Steve Jobs played key role in developing the next iPhone
Deceased Apple co-founder Steve Jobs played a key part in developing the next iPhone, which is expected to be redesigned and have a larger screen than past models.
Jobs, who died in October a day after the iPhone 4S was announced, worked closely on the sixth-generation iPhone as well, according to a new report.
In 2010, he said no one would buy a smartphone so big you couldn’t get your hand around it. But with more rumors supporting a larger-screen iPhone, it appears that Jobs may have changed his mind before he passed away. Or at least compromised.
The next iPhone is expected to have a 4-inch screen, up from the current 3.5-inch screen, but the latest report backing the new feature says the phone won’t necessarily need to get bigger to accommodate the larger screen.
“A 4-inch screen, measured diagonally, can fit on the face of the iPhone with the current dimensions,” a Bloomberg News report says.
The next iPhone, expected to hit stores in October, is also expected to finally work on 4G networks. It would join the third-generation iPad, which became the first Apple product to work with 4G earlier this year.
And the sixth-generation iPhone will have an overhauled looked too, according to the report. This would be the first time a significant change is made to the iPhone aesthetics since the release of the iPhone 4 in 2010.
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Article source: http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-apple-jobs-iphone-20120518,0,5685634.story
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Article source: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/story/2012-05-19/reviewed-samsung-galaxy-tab-2/55063068/1
Claims of Larger iPhone 5 Persist
The next iPhone, which may or not be called iPhone 5, will have a 4-inch screen according to several unidentified sources cited in news stories this week.
An array of bloggers and technology commenters are already accepting these mainstream media accounts as confirmation of the long-rumored big-screened phone.
The unsupported conviction or hope that Apple would create bigger iPhones has burned bright for over a year. Many expected that what turned out to be iPhone 4S would have a larger screen, but it kept the 3.5-inch display. Android-based phones from rivals such as Samsung come in a variety of diagonally measured screen sizes, many much larger than the iPhone’s 3.5-inch display. The Samsung Galaxy Note has a 5.3-inch screen, for example.
SCUTTLEBUTT: iPhone 5 rumor roundup for week ending May 11
A close look at the stories by The Wall Street Journal and Reuters reveals that they, too, rest on a thin foundation. Despite their length, both actually add very little detail about the purported big screen iPhone. And both use almost identical language to describe their sources: “people familiar with the matter” and “people familiar with the situation.”
The next iPhone is “likely to have a larger display than its current models have, with the company ordering bigger screens from its Asian suppliers, people familiar with the matter said,” according to the Journal. “The new screens measure at least 4 inches diagonally, the people said. … Production is set to begin next month, the people said.”
If the production schedule is correct, that would suggest the phones will be released, if not announced, later in 2012, rather than earlier as some had predicted, or hoped.
According to Reuters, “Apple Inc plans to use a larger screen on the next-generation iPhone and has begun to place orders for the new displays from suppliers in South Korea and Japan, people familiar with the situation said on Wednesday.”
And, apart from both stories asserting, based on the same sources, that Apple will rely on a trio of manufacturers for the new screens — Korea’s LG Display, Sharp and Japan Display, a recent merger of the display production units of three companies — neither story adds anything more.
But that was enough for folks like Richi Jennings, who writes Computerworld’s IT Blogwatch. He concludes, “The iPhone 5 release date is basically now known. And the rumors of a larger, 4-inch screen are all-but confirmed.”
But as with all such “reports,” the weight to be attached to the conclusions hinges on the identity, reliability and motives of the sources. And neither Reuters nor the Journal sheds any light on these. Their sources may be from display manufacturers or they could be rumor sites that claim to have sources in display manufacturers.
The principal objection to a larger-screen iPhone, and to iPhones with multiple screen sizes, has been the impact on software developers, who would have to change their existing application code for the new size and generally speaking to factor in multiple display sizes when targeting iPhones. To allow apps to remain unchanged, and keep the existing iPhone resolution of 960 by 640 pixels, Apple would have to increase pixel size, but that would reduce the “Retina Display” pixel density, currently 326 pixels per inch.
One possible solution, outlined in April 2012 in an informative post at The Verge, is for Apple to change the phone screen’s aspect ratio, currently 3:2, to 9:5. That would let Apple extend the diagonal screen size to 3.99 inches, making the screen taller but no wider, and possibly allowing the iPhone to retain the same overall dimensions. The pixel density would still meet Retina Display standards, but the screen overall would have 20% more pixels than iPhone 4 and 4S, according to The Verge’s calculations.
John Cox covers wireless networking and mobile computing for Network World.Twitter: http://twitter.com/johnwcoxnwwEmail: john_cox@nww.comBlog RSS feed: http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/2989/feed
Read more about anti-malware in Network World’s Anti-malware section.
Article source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/255793/claims_of_larger_phone_5_persist.html
Aaron Sorkin to direct Steve Jobs film
(CNN) — Aaron Sorkin, the celebrated screenwriter whose punchy dialogue propelled TV’s “The West Wing” and the Facebook movie “The Social Network,” will write and direct an upcoming film on the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
Sony Pictures has confirmed that Sorkin will adapt “Steve Jobs,” the in-depth biography of the tech icon that was written by Walter Isaacson and released shortly after Jobs’ death last year.
“Steve Jobs’ story is unique: he was one of the most revolutionary and influential men not just of our time but of all time,” Amy Pascal, co-chair of Sony Pictures Entertainment, said in a written release.
“There is no writer working in Hollywood today who is more capable of capturing such an extraordinary life for the screen than Aaron Sorkin; in his hands, we’re confident that the film will be everything that Jobs himself was: captivating, entertaining, and polarizing.”
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The legacy of Steve Jobs
Sorkin won an Academy Award for adapting “The Social Network,” which in 2010 propelled Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to household-name status. His other work includes “A Few Good Men,” “Moneyball,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” “The West Wing” and “Sports Night.”
The yet-unnamed Steve Jobs film will be Sorkin’s first movie-directing gig.
Sony reportedly wanted Sorkin for the film and began courting him immediately after securing the rights to Isaacson’s book late last year.
Sorkin actually knew Jobs and wrote a piece for The Daily Beast about his memories of Jobs after his death. He wrote that he and Jobs had developed a “phone friendship” that led Jobs to invite him to write a movie for Pixar (the animation studio Jobs ran) and to tour Apple.
“I told him I’d take him up on it and I never did,” Sorkin wrote. “But I still keep thinking about that Pixar movie. And for me, that’s Steve’s legacy. That, and the fact that I wrote this on a Mac that I loved taking out of the box.”
Another Jobs movie is also in the works. An independent film starring “That ’70s Show” alum Ashton Kutcher is scheduled to begin filming in May.
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Article source: http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/16/tech/innovation/steve-jobs-aaron-sorkin/?hpt=hp_t2
iPad mini to debut during second half of 2012?
The iPad and its imaginary, smaller friend.
(Credit:
CNET)
Apple has reportedly already tagged LCD suppliers for an
iPad mini, with an eye toward launching the
tablet in the second half of the year.
This latest scuttlebut comes courtesy of Taiwan news outlet Liberty Times (English translation).
Citing the usual, vague “market rumors” but also a report from Japanese securities firm Macquarie, the Liberty Times said the iPad mini could start shipping by the end of the third quarter with a goal of 6 million units.
That 6 million is the same number projected last month by Chinese online portal Netease.
LG and Au Optronics have already passed Apple’s certification tests to provide the tablet’s LCD panel, the report said. Both have been working to ship the panels for actual production of the diminutive iPad, according to the report.
Further details translated by Japanese blog site Macotakara say TPK Holding will produce 4 million backlight modules, with Chimei Innolux providing an additional 2 million. Nissha Printing would make the tablet’s touch film sensor.
This latest rumor follows other claims, some still tentative, that Apple will unveil a 7-inch iPad this year.
Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes recently pointed to evidence of an iPad mini in the supply chain, as seen by the firm’s global research team. One report said that the small tablet would offer 8GB of storage and sell for $200, while Netease put the price tag in the range of $249 to $299.
The iPad finally got a bit of competition in the fourth quarter from Amazon’s 7-inch
Kindle Fire, which boosted the overall market share for Android tablets.
Apple has since regained lost ground and remains the dominant player in the tablet arena. IHS projects a tablet market share of around 61 percent this year.
Still, the iPad has watched its lead decline amidst a swarm of Android tablets, large and small, released over the past year. An iPad mini could be the ticket to combat the Kindle Fire and other smaller tablets. But Apple typically sets the trends rather following those already set by others. So if we do see an iPad mini this year, I’d expect Apple to add some kind of twist to distinguish it from its Android rivals.
Article source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57436077-37/ipad-mini-to-debut-during-second-half-of-2012/
An iPhone with a bigger screen? It might finally be in the cards
Rumors of a sixth-generation iPhone with a larger 4-inch screen are starting to gain traction, with another report coming out backing the claim.
The iPhone, which has had a 3.5-inch screen since its initial launch in 2007, may finally follow the trend started by Android smartphones and increase its screen size as a way to once again wow customers with a new feature.
Apple reportedly has prepared to begin ordering larger screens for its flagship product from suppliers in South Korea and Japan.
The orders may begin as early as June, giving the production of the next iPhone a timetable to start in August, according to a report by Reuters.
The suppliers charged with this order of larger iPhone screens are LG Display Co. Ltd. and Sharp Corp. in South Korea and Japan Display Inc, according to Reuters, which offers “people familiar with the situation” as its source of information.
The report by Reuters comes a day after an initial report by the Wall Street Journal outlining the possiblity of a larger iPhone on its way.
Rumors of an iPhone with a larger screen have preceded the launch of previous iPhones, but have always proven false.
But this time around, the evidence is beginning to look pretty solid, and as Reuters notes, a larger screen would give the iPhone a “wow” factor once again. Its latest iPhone, the 4S , has sold well, but upon its unveiling, many customers were unimpressed by the device, which on the outside looks exactly the same as its predecessor, the iPhone 4.
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Article source: http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-apple-iphone-larger-screen-20120517,0,5785503.story?track=rss
Steve Jobs on camera: ‘The publishers are actually going to withhold their …
Telegraphing an alleged price-fixing conspiracy 2 years before the DOJ caught up to it
Jobs talking price-fixing at the iPad launch. Source: AllThingsD
FORTUNE — Paid Content‘s Laura Hazard Owen, combing through documents newly unredacted in the states‘ (as opposed to the U.S. Department of Justice‘s) antitrust complaint against Apple (AAPL) and five book publishers, uncovered a gem: a blunt Steve Jobs e-mail that basically hands the attorneys general their price-fixing case.
In a note to a publishing executive nervous about sticking it to Amazon (AMZN), Jobs wrote:
As I see it, [Conspiring Publisher] has the following choices:
1. Throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream ebooks market at $12.99 and $14.99.
2. Keep going with Amazon at $9.99. You will make a bit more money in the short term, but in the medium term Amazon will tell you they will be paying you 70% of $9.99. They have shareholders too.
3. Hold back your books from Amazon. Without a way for customers to buy your ebooks, they will steal them. This will be the start of piracy and once started, there will be no stopping it. Trust me, I’ve seen this happen with my own eyes.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see any other alternatives. Do you?
Good stuff. But as several readers have pointed out, Jobs telegraphed all this in a brief on-camera exchange with the Wall Street Journal‘s Walt Mossberg at the launch of the original iPad in January 2010, more than two years before the government’s antitrust lawyers caught up to the alleged conspiracy.
It’s in the AllThingsD video here. You can skip Kara Swisher’s irritating preamble and go straight to the Steve Jobs part, which starts at the 1:40 mark. Mossberg asks Jobs why customers would pay $14.99 for an iBook when they could get the same title from Amazon for $9.99.
“The prices will be the same,” Jobs assures him. “The publishers are actually going to withhold their books from Amazon.”
Which they did. Amazon was forced to abandon the $9.99 model and for two years — until the DOJ filed its suit – e-book prices were the same on the iPad, the Nook and the Kindle.
Amazon has now gone back to offering New York Times bestsellers for $9.99.
As we’ve suggested before (see here, here and here), it seems wrong that the government would give a pass to Amazon — an e-book monopolist selling titles below cost — and instead sue five publishers gasping for air in a shrinking market.
Adding insult to injury, Amazon has since started signing up authors for its own imprints, threatening to cut publishers off at the source. For a view of how the whole business looks from Publisher’s Row, see Brad Stone’s excellent “Amazon’s Hit Man,” in Bloomberg Businessweek.
In UK, too, Apple relents on iPad 4G branding
(Credit:
CNET)
Apple has removed all references in the U.K. to “4G” data speeds on its new iPad following a similar move in Australia.
The company told ZDNet UK in a statement that it had removed references to 4G connectivity to simplify customers’ understanding of the product, as different countries use different terms for wireless standards. That follows a similar move recently in Australia.
“The new
iPad supports many high-speed networks around the world, including LTE in the U.S. and Canada and HSPA+ and DC-HSDPA in many countries. Carriers do not all refer to their high speed networks with the same terminology, therefore we’ve decided to use “Wi-Fi + Cellular” as a simple term which describes all the high speed networks supported by the new iPad,” an Apple spokesman said in a statement on Tuesday.
Read more
of “Apple rebrands iPad 4G as ‘Wi-Fi + Cellular’ for UK” at ZDNet UK/
Article source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57434556-37/in-u.k-too-apple-relents-on-ipad-4g-branding/
Stunning iPhone app is our first taste of the new Google
Here’s what a status update looks like in the new Google+ iPhone app.
(Credit:
Jason Hiner/CNET)
Vic Gundotra has been running engineering teams at Google since 2006 but he’s never been more bullish about what Google is building than he is today and there’s one simple reason: Design.
“We care more about design than we ever have in our history,” Gundotra said the day after his pet project, Google+, launched a groundbreaking new redesign for its
iPhone app.
The new app design is a stunning departure from the previous Google+ app and from the Google+ site interface itself. Released on May 9, it turns the act of scanning social media updates into a highly visual experience by combining a slick rendering of your avatar with the signature image of whatever you’re posting and then overlaying the first two lines of your text. The effect is quite appealing, and addicting.
I immediately found myself spending a lot more time in the app. In fact, within the first 24 hours I found myself going to the Google+ app before opening my Twitter app just because it’s a lot more pleasant to flip through. That’s never happened before. Twitter has long been my social network of choice, and even more so on mobile.
I was so struck by this that I got in touch with Google+ chief Gundotra to ask him if this little app was as really as significant to him and Google as it appeared it was to me.
“This redesign was a very, very big deal for us,” he said.
He also confirmed that the data from the first 24 hours showed the same experience that I had: Users were spending a lot more time in the app.
A visual leap
For Gundotra and his team the goal with the new smartphone app was simple: Make sharing less intimidating and more attractive.
Here’s what a full status update looks like when you tap into it.
(Credit:
Jason Hiner/CNET)
“Sharing is one of the most stressful things people do,” Gundotra said, referring to the fact that when sharing, most people worry about whether anyone will notice and what they will say if they do notice.
“When they share, they want to be really proud of what they share,” he said. “So we asked ourselves, ‘How can we put them in the best light possible?’ We want to make you look good when you share.”
To accomplish that, Gundotra’s team completely blew up their existing mobile app — which had debuted with the launch of Google+ last summer — and started over. They wanted to come up with something that truly took advantage of the strengths of today’s smartphones.
“We don’t believe mobile is a small version of the desktop,” said Gundotra. “We are optimizing the experience for the device… The intimacy of touch allows us to do things you wouldn’t do on the desktop.”
As a result, the Google+ design team broke away from the straight reader app like social competitors Twitter and Facebook have. That format works for Twitter because of the 140-character limit, which means readers can quickly scan lots of updates to stay on top of what’s happening in the world. But, Facebook and Google+ have no character limit and so posts are longer and sharing photos is a lot more common. The result is a mobile experience that’s clunky to navigate and feels like a crippled subset of the desktop experience.
That’s why Google+ decided to change the game and go visual. The result is a social app that is a lot closer to Flipboard or Pinterest than the Twitter or Facebook apps. It feels more like a visual bookmarking or photo app, and it works because the lion’s share of online articles now include a big horizontal image that ends up serving as a thumbnail when shared on social services and in various apps. And, even when there is no text, Google+ makes the update look good with some nice font smoothing and scaling.
All in all, I actually prefer using the Google+ mobile app to the desktop browser experience, which is another first for me.
Bold redesign of Google+ iPhone app (photos)
The big question mark is how well it will scale. Right now, Google+ is mostly inhabited by a rabid group of technophiles so the updates don’t flow by nearly as fast as Twitter. Obviously, that also depends on how many people and who you follow. But, if Google+ were to take off and people started posting more, I think I’d have to follow fewer people, check Google+ more often, or simply find that it wasn’t as effective for scanning updates since each Google+ post takes up about 3-4 times as much screen space as a Twitter update, for example.
The other big question is why Google released this redesign for the iPhone before releasing a version for Google’s own
Android platform. The original version of the Google+ mobile app was nearly identical on the two platforms.
Gundotra said, “It’s just the way schedule worked out.”
The Google+ team is building additional functionality into the Android app. The iPhone app with the core functionality was finished before the Android app was ready, so Gundotra made the decision to go ahead and release it. However, even in the blog post he wrote announcing the redesigned app, he teased that the Android app was coming in a “few weeks” and that would include some “extra surprises.”
When I pressed Gundotra, he wouldn’t reveal any hints about the additional functionality in the Android version of the app. He simply said, “I think you’ll be delighted by the few more surprises we have in store.”
But, he also all-but-guaranteed that a
tablet app was also in the works. “It’s one of our most requested pieces of feedback, and we pay very close attention to feedback,” he said.
Bigger implications
Design has never been a core competency at Google. In fact, the company has almost been anti-design from the beginning. In many ways, the secret of the success of Google.com has always been its sparseness. It has had virtually no design except for the multi-colored Google logo pared with a simple text entry field, and then when you click “Google Search” or hit Enter you get a straight list of search results without much additional clutter on the page.
Here’s the design of Google’s original search engine from the late 1990s.
(Credit:
Google)
Google’s other big hit, Android, has often been criticized for its design — even being chided as a less-polished knock-off of the iPhone. Other products such as Google Docs have suffered from inconsistency and generally unremarkable designs.
However, since Larry Page returned as Google CEO last April he has put far greater emphasis on product development by cutting the number of products that Google is working on and demanding higher quality from the ones that are left. Earlier this year Page said:
“Creating a simpler, more intuitive experience across Google has been [an] important focus. I have always believed that technology should do the hard work — discovery, organization, communication — so users can do what makes them happiest: living and loving, not messing with annoying computers! That means making our products work together seamlessly… As Sergey said in the memorable way only he can, ‘We’ve let a thousand flowers bloom; now we want to put together a coherent bouquet.’”
We saw hints of this last year when Google simplified its home page and launched an updated navigation bar that was standardized across all of its major products. We saw another hint of it last month when Google+ launched a major overhaul of its full browser experience.
But, this new mobile app that has ironically first reared its head on the iPhone is the most powerful example of the kind of service that Google+ wants to be and the kind of products that Page’s new Google wants to create.
“Google+ is demonstrating what will be the future of the entire company,” said Gundotra. “We want software to be emotionally resonant with users… This is just the beginning.”
Article source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57434097-93/stunning-iphone-app-is-our-first-taste-of-the-new-google/
For Steve Jobs, Patents Kept Beauty Of Design Alive
Enlarge Melisa Goh/NPR
Steve Jobs filed more than 300 patents, now on display at the Smithsonian’s S. Dillon Ripley Center in Washington, D.C.
Melisa Goh/NPR
Steve Jobs filed more than 300 patents, now on display at the Smithsonian’s S. Dillon Ripley Center in Washington, D.C.
U.S. Patent No. D486486 reads: “A display device with a moveable assembly attached to a flat panel display and to a base.” Then there’s Patent No. D469109, “the ornamental design for a media player, substantially as shown and described.”
Those are just a couple of the more than 300 patents that bear the name Steven P. Jobs, the late CEO of Apple. A new exhibition opened on Friday at the Smithsonian’s Ripley Center in Washington, D.C., titled The Patents and Trademarks of Steve Jobs: Art and Technology that Changed the World.
Walter Isaacson is the author of Steve Jobs: A Biography. He tells Weekend Edition Sunday host Rachel Martin that Jobs belongs right alongside the pantheon of great American inventors like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and the Wright brothers.
“Even more importantly … he was great at design patents,” Isaacson says. “He understood that design matters [and] that beauty matters.”
Even though his name is on hundreds of patents, Jobs wasn’t necessarily a skilled engineer. His expertise, Isaacson says, was in his ability to identify and execute great design and ideas.
“The magic of Apple under Steve Jobs was — and still is — that it could connect design and beauty to great engineering, and then execute on it,” he says.
Jobs’ collaboration with industrial designer Jony Ive was one of the “greatest in our modern era,” Isaacson says. Ive told him it was Jobs who was able to appreciate the great ideas, embrace them, develop and execute them.
“That’s why his name is on so many patents,” he says.
Some of those patents include even the packaging for many Apple products, like the original iPod. Jobs was taught early on that you have to impute a beauty to a product from the moment people see the box, Isaacson says.
That idea carried over to the now-famous Apple stores, where Jobs also has his name on the patent for the iconic glass staircases that seem to hover in the air.
“He had the patent on how it [was] fastened and how those stairs seemed to float,” he says. “And in our lives, in a world of shoddy products, it reminds us that beauty matters.”
Though most companies file design and product patents simply to keep their property safe, Isaacson says Jobs’ motives were slightly different. He says Jobs was demonstrating his care for design.
“When you care enough about how you open a box or how you get to the second floor of the store, that shows a commitment to beauty and design,” he says.
The Patents and Trademarks of Steve Jobs: Art and Technology that Changed the World is showing at the Smithsonian’s S. Dillon Ripley Center in Washington, D.C., from May 11 through July 8.
Article source: http://www.npr.org/2012/05/13/152590769/for-steve-jobs-patents-kept-beauty-of-design-alive
