apple i pad

Well bless my soul and whiskers. This is the first time I've joined the congregation at the Church of Apple for a new product launch. I've watched all the past ones, downloaded the Quicktime movies and marvelled as Apple's leader has stood before an ovating faithful and announced the switch to Intel, the birth of iPod, the miniMac, the iTunes Store, OS X, iPhoto, the swan's-neck iMac, the Shuffle, Apple retail stores, the iPhone, the titanium Powerbook, Garageband, the App Store and so much more. But this time I finally made it. I went to San Francisco for the launch of the iPad. Oh, happy man.

The day had special resonance. In front of his family, friends and close colleagues stood the man who founded Apple, was fired from Apple and came back to lead Apple to a greatness, reach and influence that no one on earth imagined. But a year ago, it is now clear, there was a very strong possibility that Steve Jobs would not live to see 2010 and the birth of his newest baby.

With revenues of $15.6bn, Apple is now the largest mobile-device company in the world, Jobs told the subdued but excited 600 people packed into the Yerba Buena Cultural Center for the Arts theatre. A few more triumphant housekeeping notes followed and then we were into the meat of it. Well, the whole event is available to be watched online, you don't need me to describe it. He picked up an iPad and walked us through. Afterwards I was allowed to play with one myself.

I know there will be many who have already taken one look and pronounced it to be nothing but a large iPhone and something of a disappointment. I have heard these voices before. In June 2007 when the iPhone was launched I collected a long list of "not impressed", "meh", "big deal", "style over substance", "it's all hype", "my HTC TyTN can do more", "what a disappointment", "majorly underwhelmed" and similar reactions. They can hug to themselves the excuse that the first release of iPhone was 2G, closed to developers and without GPS, and that cut-and-paste and many other features that have since been incorporated. Neither they, nor I, nor anyone, predicted the game-changing effect the phone would so rapidly have as it evolved into a 3G, third-party app rich, compass- and GPS-enabled market leader. Even if it had proved a commercial and business disaster instead of an astounding success, iPhone would remain the most significant release of its generation because of its effect on the smartphone habitat. Does anybody seriously believe that Google, Nokia, Samsung, Palm, BlackBerry and a dozen others would since have produced the product line they have without the 100,000-volt Taser shot up the jacksie that the iPhone delivered to the entire market?

Nonetheless, even if they couldn't see that three billion apps would be downloaded in two years (that's half a million app downloads a day, give or take) could they not see that this device was gorgeous, beautifully made, very powerful and capable of development into something extraordinary? I see those qualities in the iPad. Like the first iPhone, iPad 1.0 is a John the Baptist preparing the way of what is to come, but also like iPhone 1.0 (and Jokanaan himself too come to that) iPad 1.0 is still fantastic enough in its own right to be classed as a stunningly exciting object, one that you will want now and one that will not be matched this year by any company. In the future, when it has two cameras for fully featured video conferencing, GPS and who knows what else built in (1080 HD TV reception and recording and nano projection, for example) and when the iBook store has recorded its 100-millionth download and the thousands of accessories and peripherals that have invented uses for iPad that we simply can't now imagine – when that has happened it will all have seemed so natural and inevitable that today's nay-sayers and sceptics will have forgotten that they ever doubted its potential.

"What can I do with it that I can't do with a laptop or an iPhone?" they might now be objecting. "Too big for my pocket, not big enough for serious use. Don't see the need. It's a solution looking for a problem."

There are many issues you could have with the iPad. No multitasking, still no Adobe Flash. No camera, no GPS. They all fall away the minute you use it. I cannot emphasise enough this point: "Hold your judgment until you've spent five minutes with it." No YouTube film, no promotional video, no keynote address, no list of features can even hint at the extraordinary feeling you get from actually using and interacting with one of these magical objects. You know how everyone who has ever done Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? always says, "It's not the same when you're actually here. So different from when you're sitting at home watching." You know how often you've heard that? Well, you'll hear the same from anyone who's handled an iPad. The moment you experience it in your hands, you know this is class. This is a different order of experience. The speed, the responsiveness, the smooth glide of it, the richness and detail of the display, the heft in your hand, the rightness of the actions and gestures that you employ, untutored and instinctively, it's not just a scaled up iPhone or a scaled-down multitouch enhanced laptop – it is a whole new kind of device. And it will change so much. Newspapers, magazines, literature, academic textbooks, brochures, fliers and pamphlets are going to be transformed (poor Kindle). Specific dedicated apps and enhancements will amaze us. You will see characters in movies use the iPad. Jack Bauer will want to return for another season of 24 just so he can download schematics and track vehicles on it. James Bond will have one. Jason Bourne will have one. Some character, in a Tron-like way, might even be trapped in one.

There's much to like, of course. The physical beauty and classy build quality, as in anything designed by Jonathan Ive. The shockingly low price — $499 for the basic model. The contract-free, unlocked nature of the 3G version. But there are two chief reasons for its guaranteed success.

1. It is so simple. It is basically a highly responsive capacitative piece of glass with solid-state memory and an IPS display. Just as a book is basically paper bound together in a portable form factor. The simplicity is what allows everyone, us, software developers, content providers and accessory manufacturers to pour themselves into it, to remake it according to the limits of their imagination. I'll stop before I get too Disney.

2. It is made by Apple. I'm not being cute here. If it was made by Hewlett Packard, they wouldn't have global control over the OS or the online retail outlets. If it was made by Google, they would have tendered out the hardware manufacture to HTC. Apple – and it is one of the reasons some people distrust or dislike them – control it all. They've designed the silicon, the A4 chip that runs it all, they've designed the batteries, they've overseen every detail of the commercial, technological, design and software elements. No other company on earth does that. And being Apple it hasn't been released without (you can be sure) Steve Jobs being wholly convinced that it was ready. "Not good enough, start again. Not good enough. Not good enough. Not good enough." How many other CEOs say that until their employees want to murder them? That's the difference.

I have always thought Hans Christian Andersen should have written a companion piece to the Emperor's New Clothes, in which everyone points at the Emperor shouting, in a Nelson from The Simpsons voice, "Ha ha! He's naked." And then a lone child pipes up, "No. He's actually wearing a really fine suit of clothes." And they all clap hands to their foreheads as they realise they have been duped into something worse than the confidence trick, they have fallen for what EM Forster called the lack of confidence trick. How much easier it is to distrust, to doubt, to fold the arms and say: "Not impressed." I'm not advocating dumb gullibility, but it is has always amused me that those who instinctively dislike Apple for being apparently cool, trendy, design-fixated and so on, are the ones who are actually so damned cool and so damned sensitive to stylistic nuance that they can't bear to celebrate or recognise obvious class, beauty and desire. The fact is that Apple users like me are the uncoolest people on earth: we salivate, dribble, coo, sigh, grin and bubble with delight.

No, I don't have shares in Apple. I came so close to buying some as an act of defensive defiance in the early 90s when every industry insider and expert in the field agreed that Apple had six months to go before going bust. But I didn't. If I had done I could now afford to buy you all an iPad. Yes, I do like and have tried to champion OpenSource software. How can I square that with my love of Apple? I'm complicated. I'm a human being. I also believe in a mixed economy and mixed nuts. I love our NHS and the National Theatre, but I also love Fortnum and Mason and Hollywood movies. "Apple," Steve Jobs said, "stands at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts." This statement confused non-Americans who are not familiar with the phrase "liberal arts" but I think shows the fundamental cultural seriousness of Jobs and Apple, which in turn explains their huge success and impact. He might perhaps more accurately have said that Apple "stands at the intersection of technology, the liberal arts and commerce".

You may or may not be in the queue for an iPad in March, April, May or June. Or you may decide to stay your hand for version 2.0 or 3.0. But believe me the iPad is here to stay and nothing will be quite the same again. You should know, however, that plenty of industry commentators disagree with me. They have pronounced themselves less enthralled. It is perfectly possible I will be proved wrong about its enduring, game-changing place in the landscape and that people will gleefully rub my nose in this blog in two year's time. I'm certainly not wrong about how soul-scorchingly beautiful it is to use though. And that, for me, is enough

Google Nexus One

Google's Sexy Nexus One Pushes Android to New Limits
You can now go to Google's website and pay Google directly for a phone that bears the search giant's corporate logo and the rather boring name of Nexus One. (Even if it is named after a robot in Blade Runner.)

This is quite a shift from the company's original stance as a neutral distributor of the Android mobile operating system, used by multiple carriers on multiple handsets. Now Google is competing with the very manufacturers that use its OS.

Building the Nexus One (or, to be precise, contracting HTC to build it) may well tick off Google's current and future Android partners. So, what features were so important to Google that it would take that risk?

And why would you want to buy one at the seemingly steep, unsubsidized price of $530?

The answers give a few clues to the next generation of smartphones: fast, always-connected, expandable and fully dependent on the internet. And while the Nexus One isn't completely there yet, it's a few steps closer to the ideal Android phone.

No-BS sales model. Google wants to make it easier for people to buy phones, and once they buy them, to control their relationships with network carriers. So, you can buy an unlocked version for $530 (the phone works with "nearly all" GSM SIM cards, says Google) or pay $180 for a two-year contract with T-Mobile. Google says later on, there will be other carriers and other plans.

I used my Nexus with T-Mobile, which had good 3G coverage in New York City and zero network coverage of any sort in my place in western Massachusetts. I was able to make phone calls, though, by swapping my SIM card with the one from my AT&T iPhone. (As Google acknowledges, this combination gives you voice calling, but not access to AT&T's 3G network. Bummer.)

At $80 a month, the T-Mobile plan is $20 a month cheaper than what Verizon charges on the Droid Android phone. Hopefully, some of the future plans will be dirt-cheap, allowing people to amortize the initial cost of the unlocked phone.

Cool Design. Physically, the Nexus One is as pleasing as any phone in the market. The HTC-manufactured device (built to Google's specs) is like an iPhone with curvy corners, cast in a classy burnished gray with a black frame around a brilliant 3.7-inch 800 x 400-pixel OLED (!) screen. There are four hard-wired touch controls on the bottom of that frame, including one that instantly brings up a search box. (Well, it is a Google phone.)

The home screen features "live wallpaper," a dynamic and fun collection of animated backgrounds. It calls into question, though, whether this frill has a price. At one point, I peeked at the phone's power meter and found that screen was eating up half the energy. This is a real problem: When I failed to recharge the Nexus during the night, it would inevitably be dead the next morning. The battery's official ratings are impressive — seven hours 3G talk time, seven hours video. Indeed, talking or using media didn't run things down too quickly, but the promised and paltry five hours of 3G internet use — along with the drain from the screen — is an issue for a device that urges you to use the internet all the time.

You can replace the removable battery on the fly, but Google clearly intends for customers to make use of the power management widget that dims the screen.

The Nexus One offers one of the more coherent implementations of the Android interface, which can sometimes be a bit rough around the edges. It's easy to switch between the five screens that hold app icons and widgets, and you can get a thumbnail view of any of the screens by touching a dot on the home screen. Widgets are hit and miss: The Facebook widget just highlights single updates. But the constantly updating news and weather widget was always worth a look, as evidenced by the update onscreen as I write this: "Sheen's mother-in-law has misgivings."

One of the signature design features of the Nexus is a tiny tricolor trackball that glows when you have messages or notices. This isn't terribly helpful for navigation because it's just as easy to scroll with your finger. As for the glow: Uh, don't we typically stash phones in our pockets?

Like other Android phones, the Nexus One does not support multitouch gestures on the screen, so iPhone immigrants will be frustrated by the lack of two-finger maneuvers, especially when trying to resize web pages.

Speed. One of Google's core values is that when things run things faster people use them more and like them more. True to its principles, Google has loaded the Nexus One with a speedy Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. I haven't done the metrics, but the thermometer meters that indicate how fast something loads on the Nexus definitely zip by faster than on other phones. The speed provides a halo effect that really heightens the pleasures of using the Nexus One.

Heightened senses. Probably the best feature in the Nexus One is the ubiquitous voice recognition. Just about every time a text field appears — in search, in maps and even in e-mail — you can press a microphone key on the virtual keyboard and just say what you want to put in the field. If you take it easy and enunciate your words as if speaking to a fairly dense child, a reasonably accurate transcription of your words will appear on the screen. There are the usual cosmic misunderstandings, but expanding voice recognition is a welcome step toward our eventual liberation from Lilliputian physical keyboards and unforgiving soft keyboards.

This brings up a puzzler: The Nexus One, like other recent Android phones, has a solid navigation system that makes use of Google Maps and GPS, and it doesn't cost anything. But the voice that gives you turn-by-turn instructions is the same grating metallic female voice heard on earlier versions. It's weird that a device built around speech recognition should lag so much in speech synthesis.

The 5-megapixel camera, with zoom and flash and editing features, takes good pictures and clear video, and can location-stamp them with GPS.

Super syncing with Google products. The Nexus One makes use of your Google account the way a peasant farmer utilizes a pig carcass — it uses almost every part. (Except Google Docs, which you can view from the browser, but without editing.)

All you have to do is sign in to enable your e-mail, calendar, contacts, Picasa galleries (with a neat new interface for accessing photos) and Google Voice, the free application that organizes your phone activities and transcribes your voicemail. Google Voice doesn't work with the iPhone, and I had trouble making outgoing calls with it on the Droid. But it works like a charm with the Nexus.

But when it comes to syncing with your computer, the Nexus isn't so great. This reflects Google's philosophy that if something ain't in the cloud, it probably ain't worth bothering about. Yes, you can plug a Nexus into your laptop via USB, but you have to trigger a command to mount it before the icon shows up, and then you have to drag the files over. Clearly Google would prefer that you use your Nexus One to hear music from Pandora or Last.FM and watch videos from TV.Com or YouTube, as opposed to the antiquated practice of copying and playing actual files.

That's also probably why Google sniffs at the idea of building in gigabytes of onboard memory on the Nexus. The phone comes with a miserable 512 MB of built-in flash memory. Google's message for those who want to store MP3 files, photos or movies? Let them buy SD cards! (There's a slot for that, preloaded with a 4-GB card.)

In other words, Google thinks a phone should be your connection to the cloud, which in turn hooks you to other humans, entertainment, the detritus of your professional life and, of course, any queries that can be answered by searching the vast Google indexes.

The Nexus One does an impressive job of fulfilling that vision and is certainly the best Android phone yet. And if you are eager to jump off the merry-go-round of endless contracts with network carriers, Nexus One may well be the smart phone (and the business model) you've been waiting for.

WIRED You can buy a Nexus One unlocked. Spiffy design. Bright screen. Runs Usain Bolt fast. The voice recognition works in virtually any text field.

TIRED Awkward syncing with computers. Lacks multitouch gestures. Considering its central placement, the trackball is rather underwhelming.

Manufacturer: Google
Price: $530

How To Jailbreak 3.1.2 on All iPod Touch's and iPhone's with Blackra1n on Windows/ Mac

How To Jailbreak 3.1.2 on All iPod Touch's and iPhone's with Blackra1n on Windows/ Mac



How To Jailbreak 3.1.2 on iPod Touch 1G, 2G, 3G, and iPhone 1G, 3G, 3Gs with Blackra1n very easy
1 button process

Today im going to be showing you how to jailbreak 3.1.2
This jaibreak works for the

ipod touch first gen,
ipod touch second gen,
iphone first gen
iphone 3g
iphone 3gs

This does work for the ipod touch 3g but is a tethered jailbreak only for the ipod touch 3g. If you own a ipod touch 3g I recommend holding off a bit for full jailbreak.

and a WARNING to the iPhone 3G and 3Gs users! DO NOT upgrade to 3.1.2 unless you want to lose your baseband unlock forever!

Alright lets start this. Always start with a clean refreshed ipod touch or iphone. That means going into itunes and restoring to 3.1.2

End all itunes processes
open as admin

1. Be on OFFICIAL 3.1.1 or 3.1.2 firmware version.
2. Plug in your device to your pc or mac ( ipod touch 1g,2g,3g,iphone,3g,3gs...)
3. Go to http://www.blackra1n.com and download the blackra1n application. Click on the little windows or mac icon below the website.
3. Start blackra1n.exe on your pc or mac
4. Wait for it to reboot automatically
5. Scroll to 2nd page of your device
6. Open blackra1n app on your device and choose Cydia OR icy OR rock (i prefer cydia)
7. Congratulations
Category: Science & Technology

Jailbreak 3.1.2 iPhone or iPod Touch Using Pwnage Tool

Jailbreak 3.1.2 iPhone or iPod Touch Using Pwnage Tool
Jailbreak 3.1.2 iPhone or iPod Touch Using Pwnage Tool


This is the jailbreak for users who still want to be unlocked or if you have had problems jailbreaking 3.1.2 with Blackra1n.

Mac

Tools and Downloads:

PwnageTool 3.1.4 – Tool for jailbreaking 3.1.2 firmware

PwnageTool 3.1.3 - Tool for jailbreaking your iPhone/iPod Touch


DemoGod - Run your iPhone/iTouch screen on your mac!

Cyberduck - Allows you to connect to your device through your computer (SSH

How to Jailbreak iPhone 3.1Jailbreak and unlock iPhone 3.1

How to Jailbreak iPhone 3.1Jailbreak and unlock iPhone 3.1


Jailbreak iPhone 3.1

Today the iPhone 3.1 update was released to the public. This update fixes a lot of bugs that were present in the iPhone OS 3.0 firmware. If you want to jailbreak or unlock your device, follow the steps below. If you have an unlocked iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS do not update just yet, updating will permanently lock your device and the ultrasn0w unlocking software won’t work.

The jailbreak has not been released yet, but you can do the following to prepare for it.
How to Jailbreak iPhone 3.1Jailbreak and unlock iPhone 3.1

1. You must update to iPhone 3.1 first. After updating, either locate your iPhone 3.1 IPSW file or download it using any of the links below. Remember, don’t use Safari to download. Safari can’t download .IPSW files properly, use a different browser!

iPhone 3.1 download (iPhone1,1_3.1_7C144_Restore.ipsw, 241 MB)
iPhone 3G 3.1 download (iPhone1,2_3.1_7C144_Restore.ipsw, 242 MB)
iPhone 3GS 3.1 download (iPhone2,1_3.1_7C144_Restore.ipsw, 306 MB)

2. Download redsn0w (not up yet, stay tuned!).

3. Follow the jailbreaking guide at the Jailbreak iPhone 3.1 post (not up yet).
Unlock iPhone 3.1

To software unlock iPhone 3.1, you must create a custom firmware that uses the current baseband. The iPhone 3.1 update updates the baseband to a newer one that permanently blocks the software unlock. A guide on how to unlock iPhone 3.1 this will be up later