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- Ars: Apple A4 CPU is a "feature-stripped ARM Cortex A8"While much of the speculation over the iPad's Apple A4 CPU has been focused on the fact that it was a system-on-a-chip (SoC) designed by the minds acquired from P.A. Semi, Ars Technica's Jon Stokes has another take on the story.
In a Sunday post, Stokes (who claims to have an inside scoop) notes that the chip really isn't anything more than an ARM Cortex A8 that has been stripped of much of its I/O functionality. The ARM Cortex A8, running at 600 MHz, is the SoC that powers the iPhone 3GS.
Stokes goes on to note that the "A4 is a 1GHz custom SoC with a single Cortex A8 core and a PowerVR SGX GPU." What Apple appears to have done is to improve both battery life and speed by eliminating any functionality that isn't specifically required by the iPad. Common Cortex A8-based SoCs often have more onboard functions than are really required by mobile phones so that manufacturers don't need to design a special chip. As the article states, the usual Cortex A8-based SoC has infrared, RS232 serial, USB, keypad controller, and camera blocks to handle multiple input and output devices. The iPad, of course, will only need one USB port and one serial UART, both wired to the 30-pin connector at the bottom of the device.
By stripping the A4 to the essentials, the heart of the iPad expends no CPU cycles or power doing anything that is unnecessary to the function of the device. Stokes believes that the real power of the device comes from the software, not from the A4, and in his conclusion he compares the iPad to the Nintendo Wii - "... another product that relies for its success not on its processor, but on its novel interface and broadly accessible software. I'm sure that if the iPad can do for mobile computing what the Wii did for console gaming, Apple will consider it a resounding success."
With less than a month to go until the first iPads begin to make it into the hands of users, it's likely that other revelations about the hardware used in the devices will begin to make their way to the online media.
[via AppleInsider]TUAWArs: Apple A4 CPU is a "feature-stripped ARM Cortex A8" originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Apple - Ars Technica - IPhone - ARM Cortex A8 - PowerVR
Переслать - Condé Nast reveals initial list of iPad magazines
As we move closer to the iPad's release date, more information is becoming available regarding 3rd-party content. Just this week, an internal memo from Condé Nast revealed the list of the first of the magazines that will be initially available for the device. They are:
- GQ
- Vanity Fair
- Wired
- Glamour
- The New Yorker
Condé Nast's editorial director, Thomas Wallace, noted that there's an experimental aspect to releasing these publications for the iPad. These titles will be used to test pricing and advertising strategies. It won't be easy, as distribution will be handled via iTunes, and Apple doesn't share reader data.
Last week, we saw what may be a list of the books that will be available for purchase at launch, including bestselling fiction, non-fiction and autobiography titles. iBooks is going to be a huge part of the iPad, and at this point we can't wait to get it started.TUAWCondé Nast reveals initial list of iPad magazines originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Переслать - Rumor: Apple iPad to be delayed?
Filed under: Apple
Over at Fortune, Philip Elmer-Dewitt relays speculation that the iPad might be delayed. Citing a Monday report by Canaccord Adams analyst Peter Misek, he writes that a manufacturing bottleneck may be affecting iPad production. According to the report, Apple production could be as low as 30% of its target goal (300K units versus its target of a million) and concludes that Apple might delay the iPad launch for a month due to the "...limited number of units available in March."
During Apple's January event, CEO Steve Jobs promised the new iPad device would hit shelves within 60 days, with a 3G-enabled unit to follow approximately 30 days later. To date, Apple has yet to offer a firm release date and it is not yet taking pre-orders just a few weeks before the device is due. Manufacturing delays now joins FCC approvals as a speculative reason for why Apple has not yet announced dates or pre-orders.
So far, this speculation has done precisely nothing to affect Apple stock prices. AAPL is up 4.15 at last check, holding at 208.77.Thanks, Brett
TUAWRumor: Apple iPad to be delayed? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Переслать - Review: Viva il Re board game app asks to be crowned
Filed under: iPhone, iPod touch, App Review
The iPhone might be the most amazing computer you can slip into your jeans, but there are some things it just doesn't do very well. For example, you can't really get into a bluffing match against the machine, at least not with the iPhone/iPod touch app Viva il Re ($1.99). Here's what we mean.
Viva il Re (which means "Long live the King" in Italian) is a well-designed board game by Stefano Luperto that has been beautifully ported to the iPhone by by Pro-netics S.p.A. The object is to score points and hopefully get one of your characters to become the new king, because the old king has decided to retire (can kings do that?). With the retirement announcement, "the pirouette for succession begins!" according to the official game setup. Each player is secretly hoping one of their six characters manages to reach the top, out of 13 total.
When you play the board game version of Viva il Re, called King Me!, the reasonably slow pace of the game and the face-to-face interaction means that there is time to develop guesses about which characters each player is hoping will take the throne. While the app looks almost exactly like the tabletop version and most of the functionally is the same, it's just not as much fun to compete against bots as it is to outwit other people. Continue reading and see if you agree.
The Game
The game is played over one or three rounds, with each round ending with the election of a new king (yes, we know, kings don't usually get elected, but work with us here). To start the game, each player gets a card listing six names. These are the characters that will score you points at the end of the game, so the higher you can get them in the castle, the better.
The castle (game board) is made up of seven sections, numbered 0-5 and 10. The lower six floors are where the characters spend most of their time. In the set-up phase of the game, players place a character on a floor numbered 1-4 (each player will place the same numbers of characters, and the extras start on floor zero). Once everyone has taken their place, movement starts.
Now, with each turn you can move any character up one, and only one, floor. The only time you can't do this is when a floor you want to move to is full with four characters already. Obviously, you want to get all of your characters as high in the castle as possible, because they will each score points equal to the floor they are on when the round ends.
When does this happen? When a new king is crowned. Each time a character is moved to the top floor, an election is held. You can always vote "yes," but are limited to voting "no" to a small number of times based on how many players are in the game (e.g., with three players, you can vote "no" four times, with six, just twice). As soon as everyone votes yes on a character, total up your points and start a new round. If, however, at least one person votes "no," that character is removed from the castle - and scores nothing - and the game continues. One special rule here: if it's the last round in a game, if you manage to score zero points from characters, you get a bonus of 33 points. Even royalty like to shoot the moon, apparently.
The game mechanics are simple enough, and the game is so enjoyable that people have made their own homemade boards that incorporate Star Trek or cute little animals. Board gamers are a pretty dedicated bunch, and you can guess that there's something here worth keeping if they go ahead and re-theme a game. To explore the game in an online, turn-based setting, click here of download the game rules summary in PDF.
The App
As we said, when you go through all these steps with friends around a table, it can get pretty intense, especially once a few rounds of voting have passed. When playing the iPhone app version, though, everything moves a little too fast and the "opponents" (bots) don't have any sort of personality to make you feel like you're playing a bluffing game. Instead, it becomes a simple game of moving your characters up and voting now and again. Sure, this sounds like pretty much the same thing, but if just feels very different and not in a good way. The Toilet expansion is also missing.
There are some nice digital-only touches. Instead of needing to remember who your characters are, they are conveniently highlighted in yellow on the game board. This makes your turns much quicker, since there's no need to refer back to your list of candidates.
It's impossible to know if the bots ever vote "yes" to a character that isn't on their card so as to hold on to a "no" card for later while expecting at least one other player to decline the new king, but it appears they do. We played some games where a round ended much earlier than expected, something that is certainly reminiscent of the tabletop version.
The app also doesn't remember settings - the number of players or rounds selected - from game to game, so you need to reselect them each time. Not cool. Also, each time you move a character to another level, the game automatically shifts it to the leftmost open spot on that level. This isn't a real problem, just kind of silly.
The game's music is harmless and appropriately medieval-sounding, but why can't we listen to iTunes while playing? This is quickly becoming our number one annoyance with iPhone games. We're carrying around gigs of music for a reason, my friends, and we probably like our tunes better than your game's soundtrack.
On the table, King Me! is a fun and light "filler" game. On the iPhone, though, it falls flat. The main flaw of Viva il Re is that it's for one player only. While it would make the game take longer, pass-n-play does not seem like it would be that hard to implement, and it would certainly turn Viva il Re from a C+ game into an A- in a hurry. At the very least, playing other opponents over a network would be nice. This is an interactive game, and any digital version needs to respect that. For now, we're voting "no."TUAWReview: Viva il Re board game app asks to be crowned originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Переслать - Quix makes bookmarklets even easier to use
Filed under: Internet Tools
Bookmarklets are one of my favorite things. I have an entire folder of them in my Safari Bookmark Bar for Instapaper and Readability and bit.ly and Pukka and Tumblr and ... well, you get the idea. They're incredibly handy for doing "something" with the current webpage that you are viewing, or quickly looking up other information.
Quix has come up with a way to make them even better. It calls itself "Your Bookmarklets, On Steroids" and it's hard to argue with that description. Imagine all of your bookmarklets together in one, and being able to come up with shortcuts to trigger each one.
The interface is extremely minimal: a javascript popup window with a text input space. What you type in that space dictates what happens next. Quix comes with a bunch of commands already built-in, and using them is a breeze. The syntax couldn't be simpler: just type a command shortcut (such as "imdb") followed by a word or words (like "ghostbusters" or "raiders of the lost ark"), then press Return. As Jeff Goldblum used to say "There's no step three." Some of the other built-in commands:
- Search IMDB: "imdb search word(s)"
- Search Google: "g search word(s)"
- Search Google Images: "img search word(s)"
- Search Wikipedia: "w search word(s)"
- Search only the current site using Google: "gs search word(s)"
- Reformat the current page using Readability: "read"
- Share on Tumblr: "tumblr"
- Share on Facebook: "fb"
- Share on Delicious: "db"
- Clip current page in Evernote: "evernote"
If you still are not convinced, checkout their two minute video which shows it in action. By the time I finished watching it, I was already sold. Instead of an entire folder of bookmarklets, I have one for Quix, which does everything that I did before, and more.
Oh, and one more thing: since this is just javascript, it also works on Mobile Safari on the iPhone. Ever tried to find a specific word on a long page of text in Mobile Safari? It can be a real hassle. With Quix, just type "find search word(s)" and Quix will highlight all instances of the word on the current page and show you the first one.
Quix is incredibly handy. Check it out at Quixapp.com.TUAWQuix makes bookmarklets even easier to use originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Переслать - Encouraged by iPhone market, Nuance announces new medical apps
Filed under: Enterprise, Hardware, Odds and ends, iPhone, iPod touch, iPad
Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search from Nuance Communications were definite crowd-pleasers, so today the company is announcing specialized medical versions of the apps for physicians and medical professionals.
The first app is Dragon Medical Mobile Dictation. It is designed to allow clinicians to dictate patient notes, emails and text messages instead of typing them on a mobile device. The idea is to let medical professionals dictate and capture information in real time with a smartphone, without having to return to a desktop or laptop computer. The product is expected to be available before the end of the year.
Nuance is also announcing Dragon Medical Mobile Search, a variation of Dragon Search that will allow medical staff to search a variety of medical websites completely by voice using an iPhone. The app is expected to be released by April 30.
Finally, Nuance is unveiling Dragon Medical Mobile Recorder, a voice capture app that will allow clinicians to conduct on-the-go dictation using a smartphone. Once the sound is recorded, the file is forwarded through Nuance's background speech recognition technology and into a transcription where a high quality draft is created, then returned for review and sign off. The Dragon Medical Recorder is due before the end of this year.
Nuance estimates that by the end of next year, 81% of physicians will be using smartphones. More interesting is that the company research shows the iPhone breaking away from the pack of other smartphones to be the preferred device in the medical enterprise. According to the Nuance research, the Blackberry is still the leading smartphone among physicians, but the iPhone growth is explosive and almost doubled in use by physicians between 2008 and 2009. In a July survey of Medical Students it was found that 45% owned an iPhone or an iPod touch. Of those who did not own a smartphone, 60% planned to buy an iPhone or iPod touch within a year.
That has to be good news for Apple, and I would expect Steve Jobs and colleagues to continue to push the iPhone into the enterprise in the coming months.
For Nuance Communications, it's a further endorsement of Apple products. Earlier this month Nuance bought MacSpeech, the company that produces MacSpeech Dictate. The application uses the Dragon speech recognition engine. Nuance also provided the voice recognition that powers the popular Siri app for the iPhone, that lets users do searches with natural language queries.
Peter Durlach, the Senior V.P. of marketing and Strategy for Nuance, told me the company is also taking a close look at the Apple iPad for use by medical professionals. The company will see if the form factor works for doctors and nurses, and Durlach says he expects the iPad to be an important part of future Nuance solutions.
TUAWEncouraged by iPhone market, Nuance announces new medical apps originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Переслать - TUAW Fact Check: Apple using underage labor? No.
Filed under: Apple Corporate, Apple
When a lot of people get their news electronically, skimming over headlines through news aggregators, RSS feeds, and retweets on Twitter, sometimes the majority of information people will get from an article comes from the headline.
When a headline leans towards the sensational side, or doesn't accurately reflect the information that's actually contained in the article, it's easy for poorly-represented news to spread like wildfire. This article from the UK's The Daily Telegraph, regarding Apple's self-initiated audit of its overseas manufacturing facilities, is a perfect example, with its attention-grabbing headline: "Apple Admits Using Child Labour." The sub-headline isn't any better: "Apple has admitted that child labour was used at the factories that build its computers, iPods and mobile phones."
Once a person reads those words, his or her knee-jerk reaction is most likely going to be one of disgust and horror. "How could you, Apple?" they might say. If this hypothetical reader owns a Mac or an iPhone, their eyes might glance over at it with anguished guilt; if they don't own any products from Apple, it's just one more reason not to buy them.
If you dig beyond the headline, however, to the meat of the Telegraph's article, where the actual reporting finally begins? Then you get a completely different story as early as the first sentence: "At least eleven 15-year-old children were discovered to be working last year in three factories which supply Apple." That's pretty far from the image conjured by the headline, of legions of school-aged children lined up in factories and slapping together MacBook Pros when they should be slapping together algebra homework. Instead, we find a relatively small number of teenaged factory workers -- reprehensible, but not unusual at all for overseas factories. The end of this first sentence is even more important, because it puts the focus where it belongs: three factories which supply Apple. Two paragraphs later, we find another very important bit of news not reflected in the headline: "Apple said the child workers are now no longer being used."
Other news sites performed better reporting on the matter, but at least one still had an easily misinterpreted headline. Read on to find out more.
Engadget's headline for its story is a bit better -- "Apple supplier audit reveals sub-minimum wage pay and records of underage labor" -- but it's still ripe for misinterpretation. The reporting at least is far better than the Telegraph; right away, Engadget notes that the reports of child labor come straight from Apple's own 2010 Supplier Responsibility Progress Report, and they also note that out of 102 audited manufacturers, most of them said Apple was the only manufacturer that performed compliance checks this rigorous. That means Sony, Lenovo, Dell, HP, and all the other manufacturers out there may well have even worse working conditions at their suppliers' factories than those reflected in Apple's audit, but until or unless they perform similar checks, we have no way of knowing.
Another bit of perspective on this comes courtesy of MacRumors: "Apple in 2009 found a total of 17 instances of what it considers 'core violations' of its code of conduct, representing about 2% of core issues assessed by its auditors." Far from perfect, yes, but equally as far from the sweatshop conditions conjured up by the Telegraph's headline; in fact, if you actually read Apple's own audit, you find that 97% of its facilities were in compliance with regulations against underage labor.
Finally, the wording from Apple's audit itself, with emphasis added at key points:
"Apple discovered three facilities that had previously hired 15-year-old workers in countries where the minimum age for employment is 16. Across the three facilities, our auditors found records of 11 workers who had been hired prior to reaching the legal age, although the workers were no longer underage or no longer in active employment at the time of our audit.
In each of the three facilities, we required a review of all employment records for the year prior to our audit, as well as a complete analysis of the hiring process to clarify how underage people had been able to gain employment. Apple required each facility to develop and institute appropriate management systems-such as more thorough ID checks and verification procedures-to prevent future employment of underage workers."
Issues like underage labor, poor working environments, and substandard pay are all very real consequences of doing business with overseas suppliers. Most manufacturers are content with turning a blind eye to the whole thing, so long as the shareholders stay happy and stock prices stay high. By running comprehensive audits of its suppliers, Apple runs the risk of finding out just how poorly its suppliers treat its workers, and by publishing those results, it runs the risk of news outlets like the Telegraph blowing them out of proportion. Despite what some newspapers or news sites would have you believe, Macs and iPhones are not crafted by children, and that's partly due to Apple's performance of these audits in the first place.TUAWTUAW Fact Check: Apple using underage labor? No. originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Переслать - New iPhone ad: Family Travel
Filed under: Odds and ends, iPhone
If you've been watching TV over the last few days (and who hasn't, with that USA / Canada hockey game and the tsunami coverage), you may have seen the latest in the series of iPhone ads.
The ad, titled "Family Travel," features a voice-over by a Mom who gushes that "It's unbelievable how much better family trips have gotten..." as she demonstrates using the Southwest Airlines app to check in on a flight from Denver to LA, finds a restaurant for the family (Heidi's Brooklyn Deli) in the C concourse at Denver International Airport with Gate Guru, makes sure that she has entertainment for her kids in the form of "Finding Nemo" loaded in the iPod app, and then turns off the living room lights at home with the Schlage Link app.
For those of you who are sticklers for advertising accuracy, note that Southwest flight 1403 is not an actual SWA flight between DEN and LAX and that the restaurant list for Concourse C at Denver International Airport is actually a mashup of restaurants located throughout Denver International Airport. All of the apps are free, although Schlage Link does require a monthly subscription and appropriate Z-Link hardware on the home front (similar to the Christmas tree ad from the holidays).TUAWNew iPhone ad: Family Travel originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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