If you’re anxious to compare the new Kindle Fire tablet to the iPad 2, or even the Nook Color, than this handy chart from The Verge makes it nice and easy.
What obviously stands out here is that the iPad 2 dominates every conceivable spec in the chart, minus the higher price point of course. For that reason (and others), I’m not sure if this is a fair comparison but people will be wanting to compare the devices anyway. The iPad 2 clearly has many more features, a larger screen, significantly more powerful CPU & GPU, but is also priced at at least 2.5x the Kindle tablet, and if anything this comparison does a great job of illustrating that the iPad is really in it’s own league.
Amazon has announced the Kindle Fire, the companies first true entry into the tablet market, and what is seen by many as the first real iPad competitor. Backed by Amazon’s massive content library of movies, TV, songs, magazines, books, and apps, the Kindle fire is priced at $199 and is set to be released to US markets on November 15, 2011. Orders are said to be shipping out on a first-come first-serve basis, and you can pre-order the device now through Amazon.com.
Now lets get to the interesting stuff:
Kindle Fire Tech Specs
Most of the anticipated specs are true and some of the technical details are even better than the original rumors, like a dual-core CPU, not to mention the lower price point:
7″ multi-touch color IPS display
1024×600 pixel resolution at 169 ppi
Dual-Core CPU
512MB RAM
Wi-Fi – 802.11b/g/n
8GB internal storage
Unlimited cloud storage of Amazon content
8 hour battery life
USB 2.0 micro port
Top mounted speakers and audio jack
Runs highly modified Android 2.3 OS
Tied to Amazon account for immediate setup, no tethering to PC / Mac required
Amazon Silk cloud-accelerated web browser
Free month of Amazon prime with purchase
1 year warranty
7.5″ x 4.7″ x 0.45″
14.6 ounces (weighs slightly less than a pound at 0.9lbs or 414 grams)
Noticeably absent from the tech specs are: no camera, no microphone, no 3G access, no GPS, but for the very low price of $199 the lack of certain features isn’t too surprising.
Alongside the Kindle Fire tablet, Amazon also released a variety of new Kindle readers, including the new Kindle Touch, which has a 6″ e-Ink multi-touch display and is also offered in a 3G version. Amazon’s e-readers are not really viewed as competitors to the iPad, whereas the Kindle Fire tablet clearly is, and it will be interesting to see if the device puts any dents in Apple’s longstanding tablet market domination.
Amazon Kindle Fire’s first TV commercial is below, quoting Voltaire: Read more »
Want to check the download speed of something you’re getting from iTunes or the iOS App Store? No sweat, you can check not only the progress of the download, but also see the transfer speed of what is being downloaded from iTunes.
From the sidebar of iTunes, click on Store, then go to “Downloads”
This shows a list of whatever items are currently downloading, now all you need to do is click on the progress bar to show the transfer rate
Super simple, right? This offers an easy way to determine how fast any iOS good or media file is downloading to your Mac from within iTunes. Keep in mind that this may not be reflective of your overall bandwidth or internet connection speed, because latency with Apple servers also impacts the speed of transfers.
This works similar for the Mac App Store as well if you want to check how your OS X app downloads are going too.
Firefox 7 is now available to download for all supported platforms, the new release has an emphasis on improved memory management and speed, and it does provide a noticeable difference in snappiness when loading pages or browsing the web.
The benefits are best seen if you keep Firefox open for a long time (who ever closes their web browser anyway?), use a lot of tabs, and view pages with a lot of images or text, and in my usage I can confirm it feels more responsive and has a lower memory footprint in OS X. The Mozilla dev team suggests that version 7 will use as much as 50% less memory, but I haven’t seen that dramatic of a difference. If you use Firefox for any browsing purposes or rely on it for plugins like Firebug, it’s well worth downloading.
As usual, Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux are available concurrently. If you have plugins installed, expect a few to nag about compatibility, but they all worked for me anyway.
Apple has confirmed the expected October 4th iPhone media event by sending out invites to a small group of press. The image above, sent to AllThingsD, ThisIsMyNext, SlashGear, and LoopInsight shows the invite to a 10:00AM PST event on their Cupertino campus, which only says “Let’s talk iPhone.”
OS X Lion’s Restore function is what causes app windows to re-open after you’ve relaunched an app, and people seem to either love it or hate it. Sure you can turn it off completely, but that’s a bit overkill if you only don’t want certain apps to restore their windows, and still want resume to work in others.
That is exactly what RestoreMeNot allows you to do; control which apps use window restore, and which don’t. This is easily done through RestoreMeNot’s preference panel list, where anything added to it will disable the feature when you relaunch the app.
Apps like this are probably the best solution to use if you’re not comfortable with using defaults write commands to disable Resume on a per application basis, and you don’t want to disable the feature completely via System Preferences.
Quick note: If you get a message telling you to launch an app first, that’s because it relies on the saved state folders existing. This is much in the same way of manually blocking restore works when you lock down the individual saved state directories, but of course if they don’t exist, they can’t be locked.
Two vastly different analyst reports do a great job of indicating the immense confusion surrounding the next-gen iPhone launch, which is due next week on October 4th. While some analysts are continuing to predict an all new redesigned iPhone 5 released alongside a low-end iPhone 4S, other reports suggest only one new iPhone is going to be pushed out by Apple this year, and that it’s just an incremental hardware update to the iPhone 4.
iPhone 5 is Aluminum Unibody, iPhone 4S is iPod touch Replacement
The first report from Deutsch Bank, as relayed to AppleInsider, suggests that iPhone 5 is expected to be a “completely redesigned handset” featuring “an aluminum unibody construction to replace the current glass back of the iPhone 4” and that it will have a slightly larger screen.
Additionally, Deutsche Banks Chris Whitmore suspects that the so called iPhone 4S is basically an iPod touch replacement, providing a cheaper high margin device that Apple can aim at emerging markets.
The anticipated iPhone 4S is viewed as essentially an 8GB iPod touch with an added cellular antenna
The idea of two phones released simultaneously, one of which will replace the iPod touch, is an appealing theory, but there are other reports that indicate that’s not what is happening.
iPhone 5 Looks Like iPhone 4, No iPhone 4S
Meanwhile, an apparent confirmation from the frequently reliable All Things Digital branch of the Wall Street Journal suggests that a dramatically redesigned iPhone is not going to be released this year. Furthermore, they seem to agree with the idea that Apple is not going to release two different iPhone models at all, throwing water on the dual iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 theories.
Citing a report that circulated last week from yet another analyst, AllThingsD seems to confirm two main points about iPhone 5: that Apple will release only one new iPhone this year, and that the device will look practically identical to the existing iPhone 4:
[According to Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair] Apple’s fifth-generation iPhone will be an incremental update to the current iPhone 4, not a major redesign.
This is followed by specific quotes from analyst Brian Blair that seem to discredit the dual-release iPhone 4S & 5 rumors:
“We don’t expect a second, dramatically different iPhone to accompany this as we don’t think Apple needs to have 3 models in the market to address the high end, mid-tier and low end since the iPhone 4 (with memory lowered to 8 GB) will drop to $99 and effectively attack those markets.”
“Why would Apple bump up only the processor specs of the iPhone 4 in addition to a newly designed iPhone 5 if the goal is to sell it into the pre-paid market at a lower cost,” Blair asks. “A 4S would simply cost more and a 4S itself wouldn’t create a mid-tier market unless it was priced at $99 and the iPhone 4 went to $49 with the new iPhone at $199. We see this scenario as unlikely.”
AllThingsD John Paczkowski responds to this simply with “Agreed”.
In terms of hardware specs, other than the “[possibility of] a larger screen”, the report echos what has long been expected by the rumor mill: A5 CPU borrowed from the iPad 2, 1GB RAM, 8MP camera, and a ‘worldphone’ baseband that brings GSM and CDMA compatibility onto a single chip.
iPhone 5 Specific iOS 5 Features a Big Selling Point?
Finally, Mark Gurman of 9to5mac provides information about an next-gen-iPhone-only iOS 5 feature called “Assistant” that will be “the new device’s biggest selling point”, which lets you speak commands to the iPhone through an intelligent voice command system. 9to5mac has a detailed summary of the Assistant feature that is well worth a read, and their report also reaffirms the aforementioned hardware specs from other rumors.
The most glaringly obvious aspect to all these reports is that nobody knows exactly what’s coming out of Cupertino next week from Apple. About the only thing anyone can agree on is the devices availability, where a mid-month release date looks like October 14, if for no other reason that it being in the middle of the month, with iOS 5 coming slightly earlier.
Reverse scrolling, better known as ‘natural scrolling’ for OS X Lion users, is when the content on screen follows your finger movements, just like iOS. This is activated by default for vertical scrolling, but what about horizontal?
Oddly enough, scrolling left and right maintains the old style scrolling behavior, moving the content away from your fingers instead, but with a free utility called Scroll Reverser we can change this.
Have you ever wanted to get a look at the contents of a package file on the Mac, but without installing it? You can do that with the help of an excellent command line. This continues on with our series of inspecting the contents of app installers, and in this case we’ll demonstrate how to extract package files and sort through their contents without actually installing them onto Mac OS X.
A new report says that Apple is blacking out selected vacation days during the second week of October, strongly indicating that iOS 5, iCloud, and iPhone 5 are expected to be released that week. Specifically, AppleInsider learned that Apple “has in some locations blacked out vacation time for employees from October 9th through 12th and October 14th through 15th“.
More Evidence for an iPhone 5 Release on October 14 or 15
The October 15th date is particularly relevant because several weeks ago, French Telecom CEO Stephane Richard stated that the iPhone 5 would be “out October 15th”. Due to timezone differences, if the EU and US had corresponding release schedules, October 14 could also be the release date in the USA, which may explain why those dates are blacked out from the employees vacation calendar.
Building Evidence for an iOS 5 Release on October 10
Breaking down the blacked out dates of October 9th to 12th, AppleInsider cites three additional pieces of evidence that strongly suggest iOS 5 and iCloud will be made available on those dates:
AppleCare is expecting an increase in iOS related call volume on Monday, October 10th
Apple’s past release history shows an iOS update released several days prior to a new hardware launch
A corresponding Twitter developer event with specific focus on iOS 5 is scheduled between Oct 10 and Oct 12
Similarly, a tipster with a fairly accurate track record, including the specific OS X Lion release date, suggested to OSXDaily via Twitter that Monday October 10th would be a date that some new Apple product or software will become publicly available. Separately, OSXDaily has learned that Apple has been ramping up hiring in their Austin, Texas call center over the past month to prepare for an increase in iCloud and iOS related inquiries.
Apple intends to host the October 4th media event on their own campus in Cupertino, California, according to a new report from WSJ’s AllThingsD. The event is expected to be headlined by the iPhone 5 (or iPhone 4S), in addition to introducing the next iPod touch, iOS 5, iCloud, and Mac OS X 10.7.2 update.
This is a break from Apple’s tradition of hosting a larger event at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center. Although AllThingsD isn’t sure as to why the events location is different, they propose a few theories:
Perhaps the release date was too much of a moving target to risk booking a large space like Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), which has hosted a number of big product unveils in the past. Perhaps, the company felt a more intimate venue was best for newly installed CEO Tim Cook’s first media event. Perhaps YBCA was simply already booked. Whatever the reason, the world will get it’s first look at the next iPhone at Apple’s Town Hall Auditorium in early October.
The other side to not booking the YBCA is that it has kept the event date hidden from the public, something that was relatively easy to guess due to the public accessibility of the Yerba Buena Centers event calendar. If it wasn’t for AllThingsD’s sources inside Apple, the October 4th launch date would still be unknown.
Few details on any new hardware have surfaced, and there is an ongoing debate as to whether a true iPhone 5 will be revealed or if the iPhone 4S will be the next-gen iPhone. While there is plenty of speculation in the tech world as to the specifics of the next phone, it’s important to remember that Apple goes to incredible lengths to keep products secret, as demonstrated by the immense security precautions surrounding the iPad when it was in testing prior to public launch.
This user submitted Mac setup comes from Chris K and is primarily used for video editing with Final Cut. The dual displays are powered by a Mac Pro sitting under the desk, while a MacBook Pro 15″ sits to the left and an iPad 2 rounds out the right. Great setup!
In nearly all Installer and Package apps, you have the option to view exactly what files will be installed and where the installer wants to place them on the Mac. This is an often overlooked feature of the OS X Installer, and it you’ve ever wondered what and where on earth that random .pkg wants to throw its contents, this will show you exactly that.
This is useful for so many scenarios, from knowing what an app is going to do, to troubleshooting, and it works to check where and what is going to be installed or updated in all versions of Mac OS X.
Apple looks to be experimenting with quad-core ARM CPU’s, possibly for future iPhone, iPad, and even MacBook Airs, as references in Xcodes default compiler reveal. This was first discovered by ArsTechnica, who proposes three possible scenarios for why the CPU support exists:
Quad-core processor could be included in next-gen iOS devices like the iPad 3
Ars concludes the third option is most likely, suggesting that Apple is using the CPU for prototypes:
“most probable in our opinion, is that Apple is using the Marvell chip in prototypes of future iOS device designs (or even an ARM-based MacBook Air that is rumored to exist somewhere inside One Infinite Loop) for testing purposes. An Armada XP-powered prototype logic board would allow iOS or Mac OS X software engineers to experiment with performance tuning and other optimizations”
If you’ve been using Nocturne to get the black menubar in Mac OS X but don’t care for any of the features outside of the darker menu bar, check out MenuBarFilter. All it does is turn the Mac menu bar color into a dark black gradient, closely resembling iOS.
MenuBarFilter is extremely lightweight, just uncompress the app and double-click on the Panda icon to turn your menubar black. There are no configuration choices or menu items, so if you want to quit the app you’ll have to find it in Activity Monitor and kill the process, or type this into the Terminal:
killall Finder
Why would you want to stop running this gorgeous little add-on? Bugs of course. MenuBarFilter certainly works in Lion but it doesn’t play that well with Mission Control or full-screen apps, and you’ll see some display artifacts and mismatched colors here and there. I’ve been using it since last night and as long as you don’t expect a perfect fit quite yet, MenuBarFilter is a very nice looking customization to Mac OS X.
Speaking of bugs, if you’re crafty and want to try and troubleshoot the display oddities yourself, you can grab the source code through git with:
By enabling a hidden debug feature in Disk Utility, you are able to both view and mount hidden partitions on hard drives in Mac OS X. Hidden partitions include things like Linux swap, GUID partitions, a Windows Recovery drive, and the Mac OS X Recovery HD partition, and once they’re mounted they can be edited or formatted just like any other drive. There are many cases where you’ll want access to these hidden partitions, and we’ll show you exactly how to do that.
Mac OS X 10.7.2 build 11C62 has been released to developers today with no known issues. The second update to OS X Lion primarily focuses on iCloud support, suggesting the software update will likely be released alongside iCloud, iOS 5, and whatever iPhone is announced at the October 4th event that Apple has planned.
Other than native iCloud support, OS X 10.7.2 includes a variety of bug fixes, as the apparent final release notes from MacRumors show:
The 10.7.2 update is recommended for all OS X Lion users and includes general operating system fixes that improve the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac. It also includes support for iCloud, a breakthrough set of free cloud services that automatically and wirelessly store your content on iCloud and push it to all of your devices. iCloud on OS X Lion includes the following features:
• iCloud stores your email, calendars, contacts, Safari bookmarks, and Safari Reading List and automatically pushes them to all your devices.
• Back to My Mac provides remote access to your Mac from another Mac anywhere on the Internet.
• Find My Mac helps find a missing Mac by locating it on a map and allows you to remotely lock the Mac or wipe all its data.
Getting started with iCloud is easy. After installing the update, OS X will automatically present an iCloud setup panel. Simply enter an existing Apple ID or create a new one and then follow the on screen instructions. To learn more about iCloud visit http://www.apple.com/icloud.
The 10.7.2 update also includes Safari 5.1.1 as well as fixes that:
• Allow reordering of desktop spaces and full screen apps in Mission Control.
• Enable dragging files between desktop spaces and full screen apps.
• Address an issue that causes the menu bar to not appear in full screen apps.
• Improve the compatibility of Google contact syncing in Address Book.
• Address an issue that causes Keynote to become temporarily unresponsive.
• Improve VoiceOver compatibility with Launchpad.
• Address an issue that causes a delay in accessing the network after waking from sleep.
• Enable booting in to Lion Recovery from a locally attached Time Machine backup drive.
• Resolve an issue that causes screen zoom to stop working.
• Improve Active Directory integration.
Not mentioned in the the release notes are the variety of persistent Wi-Fi issues that are effecting some Lion users, although independent reports from those using the update suggest wireless connectivity is improved in the release.
At least one of the devices to be launched by Apple on October 4th looks to be named ‘iPhone 4S’ after all. The proof comes in the form of several pictures of an Otterbox case, clearly showing the iPhone 4S monicker printed on the packaging, which were discovered and posted to Twitter by jailbreaker @chronic.
Perhaps more interesting is that the volume buttons appear to have switched places to the right side of the iPhone, matching the iPad, which is seen clearly in this picture:
Moving the volume button to the right side is compelling because:
It gives credence to several iPhone 5 cases which show the volume buttons on the right side
This breaks from the long established norm of existing iPhone and iPod touches
Chronic suggested the move is simply related to the volume button shutter features in iOS 5, but it’s also likely that Apple intends s to make all iOS devices consistent with their button locations.
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, which has a 6″ e-Ink multi-touch display and is also offered in a 3G version. Amazon’s e-readers are not really viewed as competitors to the 
