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- Back to School 2010 Buyer's Guide for Apple Lovers
With the next school year just around the corner, we've put together a list of some important products that are must haves for students who are headed off to college. If you own a Mac or even just an iPhone, there’s something for you in our Back to School 2010 Buyer's Guide.
AppleCare$39 – $349 ($39 – $239 with educational discount), Apple Store
The necessity of this little gem should go without saying. Students get substantial discounts on Apple's AppleCare protection plan, so its definitely wise to invest now for peace of mind later. AppleCare doesn't cover accidental damage, but if you're the type that uses your Apple gear a lot and all that wear and tear can cause some components to wear out, you'll be covered when you need it most.
Extra Power Adapter$29 – $79, Apple Store
From studying in the library to working out in the gym to relaxing in front of the TV, as a student you tend to move around a lot. Grab an extra power adapter for your Mac or your iPad and keep one at home and one in your bag. You'll never end up at one place and realize you left your power adapter somewhere else.
Cases$29.95 and up, Apple Store
Most everyone agrees that with Apple, form exists with function. See those impressed looks you get when people see you with your Apple gadgets? Keep them in good shape by investing in a good case. I recommend neoprene cases from Incase or perhaps a tough rubberized case from Speck.
BookArc$39.95 – $49.95, Twelve South
To save some space in your dorm or apartment, consider the BookArc stand by Twelve South. It'll give your device "a home" and give it some protection at the same time. If you're using a portable Mac or an iPad, this is a great way to free up space by elevating your device and it includes several adapters for a snug fit.
Bose In-Ear Headphones$89.95, Apple Store
Sometimes the best time for you to study might not be the best time for others, and vice versa. Give yourself some privacy by investing in a good quality pair of headphones. In-ear headphones, like these by Bose, will give you better sound than traditional earbuds and help to block out external noise.
MiFi Hotspot$299.99 (but free with contract, monthly fees apply), Sprint
While its pretty easy to find wi-fi access these days, occasionally you'll find yourself in a location where there's no internet access. If you don't have tethering support on your iPhone, grab a MiFi mobile hotspot. It uses the cellular network to obtain a signal and then broadcasts as a wi-fi hotspot, enabling access for your Mac, iPad or any other-wifi enabled device.
Speaker Pillows$9.99, Target
If you haven't seen these yet, you'll be surprised at how many different ones there are to choose from. Just like the name sounds, it's a pillow that you can plug into your iPod, iPhone, Mac or anything else and fall asleep listening to tunes. Haven't you always wanted to fall asleep listening to your recorded lectures? Talk about deja vu.
Flip Video UltraHD Camcorder$199.95, Apple Store
College can be one of the most transformational seasons of your life. If you don't have an iPhone 4, consider a Flip HD camera as a way to capture some these moments. The UltraHD camera starts at $199 for a model that comes with 4GB of storage. The Flip is staple for on-the-fly filming, so you can’t go wrong with this.
Canon PowerShot SD1300 IS Camera$179.95, Apple Store
For those who aren't into video, a traditional digital camera could be right for you. The Canon PowerShot SD1300 packs a whopping 12 megapixels for under $200. Best of all, it works with iPhoto or your iPad with the Camera Connection Kit. Can’t beat the opportunity to buy more Apple stuff to use your existing Apple stuff!
Apple Store & iTunes Gift CardsVaries, Apple Store
The next time Mom sends a care package, make sure she throws in a few of these. Apple Gift Cards can be used in an Apple Retail Store or online and can be used for buying iTunes gift cards. With iTunes gift cards, you can get music, rent movies or even buy books for your classes if they’re available on the iBookstore.
What other gadgets would setup an Apple lover for college? Share your thoughts in the comments and keep a look out for our Mac, iPhone/iPod and iPad specific buyer’s guides coming soon!
Переслать - Doxie Scanner Does iBooks
Portable scanners can be the perfect tool for mobile workers looking to go paperless. A small, light scanner makes it possible to capture documents on the fly and convert them into a digital version, thus eliminating the need for paper. The 10.9-ounce Doxie scanner is as small as most scanners, and it can now scan documents directly into iBooks for the iPhone and iPad.The little scanner handles 600 DPI resolution, and connects to Macs or Windows PCs via a USB cable. The included software provides a full suite of tools to handle captured images. One button-push on the Doxie scans documents into PDF format and ready for syncing (through iTunes) to any iOS device running the latest version of the iBooks app from Apple. This is a simple solution for those wanting to capture information for later reference on an iPhone or iPad.
The Doxie software will also scan documents to other cloud services — Evernote, Picasa, Flickr and others. The entire setup will fit in any gear bag. The scanner is $129 directly from Doxie.
Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub. req'd): Are You Empowering Your Mobile Work Force?
Переслать - Revolutionary: iPads are for Places, not People
There is a change going on in society right there in front of all of us, and we all seem to have missed it. Loosing our privacy is only a temporary side effect, as it only admits that we never really had it in the first place. Especially whenever someone or something wanted to take it from us.
It just so happens that with modern technological advances, this exposing of ones privacy into the public domain has become easier and easier. And for the most part we are each contributing to this each and every day we continue to exist online. Watching Apple overcome Microsoft in recent months is only a sign of things changing, not a final victory on an age-old battle between two companies. While Google may have us believe that one man, one company, one device, one carrier is the root of all evil, it is actually our own doing that is forging this change. Apple just happens to be manufacturing the instrument of change, not the change itself.
Since purchasing the iPad for my family, I never once considered it a “personal” device. In fact, I would not even consider it a “family” device as much as it is a “location-based” device. The location would be the family room, bedroom, den, kitchen or home theater in my household. You see it, you pick it up, you use it, you put it down again. Someone else comes along and does the same. It is a quick way to check the weather, the field location of a family soccer game, show off the family photos, read a book or magazine, or lookup what has been recently released in the entertainment world. Its format and rotation of screens and the fact that there is no keyboard dangling awkwardly to deal with when handing the device back and forth make it the perfect communicable tool of communication. The iPad is not as much a private device as it is a public device.
What’s Personal?
So then what is a “personal” device? Something I cannot go anywhere without (well almost anywhere). Something ultra-portable and in most ways unique to just me personally. Something that works when I am awake, and recharges when I am asleep. An extension of me personally. By this classification, neither a computer nor a laptop would be a personal device, as they have the means to be shared and even accessed by multiple individuals. In our household, the need to have one’s own personal computer is diminishing with each new technical device that is brought into the house. Televisions are shared, game consoles are shared, desktops and even laptops are shared. Depending on the current need, the device is used to serve each member of the household in its own unique way. That’s not to say that there aren’t a lot of grey areas in the in between parts. Even the difference between a Mac Pro and an iMac is getting harder to distinguish. And based on continuing sales trends, the usefulness of a desktop compared to a laptop is tipping the scales in favor of laptops by a margin of 60 to 40. But just because something is portable does not make it personal. The direction we are heading is more portable, but not more personal…its more social.
So what do we use these modern devices for anyway; work, personal, or both? Up and until just about five years ago, we made choices as to which ‘computer’ to bring into our homes based on the choice our employers made. This was due to some mythical belief that we would then be able to bring work home and seamlessly transition from office workstation to home workstation by carrying around a binder full of rewriteable disks or USB memory sticks. With advances in secure VPN tunnels, web enabled business software, standard based mail access, and the fact that employers have been switching to laptops, our employers are no longer the driving force behind our at home purchasing decision.
In today’s evolving digital age, even the difference between work and personal is blurring. Teams within the rank and file of even the most conservative of cooperate environments are starting to utilize more social means of communicating. This includes technologies like Facebook, Twitter, Yammer and tools like those offered by 37signals. If your boss wants to know where you are, they are way more likely to figure that out by following you online then they are by getting any sort of phone call. Things have to change as the younger workforce who all grew up in this new digital age are driving it. This is simply how people communicate today. For better or worse, everything is getting more social. Selecting a movie based on posted reviews, playing a game online, and sharing photos and videos. This move away from personal e-mail to other more open forms of social communication may be one reason 40 percent of Blackberry customers are looking to switch to an iPhone. Given the fact that we now communicate to everybody all at once, why do we even need a personal account online anymore? What we do need are devices that enable this fundamental change in the way we disperse and use information.
The Revolution
And that is the revolution. Once everything is in the cloud, and I mean everything, why hang on to the old paradigm which requires us each to have a personal account? What would one do with personal access to the system? All information entered will become instantly visible to everyone. If nothing is private, why secure your access to it? Granted we all will need a way to identify ourselves to the system, but that is all. Once we have been identified, who we are to the system is no different than the GPS signal the device receives from satellites.
Who is using the device is fundamentally no different than where the device is being used. As Google turned the name of its company into a verb synonymous with search, Apple is destined to make its social devices, like the iPad, as utilitarian as the public restroom. When visiting an establishment, or when guests come to visit, it will not be uncommon to hear a polite request “May I please use the iPad?”While devices are getting more portable, and the daily lifetime of its usefulness between charges is expanding, information about ourselves is becoming more open. There is a new place in our lives for true utility devices that provide convenient and communicable access to information based more on the availability and accessibility of the device rather than how private it is.
And that is where the iPad comes in: it is a community device, not a personal computer. Passing an iPad back and forth is much more friendly without having to balance a clam shell keyboard and screen around. The iPad will even conveniently change orientation based on how the receiving user decides to hold it. It is not that the iPad is a better personal computer than a netbook, because it is not. The reason that people are preferring iPads over Netbooks has more to do with the ending of a personal era in computing. What we all need is access to our collective cloud of communal information. And that is what the iPad gives us. iPads therefore are for places, not people.
Photo by Flickr user blakespot, licensed under CC 2.0
Переслать - Smaller MacBook Air Would Reassure Us of Apple's Commitment to Laptops
Rumor mills churned after Digitimes’ Yen-Shyang Hwang and Joseph Tsai reported last week that Apple is readying to launch a new generation MacBook Air. This as-yet vaporous machine will allegedly sport an even more svelte form factor facilitated by an 11.6-inch display and an Intel Core i-series ultra-low voltage processor as marquee features, for release sometime in the second half of 2010.Hybrid?
Hwang and Tsai cite Digitimes Research senior analyst Mingchi Kuo referencing discussions with upstream component makers, suggesting that a 11.6-inch MacBook Air will feature an even slimmer and lighter design than the previous-generation models. Technologies used for the “design and concept” are expected to be broadly used in the company’s other product lines to boost its competitiveness. That phraseology implies something more than a form factor restyling and/or new feature additions, and there is speculation that Apple may be cooking up something like a hybrid machine retaining a basic clamshell laptop form factor, but with a detachable iPad-esque display panel. If that were the case, it begs the question of whether the new-generation Air would run OS X with some iOS touchscreen technology grafted in, or (very long shot I think) the iOS itself.
Either way, Kuo expects shipment volumes of the new 11.6-inch MacBook to reach 400,000 units in 2010, which, depending on how late in the year it hits the channels, could be respectable enough.It seems logical that Apple could have decided that marketing three different 13″ laptops (the others being the white MacBook and the 13″ MacBook Pro) amounts to confusing overlap, and that a downsize would help differentiate the Air from its fuller-featured, more powerful, but thicker and heavier, siblings. However they would presumably want to avoid appearing to embrace the netbook concept, which senior Apple spokespersons like Steve Jobs and Tim Cook have famously scorned and dismissed, and which Apple is successfully challenging with the hot-selling iPad.
If the Digitimes rumor proves accurate, it would mark the MacBook Air’s first major makeover since the sleek and diminutive machine was unveiled in January 2008. Although the Air has received a couple of upgrades and refreshes, it really hasn’t changed a whole lot in 2 1/2 years.
Core i3 Power
Digitimes’ projection that the downsized MacBook Air will sport an Intel Core i-series CULV, if accurate, would make it the first Apple laptop to employ Core i3 technology, which on spec seems ideally suited to deployment in this sort of computer, but raises the question of what sort of graphics support it will have — a point not addressed in the Digitimes report. It’s notable that Apple chose to stick with Core 2 Duo CPUs for the 13-inch MacBook and MacBook Pro so it could use NVIDIA's new, faster 320M integrated GPU. But with an ultraportable machine like the MacBook Air, raw graphics performance isn’t as high a priority. Few users will be inclined to do high-end graphics, video editing, or serious gaming on an Air, and Intel’s in-house HD Graphics GPU would likely prove adequate for most users.
At What Price?
This is obviously all highly speculative at this point. One of the biggest imponderables remains price. The current MacBook Air at $1,499 can be most charitably described as something less than a bargain. For example, you can buy a white, 2.4 GHz MacBook and a base model iPad both for the same money as one base MacBook Air. The operative question: How contented is Apple for the Air to remain the low-volume boutique piece for well-heeled elites it has been up to now, or does it want to address a larger market, taking lower margins but deriving potentially greater overall profit from higher volumes?
I can fantasize about an 11.6″ MacBook Air slotted in price somewhere between the high-end iPad and the 13″ MacBook Pro — logically the psychologically significant $999 of the white MacBook (or less). However, I’m doubtful that Apple will discount the entry-level MacBook Air threshold by 50 percent.
As for an introduction date, we’re almost past the cutoff point for the fall computer-buying spike already, but students have never been the Air’s market focus anyway. More likely Apple would go with mid-fall to catch the Christmas sales wave. That is, provided a new MacBook Air really is coming this year. If so, it’ll be the most exciting and reassuring development in Mac laptops since the aluminum unibodies in October 2008.
Переслать - Fred Wilson: Apple is "Evil" and Facebook is "a Photo-sharing Site"
Union Square Ventures managing partner Fred Wilson’s had plenty of blunt opinions on the tech industry today at the Geo-Loco conference in San Francisco. But he also had some compelling justifications for his insults, even if they were mainly targeted at competitors of his portfolio companies.
Wilson was especially dismissive of Facebook, calling it “a photo-sharing site.” He said Facebook’s supposed monopoly on the “social graph” is overblown. Every big web site has a social graph, said Wilson — Google’s just isn’t “lit up” yet. Further, he argued that the web itself is the social graph. Still, Wilson acknowledged that Facebook is a “juggernaut.” He said Google should try to buy the company if it can. Google, at this point, is “challenged” on multiple fronts, Wilson said — its last great web innovation was Gmail, he contended.
Wilson said his biggest worry for his portfolio companies, which include Foursquare and Twitter, is not actually Facebook, like many would assume. It’s Apple. Apple is “evil,” Wilson said. Why? “They believe they know what is best for you and me. And I think that is evil.” The VC also said he worries that Apple owns the mobile app marketplace and the minds of mobile developers, and it interferes too much with how people use and find apps. He said he’s hopeful that Android can keep Apple honest, but he doesn’t think that’s happening yet.
Wilson even picked on the little guy, too — calling Gowalla “the second fiddle” in the social location space versus Foursquare.
Wilson did give a candid opinion of one of his own portfolio companies, admitting to Twitter’s unending problems staying online. The service breaks, he said, because “it wasn’t built right — Twitter was built kind of as a hack and they didn’t really architect it to scale and they’ve never been able to catch up.” But he promised that Twitter would soon do interesting things around location — that was the topic of the conference, after all. The company will soon use location metadata to improve “relevancy and signal to noise,” Wilson said.
The location space is more likely to be won by startups than big companies, said Wilson, because startups don’t have to change users’ existing expectations. Check-ins would be awkward on Facebook, he said, because you don’t want to tell 1,000 people you’re grabbing a beer. And younger companies have the benefit of being able to create and maintain consistent settings for privacy and information sharing from the start.
Wilson’s prediction for the location space: “The companies that do the best job on managing a user’s privacy will the the companies that ultimately are the most successful.”
Photo of Wilson courtesy Flickr user joi. Feature image courtesy Flickr user lloydcrew.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
Location: The Epicenter of Mobile Innovation
Переслать - iPad Fueling Enhanced E-Book Revolution
When Penguin announced this week it was releasing an enhanced e-book version of Ken Follett’s hugely popular novel “Pillars of the Earth,” it wasn’t too surprising the publishing house chose the iPad as its launch platform. Since the release of Apple’s tablet device, more and more authors see a way to liberate themselves beyond text-based storytelling, allowing them to offer readers (or viewers, or listeners) enhancements to their books and, in some cases, create entirely multimedia new offerings.Why is the iPad becoming ground-zero for enhanced e-book innovation? I explore this in a a GigaOM Pro article called iPad Pushes Big Authors into Enhanced E-Books (sub req’d), but the answer is pretty simple: Most of the enhanced e-books coming out today are written as apps, and the pairing of Apple’s dominant app platform with the the media-consumption friendliness of the iPad is a natural choice for authors looking to create a multimedia-laden e-book.
But why write e-books as apps and not just, say, an iBook eBook or Kindle eBook? The main reason for this app-centric approach to enhanced e-books today is the early stage of the market. While iBooks and Kindle both recently upgraded their e-book platforms to allow authors and publishers to integrate audio and video, these upgrades have only just happened; any enhanced e-book projects up to this point (and likely for the next six months) are going to gravitate toward those outlets that enable the rich-media experiences they desire.
And even then, a multimedia enhanced iBook and Kindle would not be based on any enhanced e-book standard, but instead simply be different versions of proprietary platforms. Sure, they are potentially dominant platforms, but that doesn’t mean authors and publishers won’t eventually want a standard for an enhanced e-book, since creating media for different proprietary platforms means more work and, with that, more cost. Eliminating platform-specific development costs will become a big focus as more enhanced e-book come to market; unified standards would go along way in helping in this regard.
Standards or not, many e-books in the future will undoubtedly have audio, video or both at the most basic incorporation of “extras” (think DVD extras). Or they’ll go the direction of Ryu Murakami’s latest effort, an entirely new mixed-media offering that targets multiple senses from conception.
As this happens, there is no doubt that the consumer’s own perception of what an e-book is will continue to evolve. The creation of a compelling audio- and video-enhanced e-book could significantly widen the audience for books beyond those who read today, which could also create a whole new digital book industry, much like has been seen in the digital video and music industries. No doubt as this happens, the iPad will continue to be a key platform.
Read the full post here.
Image Source: Apple/iTunes
Переслать - Flipboard Buys Ellerdale, Launches Social Digital Magazine
Remember how the iPad was supposed to herald a new era of media consumption? Well, that day is finally here — or at least an early glimpse of it, with the new iPad application Flipboard, built by a new company of the same name.
Palo Alto, Calif.-based Flipboard, backed with $10.5 million from Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures, has built a beautiful application that reformats web articles, photos and status messages into a magazine-style layout. You can use it as an alternate way to consume your Twitter followers’ shared links, your Facebook friends’ posts and pictures, or other choice feeds of web content.
The first version of Flipboard just hit the Apple app store tonight, but the next version will be even more interesting, as it will be powered by the relevance engine built by Ellerdale. In recent weeks, Flipboard acquired Ellerdale, which had developed a set of real-time search and discovery tools based on Twitter. Ellerdale co-founder and CTO Arthur van Hoff has joined Flipboard as CTO.
Flipboard is an application for content consumption, not creation. This is not your new full-functioned iPad Twitter client; it’s a way to read the articles your friends think are most interesting in a format that emphasizes photos, typography, and the appeal of well-placed white space.
Flipboard was founded by Mike McCue, former CEO of Tellme and Evan Doll, a former senior iPhone engineer at Apple. Besides Kleiner and Index, it is also backed by Jack Dorsey, Dustin Moskovitz, Peter Chernin, Ron Conway, Alfred Lin, Peter Currie, Quincy Smith and Ashton Kutcher. Ellerdale was in the process of raising its first institutional funding at the time of the acquisition.
Van Hoff said that two-year-old Ellerdale had initially wanted to create a personalized social web product, but had been warned off the challenge by investors, so it set off to build the technology first and eventually find a use for it. Only now that does original idea makes sense, he said, given the form factor of the iPad. “We’ve been building a great analytics engine, but we never had the delivery mechanism for the content sorted out. Our site was the demo, not a product, and here [with Flipboard] we have a great product.”
McCue said that while the initial Flipboard is a free application, in the future the company plans to explore advertising and subscription models as well as revenue sharing with publishers. The company also plans to soon add additional sources of content such as Tumblr, LinkedIn and Yelp.
For more on the cool stuff Ellerdale was doing, and van Hoff’s perspective on real-time as a long-time influential technologist, see our recent video interview with him.
For more on Flipboard, which is the kind of app you could really imagine sitting back, relaxing, and poring through, see this demo video they made:
And here are some screenshots:
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
The iPad: Cable TV for Publishers?
Переслать - Skype iPhone App Updated, Supports Multitasking, Scraps 3G Service Charge
Skype has updated its iPhone application, making it compatible with iOS 4.
The free communication app, which was originally released back in March of 2009, can now be run in the background thanks to iOS 4 multitasking capabilities. The 2.0.1 update means that not only can calls be made over 3G, but you can also receive Skype calls and instant messages while running any other application.
The application will continue to work and deliver calls even when your device is locked. Skype also detailed that, when in a call, a user can switch out to any other application and the call will continue. Of course, these multitasking changes will only work on the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 3GS.
Skype also went on to reveal that plans to start charging for 3G calling on the iPhone have now been scrapped. The company originally intended to charge for the functionality in 2011, but due to “some operators starting to move to tiered pricing models,” Skype said these plans are no more.
If you haven’t already, why not download the free 7.8MB application and give someone a call to tell them the good news. It’s good to talk.
Переслать - Top 5 Twitter Apps for iPad
When it’s not displaying the Fail Whale, Twitter is a pretty useful service for keeping up with family and friends. The first app I install on every mobile device is a Twitter app of one flavor or another, since having a good app can make all the difference to getting the most benefit out of Twitter. Fortunately, there are plenty to choose from.
The iPad screen is particularly good at working with the social network, due to its larger size. I admit I have a weakness for Twitter apps, and I’ve tried so many I have lost count. Here are my current top five Twitter apps for the iPad. If you have a favorite share it in the comments.
Twitterific Pro. This is my “go-to” Twitter app on the iPad. I use it in either portrait or landscape as it displays well in either orientation. Working with multiple Twitter accounts is easy (on the Pro version) and the app handles all standard Twitter functions. It is not as configurable as other apps, but it works very well. Users of the paid version can also install the iPhone version on that phone for free. Free and Pro ($4.99).
Tweetdeck. My favorite Twitter app for the desktop is Tweetdeck, as I find the multiple column display presents a lot of information at a glance. The iPad version is very similar, although it displays very differently. In portrait display, the top third of the screen is wasted until you tap on a tweet. That opens up the details window, which lets you do all the normal things to a tweet that you expect. Tilting the display to landscape shows the power of Tweetdeck, as it mimics the desktop version by putting a lot of information at your fingertips. Updates can be slow because of all the information in the multiple columns. Free.
Osfoora HD. Osfoora (strange name) can do virtually everything with Twitter you’d ever want to do, and has a configurable display. The display reminds me somewhat of Tweetdeck, so I’m not sure I like the wasted screen space. It’s a solid performer, and many iPad owners swear by this app, so it makes the cut. $3.99.
Twittelator. This app is one of the most attractive Twitter clients you’ll see. Twittelator looks good, but the layout can be confusing at times, because the timeline is rather small while the individual tweet window is huge in comparison. It is a full-featured Twitter client, and lots of people love it, so it’s on the list. $4.99.
Echofon Pro. Echofon adds syncing to a good Twitter app to give it a leg up on the competition. Unread tweets are synced among the iPad, iPhone and desktop so no tweet gets missed. More importantly, no tweet gets read twice due to device switching. $4.99.Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req'd): Forget, Syncing, Let's Put Music in the Cloud!
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