iphone

You are currently browsing articles tagged iphone.

WWDC roundup and iPredictions

June 8, 2009 in Apple | 2 comments

Sadly, it's just a mockup, but it's gorgeous anyway

Sadly, it's just a mockup, but it's gorgeous anyway

Well, not long to go now until WWDC 2009. The rumour mills are once again chugging away, and the general gist of them is as such:

  • Apple will almost certainly announce a new iPhone, probably with video conferencing. iPhone OS X 3.0 will certainly be putting in an appearance.
  • Snow Leopard’s final preview build will be released (we know this) and we can expect speed improvements, improved memory management and 64-bit optimisation, a brand new Finder written in Cocoa (really? it took nine and a half damn years?) and possibly a new UI, codenamed Marble. It’s known that QuickTime is getting a major upgrade, and is also getting a revised silver icon.
  • This isn’t really a rumour, but it’ll be interesting to see, in the coming months, how Apple reacts to Palm’s move to make the Pre fake an iPod (and therefore sync with iTunes). They could do one of three things: they could update iTunes to remove the sync functionality with the Pre, they could leave it as it is, or they could offer an olive branch to third-party hardware developers and start offering an iTunes API. I think the third would be the wisest, but the second is the most likely.
  • And finally… the Dear Leader. He took leave from Apple until sometime in June, and we know that his minions, Phil Schiller and Tim Cook will be doing the WWDC keynote. Although Schiller ain’t bad, he’s not as confident and doesn’t have as much charisma as Jobs. Tim Cook is like watching Dick van Dyke trying to read the news—it’s painful. However, if video conferencing on the iPhone is one of the features that will be announced… well, I wouldn’t be in any way surprised if he made a surprise appearance, say, calling from a fresh iPhone in the audience.
  • Someone, somewhere in the WWDC audience will need fresh underpants at some point during the keynote, because the previous set will have melted.

Tags: , ,

WWDC ‘08 Stevenote Post Mortem

June 11, 2008 in Apple | No comments

If you’ll recall, a couple of days ago, I wrote about what I expected would appear at WWDC ‘08. As it transpires, it was a rather surprising event.

  • The iPhone: This made up the bulk of the Stevenote, where Steve Jobs was also (unusually) assisted by Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller. The 2.0 firmware is almost complete and will appear next month – I was surprised it wasn’t complete by now, but I suppose they’re just being careful with a few final sweeps for bugs. The actual revised iPhone wasn’t surprising from a hardware perspective: 3G, lower price, GPS, similar case design… but I was surprised that the case is now almost all plastic instead of all aluminium. The new feature list is somewhat disappointing, although thanks to the iPhone’s nature it shouldn’t be too long to see a change to this. O2 are also going to offer it on a pay-as-you-go tariff, for an unconfirmed price. However, I can’t take much credit for this. The 3G iPhone was the worst-kept secret in history.
  • Mysteriously, the rumoured new MacBooks didn’t appear. This was surprising, although the amount of iPhone stuff they got through probably restricted what else they could get in the keynote.
  • Mac OS X 10.6 was announced – it’s called Snow Leopard, and not Cougar as I expected. I was right in that it’ll concentrate on polish and performance; however, it’s hard to see Apple resisting the temptation to shoehorn a few new features in, including a few aesthetic changes. However, it was only mentioned briefly in the keynote.
  • The Mac Mini and Blu-Ray SuperDrives were not mentioned, which is also quite surprising, particularly for the former. Said machine hasn’t been revised for around a year now, indicating a revamp of the line may be imminent. I suspect both the Mini and new MacBooks (if any) will appear at a similar event to the event the revised iMac appeared last year, so at this rate we could be looking at August.
  • MobileMe (a new synchronisation service which also features .Mac’s old functionalities) wasn’t much of a surprise: it would have been insane for Apple to build in the push PIM, synchronisation, remote kill, etc if it could only be used by enterprises with Microsoft Exchange. I also like the idea of being able to sync my Eee, my iMac, and my phone’s address book, although whether or not it likes Linux is another matter. I suspect it will.

Overall, the Stevenote was something of a disappointment. It was interesting to see what they had to show us, but it concentrated heavily on the iPhone. This is very surprising.

Tags: , , , , , ,

iPredict for WWDC…

June 7, 2008 in Apple | 1 comment

The infamous iHype has been steadily growing in anticipation of Steve Jobs’s keynote on Monday at WWDC.

The Macworld offices are, evidently, very busy, with new rumours coming in left, right and centre. And this is not to mention the Apple rumour sites, whose editors must, judging by the number of rumours we’re seeing, be on forty caffiene tablets an hour.

Rumors include a tablet Mac, larger iPhones with 3G and GPS, 14-inch MacBooks with aluminium casing, and all manner of other goodies.

I have slightly different predictions:

  • It is almost certain we will see a 3G iPhone, although I suspect the case design will remain largely unchanged. We’ll see, at most, an all aluminium and glass design – I severely doubt the authenticity of the iPhone with white plastic casing. We’ll see voice dialing, a revised home button which glows different colours when SMSes, MMSes, etc are received, 802.11n, and the actual launch of the 2.0 firmware and the App Store. O2 will also offer the iPhone on a pay-as-you-go plan in the UK, charging 11p a minute for each call and SMS, and offering free Internet access (3G, GPRS, EDGE and Wi-Fi with The Cloud).
  • I suspect we may see new MacBooks and MacBook Pros next week. Both devices will be made completely out of aluminium, and the MacBook Pro will take on a more ‘brushed metal’ appearance, similar to the iMac. The MacBook will have a black surround around the screen, also similar to the iMac.
  • The first features of Mac OS X 10.6 will be revealed. It’ll be called Cougar, and will focus heavily on polish and reliability. One of the most immediately obvious features is Fairy Dust, a new set of graphical transitions that occur when a window is minimised, an icon is undocked, etc. This will mean that the Genie effect is revised, and now causes the window to ’sink’ as well as warp into the Dock, and that when the Trash is emptied, the Trashcan will glow and the items inside will appear to explode. Cougar will also include a new Terminal, which allows users to switch, using a menu, between the Bourne shell, the Korn shell, bash, dash, csh, tcsh, and a new, Apple designed shell called crash (Completely Redesigned Apple SHell). It’ll also have native support for ZFS and ext2/3/4. The new graphical enhancements will give Cougar the slogan ‘everything that happens is a blockbuster’, and therefore the new intro movie will reflect that fact, flying around a maze of historic Macintosh models while Ed Welch’s theme tune to Blockbusters plays in the background – additionally, the new intro movie will reveal that OS X has finally been translated into Welsh.
  • ‘One More Thing’ will be a new revision of the Mac Mini. It will include an all aluminium design, and will also have FireWire 800 on board, 802.11n, a SuperDrive, keyboard and mouse as standard, and a $200 discount off a 20″ Cinema Display.
  • There will be one more iddy-biddy thing: there’ll be Blu-Ray SuperDrives for Macs, which can be ordered separately and installed by hand, or added as a build configuration option for an extra $300-ish.
Even if I am entirely wrong, it’ll be very interesting to see what is revealed on Monday. Now I just need to work out what time the keynote starts, and what time it’ll be in London when that happens.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

« Older entries