Apple shows off Apple TV and 2010 range

This week is going to be a busy one for the world of technology – the IFA is taking place in Germany and Apple has just shown off their new 2010 models of the Nano, Shuffle iPod Touch and their new Apple TV gizmo.

There isn’t much to say about the new Shuffle so we’ll get that out of the way first. It has a 15 hour battery, the button has made a comeback and is now on the front of the device, it comes in five colours and will be available from next week. $49 will bag you a 2GB model.

The Nano has had the biggest overhaul and has turned the most heads. It now has a touch screen which replaces the click wheel and it’s 46% smaller and 42% lighter. It comes in seven colours and has a 24 hour battery. It’s not all good news though – there’s no camera and no video playback. And although it has a time and date function, there’s no alarm feature…because it doesn’t have a speaker. Prices are set at $149 for 8GB or $179 for 16GB.

As predicted by many, the new iPod Touch is simply an thinner iPhone 4 minus the phone features. That means it’ll feature a retina display from the iPhone 4, an Apple A4 core, 3-axis gyroscope and FaceTime support due to the addition of a front camera. It’ll be arriving in US stores next week at a price of $229 for 8GB, $299 for 32GB, and $399 for 64GB. No 16GB or 128GB models it would seem.

If anything, Apple TV is inexpensive. The tiny black box will only cost $99. It sits under your TV and allows you to stream TV shows and movies onto your picturebox in 720p. Apple says that 720p works best for picture quality and bandwidth. Round the back you’ll find a HDMI port, Ethernet, optical audio, USB sockets and it also has 802.11n WiFi. TV shows from ABC and Fox will cost 99 cents at time,while HD movies will cost $4.99. Other services set to appear include YouTube, Netflix, photo sharing site Flickr and Mobile Me. Rotten Tomatoes will be providing information for the movie database. The device also comes with a white-coloured remote that resembles an elongated Shuffle.

Apple claimed during their conference that the iPod Touch is now the #1 gaming device outselling the Nintendo DS and PSP combined. This however does seem a little hard to swallow – at last count 132 million Nintendo DS handhelds have been sold compared to 120 million iPod Touch units.

Nintendo should be worried though, especially if Epic’s new iPhone engine – which can be seen for yourself by downloading the Epic Citadel demo – is anything to go by. You can read a little bit more about that over on Kotaku.

Pleco Chinese Dictionary app amazes

The Chinese language barrier is about become a whole lot smaller – Pleco are launching their real-time optical character recognition (OCR) app on iPhone this September.

It can translate text via  images presented on your phone’s camera display. As the video below shows – which uses text from Lord of the Rings – there’s no lag or loading times and you can even save words and phrases:

Samsung Galaxy S says Hello

A rather witty newspaper advert for the Samsung Galaxy S. In addition, Samsung have even been giving away free Galaxy S phones to disgruntled iPhone 4 users on Twitter. Nice one Samsung.

Antennagate

Ninety journalists gathered at an Apple press conference last Friday where Apple addressed the problems with the iPhone 4’s reception. Or “Antennagate,” as the issue is now seemingly referred to.

“We’re not perfect. We know that. You know that. And (our) phones aren’t perfect either. We’ve been working our butts off to understand what the real problems are,” said Steve Jobs during the conference.

The outcome? From next week until 30^th September a free signal boosting mobile phone case will be available on Apple.com . If you’ve already purchased a case then a refund will be given.

It was also announced that the delayed white version of the iPhone 4 would be available from 30^th July in the US.

iPhone 4 predictably official

Yesterday Apple held their Worldwide Developers Conference, and as everyone expected, unveiled the iPhone 4. The real thing has turned out to be exactly like the leaked iPhone back in April. Although there were mixed reactions when the leaked version was first seen (some referring to it as a cheap Japanese knock-off), now that it’s official everyone agrees that it’s a thing of beauty, with the aesthetic stylings of a classic Leica camera.

So what’s new? There’s the 960×640 3.5 inch IPS LCD display, which the Apple marketing department are referring to as “the retina display” (a nice way of ignoring the fact it’s not a low-power, daylight-friendly AMOLED display like most other new smartphones). Under the hood there’s an A4 CPU, as seen in the iPad. Battery life has been boosted slightly, with 7 hours of 3G talktime. The camera has also got an upgrade, now with 5 megapixels and 720p HD video recording, plus a small front-facing camera. That’s your lot on the hardware front – memory and storage remain unchanged.

As you can probably guess, we’re not really blown away by the iPhone 4. Of course, the early leaked version did take some of the wind out of the announcement, although the incremental hardware upgrade – basically just taking the iPhone 4 to the same level as the HTC Incredible and similar new Android phones – leaves us a little underwhelmed. That said, many see the apps as the iPhone’s… killer app. So we’re sure it will still sell like crack-covered hotcakes.

New iPhone 4G leaked

It’s been flushing around the internet for a couple of days – reports of ‘prototype’ iPhone lost in a bar, apparently the new iPhone 4G – though at first it smelt like bullshit, a story too contrived, with people at MacRumours commenting that the design looked like a “cheap Japanese fake” (they don’t seem to realise that China makes the cheap knock-offs, not Japan).

Now though Gizmodo have posted an in-depth article on the new iPhone, which they claim is proof that the thing is 100% real. We’re moderately convinced now.

In a surprising twist, the Apple sites which previously called this a “cheap Japanese knock-off” now recognise it to be a stunning piece of “Apple industrial design that fits in perfectly with the product line” (nice turnaround, Apple fanboys!).

Gizmodo don’t know much about the new iPhone hardware, as they can’t seem to turn their device on, but they do report it has an improved camera, an extra front-facing camera, a higher resolution display, a few more buttons, and uses a Micro-SIM slot rather than the standard SIM card. It’s basically the same size and weight as the current iPhone, just a little bit thinner. We still don’t know what type of CPU it has, whether it uses the same A4 chip as the iPad or not (probably, we’d guess).

So there it is. It seems quite real. You can probably buy one in June or July.

iPhone OS 4 unveiled

Apple held a brief press conference today to unveil the new features of their iPhone OS 4. Thousands of Apple fans were waiting eagerly in anticipation for Mr Steve Jobs to demonstrate some amazing new features. So, let’s reveal those new features!

There are 7 main updates (“tentpole” features as Jobs described them) in iPhone OS 4, and those are:

• Multitasking (more like saved states and fast app switching though, not true multitasking)
• App folders (to organise the apps on your iPhone’s ‘desktop’)
• Enhanced Mail app
• iBooks (the same as the iPad, with a free copy of Winnie the Pooh!)
• Enterprise support (encrypting emails and other dull stuff)
• Game Center (online game matchmaking and achievements like Xbox Live)
• iAds (adverts in your iPhone apps. Yep. Seriously)

The new OS is due to be released on the iPhone and iPod Touch this summer, with an iPad version following in autumn. Colour us underwhelmed.

iPhone and Android rule the roost

If you care about mobile phone market share and the smartphone operating system ‘war’, then you might find AdMob’s latest Mobile Metrics Report for February 2010 mildly interesting and insightful.

Their full PDF report download covers all the fine details, but we’ll summarise the basics; the iPhone OS now accounts for 50% of smartphone operating systems worldwide (at least based on the sites that AdMob actually targets), with Android gaining on it with a 24% share. Unfortunately for Symbian, its share of the smartphone OS market dropped from 43% last year to just 18% this year.

Within the US, Android browsers now account for 42% of the market, just a tiny bit behind the iPhone, with all other browsers fading into insignificance.

It’s a little bit different on the overall hardware front though – Samsung are clear winners with 32% of the market, Nokia a little behind with 24%, whilst the likes of HTC only manage a footnote under the general banner of ‘others’. Of course, this covers all phones with internet access, not just ‘smart’ ones.

Do take the report with a pinch of salt, as it’s all based on traffic generated on AdMob’s network, so it’s fairly US centric. Also keep in mind that Google own AdMob, for whatever that’s worth. Still, AdMob’s quite a good sample, as they serve 7 billion adverts a month within the US, and another few billion across the rest of the world.