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Apple unveils new, consumer-friendly battery charger

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 01:28:47 +0000

Apple has launched its own plug-in charger for AA batteries , extending its wireless device and energy efficiency strategies. In addition to making its wireless keyboards and mice more user friendly, the company’s new product will slash the amount of power that’s demanded by competing chargers. The Apple Battery Charger includes six AA batteries in the device’s $29 price tag. This hovers around the price of many of the other chargers on the market, but Apple says it has built in a little extra: the ability to save money, however little, on electricity. A lot of other chargers continue to suck power even after the batteries they carry are fully juiced. Apple’s spin the product consumes 10 times less electricity than these rivals — about 30 milliwatts once its charge cycle is finished (as opposed to an average 315 milliwatts), the company says

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Apple unveils new, consumer-friendly battery charger

Intel snags former Palm and Apple VP Mike Bell for smartphone plans

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 22:10:19 +0000

Palm’s brain drain continues as it loses another executive to a major competitor. Mike Bell, most recently senior vice president for Product Development at Palm, has moved on to a similar role at Intel’s Ultra Mobility Group as Director of Smartphone Product Development, Engadget reports . In an internal email, Intel said that Bell “will help build and lead a team to build breakthrough smartphone reference designs to accelerate Intel Architecture into the market.” Bell was a “good get” for Palm. In 2007, the company managed to lure him away from Apple, where he spent 16 years working on a variety of projects including the iMac, Apple TV, and iPhone. His defection from Apple reportedly led to “screaming matches and threats of lawsuits” from Apple, according to Valleywag . It apparently infuriated Apple CEO Steve Jobs to such a degree that Palm didn’t dare to announce his hiring publicly.

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Intel snags former Palm and Apple VP Mike Bell for smartphone plans

Update: California Farmers’ Market Finder (Lifestyle)

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 23:24:33 +0000

California Farmers’ Market Finder 2.3 Category: Lifestyle Price: Free, Version: 2.2 -> 2.3 ( iTunes ) Description: This is your guide to California Farmers’ Markets. As lovers of our local farmers’ markets, we struggled through web searches with old data and incorrect locations

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Update: California Farmers’ Market Finder (Lifestyle)

Update: Hotel Tycoon Lite (Games)

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 23:27:11 +0000

Hotel Tycoon Lite 2.1.1 Category: Games Price: Free, Version: 2.1.0 -> 2.1.1 ( iTunes ) Description: Hotel Tycoon Lite – Real time hotel business simulation game Build and manage your own hotel chain. ** Updated for iSO4 (Crash problem fixed clearly) You can build only 2-star hotels in the lite version. There are six virtual cities which has their own features. In the start, you have a small hotel and some amount of money. You can buy an empty real-estate in the market, and build a new hotel. As an owner, you are supposed to hire employees, advertise your hotels, make promotions, start services, renovate rooms. You can adjust the room price day by day.

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Update: Hotel Tycoon Lite (Games)

Google researcher says friend groups may give it a window to best Facebook

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 02:40:00 +0000

If there’s an opening for Google in the crowded social networking market already dominated by Facebook, it might be in helping users navigate through their many friend groups, according to a presentation from Paul Adams, the lead for user experience research at the company. Adams report comes at a critical time for the company, as it is reportedly working on a full-fledged social product to be launched later this year. Through studying the nuances of social interaction both off- and online, Google researchers found that people typically have between four and six friend groups and only have between two and six “close” friends, he said. College friends don’t necessarily mix with work friends, who don’t necessarily mix with a person’s family. While that’s an almost absurdly intuitive conclusion, it’s a difficult problem to design a product around. Facebook, while offering friend groups, has a fairly rigid interpretation of identity.

New: Backup (Productivity)

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 13:43:45 +0000

Backup 1.6 Category: Productivity Price: Free, Version: 1.6 ( iTunes ) Description: Backup allows you to backup your contacts online, synchronize them and restore them on your new iPhone. It uses the OMA SyncML standard and is therefore compliant with the SyncML servers available on the market.

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New: Backup (Productivity)

Computex sees invasion of the iPad killers, world yawns

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 13:56:08 +0000

Giant trade show, Computex sees a wave of iPad pretenders this morning as the big tech event opens its doors. No matter, as ARM president Tudor Brown reckons half of future tablet PCs will be ARM-based, just as the iPad is. Of course, as we know, Apple has sold two million iPads in just 60-days — just how much of the growth of the future tablet market will Apple seize

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Computex sees invasion of the iPad killers, world yawns

New: myMarkets Vic (Lifestyle)

Fri, 28 May 2010 16:33:24 +0000

myMarkets Vic 1.0 Category: Lifestyle Price: Free, Version: 1.0 ( iTunes ) Description: myMarkets Vic is a fun, different way to interact with and experience Victorian markets.

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New: myMarkets Vic (Lifestyle)

Standalone e-readers doomed after 2013, report says

Thu, 27 May 2010 21:11:02 +0000

Even as Amazon battles with publishers over e-books for its Kindle reader, and Sony prepares to sell its Reader in Japan, China and Australia, research from a telecommunication and media analyst firm says the market for mobile broadband e-readers such as these will peak in 2014, when consumers worldwide will buy 14 million of them. After that, the firm’s report says, sales will begin falling as multi-purpose devices like Apple’s iPad, plus improved smartphones and netbooks that are e-book friendly, begin to replace one-function readers. More surprisingly, the report forecasts that cheap readers built without wireless broadband networking will chew off a significant portion of the market. “The current absence of an obvious subsidy model for mobile network operators, the launch of the iPad and market dynamics are likely to limit the market in the long-term,” wrote analyst Gavin Byrne in a report prepared by London-based firm Informa Telecoms & Media . By market dynamics, Informa means that e-readers will be squeezed by two different types of competition. The most obvious are “multifunctional devices such as mobile phones, tablet computers, netbooks and other portable consumer electronic devices” including the iPad

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Standalone e-readers doomed after 2013, report says

Canesta, YDreams partner to take augmented reality mainstream

Mon, 24 May 2010 10:20:21 +0000

Canesta , a startup that makes chips to enable electronic devices to “see” by locating objects in three dimensions, has announced a major partnership today with natural user interface company YDreams to develop augmented reality (AR) offerings. AR applications are used to superimpose data over real-world objects seen through a camera (such as a cellphone or game console camera)

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Canesta, YDreams partner to take augmented reality mainstream