PCWorld Testing Shows iPad Heat Levels Comparable
to Android Tablets

post from Daring Fireball on 26 March 2012 08:03:20 PM. © Daring Fireball

Melissa J. Perenson, reporting for PCWorld:

Though the new iPad did run hotter than the iPad 2, the difference wasn?t great. And in repeated lab tests of the new iPad, we could not replicate the disturbingly high temperatures that some sources have reported. More important, the new iPad was not dramatically warmer than either the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime or the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 LTE, even though its battery has a substantially higher milliampere-per-hour (mAh) rating than theirs do (11666mAh for the new iPad, versus 7000mAh for the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and 6930mAh for the Transformer Prime).

Remember when Consumer Reports reported on the temperatures of theTransformer Prime and Galaxy Tab? Yeah, me neither.

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http://www.macworld.com/article/1166068/not_so_hot_new_ipad_heat_levels_comparabl
e_to_android_tablets.html

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Android Phone or Condom

post from Daring Fireball on 26 March 2012 08:03:20 PM. © Daring Fireball

Des Traynor:

Here?s a simple rule: if your product isn?t a condom then don?t name it like one. What am I talking about? Let?s take a look?

Hilarious.

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http://blog.intercom.io/whats-in-a-name/

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AnandTech Tests New iPad Battery Life

post from Daring Fireball on 26 March 2012 08:03:20 PM. © Daring Fireball

Anand Lal Shimpi:

Now for the killer. If you have an iPad on Verizon’s LTE network anduse it as a personal hotspot (not currently possible on the AT&Tversion), it will last you roughly 25.3 hours on a single charge.Obviously that’s with the display turned off, but with a 42.5Whbattery driving Qualcomm’s MDM9600 you get tons of life out of the newiPad as a personal hotspot.

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http://www.anandtech.com/show/5694/tested-battery-life-on-the-new-ipad

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AT&T to Sell Nokia Lumia 900 for $100 on April 8

post from Daring Fireball on 26 March 2012 08:03:20 PM. © Daring Fireball

It’s a shame they’re not selling the Lumia 800 instead, but the carriers seem hell-bent on pushing LTE, no matter how big the phones have to be to support it. It’ll be interesting to see whether Nokia can get any traction here in the U.S.

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http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57404235-94/at-t-to-sell-nokia-lumia-900-for-$10
0-on-april-8/

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Why Mike Daisey isn’t done apologizing for
his lies

post from Apple on 26 March 2012 05:02:55 PM. © Apple

Nine days after monologist Mike Daisey was exposed as a fabulist, a man who manufactured personal stories about Apple’s supply chain in China out of thin air in hopes of selling a message and theater tickets, he finally apologized for his actions. In doing so, he once again left out a key detail.

Daisey’s infamy has grown following the decision of This American Life on March 16th to retract an earlier report after discovering that Daisey could not account for key facts in both his monologue (The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs) and in his statements to This American Life for a report on Apple and manufacturing that got widespread attention. Among other things, Daisey completely made up an anecdote in which he had supposedly invoked a sense of child-like wonder in a former Foxconn worker with a hand mangled on the iPad production line by showing the man a working iPad for the very first time.

After his uncomfortable performance on “Retraction,” Daisey defended his work, writing on his personal blog that “my show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity.” Given more time to think about it, he actually doubled down, attacking his critics: “Given the tenor of the condemnation, you would think I had concocted an elaborate, fanciful universe filled with furnaces in which babies are burned to make iPhone components, or that I never went to China, never stood outside the gates of Foxconn, never pretended to be a businessman to get inside of factories, never spoke to any workers.“

However, it later emerged that Daisey had insisted on printing “this is a work of non-fiction” on playbills for his monologue, making it clear that he wanted audiences to walk away from the performance seeing Daisey as a courageous muckraker unafraid to tell the stories others wouldn’t touch.

Daisey’s conscience finally caught up with him over the weekend. On Sunday, he wrote the following:

When I said onstage that I had personally experienced things I in fact did not, I failed to honor the contract I?d established with my audiences over many years and many shows. In doing so, I not only violated their trust, I also made worse art. This is not the place for me to try and explain my good intentions. We all know where the road paved with good intentions leads. In fact, I think it might lead to where I?m sitting right now. I had an acting teacher, years ago, who always taught that the calling of an artist is to be humble before the work. He knew, I think, how easy it can be to lose one?s way.

He went on to apologize to his other theater performers, human-rights advocates, and journalists that had interviewed him for stories in which he repeated all his falsehoods. “Things came out of my mouth that just weren?t true, and over time, I couldn?t even hear the difference myself,” he wrote.

But Mike Daisey forgot to apologize to the entity that was the direct target of his lies: Apple.

Original Sin

Daisey’s selection of Apple and Jobs as the centerpieces of his monologue was not a coincidence. A self-confessed Apple fanboy, he held great admiration for the work that Apple contributed to the world under Jobs’ second term as CEO as well as immense disgust for the conditions under which modern consumer electronics devices are produced. Given that Apple is the largest producer of modern mobile devices made in factories such as Foxconn’s, and given the intense scrutiny that is paid to all things Apple both inside and outside the tech industry, it’s not hard to see why Daisey chose Apple and Jobs as protagonists in his work.

But in reality, Daisey exposed nothing about Apple’s manufacturing issues that wasn’t already known. It’s not that his whole account was fabricated: workers manufacturing products for Apple have been poisoned by dangerous chemicals, killed in explosions that were preventable, and have committed suicide in groups over the last few years.

Steve Jobs Announces iPhone

What Daisey did do, however, was present made-up emotional and personal stories about those issues as if they were new. He spent months on a media blitz linking Apple as the main contributor to the widespread labor and safety issues at companies like Foxconn (which builds products for an entire industry) based on fabricated accounts of his travels in China.

He implied that the company was covering up even worse violations, such as the widespread use of child labor, in one of the most dramatic scenes of his monologue. He wrote an op-ed in the New York Daily News the day before the latest iPad was released, saying “I traveled to the factories in China, spoke to dozens of workers, heard their stories firsthand and went undercover into factories and dormitories. ? The company has been choosing profit over workers? lives.”

And perhaps worst of all, on the day after Jobs died Daisey repeated the story about the Foxconn worker with the mangled hand in The New York Times, linking Jobs’ legacy to a horrific anecdote that never happened. After This American Life published its retraction earlier this month, the Times removed that paragraph from its archived copy of the article.

The Daisey And The Damage Done

There is no doubt that the consumer electronics industry needs to do more to improve the working conditions under which its products are made, and that Apple, as the leading consumer electronics company of our time, is in a position to make an outsized impact. But Daisey’s contribution to this issue was not just to raise attention to the problem at large (which he definitely did), it was also to generate publicity for his Apple-themed show. He did that with lies that declared not only was Apple not doing as much as it could to solve the problem, but that it was actually a worse actor than its peers.

On a petition circulated by Change.org following the airing of the first episode of This American Life, over 255,000 people affixed their names to a call for Apple to do more to protect workers. They said things like “I can still make the decision to buy PC instead for the sake of my conscience and the wellbeing of other people” and “As a Mac user for 17 years, this is the first issue that could make me stop buying from Apple.” A petition to retract that petition following the exposure of Daisey’s lies has just 373 signatures.

Mike Daisey built the key parts of his monologue–and much of his current fame–on lies he told about Apple. He has one more apology to make.

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http://gigaom.com/apple/why-mike-daisey-isnt-done-apologizing-for-his-lies/

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Dick Head Calls iPad a Penis Iron

post from Daring Fireball on 26 March 2012 05:02:53 PM. © Daring Fireball

Rob Enderle:

Last week was an interesting week. Apple announced what appears tobe a penis iron in the new iPad, and folks are burning throughtheir monthly 4G data plans in a few hours. Tim’s having his firstAntennagate moment, and Steve Jobs he isn’t.

It’s getting harder and harder for Enderle to stay in character as the “Apple is in trouble and I’m the only guy smart enough to see it” guy.

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.technewsworld.com/edpick/74694.html

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ScanFLX makes mobile Netflix disc management a
snap

post from Apple on 26 March 2012 04:03:29 PM. © Apple

Twice as many Netflix customers are streaming vs having discs mailed to them, but that doesn’t mean it should be difficult to manage a Netflix disc queue. ScanFLX, a nifty new $0.99 iOS app, makes it easier to add titles to your list of DVDs or Blu-Ray movies by using the camera on your device. Simply scan the barcode of a movie and with one tap, the title is added to your Netflix queue.

GottaBeMobile found the new app earlier today and says the $0.99 is a launch promotion. The iOS software is slated to sell for $1.99 at some future point. Even at two bucks, I think it’s well worth it, provided you still subscribe to Netflix for the physical discs.

The convenience really comes from wandering around the movie aisles at Target, WalMart, Best Buy or wherever DVDs and Blu-Ray discs are sold. Instead of trying to remember the interesting looking titles, taking photos of them or writing them down for later input to a Netflix queue, a simple barcode scan in ScanFLX does trick. You get a brief summary of the movie, the number of stars earned by reviewers and the option to add to a Netflix queue. Brilliant!

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Apple cracks down on UDID use

Apple said seven months ago it would begin outlawing apps on its iOS App Store that use a device’s universal device identifier, or UDID. Reports are rolling in that indicate the company has started to actually enforce this policy.

UDIDs are a unique string of numbers associated with a device that can let developers of apps track their apps. Or when passed between apps, UDIDs allow ad networks, for example, to build a profile noting user habits and preferences associated with that device, which allows them to more carefully target their ads.

The rejection of their use doesn’t seem to be completely universal just yet, however. TechCrunch says Apple’s process is happening like this: “Two of the 10 review teams started doing blanket rejections of apps that access UDIDs this week. Next week, that will rise to four [of] the ten teams, and keep escalating until all 10 teams are turning down apps that are still using UDIDs.”

This, of course, comes as Apple has gotten some negative attention for its handling of privacy violations — including approving apps for sale in its App Store that have violated Apple’s privacy guidelines by uploading users’ contacts to the app developers’ servers. Some members of Congress have been sniffing around this privacy issue and others, including a loophole in Apple’s software that allows the uploading of user photo libraries.

And it’s just a few days since the Federal Trade Commission made it known that it is concerned about comprehensive tracking when it comes to personal data, and that it wants to see “privacy by design” built into consumer web services and apps.

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Ragamala - The garland of music - now released on
Apple iTunes Store

Reality Premedia Services is proud to announce Ragamala, an iPad app that portrays the beauty of 26 ragas and their association with colors, birds, animals, moods, paintings, poetry and music. It will appeal to your senses of hearing, touch and seeing. Each raga is played by flute and guitar. Popular songs based on the raga are also played. It has four modules; Musician, Poet, Painter and Browser.

Read The Full Article:
http://prmac.com/release-id-40190.htm

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ARG Zombies Kickstarter Rewards Change

ARG Zombies, currently in a funding campaign at Kickstarter.com, just lowered early access to the game to the $1 tier of donations. With five days left, they hope to achieve the remaining money on their funding campaign... One dollar at a time. ARG Zombies uses your devices GPS capabilities as the core concept behind the game. Travel across the US, fighting zombies and other monsters that are unique to the part of the country you are in.

Read The Full Article:
http://prmac.com/release-id-40274.htm

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