Archive for June, 2008

Here’s an interesting one. That AMD netbook we spotted hanging around at Computex isn’t a bona fide AMD product after all. According to the unit’s device manager, it’s actually an Everun, although the only Everun we know of looks drastically different that the thing pictured above. In all likelihood, that moniker is simply a placeholder, and AMD spokesman Phil Hughes even confirmed that “it [was] a Raon Digital product.” Reportedly, the unit will hit production at the end of July, and while a ship date wasn’t mentioned, both a Sempron- and Turion-based version should be available. Early reports even suggest that WiBro / HSDPA could be found on select variations, but we’ll give Raon Digital a chance to come clean before we dig deep into even wilder speculation.

[Via Pocketables]

Read - Device Manager photograph
Read - AMD spokesman comments

“I can run this on a Mac or PC — you might guess which my favorite is. I’m going to launch my favorite browser — which happens to be Safari. Just log right in.” Looks pretty solid, almost identical to the desktop apps.

“It’s a breakthrough web 2.0 app interface.” Demo time!

Mail, contacts, calendar — all this stuff looks exactly like Apple’s native apps. This is pretty nice.
“Go to any browser, type me.com. Simple, easy to remember. Log in… you get an incredibly rich email client. It feels like a desktop.”

“What’s really going to surprise people, we’ve built an incredible suite of web 2.0 apps using Ajax.”

11:16AM PT - “It works with the native apps on my Mac or PC — it works with Mail.app, iCal, Address Book… as well as Outlook. You’d expect that it would work with those native apps.”

Example of email — gets pushed down to all devices. Change a contact? Gets pushed up to MobileMe, down to all other device. “The best part of this, it works over the air. Everything is up to date.”
“MobileMe stores your info up in the cloud so you can get to it anywhere using any of your devices — Mac, PC, iPhone — it will push information up and down to keep everything up to date all the time.”

Push email, contacts, and calendars… everything is up to date wherever you are.
Schiller just called ActiveSync ActiveStink — the mockery! Guffawing.
“Good morning, I’m really excited to tell you about this brand new service… so what’s the idea? It’s like having Exchange for the rest of us.”

Phil Schiller’s up! Demo time.

“We’re very very excited about this. It’s called MobileMe.”

“Now, we’ve got something entirely new.”

“Imagine you’re a professor teaching a class on how to write iPhone apps! You want people to mail apps around… you can get certified and register up to 100 iPhones, apps can be circulated and posted for up to 100 iPhones. We think we’ve got a great story now.” Applause.
“But we’re adding a third way — we call it ad hoc.”

“We got some other feedback that enterprises want another way to distribute apps — they want to disto them for themselves, so we’re adding enterprise app distribution.” Enterprises authorize iPhones, and then create and distribute apps on their intranet that can only run on those phones. Users sync their custom apps through iTunes. Yes, iTunes is apparently the new enterprise tool.
11:11AM PT - “Now, we’ve enlarged the scope of the App Store from the 22 countries it was going to be in, it’s going to be in 62 countries — so almost anywhere in the world where there’s an iPhone. If your app is 10MB or less, they can download it over cell, WiFi, or iTunes — if it’s over 10MB they can get it on WiFi or iTunes. So that’s the App Store. We think there’s never been anything like it.”
“And for those apps you bought, when there’s an update you can download that update wirelessly as well. Devs set the price of the apps, keep 70% of the revenues, we don’t charge them any fees — we FairPlay their apps so they’re secure, and if they want to give them away for free, there’s no charge whatsoever.”

“Of course, we’ll have all these great apps, but how will we distribute them? The App store… it’s a way for devs to reach every single user. Users can pick their apps and wirelessly download them right to their phone.”

“It will be a free software update for all iPhone owners, and the price is down to $9.95 for iPod touch owners.” Meh applause.
“This is pretty cool. It’s one of the great advantages of not having plastic keys for your keyboard!” Big applause. “We think the iPhone 2.0 software will be phenomenal and raise use to a whole new level. We’ll release it in early July.”
“Really importantly, we’ve added many many languages, some of the ones we’re most excited about: two forms of entry for Japanese, two forms of entry for Chinese (simplified and traditional), including character drawing / recognition.” Eat up Martha.
11:07AM PT - “It’s super easy to download these docs and look at them on your iPhone. We’ve also added bulk delete and move, it’s rather handy. And the ability to save images you might get in an email, tap on them and save them to your library. The calc has a scientific mode… we’ve added parental controls. Teenagers might not like this, but that’s the way it has to be.” All the stuff we saw a couple months back.

“Isn’t that fantastic? This is going to be great. In addition… we’ve got a few new features. The first one: contact search. Type in a few chars, instantly find who you’re looking for. Second? Full iWork document support — Pages, Numbers, and of course, Keynote. Great way to look at your iWork docs on the go. And we’ve completed MS Office support: Word, Excel, and now PowerPoint, too.”

Forstall’s off, Steve’s back!

“The great thing about this: it scales… it’s a unified push notification service for all devs. It preserves battery life and maintains performance. And it all works over the air — WiFi and cellular. Available in September, but next month we’ll be seeding to devs. This has been an update of the SDK, thank you!”
11:04AM PT - Apple will maintain a persistent IP connection to the phone, where a 3rd party server can ping Apple’s notification service to your device. It can push badges, sounds, and custom textual alerts (like how SMSs look).

“We’ve come up with a far better solution — a push notification service Apple will provide to all developers.

“This is nuts.” Huge applause for that one.
“The wrong solution is to enable background processes… to allow an app to continue to run even after their user thinks they quit it.” Windows Mobile, we’re looking at you. Why’s it bad? “First, battery life, it drains power. Second, performance, it sucks up cycles and makes other things feel sluggish.” Uh oh, he’s showing the WinMo task manager.
“There has been one feature request that doesn’t currently exist… it’s mainly come from clients like IM, where by their very nature they want to get a notification even if the user isn’t running the app. We absolutely want to solve this problem, the question is how?”

Forstall’s back: “That was all running on an iPhone! And they had two weeks. One of the most fun parts about building a platform like iPhone 2.0 is seeing the innovation that comes from our developers.” Applause for the devs!

“And our LAST app [emphasis ours] comes from Digital Legends Entertainment… they only started two weeks ago.” Let’s see this fancy game, shall we?
ANOTHER medical app. This one by MIMvista. Someone, wake us when Steve’s back.

Wow, we heard Apple’s stock is down almost $5 since this keynote started. Maybe they should just demo their top three and keep going.

10:52AM PT - Next: Modality, showing a medical learning app. Great.

It’ll be out in the App Store “in a few weeks’ time.” Forstall’s back. Next, MLB.com, baseball fans will “love this application.” Jeremy Schoenherr is up to demo it.

The blues simulator just got huge applause!
Hmm, not too shabby — showing a piano, and what do you know, it’s better than the multi-touch piano they showed at D with Windows 7. They played a riff from Lennon’s “Imagine.”
Mark Terry from Moo Cow Music, it’s called Band, a collection of virtual instruments for creating music from scratch.

10:46AM PT - Forstall back, and another developer demo. Ugh.
Showing Enigmo — looks pretty hot, water droplets doing polygon-accurate collision tests per second. Next is Cro-Mag Rally, nine tracks, ten cars. Porting both games took “three days to get each game up and running — totally playable.”
Next is long time Mac game developer Pangea Software… two games to be demoed by Brian Greenstone. Man, please let this string of demos end!
Showing photography and video from their news network. Not bad! “We encourage you to get involved with the news you see — you can send news to us immediately from your iPhone.”
10:40AM PT - Next up, the Associated Press, Benjamin Mosse is up.

Showing photoblogging — they’ve looped in to the camera API to take shots and fire them off to your blog. Dialogue looks more like an email than a CMS. TypePad will also be available free.
10:40AM PT - Next up, the Associated Press, Benjamin Mosse is up.

Showing photoblogging — they’ve looped in to the camera API to take shots and fire them off to your blog. Dialogue looks more like an email than a CMS. TypePad will also be available free.
Man, these demos are crazy boring. Throw us a bone here Apple! Loopt will be free on the App Store at launch
Next is Loopt, Sam Altman is going to demo.
10:34AM PT - Demoing bidding, watching items, searching, My eBay, all the usual stuff, and bidding from the app. That’s nice, but couldn’t this have been done over the web?

Forstall: next is eBay. Ken Sun’s on stage.
Crap, these graphics look unbelievable compared to anything we’ve seen on a cellphone before. Seriously, these are DS-quality graphics, easily.
“Back when we showed you SMB in March, our dev team created four stages from scratch in just two weeks of dev time. 8 weeks later we had 110 stages… they also gave us all four of the classic monkeys!” Chuckles… aww, they’re playing as Baby.
“Thousands of people are building apps… we were really amazed with the quality of these apps. We’ve invited a number of these devs up here today.” Sega’s starting out. “Sega blew us away with what they accomplished in just two weeks with the first cut of Super Monkey Ball…” Ethan Einhorn from Sega is taking the stage

10:26AM PT - Going over quotes flacking the SDK… Disney, InfoWorld. Ok, we get it, you’re preaching to the choir here! This is the Apple developer conference, after all.
“We’ve got a great set of APIs and a really powerful set of tools. This has been out about 3 months… we asked them, what do they think? The response were unbelievably positive. Let me read you some of their quotes…”

Looks like he’s done, getting a rousing round of applause.
The quick-built app is loaded into the simulator and running. “Now let me take it one step further…” he’s going to test a tethered app install.

Ok, Scott, we love what you’ve done here, but we’re yawning. Then again, the thousands of devs in the audience are probably stoked — those that haven’t used the SDK anyway.

Demo time! “I want to concentrate on how we construct a UI…” making an app called Nearby Friends. Accesses the contacts database and Core Location to filter all contacts with contacts within 10mi. Building the UI with Interface Builder. Dragging and dropping interface elements.
Going over debungging and Xcode, instruments — all the stuff from the March iPhone roadmap event.

10:20AM PT - “We top it all off with Cocoa Touch — our UI object oriented framework, which makes building an app for our fullscreen touch interface an absolute breeze. We have a great set of APIs. On top of this we have a really powerful set of tools.”

“With the SDK in iPhone 2.0 we’re opening the same native APIs and tools we use internally… that means you as a dev can build apps for the iPhone the same way we do. Let’s start by talking about the APIs. The APIs and frameworks on the iPhone share extensively with OS X… We use the same kernel in the iPhone that forms the basis of OS X… almost all of them share the same source code line-for-line as OS X.” He’s going over the bits of Core Services: SQL lite, OpenGL ES, OpenAL
Steve’s back on: “That gives you a sense of what we’re doing in the enterprise, all this stuff built into iPhone 2.0. Next up is the SDK, to take us where we are there and to show us some really exciting stuff, I’d like to bring up Scott Forstall.” Applause.

Still going… the Army sure does love the new iPhone software!

Going over some firms, testimonials style. Great if you care about the petabytes in the datacenters of Disney, we guess!

10:13AM PT - “We’ve had phenomenal participation from higher education. Again, gotten fantastic feedback. We made a video of these customers, I’d love to show it to you…” Video time!

“We’ve had a beta going… 35% of the Fortune 500 has participated in that beta program. The top 5 banks, top 5 securities firms, 6 or 7 top airlines, 8 of 10 top pharma, and 8 of 10 top entertainment companies.”
“Exchange… as you know, we’ve done it… push email, calendars, contacts, auto-discovery, global address lookup, remote wipe, all this stuff built in. In addition we’ve worked with Cisco to build in their VPN services… all sorts of security demanded by the enterprise. Everything they told us they wanted, we built in.”
“iPhone 2.0 software, there are three parts: enterprise support, SDK, and new end-user features. Let me start with enterprise.”

10:10AM PT - “Let’s talk about iPhone, the place to start is our new software — the iPhone 2.0 platform, a giant step forward from where we’ve been… we started a dev program in March, which is just 95 days ago. In those 95 days we’ve had over 250k download the free SDK. We’ve had over 25k people apply to the pay developer program… unfortunately we couldn’t take everybody, so we admitted 4k people to the program…”

“To help me, I’m going to ask Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller to help me with parts of this. Then… Bertrand Serlet will give you a sneak peak at the next version of OS X called Snow Leopard.”
“Let’s get started. As you know there are three parts to Apple — the first part is Mac, second part is our music business, iPod and iTunes, and the third part is the iPhone. I’m going to take this morning to talk about the iPhone.”
“I’m sorry for all those folks that couldn’t be here… we’re going to have a great week this week. 147 sessions, 85 on the Mac, and 62 on the iPhone… it’s going to be packed! 169 hands-on labs, 1k Apple engineers, iFund and Intel sessions. I think it’s going to be one of the best WWDCs ever.”

10:07AM PT - “Thank you very much. I’m really glad to be here this morning. We’ve been working hard on some great stuff… thank you for coming to WWDC 2008. We’ve got a record 5200 attendees — we wish we could have had more, but we sold out!”
Roar, applause.

Music’s over, and here we go… lights all the way down, Steve’s on stage!

10:06AM PT - Lights are coming down! Crowd beginning to roar!

Announcer: “Turn off all cellphones, iPhones, PDAs… our program will start in a few minutes.”

10:02AM PT - OK, weird, a bunch of attendees just stood up and started clapping — we don’t know why, since it wasn’t Jobs (or so we think).
9:51AM PT - People still funneling in — this auditorium seats thousands of people, so it takes a little while. Say, is that Gavin Newsome? Oh, and there’s Al Gore.

9:46AM PT - We’re in! The cattle rush of the media was pretty mellow this time around. Shockingly enough, they’re playing oldies — not the usual soundtrack of Gnarles Barkley, Coldplay, Gorillaz, etc.
9:37AM PT - Everybody is crowding up at the closed gates, preparing for the Running of the Media.

9:16AM PT - People are really filing in. You’ve never heard so many people say the word “iPhone” in your life.

8:43AM PT - We’re in line at the Moscone Center (which is actually pretty spare at the moment), but it’s early. The media’s got a ton of MacBook Airs. Stay tuned for our live coverage of the event.

Steve just ran through a bunch of features of iPhone 2.0, and while we saw most of them back in March, some of them were new, like being able to draw in Chinese characters. There’s also new support for iWork documents and better Office doc support, as well as new abilities to save images from email to the photo library, and new contact search functions. It’ll hit in July free for iPhone owners, and the price has dropped to $9.95 for iPod touch owners — still high, but better than the $19.95 we heard in March.

Developing…

The Commodore 64 did a lot of things right: the right price, the right graphics, the right games, and the right 8-bit audio chipset that allowed 12 year-old programmers to POKE and PEEK their way into analog music bliss. Modder and musician “TK” saw an opportunity in all of this for an analog synthesizer, and he went for it. Fitting it with potentiometers, LEDs, and an additional 8 SID sound chips (for a total of 8), he is able to get 4 stereo pairs of sound and 4 voices out of what he calls the Midibox SID. If you hadn’t figured from the name, he did add MIDI control to the little beast. And, no, you cannot play Doom on it. Video after the break.

The last time we saw this downsized Atom-based laptop, it was looking staid and proper in a press shot. Finally someone has gotten their hands on this thing, and we’ve got to say — it looks pretty handsome (even if it is a rebadged, recolored MSI Wind, and a dead ringer for the Mini-Note). Specs seem unchanged, with a 10-inch 1024 x 800 display, 80GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM, and a 1.3-megapixel webcam, and the price appears to be holding at €399 (or about $630) as well. Still no word on when or if this is going to hit the states, but we’ve got our fingers crossed.

Just because you haven’t seen one on every street corner doesn’t mean that HP’s Blackbird 002 gaming rig hasn’t been around the block a time or two. Still, those of you who haven’t found the nerve (or spare change) to pull the trigger can look forward to being tempted even more this summer. Starting soon, the Blackbird 002 will be available in an exclusive configuration at Amazon, NewEgg and select Best Buy, Circuit City, J&R and Micro Center locations. This launch marks the first time the unit has sashayed into B&M outlets, and packed within will be an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 processor, dual NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT graphics cards, 4GB of Corsair Dominator RAM, 500GB SATA drive, 7.1-channel onboard HD audio, a 15-in-1 multicard reader, 900-watt power supply and an nForce SLI motherboard with RAID support. Said config will run customers $3,299, and a list of locations from which to buy it will be made available on June 29th.

 
HTC Touch Diamond boot video from Joshua Topolsky on Vimeo.

For those of you who absolutely, positively can’t wait to see more of the Touch Diamond in action, the folks over at pocketnow are giving you a taste of what it’s like to hold one in your hands. Apparently, when you boot up the phone you’re greeted with a helpful video showing you how to navigate the heavily-skinned version of Windows Mobile (AKA Touch Flo 3D) that it sports. Needless to say, it’s smoother than a baby’s bottom. Not that we’d know. Video after the break in its full 640 x 480 resolution.