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Watch the iPhone 4 Press Conference from today July 16th, 2010

-=_MaXsKi_=- — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 20:01:07 +0000

Not many of us could make it to the Apple Conference on July 16 2010 event, so if you want to relive and watch the entire Conference you can do so here.

Apple has uploaded the entire iPhone 4 Conference on both their official website, and on their YouTube channel so that you don’t miss some of the most important announcements by Apple in recent times.

Click Here to watch the stream

You can also read the entire Conference here

LIVE BLOG of Apple’s iPhone 4 Press Conference

-=_MaXsKi_=- — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 18:02:14 +0000

Live Apple iPhone 4 Conference click on image above to read this article

11:25AM Gdgt:
Steve: Thank you for coming! Has this helped? I wish we could have done this in the first 48 hours, but then you wouldn’t have had so much to write about.

11:25AM Gdgt:
Q about Steve’s email habits.
Steve: I get a lot of email, and my address is out there. I can’t reply to all of these emails — I have a day job. Some people post them on the web, which is kind of rude, but the most recent phenomena is people just making them up! But they’re our customers, and I want to communicate with them.

11:22AM Engadget:
Q: You released a software update for the iPhone about two years ago which improved the signal. You say now you’ve got a long-standing bug that doesn’t show the right bar data. Can you square those two things?
Steve: Well let me say something about Apple. We didn’t want to get into any business where we didn’t own or control the primary tech, because if you don’t the people who do own it will beat you. Our big insight about 8 years ago, was that it was going to shift from big displays or optical pickup heads, or radios being the most important component, we thought it was going to be software. And we’re pretty good at making software, we showed that in the iPod… other people are good at it too, like Palm, but we brought great software to the smartphone space. We’ve been able to create and distribute major updates to this software since the iPhone was released, and we’ve made the product better and better for free. Everyone is copying us now, but we were the first ones to do it. To answer your question, the formula we use the calculate bars has been off since the beginning, and the new update fixes that for the iPhone 4, 3G, and 3GS… I don’t know if I understand the other part of your question?

11:16AM MacWorld:
Jobs: John Markoff! Nice to see you. Markoff: I’ve had an iPhone in a heavily congested cell in SF for a long time. I’d like to know if the handset has any role in congestion management. Separate from the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3 issue. Does the stack play no role in the management of congestion?

Jobs: When AT&T wants to add a cell tower in Texas, they say it takes about 3 weeks. When they want to add a cell tower in SF, the average time to get approval is 3 years. Not all of us want cell towers in our backyard, but we all want good reception. They’ve tried to make them look like banana trees, but still, it’s a problem.

11:14AM MacWorld:
Hank from Marketwatch: Has there been a slowdown in sales? Due to shortages? Or an impact in sales in the past week? Jobs: We were able to build up a supply before the launch date, but the run rates we were at weren’t 1.7 million every three days.
Cook: The 1.7 was a fairly precise number. This number is “well over 3 million.” Jobs: I’m just trying to give you a feel for the fact that this is our most successful product launch and demand looks beyond what we’re capable of supplying, and that hasn’t changed. Cook: We are selling every phone we can make right now.

11:15AM Q: What kind of impact do you think this will have on sales?
Tim: We’ll hold financial stuff for our Q2 results call next week.

11:13AM To be clear, Jobs was not happy with our question. “You guys talk to each other a lot.”

11:12AM We asked if there was possibility of a software fix… based on the NYT article stating an inside source claimed there could be a fix of that type coming.
Steve had a long answer largely dismissing the question. Then Scott Forstall asked for a mic, and he said that the statement in the Times was “patently false.”

11:08AM Q: Was a recall ever up for discussion?
Steve: We get email from people all over the world about issues. We’re really serious about this. We try to figure this out. We come out to their places with test equipment, we want to see logs. We try to get the info and figure it out…
Bob: For the record, we told them we were coming first.
Steve: And we didn’t break down any doors.

Big laughs for that one, on stage at least!

11:06AM Steve: But not everyone is seeing this — a small number encounter it. For those customers we’ll get them a case, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll get them a full refund. And we’ll continue to work on antennas that don’t have this problem. But I think we’re where the rest of industry is right now.

11:04AM Q: Is there a hardware redesign in this generation that could fix this problem?
A: You can go on the web and look at pictures of Nokia phones that ship with stickers on the back that say “don’t touch here” — you can go on YouTube and see these. We should you three phones today, all good phones. So right now the state of the art of the entire industry is that no one has solved this problem. Would I like Apple to be first? Yes. Can we make it better right now? Maybe, we’ll see.

11:03AM Q: Would you have done anything differently knowing what you know now?
Steve: Well, of course the Consumer Reports stuff was bad, and of course we would have liked to get on this sooner. We just got this data. We just learned what was going on. We’re an engineering company. We think like engineers. We love it, we think it’s the right way to solve real problems. I don’t think that’s going to change, and the way we love our customers isn’t going to change. Maybe it’s human nature — when you’re doing well, people want to tear you down. I see it happening with Google, people trying to tear them down. And I don’t understand it… what would you prefer? That we were a korean company, that we were here in America leading the world with these products… maybe it’s just that people want to get eyeballs on their sites. We’ve been around for 34 years… haven’t we earned the credibility and the trust of the press? I think we have that from our users. I didn’t see it exhibited by some of the press as this was blown so far out of proportion. I’m not saying we didn’t make a mistake — we didn’t know that it would have these issues, we didn’t know we were putting a bull’s eye on the phone… but this has been so overblown. But to see how we could do better is going to take some time.

10:58AM John Gruber: Do any of you use the cases? I don’t.

Steve: Well I don’t. And I get better reception, I hold it like this [death grip] and never see problems.

10:56AM Q: Will the refund include third party cases?
A: There’s a very small number of third party cases out there. So no.
Q: Well it’s interesting, there aren’t any cases out there, and it’s hard to get cases now. If the third party case buyers can produce a receipt, why not give them one?
Steve: It’s really simple, if we tell people what our next product is, they stop buying our current products. Sometimes websites buy stolen property and they get out there… and case makers have a history of showing off their new cases for our new products. The case vendors haven’t had a history of helping to keep our work under wraps.

10:53AM Q: On the September 30th date, is that to let people know that you’ll have to buy a case?
Steve: Not really, we’ll reevaluate then. Maybe we’ll have a better idea. Maybe Eminem will come out with a band-aid that goes over the corner and everyone will want that.

10:50AM Gdgt:
Q: Is there anything you could have said in the launch keynote to lower expectations?
Steve: I’ve thought about that a LOT. We didn’t fully understand if there were problems at that point. We might have set the expectation that smartphones have weak spots… but the fact is, most smartphones seem to have the same characteristic as the iPhone 4. If you grip them in a certain way they lose signal strength dramatically, especially in a low signal strength area. And one of the things we’ve learned is that as a leader in the smartphone world now, we need to educate. So what we need was data. And now we’ve got some and we’re sharing it now.

10:48AM Gdgt:
Q: Do Apple customers have to choose between form and function?
A Steve: No. The Retina Display in the iPhone 4 is being widely hailed as the best display ever created. … We try to have our cake and eat it too, we try to have great design and great performance. If you look at our products, that’s what we deliver.

10:46AM Engadget:
Q: Are you willing to make an apology to investors?
Steve: You know we hear from customers who love this phone and have a great experience with it, and we’re doing a lot to help them with any issues they’re seeing. To investors, you know, you invest in the company we are, so if the stock goes down $5… I don’t think I owe them an apology.

10:44AM Engadget:
Q: Were you told about the design before the phone was released?
Steve: Are you talking about the Bloomberg article? That’s a crock, and we’ve challenged them to show proof that that. If anyone had said this thing has problems, we would have dispatched people to deal with that issue.

10:43AM MacWorld:
Q: Ryan from GDGT. You can cause the signal drop with one finger, not a whole grip. A from
Mansfield: On any phone, your body is a signal absorber. And none of us has a walkie-talkie style antenna anymore….

10:41AM MacWorld:
Q: Is this a PR problem? Should Apple have had more iPhones in more hands, earlier? A: Well we did, and we do now, and most people aren’t seeing it. If we did this all over again, we’d try to come up with some mitigation, but so far nobody in the industry has been able to do it.

10:41AM Engadget:
Q: I can’t get my Bold to drop right now, maybe you can show me how to do it?
Steve: You may not see it in certain areas.

10:40AM Engadget:
Q: Are you doing anything else to address the issue? Perhaps changing hardware?
Steve: You know, the 3GS has the same problem. We’re getting reports from customers that this is better than the 3GS. So I don’t know changing the antenna design would help — I don’t know what our next antenna design will look like.

10:38AM Macworld:
Q: How’s your health?
Jobs: I’m fine. I was better earlier this week, on vacation in Hawaii. But I thought it was important to come back for this. I’m fine. Thanks.

10:38AM:
Q&A with Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, and Bob Mansfield

10:37AM MacWorld:
The problem here is, Smartphones are limited, we made ours very visible, some people chose to demonstrate it, we screwed up with the display of the bars. So we are giving everyone a case and if you still have a problem, we’ll give you a full refund. But the data supports the fact that the iPhone 4 is the best smartphone in the world, and there is no “antennagate,” there is a challenge for the entire smartphone industry someday to improve so there are no weak spots on any phone. We love our customers. And we’re going to try to take care of every single one.

10:35AM Engadget:
So we love our users. We also connect users with great apps and developers, and great content through iTunes, and really bring content creation and our users together. We love our users so much that we built 300 Apple retails stores for them to give them the best buying experience in the world… with Genius bars, and seminars. We had 60m people through our doors last quarter. We do this because we love our users, and if we screw up, we pick ourselves up and we try harder. And when we succeed, they reward us by staying our users. We take this really personally. Maybe we should have a wall of PR people keeping us away from this stuff, but we don’t, we take it really personally. So we’ve worked the last 22 days on this trying to solve the problem. And we think we’ve gotten to the heart of the problem.”

10:32AM Gdgt:
“On July 30th we’re going to bring the iPhone to 17 more countries — these are the same we announced before. In ending, I’d like to just give you a feel of what we care about, how we operate, and how we make decisions.”

“We love our users. We try very hard to surprise and delight them. We work our asses off. And it’s great, and we have a blast doing it. And we make some pretty interesting products for them — Macs, iPhones, iPads, iPods, the Apple TV… we make some pretty great products.”

10:31AM Engadget:
“And if you’re not happy, you can bring the phone back. We’ll give you a full refund within 30 days. No restocking fee. We want to make everyone happy, and if we can’t make you happy we’ll give you a full refund. So I have some other updates. We’re tracking some problems with the proximity sensor and we’re working on it. White iPhone, we’re going to start shipping at the end of the month.”

10:30AM MobileCrunch:
We can’t make enough bumpers, so we will offer a choice of cases. You can apply on our website late next week. Pick a case, zoom, we’ll send it off to you.

10:29AM gdgt:
“Secondly: a lot of people have told us the bumper solves the signal strength problem. Okay. Great. Let’s give everyone a case. We want to give everyone is going to get a free case.”

10:27AM gdgt:
“When our engineers and scientists look at this data, it’s very hard to escape the conclusion that there is a problem — but it’s affecting a very small percentage of our users. I myself have gotten over 5000 emails from users telling me their iPhone works fine, and they can’t figure out what this is about. Having said this, we care about EVERY user. And we’re not going to stop until every one is happy. But it’s important to understand the scope of the issue — the data says the issue has been blown so far out of proportion, it’s incredible. It’s fun to have a story, but it’s less fun to be on the other end of it. So here’s what we’re going to do. Yesterday we released iOS 4.0.1 that fixes some of these bugs with our algorithm. We recommend every iPhone owner update to it.”

10:26AM Engadget:
When the 3GS came out, we didn’t change the design from the 3G. So there were already lots of cases out there for the phone. And more than 80% of new buyers left the store with a case. Now the new phone doesn’t fit those cases, and we can’t make these bumpers fast enough, so only 20% leave the store with a case… but we’re going to figure it out.

10:26AM MobileCrunch:
“Even that’s too much for us. I have my own pet theory on this: when the iPhone 3GS came out, we didn’t change the design. There were a number of cases available, on day one. The iPhone 4 has a radically new design, so none of the cases fit, and we can’t make enough of our bumper cases.”

10:23AM Gdgt:
“One more data point. AT&T has given us the early call drop rate just a couple days ago. They log call drops, it helps them improve their network. AT&T won’t give out the absolute call drop data for competitive reasons, but they’ll let us release the delta. But how do the call drops on iPhone 4 compare to 3GS a year ago per 100 calls? we believe the iPhone’s antenna is superior, the data says the iPhone 4 drops more calls than the 3GS. But how many more calls per hundred does it drop? Again, listening to ‘Antennagate’ on the web, it must be dropping many more calls! The iPhone 4 drops less than ONE call per hundred than the 3GS. Less than one.

10:21AM Engadget:
“Let’s keep going. So smartphones have weaknesses, and AppleCare data shows only 0.55% have called in about reception issues. The third, return rates… AT&T has a ‘buyer’s remorse’ clause, you can return a phone no questions asked. Apple has the same thing. So what are our return rates? Well we’re going to compare it to the iPhone 3GS… In the early days of the iPhone 3GS return rates were 6%… below the average, we were happy with that… so for the iPhone 4? You think half the people must be returning their phones with what you read online… well it’s 1.7% — less than a third of the 3GS returns.”

10:18AM MacWorld:
We have learned: Smartphones have weak spots. You will drop reception. Next, we have gotten some very interesting information from AppleCare. Whenever anyone calls in with a problem, it’s logged and we have the statistics. And we asked, what’s the percent of iPhone 4 users who have called AppleCare with any issues about antenna or reception, or anything near. 0.55% of all iPhone customers have called AppleCare with an antenna issue. So this doesn’t really jive with what you read about this problem.

10:17AM MobileCrunch:
We do a lot of testing. “We’ve invest over 100 million dollars in these rooms”. “The iPhone 4 went through all of these tests. We KNEW that if you held it in a certain way, the bars would go down.”

“We didn’t think it’d be a big problem. Phones aren’t perfect. It’s a challenge for the entire industry.”

10:16 Gdgt:
“X marks the spot. You know exactly where to [not] hold it! … we screwed up on our algorithm. Again, all smartphones seem to do this — we haven’t figured out our way around the laws of physics. Yet.”

10:14AM Gdgt:
“This is life in the smartphone world. Phones aren’t perfect. It’s a challenge for the whole industry, and we’re doing the best we can. But every phone has week spots. Now, we’re not perfect: we made it very visible (with a little help from some of our friends from certain websites).”

10:13AM: Engadget:
“Samsung Omnia II — it’s got 4 bars to start… we grip it in a not unusual way… this one has a long hysteresis in their algorithm… None of this is standardized… and so again, you’ll see it go back up. They go back up faster than they go down.”

10:11AM Engadget:
“There’s the Bold, 5 bars to 1 bar.” “Next, the Droid Eris.” “Starts off with 4 bars… and the time it takes for the bars to go down has to do with the algorithm… so it goes down to zero bars, and then it goes back up.”

10:09AM Gdgt:
So we want to find out what the real problem is before starting to work on solutions. So we’ve been working our butts off to come up with real solutions. “‘Antennagate’ — it doesn’t seem like a good idea if you touch your phone in a certain way and the bars go down. But one of the first things we learned: it’s certainly not unique to the iPhone.” “We did our own testing — let me show you an example of some other smartphones. First, BB Bold 9700, perhaps the most popular business smartphone.” Video showing the bars — they drop from four or five to one. “Pretty much identical to the videos on the web about the iPhone 4.”

10:07AM MacWorld:
But before we go into that, I want to talk about the problems and about the data we’ve got” that informs us and helps us make our users happy. “We have sold well over 3 million since we launched it 3 weeks ago”. PC World namechecked as listing iPhone as #1 phone. Highest customer satisfaction of any iPhone or smartphone ever. owever, we started getting some reports of people having some issues with the antenna system, which is very advanced…

We heard about this 22 days ago and have been working our butts off. It’s not like we’ve had our heads in the sand for 3 months; it’s been 22 days. And Apple is an engineering driven company. We have some of the finest engineers here in the world, in the areas that help us create our products. So we want to find out what the real problem is before starting to work on solutions. So we’ve been working our butts off to come up with real solutions

10:06AM Gdgt:
Steve: “Good morning, thank you for joining us! We saw that on YouTube today and we wanted to share it. We’re not perfect. Phones aren’t perfect. We know that, you know that. But we want to make all our users happy. If you don’t know that, you don’t know Apple. We’re going to talk about how we’re going to do that.”

10:04AM Engadget:
Oh my. “The iPhone 4 antenna song” just came on!

“There’s an awful lot of hoopla… about the iPhone antenna… Oh sure I can make it happen, but in terms of daily usage… I have yet to drop a call… Hey let’s all sing this song: if you don’t want an iPhone 4 don’t buy it, if you bought one and you don’t like it, bring it back. Bring it back to the Apple store… but you know you won’t.”

10:02AM MobileCrunch:
We’re still waiting for the event to start. Some elevatory smooth jazz is playin’. The event is reaaally small.

9:59AM Gdgt:
We’re in and seated! This is definitely the smallest Apple event I’ve ever seen.

9:57AM Engadget:
Okay we’re in our seats… and some smooth, smooth jazz is playing. The room is not completely full — not surprising given the short notice.

How to install Flash on your iPad, Frash by Comex Leaked and now being downloaded as a .deb file

-=_MaXsKi_=- — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 20:11:16 +0000

Last week, Comex, the developer behind the Spirit jailbreak, gave us a preview of Frash, which is nothing less but Flash for Android ported to the iPad.

Today it seems someone released a .deb of Frash, and while Comex is not opposed to it, you’ve got to understand it’s just an alpha version.

This tutorial will show you how to install Frash/Flash on a jailbroken iPad.

Step 1: Make sure your iPad is jailbroken. If not, jailbreak your iPad using Spirit.

Step 2: Download Frash.deb. For legal reasons, I cannot link to the file but a Google search can go a long way, if you know what I mean… (TIP: Search for Frash-0.01.deb or Frash.deb)

Step 3: SSH into your iPad and navigate to /var/root/Media.

If you don’t know what SSH means or if you have never used it please Read This article before going forward with this tutorial.

Step 4: In the Media folder, create a folder called “Cydia”. Open the Cydia folder you just created and create another folder called “AutoInstall”.

Step 5: Upload Frash.deb to the AutoInstall folder.

Step 6: Reboot your iPad a few times.

Done! Now navigate to any site that uses Flash. You should see the red F logo where Flash is played.

Tap the logo and the Flash animation will start playing
Again, this is just an alpha version that wasn’t even officially released by Comex.

You may want to try it just for fun if you dare. I suspect it will be posted in a repo on Cydia soon so you may want to wait for that.
I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

[via Engadget]

Apple makes number of Improvements in new MobileMe Update

-=_MaXsKi_=- — Fri, 21 May 2010 22:33:42 +0000

Apple’s MobileMe service has been updated with numerous improvements, according to MacDailyNews.

Gallery
● Gallery app for viewing shared photos and movies on iPhone and iPod touch
● Support for video publishing in Aperture 3

iDisk
● Improved iDisk sync reliability for Mac OS X v10.6.3 or later
● iDisk app support for email address auto-completion when sharing files, and copying images to the clipboard on iPhone and iPod touch

Sync of contacts
● Improved sync reliability on Mac OS X v10.6.3 or later, and on Windows with MobileMe Control Panel 1.5.2

Find my iPhone
● Safari access on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch

Account
● Password strength indicator to help in creation of a secure password
● Ability to convert an email aliases to family pack member account

me.com website
● SSL access for web applications at me.com

Mail beta at me.com
● Widescreen and compact views
● Rules to keep your email organized everywhere
● Single-click archiving
● Message formatting toolbar
● Improved performance
● Increased security with SSL

Apple iPad is coming in 60 and 90 Days, WiFi+3G Versions, Watch the VIDEO

-=_MaXsKi_=- — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:03:18 +0000

Last year and for the last couple of months, there were lot of speculations about the Apple’s upcoming tablet device. Some of them were controversial and some were legit but the at the end of the day Apple came through once again and made something more advanced than anything out there.

This morning, Steve Jobs finally brought an end to all the rumors by unveiling iPad at Yara Buena Center in San Francisco. Here is what you all need to know about Apple iPad.

Will run all of your existing iPhone Apps and Games
iBooks – Book Store like Amazon
iWorks Suite of Apps
.5 inches thin and weighs 1.5 lbs
9.7 inch IPS Capacitive multitouch display
1GHz proc Apple A4 chip (PA Semi!)
Comes in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB
802.11n WiFi, BT 2.1 and Compass
10 hrs working battery life, 1 month standby

As of yet, there were no indications on the notifications, multitasking and phone calls.

iPad comes in two models, with and without 3G. Price details are as follows. WiFi model will be available at retail in 60 days time while the one with WiFi+3G will be available in 90 days from today.

The official Apple iPad site has now gone LIVE where they have posted a video showing the Apple iPad in action. You can find the video embedded below.