Sources tell me that Apple isn’t yet happy with the watch’s battery life, which isn’t going to break any industry standards. “It’s about a day right now,” said one, adding that Apple is working on various modifications ahead of the device’s 2015 launch to improve it. Reached for comment, Apple spokeswoman Nat Kerris declined to provide an estimate on expected battery life, but said the company expects users will charge their Apple Watches once daily. “There’s a lot of new technology packed into Apple Watch and we think people will love using it throughout the day,” Kerris said. “We anticipate that people will charge nightly which is why we designed an innovative charging solution that combines our MagSafe technology and inductive charging.”
It goes without saying that higher battery life is always better. However, in most instances, one day battery life is all you need. Use through the day … charge at night. Apple clearly scrapped its sleep tracking features for this version because otherwise there would be no good time to charge it. You don’t want to unstrap something at midday just to ensure it can track your sleep patterns in the evening. There’s a natural cycle of how human beings live and the Watch mirrors that. I think 24 hours of longevity is perfectly acceptable.
All the social networks I tried didn’t feel terrible. In fact, some of them were very positive experiences. In particular, Twitter and Instagram worked really well.
Granted, I haven’t used one of these things personally, but there is no way I could described that Instagram interface as a “positive experience”. It’s horrid. This is the definition of a phone on your wrist — a conceptual disaster.
Smartwatches succeed when they do enough things that phones can’t do or are bad at doing. I always come back to how Jobs introduced the iPad, clearly placing the iPad as better than both a phone and a laptop in several key areas. The same thing applies to the watch. The obvious example is the health sensor tracking — phones don’t have contact to the skin so they can’t do that stuff.
That’s what I’m most looking for on Tuesday; what else has Apple done to make the iWatch superior to an iPhone. Health tracking alone isn’t enough.
Samsung announced its new curved-display smartwatch last week, but today we were able to get up-close and personal with the new wearable. Unlike most smartwatches, the Gear S has two very special features. The first is a curved 2-inch, AMOLED display, and the second is 3G connectivity, allowing the smart watch to be used independent of a smartphone.
The curved display measures in at a 260×480 resolution, and under the hood you’ll find a GPS sensor, an accelerometer, gyroscope, UV detector, barometer, and heart rate monitor, alongside 4GB of internal storage and 512MB of RAM. It’s all powered by a dual-core 1.0 GHz processor and Tizen, Samsung’s own mobile operating system.
The Gear S has a 3G radio in it, so it can actually operate without a tethered phone giving it network access. This cuts battery life significantly of course, but as I was speculating on Twitter, smartwatches might be able to get away with ‘only’ one-day battery.
I like the conceptual design of this watch as well. My hypothetical iWatch is basically a band that has an integrated — seamless — curved display. The Gear S’s face is not too far off what I imagine. The main difference here is that the screen is still separated from the band — I think the iWatch would be made such that it look like all one part, with the screen inline to the body.
Remember back in June when I said Apple hoped to schedule a special event in October to show off a new wearable device? Remember how I also said this: “Could things change between now and fall? That’s certainly possible.” Turns out that was a prescient hedge, because things have changed. Apple now plans to unveil a new wearable alongside the two next-generation iPhones we told you the company will debut on September 9th.
There is no way this watch/band/thing is being released in September, although that’s not what is surprising. If you look at history, the iPad was announced in January and released in April. The iPhone was announced in January and released in June.
What’s surprising is the announcement in September, alongside the new (big deal) iPhones. Apple has no clear motivation to rush an announcement — they could easily wait until October (just like their original plan that Packzwoski reported on a few weeks ago).
You could argue that coupling the products at the event is a sign that the iPhone and iWatch are meant to go together, like the iWatch is some ‘minor’ accessory. I just can’t get behind that, though. The whole community has been hyping this product for a long time now. If expectations were inflated, I think Apple’s PR team would have got the word out by now. They haven’t. This product is a big deal.
So, here is my guess, the iWatch is demoed in September but only briefly. The star of the show will be the phones. Needless to say, release information for the watch will also not be available. (Think how the Mac Pro was a sneak peek at WWDC). Then, in October, Apple can finalise details and really get the marketing train pushing for the watch’s public debut — I’m guessing late November. This gives people a taste of Apple’s trump card, but September is still firmly cemented as iPhone month.
Includes 3 characters; Tanooki Mario, Cat Peach and Link. 4 vehicles including the Blue Falcon kart representing the F-Zero franchise. 8 course packs including classics like Wario’s Gold Mine from Mario Kart Wii,as well as the world of The Legend of Zelda.
Is this a sign of Nintendo modernising with the times?
Mario Kart 8 will now save your most-recent kart settings between play sessions - so there’s no more setting up your racer every time you load the game.
The menu options for “Next Race” and “Watch Highlight Reel” will be switched - a much-requested change by fans - and you’ll be able to alter options for other user’s highlight reels to watch different characters or events.
Thank the lord. It felt like Mario Kart’s menu designer was the same person who made iOS 7’s Shift key.
The most expensive and complicated things we have to create and shoot are kitchens. From both an environmental and time point of view, we don’t want to have to ship in all those white-goods from everywhere, shoot them and then ship them all back again. And unfortunately, kitchens are one of those rooms that differ very much depending on where you are in the world. A kitchen in the US will look very different to a kitchen in Japan, for example, or in Germany. So you need lots of different layouts in order to localise the kitchen area in brochures. Very early on we created around 200 CG exchanges versions for 50 photographed kitchens in 2008, with the products we had - and I think everyone began to understand the real possibilities.
IKEA trained its photographers in 3D modelling and its 3D artists in photography. This was something I didn’t expect from a flatpack furniture company.
Two supply chain sources said display panel production suffered a setback after the backlight that helps illuminate the screen had to be revised, putting screen assembly on hold for part of June and July. One said Apple, aiming for the thinnest phone possible, initially wanted to cut back to a single layer of backlight film, instead of the standard two layers, for the 4.7-inch screen, which went into mass production ahead of the 5.5-inch version.
Every year, it is reported that Apple is facing production problems with new products. With Apple’s relentless push to adopt new technologies at immense scales, like the single-layer backlight mentioned in this case, it’s not really that surprising that they frequently have issues. However, as long as Apple is equipped to deal with such problems (that they must expect), there isn’t really a “problem” at all. Given the iPhone’s consistent release cycle, I think you can say that it is true.
Ahead of Apple’s new iPhone event on September 9th, Thailand’s National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (that nation’s version of what we know in the U.S. as the FCC) has approved two new iPhone models for sale in the country. The approval was confirmed on Twitter by the country’s Secretary General for these matters, and a local report indicates the model numbers for two new devices: A1524 & A1586.
The model identifiers are puzzling. The current 5s and 5c goes up to A1533 and A1532. It would make sense for the the device labelled ‘A1586’ to be somehow next-generation (as it is significantly beyond the 5s and 5c identifiers). The specification of the A1524 model number is much less obvious. Painting by numbers, as it were, the A1524 should closely resemble an iPhone 5c.
Gurman speculates that the model number could represent variants of the iPhone 5s and 5c, such as antenna tweaks, which probably makes the most sense.
“Apple and Samsung have agreed to drop all litigation between the two companies outside the United States,” the companies said in the statement. “This agreement does not involve any licensing arrangements, and the companies are continuing to pursue the existing cases in U.S. courts.”
A bit random timing for this to come about, but I suppose it is a good thing for all this to end. It’s slightly strange to me how the two companies continue to fight in the US though. Assumedly, the US is the market with the highest number of affected devices, making it worthwhile to continue chasing royalties and such.
Let’s hope this doesn’t flare up again in two months, when Samsung and Apple inevitably steal from each other for their wearable products. From what I can see, this agreement doesn’t preclude that from happening.
From ISPs I have spoken with, they tell me Apple has put a massive amount of capacity in place, with many saying that Apple has more than 10x the capacity they are using today, all ready to go.
Based on my calculations, Apple has already put in place multiple terabits per second of capacity and by the end of this year, will have invested well more than $100M in their CDN build out.
I don’t believe Apple expands capacity by an order of magnitude merely for future-proofing reasons. Adjustments to user growth happen gradually, not in one burst. My guess would be that this is for video content tied in with some new Apple TV (or iTunes Movies) initiative. Bitrates for high-definition video content are high enough to explain such increases in CDN bandwidth potential.
Unread for iPhone has earned a total of $32K in App Store sales. Unread for iPad has earned $10K. After subtracting 40 percent in self-employment taxes and $350/month for health care premiums (times 12 months), the actual take-home pay from the combined sales of both apps is $21,000, or $1,750/month.
Considering the enormous amount of effort I have put into these apps over the past year, that’s a depressing figure. I try not to think about the salary I could earn if I worked for another company, with my skills and qualifications. It’s also a solid piece of evidence that shows that paid-up-front app sales are not a sustainable way to make money on the App Store.
You have to be efficient with your time to make good ROI’s on the App Store. I think that is a much more important than what app pricing model you choose. Betting on apps of incredibly large scale means you bear proportionately more risk, with the possibility of no return whatsoever. If you want to maximise your profitability, make small apps that do a few things well. The amount of effort you put into an app has very little to do with how much of the market will buy it. This means that making big apps exposes you to substantially more risk, which is not fairly counterbalanced by significantly higher earnings potential.
In my opinion, you make money on the App Store by selling small things — it’s very nature is a bitesize marketplace. This is how you maximise your effective hourly wage. This doesn’t mean you have to turn around crap. You can still output quality pieces of software. Pour your heart into something for a short while (a month, maybe three), then ship it. Make your easy money (the first couple of weeks of sales). Iterate until interest dies away. Work on something else. Repeat. If something becomes a smash hit, then by all means develop it.
Unread is the complete opposite of this, it’s a beast of an app. It took Sinclair a year of development time. As a result, Unread faced massive risks when it finally shipped. Recouping months of development time is a lot more painful than recouping weeks of work. Sometimes you will get lucky, often you won’t.
I made Writing Aid in under a month, on and off. Thankfully, it sold well and produced a fantastic sales to hours ratio. Imagine a scenario where it didn’t do that well. I would have essentially wasted a month of work … but that is a hell of a lot better than wasting a year of work. You hedge your bets by moving fast and moving on.
Sinclair is annoyed that he formed a band and made a (well received) album that doesn’t earn enough for him to live a life as a rock star. I think indie devs should make songs, not albums.
TechCrunch has learned that Apple has made another acquisition, one that it is using to boost its e-books effort and “beat Amazon at its own game.” It has bought BookLamp, a startup based out of Boise, Idaho, that developed big data-style book analytics services.
I’m not quite sure what ‘beating Amazon at its own game’ entails, but from the outside, iBooks has always seemed like a runt in the litter. Apple pays as much attention to books as they do podcasts, yet they push iBooks as a mainstream operating system feature. Crucially, books costs money. Users expect more from stuff that they pay for and today Apple doesn’t really deliver.
One little known fact is that the iBooks app was developed very late in the iPad cycle. What was demoed in January 2010 was built in the last couple months of 2009.
Kamcord, the SDK that lets iOS developers offer gameplay recording and sharing functionality, is today launching a redesigned community iOS app while announcing some impressive new milestones for the service.
Kamcord’s Eric Edelman tells me the company is doing “greater than 1% of YouTube’s upload volume now,” which means it’s uploading more than 1 hour of gameplay videos every minute. In total the platform is now at 14 million videos uploaded by users accounting for a 4x growth in share rate and up 9M videos since May. It’s also now in over 340+ mobile games, up from 200 mobile games in February when it launched official integration for Unreal Engine developers on both iOS and Android.
Twitch announced a competing SDK in March, although it doesn’t seem to have anywhere near the adoption that Kamcord has attained. It’s just another example of mobile being an equaliser for new entrants and incumbents. Twitch may be the largest video streaming platform for desktop games, but it hasn’t been able to translate that into mobile streaming dominance.
With up to 12 hours of battery life, an incredibly thin and light design, and fast all-flash storage, what’s not to love?
This is a really cool video. It’s closer to an iPod commercial from a decade ago than anything Apple has done recently. I think part of the brilliance stems from the fact that the ad focuses on the stickers, an accessory Apple doesn’t even sell. The laptop is almost an afterthought, a given. It states ‘we are on top’, in a way that doesn’t feel boastful or brash.
To substitute for a physical gift card, iTunes Pass installs a new pass inside of the iOS Passbook application. The Apple Store employee can scan the pass in order to immediately apply the credit to the Apple account. Users can install the iTunes Pass feature in Passbook on the main screen in the iPhone iTunes Store app. This enhancement is Apple’s second first-party use of Passbook. Apple previously opened up the ability for Apple Store gift cards to be stored in Passbook.
This feels like something Passbook should start with. Everyone with an iOS device has an iTunes account, so everyone can get some form of utility out of this pass. It would stop Passbook from being empty by default.
