How an App Store Could Revolutionize the TV Industry

This week’s media event could finally confirm (or scuttle) rumors of a new Apple TV device. If it’s based on iOS 4, like many pundits believe, there’s strong potential for this device to feature its own App Store. If such a future came to fruition, Apple could be facing another round of tough negotiations with content producers like it faced when it introduced the world to digital music and movie downloads. If it’s successful though, Apple could revolutionize the television content marketplace.

 

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Samsung’s next Bada device announced: the entry-level Wave 723

Are you in the market for a different smart phone operating system? Sick of the mainstream players? Perhaps you have a fondness for immature OSes that are only supported by one manufacturer?

Well, I’d initially recommend the Wave — Samsung’s original Bada-powered smartphone — but I know you’re a bit more budget minded than that. Who wants Super-AMOLED anyway?

Samsung hear ya, buddy, as today they announced their third-ish (fourth, I suppose) Bada-powered phone: the entry-level S7320E Wave 723 (henceforth known as just the Wave 723).

The most obvious feature is the built-in leather case, but other than that, the phone rocks a 3.2″ WQVGA (240×400) TFT display, 5MP camera with LED flash and QVGA (read: gross) video recording, Bluetooth 3.0, WiFi N, GPS, quad-band 2G, dual-band 3G, 3.5mm headphone jack, 90MB on-board storage, plus a MicroSD slot, and will measure just 109.5 x 53.9 x 11.8 mm.

The phone should be out in September, and, while pricing hasn’t yet been announced, expect cheap.

Check some more pics in the gallery, below.

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Motorola: Droid X’s HDMI Port Is Only Active In Gallery App

The Droid X’s vaunted HDMI out seems to be of extremely limited utility at the moment, as a Motorola developer has said that it is only ever active within the Gallery application on the phone — essentially limiting it to media recorded on the phone, or media you’ve managed to slip in there. Wait, what about using a Netflix or YouTube app? And what if you want to watch a .MOV or .AVI off your SD card?

While it’s not exactly a crippling issue, it is bothersome in phone the tagline for which is “Droid does.” Not as bad as that refresh rate cap issue on the EVO, though. That would have really bugged me.

Of course, you’ll likely be able to get around it once a safe and reliable workaround or root method is distributed (contrary to early reports), but it still sucks for the end user who doesn’t want to have to worry about this kind of thing.

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Samsung Epic 4G Gets Naked For FCC

With the Samsung Epic 4G launching very soon, here’s an interesting alternative view of the device. If you dig around enough on the FCC website, you’ll be able to find nude pictures of almost every phone. Sometimes they are barely legal shots, like this Samsung Epic 4G.

Wireless Goodness found these shots, and has a much more comprehensive idea of exactly what’s going on with the various circuits then I do. For example, the shot up above is of the main board and CPU: a Samsung Hummingbird processor running at 1GHz. The Hummingbird is a not so distant cousin of the Apple A4 processor, as both are made by Samsung. You can also see the NEC MC-10170 chip, which is the same video processing chip found in the Galaxy S devices.

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What We’re Reading About the Cloud

 

In today’s cloud news we’re tackling the Large Hadron Collider and its petabytes of data as well as the importance of knowing where your apps will eventually run with so many diverse client devices out there. HP is also attempting another cloud play.

The Seven Secrets of Successful Data Scientists (From Dataspora Blog) At least in terms of building the infrastructure, this seems like solid advice. You can’t do all the fascinating analysis attributed to true data science if you have a faulty foundation.

Hybrid Apps: The Art of Being in Two Places at Once (From TechNewsWorld) This is both a good guide to buildings apps and a good lesson in strategy. Consumers use apps on a variety of devices, sometimes not online, so how/where the apps run needs to adjust accordingly.

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Charge Your iPhone 4 With Sunlight

 

While we’ve been trying to beam the idea of a solar-embedded iPhone into Steve Job’s head (so far successfully), a design company called Frostfire is helping out. The company has created an iPhone 4 case that has a rechargeable lithium-ion battery at the base with a small solar panel embedded on it that can extend the battery life of your iPhone 4 while on the go.

Twenty minutes of direct sunlight shining on the so-called “Mooncharge” case will buy you an extra 50 minutes on standby mode, or 5 minutes of chatting, so, yeah, not a whole lot. The battery can be charged via a USB cord, as well, and fully charged, will provide the user with 315 hours on standby or 5 extra hours of talk time. The case costs $70.

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Over 250,000 Apps Now in the App Store

 

Apple’s App Store now offers a selection of over a quarter of a million apps — a record reached in just a little over two years since the App Store first opened its digital doors.

The 250,000 milestone, a figure which Apple will no doubt mention at its upcoming September 1 media-event, was recorded by 148Apps, who released the newly collected data this weekend. Its numbers detailed that over 50,000 developers are now actively working on the iOS platform, with them submitting an average of 626 applications per day. Further insight revealed that the average price of a paid application is now $2.67.

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What is Popcode?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8BaE5RtYOY&feature=player_embedded

iPad Magazines: The Pros & Cons

When the iPad was launched earlier this year, one of the big talking points was that the iPad might be the savior of magazines. By now many magazines are available on the iPad, either in their own standalone app or in a virtual magazine store. In this post we look at how magazines are using the iPad, what the user experience is like, and what iPad magazines still need to do to improve.

We'll analyze a standalone iPad magazine app (Wired) and a service that offers access to many different magazines (Zinio).

Note that we're focusing purely on the user experience of iPad magazines, rather than business matters like profitability or number of downloads.

Wired

Wired magazine has been the most high profile magazine to utilize the iPad's interactivity. Each new edition costs US$4.99 and is a fairly bulky download - the most recent 'Web is dead' edition was 482MB. But it is packed with interactive goodies.

The iPad version of Wired features videos, touchscreen infographics, slideshows, music and more. For example, a story about a small American town called Picher that has been "devastated" by lead and zinc mining, is accompanied by a video featuring Picher locals talking about the impact of mining on their town. It augments the story nicely and brings the reader closer to the issue.

There are some oddities to the Wired app, however. For example, you can't do the usual pinching motion to enlarge text that is present in most other iPad apps. So if the font type is too small for you to read, you're out of luck. The blog iA has a thorough critique of this and other issues. Also see our own Sarah Perez's thoughts on the sometimes confusing features of various iPad magazines.

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Turn Your Head & Swipe: Doctors Love the iPad (Infographic)

The iPad meets many of the needs doctors say that have for a lightweight mobile computer and many are very interested in the device. An infographic below, from Mobile Health News, articulates various things doctors are taking into consideration.

ComputerWorld's Matt Hamblen wrote about medical, legal and other professional use of the iPad today as well. Hamblen writes that doctors like the device's unobtrusive size and unintimidating profile in patient care, but wish that it had Bluetooth support. Easy access to electronic health records is the device's most compelling quality, something Mike Kirkwood wrote about in depth here on ReadWriteWeb before the iPad launched. (The Healthcare System: An Apple Tablet's Biggest Opportunity)

The infographic below was created in support of the latest research report from Mobile Health News, titled The iPad vs. The Tablet PCs in Healthcare. A similar recent report that may be of more general interest is PSFK's Future of Health report for UNICEF.

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Re-imagining the Interface of Mobile Augmented Reality

The mobile augmented reality (AR) industry has seen a tremendous amount of growth over the last year. No longer are we simply holding our phones up looking around for nearby coffee shops - now our magical pocket computers can recognize images and augment them in real-time with 3D graphics. Mobile AR browsers like junaio and Layar have begun to venture into this realm, but a new player, Popcode, has a different spin on the mobile AR interface and how we interact with objects in the real world.

Rouli Nir at Games Alfresco brought Popcode to my attention today with his article introducing Extra Reality Ltd., the British company behind the technology. Available for Android only at the moment, the free app lets users activate AR experiences by scanning one of Popcode's unique codes.

The codes consist of a series of dots and dashes (like Morse code) placed above and below the Popcode typographic logo. By scanning this marker, the app will quickly download the necessary assets to load a 3D experience based on the markerless tracking of an actual real-world object. Some of the examples in the video below include interactive business cards, maps and t-shirts.

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