We’re announcing a new watch called Pebble Time with a new timeline interface. Pebble Time features a new color e-paper display and microphone for responding to notifications. No compromises on what you love about Pebble: up to 7 days of battery life, water resistance and customizability. Pebble Time is fully compatible with all 6,500+ existing Pebble apps and watch faces. Three colors available exclusively on Kickstarter. Pebble Time starts shipping in May.
It’s going to retail for $199. When compared against the $349 Apple Watch Sport, I can’t comprehend how this product is compelling for iPhone users. This smartwatch doesn’t ship until May — even if you are unsure about the Apple Watch, you might as well wait until April to compare.
At a software level, the Apple Watch will outclass the Pebble Time in every way. Third-parties cannot integrate with peripherals as closely as Apple can. The Watch has special privileges: it can have a permanent connection with the host iPhone, sending data far beyond the current list of notifications. I foresee features like Handoff are crucial to the smartwatch-phone experience and you will miss them on non-Apple accessories.
On hardware, Pebble has gone in a different direction to Apple. (Small devices require tradeoffs). Rather than OLED, the Time uses a colour eInk display, which can show 64 colours. This means you could play a NES Super Mario platformer on your wrist, but things like photos are not going to work. This is an interesting decision. Although I question whether users will want to look at their ‘universe of photos’ a la Apple Watch, almost any app notification nowadays benefits from a full colour image. Facebook profile pictures being the obvious example.
In addition, e-paper display refresh rates are lacklustre. The Pebble Time UI has some interesting context transitions, reminiscent of hand-drawn animations. The Clock irregularly transforms into a smaller representation, for instance. It’s a cool effect on the concept videos. However, on the watch itself the frame-rate of this transition is severely impaired by the screen technology. It looks bad.
The e-paper display does mean that the Time has a week of battery life. This sounds awesome, but I really don’t think battery longevity is enough to ‘outperform’ Apple’s efforts. Smartwatches have natural charge cycles. Use in day, charge at night. As a long as a smartwatch can last the waking hours, I don’t think anything beyond that threshold matters.
Bringing utility to the table is much more important than battery life. The Apple Watch simply does a lot more stuff than the Pebble does. Plus, ostensibly, it looks a lot nicer on your wrist and is available in far superior material finishes.
Well, one million of those users were people who downloaded iOS 8 and either never reopened Twitter, or forgot their password and couldn’t log back in. The other three million were lost due to Safari’s Reader section, which no longer pings Twitter automatically for content like it did in iOS 7. Users who were counted as active because of this automatic pinging on iOS 7 were then lost when they updated to iOS 8.
Basically, Safari’s Shared Links section made you count as an active Twitter user, even if you never opened the view on iOS 7, as long as you had a Twitter account logged in in Settings. iOS 8 stops Twitter from counting you as an active user because it only fetches when Shared Links is opened. Twitter blames this change for 3 million users ‘leaving’.
However, I don’t think you can say that users have left Twitter because of iOS 8. These users should never have been counted as active, because they really weren’t. The way the Safari app worked before just made them classify as active in Twitter’s analytics. It was over-counting.
The new behaviour is a more accurate representation of how many people actually use the service. The three million weren’t “lost” — they should never have been included in the statistics at all.
The upcoming laptop is so thin that Apple employees are said to refer to the device as the “MacBook Stealth” internally. In order to reach that new level of portability, Apple not only slimmed down the trackpad and tweaked the speakers but the ports as well.
The upcoming 12-inch Air has the fewest amount of ports ever on an Apple computer, as can be seen in the rendition above. On the right side is a standard headphone jack and dual-microphones for input and noise-canceling. On the left side is solely the new USB Type-C port. Yes, Apple is currently planning to ditch standard USB ports, the SD Card slot, and even its Thunderbolt and MagSafe charging standards on this new notebook.
This laptop is going to be controversial. ‘Only Apple’ would have the bravado to reduce connectivity to one (new sized) USB port and a headphone jack. This isn’t just a boycott of industry standard inputs, which is the naive response from critics, Apple is openly forgoing inclusion of its own patented connectors, like Thunderbolt and MagSafe.
If this laptop ships as described, this is one of the ballsiest things Apple has done for years. Because you will power this thing through the USB port, you literally won’t be able to use an accessory whilst it charges. The rest of the redesign is pretty standard although I was disappointed by the appearance of the base. The speaker holes look ugly in the mockup and the trackpad is too close to the keyboard for my liking.
I may like the look more when I see it for real, so we can wait a bit before getting too angry. There’s no getting away from it. Stripping away all connectivity is a massive statement, especially if Apple kills off the old 11 inch Air when this is released.
Workflow is your personal automation tool, enabling you to drag and drop any combination of actions to create powerful workflows.
Workflow includes over 100 actions, including those for Contacts, Calendar, Maps, Music, Photos, Camera, Reminders, Safari, AirDrop, Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, Evernote, and iCloud Documents, to name a few.
I’m not sure what to say about Workflow. iOS places too many constraints on third-party apps for Workflow to ever fully satisfy what I want from an app like this. A forgiving mentality would say that this is the best implementation they could make within the system-imposed limits. I can’t think at that kind of level, though. Personally, I’m left frustrated that the app can only do so much. I don’t care that the reason for the shortcomings is outside of the developer’s control.
The only way an automation app will ever meet my standards is if Apple made it and created a plethora of integration points to enable complex interactions between apps. Given Apple’s lack of attention for Automator on OS X, I doubt that will ever happen.
Workflow caters for a slim slice of the user base that has no ambition of doing more. Frankly, Apple shouldn’t have featured this app in the way that they did. Novices will be lost — the app is too complicated for most people. For those who do understand it, once the novelty wears off, the app will fall into disuse once the walls are hit. A Mac (and/or a set of dedicated iOS apps) is better at all of the tasks Workflow can offer, simple as that. If you don’t have a Mac, then you’ll get lasting value out of Workflow.
Samsung has closed its high-profile Samsung Experience store in one of Europe’s biggest shopping centres.
“We regret to announce that we will be closing the Samsung Experience Store at Westfield Stratford City at the end of this year”, Samsung told CNET today. Photographs posted on Twitter by visitors to the mall in London show the shop already being dismantled.
reddit recently raised a round of $50 million where the new investors agreed to give back 10% of the shares they bought to the community in the form of a “cryptocurrency” that was to be “backed” by reddit shares. For legal reasons, it is unlikely we will make the cryptocurrency exchangeable for actual shares, since we are not a public company, and therefore it would be illegal to give shares to millions of people. Howevever, we are working on a legal strategy and I’m sure the cryptocurrency will be exchangeable for something of value.
Also, we used the word “cryptocurrency” originally, but a better term is “digital asset”, since in many ways notes will not be like a currency at all. For instance, we are not planning on letting users buy gold with the cryptocurrency (although we haven’t eliminated that possibility).
The asset will be based on blockchain technology. As I have said in many previous reddit comments, we are not committing to any particular protocol at this time, but our preference is either for colored coins or sidechains depending on the winds of the bitcoin world in the coming months (the bitcoin world changes very, very fast, and we want to be certain we pick the best technology).
So, 1/6th of Reddit users will randomly be gifted a ‘digital asset’ that will probably be exchangeable for something of value at some point in the future. Maybe. Reddit tries out some weird stuff.
Twitter Cards aren’t available to third-party clients over the API, which has forced Tweetbot and Twitterrific to come up with their own custom integrations to display tweet previews for web content. The result is that the timeline shown in these two clients will look different and out of place after you get used to the richness of previews in the Twitter app.
This isn’t completely true. Twitter Cards are implemented through metadata tags in the website source. All the information for cards are described by this information. The Twitter app crawls the linked URL to strip out this info and displays it as a ‘card’.
Whilst the Twitter API won’t expose the formatted data inline, there’s nothing stopping third-parties from crawling URLs themselves and accessing the same information. With a little bit of work, Tweetbot could mirror the ‘cards’ functionality 1:1. Twitter might balk at it but I haven’t seen anyone toe the line yet to find out. I don’t think there is a rule (yet) that prevents it.
Noto also read out Twitter’s new mission statement, which he admitted was a mouthful: “Reach the largest daily audience in the world by connecting everyone to their world via our information sharing and distribution platform products and be one of the top revenue generating Internet companies in the world.”
“I struggle to read it every time,” Noto said.
Ignoring the weird PR crap and the alarming focus on revenue maximisation, the CTO himself ‘struggles to read it every time’. Isn’t that a good enough sign you should pick something else?
The iOS lock screen may appear simple and almost featureless at first glance, but it actually serves quite a few different functions, and adding landscape support for all of them is certainly a non-trivial task. Again, it strikes me this is likely the reason for not supporting this yet, given the almost certainly enormous complexity of this part of iOS’s codebase.
There is a lot of effort involved, yes, but it’s disappointing that Apple didn’t make the effort with the iPhone 6 Plus. It’s a bit hypocritical for Apple to expect third-party developers to go the extra mile and optimise app layouts, when it can’t dedicate the time to do it fully as the platform vendor.
But Geekbench only measures CPU performance — year-over-year, the iPad Air 2 is even more impressive in terms of GPU performance. Apple claims, “The A8X chip has an astonishing 2.5 times the graphics performance of the A7 chip,” and from what I’ve seen, that’s true.
The iPad is no longer following in the wake of the iPhone, performance- and specs-wise. It’s forging ahead. With 2 GB of RAM, it’s a year ahead of the iPhone (we hope) in that department. Performance-wise it’s fast enough to replace a MacBook Air for many, many people. The demos that Apple chose for last week’s event — the Pixelmator image editor and Replay real-time video editor — emphasize that. Those are performance-heavy tasks, and the iPad Air 2 handled them with aplomb.
The gap between the iPad’s hardware capabilities and iOS’ software capabilities grows further. Apple isn’t known for overspeccing their devices. There’s something we aren’t seeing yet, for sure.
I think the Mac changes are good. Great, even. The Retina iMac is a technical feat of engineering and well priced, at that. You need to pay more than $2499, but I don’t think it is unreasonably costly considering the quality of display it includes. Whether the GPU can hold up to the task is another matter.
However, on the iPad side, I don’t think Apple is deserved of any praise. The iPad mini lineup is a literal disgrace. On the low end, Apple is still selling the A5 Mini. The iPad mini 3 doesn’t even deserve a numerical designation. It’s exactly the same product with Touch ID. Not updating the internals at all is insane to me. One of the most compelling aspects of the 2013 Mini was the fact it was identical to the Air in performance, just smaller. That nicety is gone completely with this generation. Even Apple didn’t care for the thing, giving the new Mini only a fleeting mention on stage.
With the Air 2, it’s obviously difficult to make products drastically better every year. The Air 2 is an incremental improvement when I feel like it needed something spectacular. Don’t ask me what that amazing thing is, because I don’t know. The delta between the iPad 4 and the iPad Air 2 is really not that large, given the timeframe. In January, I said that “iPad hardware is outstripping the capabilities of the OS it runs”. With the A8X, that disparity has widened still. I continue to believe Apple will unveil a new split-screen environment for iPad multitasking soon and it is a real shame that it wasn’t ready for today’s event.
The Global Shipping Programme is an easy way for business and private sellers to reach millions more buyers with minimal changes to your current processes. This new programme is designed for sellers who don’t currently offer international postage on listings.
The Global Shipping Programme works by automatically showing international postage costs on your eligible listings to prospective buyers in other countries at no additional cost to you. Your items will be available first to buyers from selected EU countries and later in 2014 to buyers in selected non-EU countries.
I can’t comment on whether or not this is bottom-line profitable for eBay, but I do know that this is spectacularly executed. Obviously, eBay drives more bids, more sellers and more money to flow through its service by encouraging international postage, but that’s not what I want to talk about. It’s the execution that is genius.
As long as a seller shipped domestically before, almost nothing changes in the workflow to participate in this program. eBay takes on the responsibility of not only shipping the items, but also calculating the various regional prices. eBay manages customer information and sends the seller a proxy domestic address, just like a normal domestic auction. The seller posts the package to eBay and eBay ships it to its final international destination.
This means the seller only pays domestic shipping charges to eBay. eBay recoups its expenditure through the additional P&P costs that the buyer is already used to seeing.
In fact, the process is so transparent that eBay can (and is) automatically enrolling sellers into the scheme without being obnoxious. eBay isn’t asking the seller to take on any additional responsibility, so there’s no penalty for the seller to be part of the scheme.
The efficient reallocation of resources here, where eBay is pooling individuals to take advantage of its economies of scale in distribution, is just sublime. This is what you call an elegant product change.
Apple organised a high-profile dinner for 250 fashion insiders, co-hosted by Azzedine Alaïa, Marc Newson and Jonathan Ive. But the guest of honour was the Apple Watch, several versions of which were displayed in a case right in the middle of the dinner venue, a space normally used as Mr Alaïa’s showroom. On their way out, guests were given exclusive images of the product, shot by Davis Sims and styled by Karl Templer, the very duo behind the Apple Watch’s fashion editorial debut on the wrist of Chinese supermodel Liu Wen in Vogue China.
The photography is nice, but notice how every picture shows the Apple Watch from a top-down perspective. At no point do the shots show the side of the device, where the thickness is noticeable. It concerns me a little that the photographers made a seemingly-conscious effort to conceal the depth of the Watch. On the flip side, the post also includes an interview with Vogue China’s editor and she seems to love how it looks …
Many users are reporting that cellular functions and Touch ID are no longer working post update, so we would recommend holding off until further notice. Many who have updated their iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, and iPhone 5s are reporting no problems, so it appears this problem is likely confined to iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.
This obviously shouldn’t have happened. I’m not sure how this got through QA, but I don’t really care. What matters is if a bug of this ilk recurs again, in the future. Then you can say Apple has structural problems as an organisation. Isolated incidents are not signs of poor management — they are (in most cases) genuine mistakes.
Apple has started airing two new iPhone 6 ads starring the duo of Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake. Tim Cook unveiled two ads starring the pair during the iPhone 6 announcement earlier this month with ads that focused on the Health application and size of the phone.
The new ads, dubbed “Huge” and “Camera” started hitting airwaves tonight and focus once again on the size of the display and the upgraded cameras with enhanced image stabilization, slow-motion and time-lapse capabilities.
The idea of these ads is clever, but I don’t think they have been executed very well. Camera is decent, but Huge is cringe-worthy. Timberlake’s repetition of “It’s huge!” comes across as an insult. On top of that, these ads don’t scale well geographically. The ad requires you to recognise who is speaking and it is not obvious enough. At the iPhone event, Cook asked ‘Do you know who they are?’ to the crowd. It was followed by an awkward prolonged silence.
Both cameras shot well in good light, with great performance in super bright sun. Especially welcome were their ability to capture even bright reds like Mrs. Incredible’s costume (shot with iPhone 6).
Solid, bright reds are notoriously difficult for image sensors to capture but both iPhones handled them well.
Apple has made significant improvements to its ISP (Image Signal Processor) which have resulted in apparent gains in sharpness, color rendition and low-light performance. The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are the best smartphone cameras I’ve ever used, and approach the best point-and-shoot cameras I’ve ever shot.
I was really impressed by this picture. The red is vibrant and deep and the outlines are super-crisp. It also helps the picture is relatable. It’s not framed or staged. Panzarino is at Disneyland, taking photos of his daughter. I can connect with it much better than the sample images posted in other reviews.
