kumar.
Analyst estimates of a device’s shipping volume are notoriously unreliable, and the market obviously didn’t put much stock in Grozovsky’s numbers. But the fact that the downgrade was so widely reported is yet another datapoint on a trend that I’ve informally observed of late. Based on gadget press commentary on Palm, my discussions with others in the tech industry, and my own feelings on the Pre, it seems that Palm has lost momentum over the summer. Some of this momentum loss is Apple’s fault, but most of it is Palm’s
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The US Department of Justice has weighed in on Jammie Thomas-Rasset’s $1.92 million liability for damages, calling the amount perfectly constitutional. In fact, Congress intended for such massive damages to fall like a stone upon even noncommercial P2P users.
Thomas-Rasset was the first defendant in the RIAA’s 18,000-person war on file-sharing to take her case all the way to trial. After two trials, she ended up owing $80,000 per song, for a total of $1.92 million, an amount promptly challenged as “unconstitutional” by the defense.
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Obsessive compulsive on the cellular and organismal level, via strep throat: In some ways, an autoimmune disease is a bit like an obsessive compulsive disorder, with the immune system getting so keyed up to clean up an infection that it starts going after anything that even looks like the original invader. But now there’s an indication that some cases of obsessive-compulsive behavior are the result of an autoimmune disease. Apparently, streptococcal infections (think strep throat) can leave their younger victims suffering from tics and other obsessive-compulsive syndromes. A recent paper describes how inoculations with strep bacteria could trigger an analogous set of symptoms in mice. Apparently, the same symptoms could be transferred to new mice simply by injecting them with antibodies isolated from the first, indicating the involvement of an immune response. Weird on many levels.
A vicious Facebook cycle: The title of this paper about says it all—”More Information than You Ever Wanted: Does Facebook Bring Out the Green-Eyed Monster of Jealousy?” The only thing that’s missing is the answer, which is a statistically significant, personality controlled, and hierarchically regressed “yes,” at least when it comes to college undergraduates. The authors speculate that it’s a bit of self-reinforcing process. Anyone who’s prone to use Facebook will obviously use it to check out their new partner, come across notes and photos that are probably ambiguous (or evidence of past relationships that’s not), get a bit jealous, and start searching for more details.
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Although the US and other nations currently produce ethanol from the sugars and starches of crops like sugar cane and corn, ethanol isn’t a good match for our existing fuel infrastructure—and this form of production runs the risk of putting energy in competition with food production for resources like land and water. As a result, attention has shifted to figuring out how to produce a new generation of biofuels from different sources that more closely approximate the diesel and gasoline in use today.
Yesterday’s edition of Science contained a perspective on the prospects for these next-generation biofuels. Although it’s very short, only a page long, it contains an excellent list of references to very current publications. The diversity of approaches it covers highlights how many options there are to produce different fuels, each with its own advantages and drawbacks. In the following sections, we’ll discuss different methods of producing biofuels; although the text presents them as alternatives, it’s important to emphasize that there are significant overlaps among them, and more than one technology might emerge for widespread use.
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Snow Leopard may be arriving far sooner than most of us expected, and Microsoft is dropping Entourage in order to replace it with a version of Outlook for the Mac. If that’s not exciting enough for this week, other top Apple news involved antiglare screens coming back to the MacBook Pro, more rumors about the Apple tablet, and possible Blu-ray support coming to iTunes. Read on for the roundup:
Snow Leopard cometh soon, brings installation tricks galore: The latest build seeded to developers has gone golden master and could be set for retail release any day now. The latest information suggests that installing Snow Leopard should be a breeze, too.
Office for Mac to get actual version of Outlook in 2010: Hell has frozen over: Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit says that the next version of Office for Mac will arrive in 2010 with a genuine Outlook client and better Exchange support.
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Let’s look back at the week that was in Microsoft news:
Zune HD 16GB is $220, 32GB is $290, coming on September 15: Microsoft has finally confirmed that the Zune HD 16GB will cost $220 and that the 32GB version will cost $290. The device is set for release on September 15, 2009.
Zune HD specs reveal battery life estimates, format support: Microsoft has finally released the technical specifications for the Zune HD. We’ve got details on dimensions, included accessories, battery life, and format support.
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Two class action lawsuits have been filed recently against Apple and AT&T for the lack of support for multimedia messaging (MMS) in the US. While support is baked in to iPhone OS 3.0 that was released this past June, the feature has yet to be enabled for US customers by AT&T.
When Apple announced that iPhone OS 3.0 was coming, it said that it would support MMS on the iPhone 3G and the upcoming iPhone 3GS. Unfortunately—to a chorus of boos during the keynote—Apple SVP Scott Forstall said that support from AT&T wouldn’t be ready at launch. At the time, AT&T said that support would be coming in “late summer.” Summer’s not over quite yet, so we presume that AT&T is still completing “some system upgrades that will ensure our customers have the best experience with MMS.”
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This week in gaming we have an exploration of the issues that make us walk away from games, a review of an addictive Xbox Live Trials title, and we take the Xbox 360′s Games on Demand for a Spin. Here is your week in gaming.
Why we quit: the moments that push us away from gaming: When you look at the behavior of gamers, developers may want to de-emphasize the question of why we play, and begin to worry about why we quit. How one badly-placed checkpoint made us wonder: what makes us walk away from games?
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A week ago, Samsung’s Ion-based N510 netbook (Ion is the name for NVIDIA’s chipset and integrated GPU for the Intel Atom processor) became available for preorder in France, and some fancy math suggested it would cost $560 in the USA. The real situation is worse, as a USA MSRP has just emerged, pricing the N510 at $599 stateside beginning in September. This news should invite some serious conversation about the price premium Ion carries, especially since new information indicates the N510 will carry the gimped Ion LE chipset, raising the possibility that the full-blown Ion chipset could be even more expensive.
The N510 is an 11.6″ model with premium features like HDMI output and 1366*768 resolution enabled by its Ion platform and extra size. Advertised battery life is somewhere between 6.5 and 7.5 hours, but it’s likely to be only slightly shorter than Menlow alternatives. As a netbook product without any pricing data, it’s clear that the N510 is relatively appealing.
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Laptops are hard to test. Any review is inherently a review of a complete system, because it’s impossible to control for one component, as is routine in reviews of desktop components. So, comparing desktop processors necessitates having one laptop for each processor, and direct comparisons aren’t possible unless the hardware is otherwise identical. In this context, it should come as no surprise that a simple question like power consumption should wait years to be properly addressed.
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Asia has seen quite a bit of action on Internet censorship in the last week, with China and Malaysia scaling back their censorship plans while Vietnam increases its control. Although most of the news was good, the region still has some way to go before free speech advocates will feel comfortable.
The highest profile of the three countries is China with its once-mandatory client-side filtering software, “Green Dam Youth Escort.” China’s technology minister, Li Yizhong, claimed to the press this week that the whole alleged requirement was one big “misunderstanding,” and that the software would no longer be required to be installed either by PC makers or by home users.
This claim is disingenuous at best, considering that Chinese officials emphasized for months that the software would be mandatory and must be preinstalled or included on disc with every new PC sold in China—a plan that was suspended on June 30 in order to supposedly give manufacturers more time to comply. The software, which researchers have discovered sports numerous security vulnerabilities, isn’t dead, though, and will still be required in schools and Internet cafes. Some PC vendors are also including it voluntarily with their products.
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Microsoft has released the Windows Management Framework Release Candidate for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 on Microsoft Connect. This RC includes Windows Remote Management (WinRM) 2.0, Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) 4.0, and Windows PowerShell 2.0. While packages for Windows XP and Window Server 2003 are not included in this RC, Microsoft says they will be made available in future.
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A video preview on TweakTown shows off a new piece of hardware from PhotoFast, whose DIY SSDs have been a barren source of amusement since their launch and ensuing obscurity last year. The new drive sports a new card format, increased performance, and additional features like RAID and a fancy new controller.Â
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Action games often have multiplayer modes that feel like are were—at best—tacked-on as an afterthought. These multiplayer games often rely on Capture the Flag and deathmatches; if done right, playing online can be fun, even if the play is unremarkable. However, details have been revealed about Brütal Legend‘s multiplayer mode, which sounds like it’s going to be much more innovative and enjoyable than expected.
According to previews, Tim Schafer’s new rock-action title will allow up to four players to battle online in an RTS format. Players will start out with bases (in the form of demonic stages) and will need to capture and control resource fountains; resources are presented as rock fans whom you’ll want to keep under your control. Each player will have unique units and spells to pit against each other, and they also have the ability to switch between a commander and an avatar on the fly.
Players can roam the battlefield with their avatar, playing the role of a near-invincible battlemage that is apparently able to blast enemy units on the fly. You can switch to a top-down commander viewpoint with the flick of a thumbstick and fly over the battlefield with the ability to command/upgrade your units via a radial menu. Commands are set to be simple, utilizing basic controller buttons with the menu.
Overall, Brütal Legend‘s multiplayer sounds like it’s going to be a mix of styles between the game’s single-player campaign and Halo Wars solid RTS gameplay. Once again, new details about the game have us all excited here at Ars, and we can’t wait to see the game in action.
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Despite the popularity of digital music, from single-track purchases to subscriptions, physical media has continued to generate the most music revenue in (almost) every market in the world. According to data from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), though, that will soon change: revenue from digital music sales worldwide are on track to equal that of physical sales as early as 2016, and by 2010 in the United States.
Digital music first appeared as a statistic in IFPI’s measurements in 2004, when it constituted just two percent of total music revenue. At the end of 2008, digital music accounted for 20 percent of the revenue of all music sales worldwide, and has steadily increased by about five percentage points every year since 2005. If the growth continues at this rate, worldwide revenue generated from digital music will equal that of all physical media sold sometime in mid-2016.
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Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM (build 7600.16385) is now available for MSDN and TechNet subscribers. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Independent Hardware Vendors (IHVs) also got access to the final build today. The 64-bit version (there is no 32-bit version for Windows Server 2008 R2) is available for download in Chinese-Simplified, English, French, German, Japanese, and Korean. Other languages are supposed to arrive on August 21. At the same time, two new downloads were recently posted on the Microsoft Download Center: Windows Server 2008 R2 Evaluation Virtual Hard Drive Images for Hyper-V (180 Days) and Windows Server 2008 R2 Multilingual User Interface Language Packs.
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Mobile streaming video company Qik has, after more than a year of waiting, finally gotten an iPhone version of its eponymous app approved for distribution via the App Store. It comes with a number of compromises, however, that depart from the promise of mobile live video streaming directly from the iPhone.
Qik is a website where users can store, view, and stream videos. It’s also a mobile phone app that lets users record, stream, and upload videos directly from their phones. Naturally, Qik announced that it was making an iPhone app early on in the App Store process, but ran into a few problems: the video stream from the iPhone’s camera wasn’t available from a public API and AT&T’s terms of service don’t permit streaming video from “Web camera posts or broadcasts.” (Such limitations were also problematic for SlingPlayer Mobile, but oddly, not for YouTube or MLB.com.) That essentially forced Qik to go underground with its iPhone client, and the company released a version that worked with jailbroken iPhones.
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Federal court documents are currently made available to the public through a crufty system called PACER. For eight cents per page, users can download filings and other relevant documents associated with individual cases. PACER is intended to open case law and court activity to broad public scrutiny, but the system’s obfuscated design and its paywall significantly undermine its efficacy.
The content hosted on PACER can be freely redistributed by third parties because copyright is not applicable to court documents, but the access fees make it costly and difficult for data archivers to assemble their own comprehensive mirrors that would offload the hosting burden and make the content more easily accessible to the general public. Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) is launching a new project to tackle this problem.
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The human stomach is a treacherous environment, bathed in a mixture of gastric acid and proteolytic enzymes. Most bacteria are incapable of surviving here, but Helicobacter pylori, a spiral-shaped bacterium that is infamous for causing ulcers, has managed to buck this trend, adapting to—even thriving in—this harshest of environments.
A neutralophile—an organism that lives optimally at a neutral pH—it synthesizes large quantities of urease, an enzyme that catalyzes the breakdown of urea to produce ammonia (NH3) and carbon dioxide (CO2), which raise the stomach’s extremely low pH to more comfortable levels. Another key to its success is its ability to make its way across the mucosa, a protective layer that separates the stomach’s highly acidic interior from the rest of the body. Without this layer, the gastric acid produced within would easily dissolve the stomach’s own walls.
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While we still don’t have an exact release date, Capcom has at least revealed when gamers can get their first taste of the upcoming Lost Planet 2, with a demo hitting Xbox Live on August 19.
The demo will be the same as the one that has been shown off to press at E3, Comic-Con, and the upcoming GamesCon in Germany. It will let players test out the co-op mode as they attempt to take down a giant salamander boss, and Capcom says that there will be a heavy emphasis on teamwork. The demo will also introduce players to some of the new weaponry—including the all-new support weapons—will be featured in the game.
While the demo will be available to Xbox Live Gold subscribers next week, those with Silver accounts will have to wait a week, with a demo released on August 26.
Ben’s thoughts
I had a chance to play this at E3, and you’re in for a treat. A slightly gross treat in places, but a treat nonetheless.
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As was announced yesterday, Marvel vs Capcom 2 is finally hitting the PlayStation Network, and it headlines this week’s PS Store update. Joining it are a few PSOne classics and quite a lot of add-on content.
PS3 owners can now download the original Tomb Raider ($9.99) to relive the pixelated glory days of Lara Croft, while lesser known PSOne games Dead in the Water and Ten Pin Alley ($5.99 each) are also available.
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In the comments section for our review of the recently-released Trials HD on Xbox Live, many readers pointed out that the game is a modern update to a concept that has been around for a very long time. Go ahead and peek into the comments for yourself and you can find a half-dozen people with fond memories of a half-dozen titles that came from the same idea. So why, some ask, should we pay $15 for such a tired concept?
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Apple’s Board of Directors is preparing to meet next week to discuss a replacement for Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The meeting is expected to take place on Tuesday, according to the ever-familiar “person familiar with the matter” speaking to the Wall Street Journal. The board meets somewhat regularly—”at least” four times a year—and the discussion of who should take Schmidt’s place is fairly standard procedure for a situation such as this.
The news comes just a couple weeks after Schmidt resigned from Apple’s Board. Though Schmidt did not issue a statement about his departure, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that both parties decided it was the right thing to do given the circumstances. “[A]s Google enters more of Apple’s core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric’s effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest,” Jobs said. “Therefore, we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple’s Board.”
The FTC launched a probe into Google and Apple earlier this year to determine whether Schmidt’s and Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson’s presence on both companies’ boards might present antitrust concerns. Despite Schmidt’s departure, the FTC has said that it’s continuing its investigation because Levinson still sits on both boards. If the Commission discovers that his presence has somehow reduced competition between Google and Apple, the two companies may face sanctions and Levinson will undoubtedly be forced to leave, but there’s little information to suggest that it’s anything more than an investigation at this point.
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Sony didn’t have much to celebrate in the July NPD report on video game sales; the company instead sent us a fact-sheet explaining just how great a deal the PS3 continues to be, pointing out all the ways the PlayStation 3 hardware bests the 360 and the Wii in terms of features.
“When you compare all the features against other industry offerings, there is no doubt that the PlayStation 3 provides the most complete entertainment system on the market today—right out of the box,” the company claims.
If a company offers a product with such wide and immediate appeal, it doesn’t usually need to bring up the competition; it merely sits back and allows the product to speak for itself. So what’s going on here?
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The big question that still surrounds the Beatles: Rock Band is the song list. What tracks will be shipping with the game? Which tracks will be added later as downloadable content? Is your favorite song included? This month’s Game Informer is reported to have the entire track list, so feast your eyes on the songs we’re likely to be playing on 9-9-09.
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A mobile application developer claims the phone is sending your GPS coordinates and more back to Palm on a daily basis.
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Everywhere you look (even here at Ars), there are articles about people making poor decisions about what kinds of info and how much to share on sites like Facebook. The Internet is no longer a place where you can hide out easily—friends, family, and employers are all lurking, reading your embarrassing status updates and checking up on those drunken pictures from last week. And that’s just the beginning—the world of social networking is a feeding ground for identity thieves and stalkers, too.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Many users are aware that Facebook has numerous privacy controls, for example, but even the most experienced Facebook users often don’t know just how much they can control who sees what. For instance, did you know that you can specify exactly who can see your status updates, down to different groups of friends (not just “friends” versus “everyone”)? What about controlling which groups of people can even find you in a Facebook search to begin with?
If you don’t want to be socially available at all, then the solution is right in front of you and you can stop reading! However, if you have been wondering how you can be socially available on Facebook while still keeping your privacy under control, this guide is for you.
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Video game sales date for July has come in from the NPD Group, and the industry continues to sink. “The US video games industry declined for the fifth consecutive month, bringing year-to-date sales to $8.16 billion, down 14 percent from the same time period last year,” wrote NPD analyst Anita Frazier. “In order for the industry to come in flat or slightly up for the total year, the back five months of the year have to come in 11 percent (or more) higher than the last five months of last year.”
She points out that we do have surefire hits like Halo: ODST and The Beatles: Rock Band coming later this year, but for now, the industry is treading water. Let’s see who’s doing it most efficiently.
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Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is a conference mainly aimed at Windows software developers. The first one was almost 17 years ago, but the conference has not happened yearly; the event is only hosted when there is a new Microsoft technology on the way. Attendees typically come to learn about future of the Microsoft platform, check out upcoming products, exchange ideas with fellow professionals, talk to Microsoft’s leaders and top engineers, and sometimes even write some code at the more hands-on labs. There is a lot to talk about this year.
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Never ones to let a good deed go unpunished, scammers quickly learned to take advantage of a user-friendly policy that allowed a misregistered domain name—perhaps due to a typo—to be withdrawn at no cost. Scammers used this “Add Grace Period” to grab huge numbers of domains, throw up pages full of advertising, then withdraw the applications before the bill came due.
It was a practice known as “domain tasting,” and it gave the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) a bad case of indigestion. ICANN, which manages domain name assignments, ultimately responded by imposing penalties that would ensure any group that performed an excessive number of these premature withdrawals wound up with a substantial bill. In a report on the results of the new policy, released yesterday, ICANN announced that its actions have essentially eliminated the delicious art of domain tasting.
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Microsoft has finally posted the technical specifications of the Zune HD on the Microsoft Store. The device’s dimensions are 52.7 mm x 102.1 mm x 8.9 mm (w x h x d), with a weight of 2.6 ounces (74 grams). The Zune HD will ship with the following accessories: headphones, Zune Sync Cable, and three pairs of foam earpiece covers. Battery life is cited as up to 24 hours (wireless off) for music and up to four hours for video, but this seemed a little toward the low-end. We e-mailed Microsoft and got back much better numbers: up to 33 hours (wireless off) for music and up to 8.5 hours for video (charge time is three hours when connected to a PC and two hours with A/C adapter), with the following footnote:
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While sales of standard handsets continues to slip, The Tech Herald reports that smartphone sales remained on track in Q2. Nokia and Apple saw singificant increases, and HTC has already started to see good results on it’s Androud baed phones, such as the HTC Magic, recently released into the Canadian market to compete directly with the Iphone.
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Digital publishing and open access policies are changing the face of academic publishing, and many of the trends that develop here are likely to make their way into the larger publishing market. That’s what made news that broke earlier this year so striking: a leaked memo suggested that the American Chemical Society’s publishing wing was almost entirely abandoning print and would focus instead on digital publishing. Since then, however, the ACS said that it will continue printing “condensed” versions of its journals for the time being. To find out how this organization is approaching publishing in the digital age, we spoke with John Brandon Nordin, its VP of marketing, Web strategy, and innovation.
Nordin pointed out that the ACS has a somewhat different mandate from that of a for-profit publishing house. “Our charter is to help advance the scientific record, and advance science itself,” Nordin said. That involves a significant amount of publishing—”In that role, we publish 34-plus journals, and have a century of publishing heritage”—but the focus is primarily on serving the academic community.
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More and more rumors continue to spill out concerning a long-rumored tablet-like device from Apple. Today seems brimming with new bits and pieces coming from a variety of sources.
A report from Gizmodo quotes an inside source that claims to have seen the mythical device. The mockups that the source supposedly had a 10″ screen and looked like a large black iPhone, complete with the iconic home button. It is expected to come in two editions, “one with a webcam and one for educational use,” and may be able to connect to a Mac and used as a touchscreen controller. The project to design the device is said to have been underway from four to six years, with the first prototype being made in late 2008; both details jibe with recent rumors.
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GameStop is an amazingly profitable company, and those profits are due largely to the margins the company enjoys on used game sales. When GameStop gives you $15 to $20 for a game that has been out a mere week, then sells the same game for $45, they’re making money that no retailer selling new games can match; new games have a very thin profit margin for retailers. Which is why it is surprising to see Best Buy make its new game prices competitive with GameStop’s used game prices.
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