Owners of Panasonic's Lumix DMC-FX90 point and shoot camera can now use their smartphones as a wireless remote for the unit, using it to check the image preview, set zoom level and shoot, including a special "self portrait" mode. The free Lumix Remote app, which will be expanded to cover additional Lumix cameras with built-in Wi-Fi, is available for both iOS (4.3 and higher) and Android (v2.2 and higher). A firmware upgrade is required as well.
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1 hour ago | Posted in: Apple
As one his first public actions as Apple's head of retail, John Browett is advancing the timetable for rolling out Apple raises for it's Apple Store employees by three months, with the raises now scheduled to kick in starting June 30 rather than the previously-planned September 30. The raises are in addition to new Mac and iPad discounts given to the employees earlier this year. Raises will be between one and five percent of current salary.
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Amazon will be the first foreign company to offer a prepaid wireless service in Japan. Nikkei [account required] reports prepaid SIM cards with 500MB preallocated to it will be sold for 1,980 Yen ($25) through the website, and as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), will be carried by NTT Docomo's LTE network. This takes place ahead of the expected Japanese launch of the Amazon Kindle in the summer.
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The Chronic-Dev Team has announced that around 1.1 million users have already jailbroken their iOS device using the latest version of the Greenpois0n Absinthe 2.0 hack. The number of users choosing to install the hack is considerable, given that it was launched for iOS 5.1.1 just last Friday with 211,401 new iPad users among them. The remaining users include a mix of devices running Apple’s A4 and A5 processors, with the only device yet to receive the exploit being the latest iPad 2 using the 32nm version of the A5 chip.
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LG Display has introduced a full HD LCD screen for smartphones. The new display packs a higher pixels-per-inch count than the 326ppi Retina Display used on the iPhone, and is a 30 percent increase compared to LG's own 4.5-inch predecessor. Based on an Advanced High Performance In-Plane Switching (AH-IPS) technology, the screen can push out 440ppi at a resolution of 1920x1080. The previous 4.5-inch LG screen could only muster 329ppi and a resolution of 1280x720, by comparison. A wide viewing angle, stable display image and rapid response speed when touched is claimed by LG, with a brighter light transmission and low power consumption to help with outdoor viewing.
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A trio of App Store user reviews for Yahoo's new Axis mobile browser appear to have been written by Yahoo employees. Staff at TheNextWeb looked at the app's user ratings, finding three five-star reviews from Yahoo employees included. The reviews are just a few among a number of positive reviews for the app, which has been generally well-received.
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17 hours ago | Posted in: industry, Apple
A contract negotiation dispute with Amazon in February that resulted in the removal of 5,000 titles from Independent Publishers Group(IPG) has finally been resolved following negotiations between the two, and most of the books have now been made available for Kindle again. No details on the new deal have been provided. IPG has offered to give up its own share of the sales revenue on the returned titles through the end of August to help make up for author's lost revenue.
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Apple updated its recently-released iOS 5.1.1 edition today for one specific iPhone model without changing the version number, likely representing only a minor bugfix in the new release. The update, which is distinguished by its build number (9B208 instead of the 9B206 built that was distributed), did not come with any release notes. For those already on the original build of 5.1.1, the update can only be downloaded through iTunes or by direct download.
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The seventh graders of Woodlawn Beach Middle School's Advanced Life Science students have published an interactive field guide of Northwest Florida called Creatures, Plants, and More! (free). "I wanted to give them the opportunity to be published so they could use this as part of their academic resume, and to make what they learn have real meaning," said Andrea Santilli, the students' teacher. The students are the first seventh grade students to publish an interactive e-book using iBooks Author.
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WordPress developer Automattic has updated its iOS WordPress app to version 3.0 (free), bringing support for push notifications as well as a moderation toolbar for comments activated by swiping over any item. The update is said to "vastly" improve performance, particularly on iPads, and language support for Taiwanese, Hungarian and Polish has been added. The app helps users administer both WordPress.com and their own hosted WP blogs.
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Numerous reports claim that the Learning Thermostat from Nest will be available at Apple retail stores shortly. Nest is a company formed around developing and marketing the thermostat by Apple's former senior vice president and original iPod architect Tony Fadell. The thermostat is listed in Apple inventory databases, but MacNN has confirmed no stock is available to purchase at this time.
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In a blog post this week, Cisco revealed that the company will no longer be producing the Cius. The enterprise-focused tablet was released last year but never caught on with business consumers, who are increasingly opting for Apple's iPad, and other competitors to a lesser extent, as a mobile computing solution.
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Fri May 25, 2012 | Posted in: computers, Apple
Auction house Sotheby's will be selling two bits of history soon -- one strongly related to Apple, the other less so -- both tied to the late Steve Jobs. On June 15, the company will be auctioning a rare working Apple I motherboard, one of only six known to exist in this state, and expected to fetch more than $180,000. Also being auctioned in a separate lot is a rare handwritten memo and typed report from Jobs from his time at Atari.
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Applications Airfoil Speakers Touchby Macintosh audio software purveyor Rogue Amoeba, and similar application Airfloat by The Famous Software Company have been removed from the app store by Apple program managers. Both applications developers possibly reverse-engineered some aspect of Apple's Airplay technology, or used the illegally-distributed cracked encryption key, both violations of the Apple developer's agreement. Apple has not commented publicly on the matter, and neither developer has received a formal explanation of why the applications were removed.
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Researchers at the MIT Media Lab have created a Minority Report-style glove and iPad input system for three-dimensional virtual object manipulation called T(ether). The system lets the team use motion tracking on gloves to create and alter virtual items with the iPads used as a point-of-view window to see what the users are manipulating. A demonstration video shows the system having multiple users simultaneously affecting the compter-generated world, both with and without the glove.
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Fri May 25, 2012 | Posted in: Apple
Apple has started hiring for two new chip engineering jobs in Israel, notes AppleInsider. The company is looking for two "SoC Backend Physical Design Engineers," to be based in the Haifa and Herzliya Pituah regions of the country. People hired for the jobs will be required to handle "physical implementation of a complete SoC [system-on-chip] from net list to tape-out," including aspects like clock and power distribution, and power and noise analysis. The openings join five others in Israel, all involving engineering. Most of these are situated in Herzliya Pituah.
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