This just in: the new iPod Touch with front-facing camera (aka the iPhone Lite) has a built-in vibrating motor for notifications, including silent call notifications. Why is this important? Well, presumably the iPod Touch is now a Facetime phone and definitely needs new ways to interact with the user. I’m personally very excited. → Read More
And you thought Giz was the only game in town when it came to Apple dev units. Some folks on eBay posted two development iPod Touches with cameras placed at the center of the rear panel and running some odd variant of OS X. It’s not huge news – we knew the Touch was getting a camera eventually – but if you had designs on these things, think again. eBay just pulled them. 9to5mac grabbed all of the images and slapped them up before the auction ended prematurely. → Read More
Ford announced today their move to upgrade their SYNC in-car communications system into MyFord Touch. This all-encompassing system integrates not only your cell phone or portable media device, but now your GPS, air conditioning, audio library, and much more. Multiple touch screens will replace the traditional dashboard of your car, and remember that mobile Wi-Fi hotspot we were talking about before? Seems that this technology will be moving on past MyFord to MyLincoln and MyMercury soon. Although I’m personally holding out for MyDeLorean. → Read More
OMWOW! Pocket-Lint has some red hot pix of the iPod Touch used in Apple Stores to enable on-the-spot check out. It’s a standard Touch with a barcode scanner and credit card reader but it replaces the old EasyPay systems from Microsoft they were using until now. → Read More
You may have seen a young man named Michael Arrington bemoaning the current state of touch technology on these very pages. While I tend to agree on the aggregate, I saw HP’s new touch line last week and came away impressed, at least in the quality of the interface HP built around the TouchSmart 300 and 600, 20 and 23-inch all-in-ones with touchscreens. Sony also dumped out some touchscreen Vaios in an event so-over-the-top that Mischa Barton was there (seriously!). OEMs are going touch-crazy. But why now? Why touch? → Read More
New games are always a cause for excitement. Ubisoft’s R.U.S.E. is a highly anticipated RTS set to release early 2010. But even cooler is the fact that you can play it on one of IntuiLab’s large multi-touch tables, and kill things just by touching them. → Read More
T-Mobile just announced a new touchscreen phone today, the “Tap”. The new phone looks to be part of the new generation of feature phones, which I suspect we’re going to be seeing a lot more of in the next year or two. The Tap has a 2 megapixel camera with video capture, a GPS, built in music player, and uses T-Mo’s 3G network. The phone will be available in two colors, “midnight blue” or “berry”. No word on the pricing or the exact release date, however it is expected to be available sometime this year. [via CellPhoneSignal] → Read More
Huh. This is actually an iPod Touch theme for jailbroken iPods and it’s just about the coolest one I’ve ever seen. It looks like a bear to implement, though, and the creator is posting it tomorrow as far as I can tell and it apparently works with WinterBoard, the theme system for jailbroken iPods. → Read More
The same guys who brought you the bubble input have created a crazy scratch UI that allows you to scratch and tap almost any surface. By sensing the sound and the finding the peaks and valleys in the waveform the system can tell if you’re scratching a shape or tapping on the surface. → Read More
If you have ever wanted to plug in a pro-quality microphone and headphone to an iPhone or iPod touch, pay attention and read on. → Read More
The Dev Team has released a seven step process to jailbreak the 2.2.1 iPod touch firmware. Sure, it’s not packaged up in a nice and pretty app, but the steps don’t look to hard. Just follow ‘em to the letter and hopefully – *fingers-crossed* – you will be able to run jailbroken apps. → Read More
MuscleNerd has posted a video showing how he jailbroke the iPod touch simply by connecting a micro controller – in this case a DefCon badge with some crazy chips in it – and sending eight characters to the iPod Touch during boot, thereby allowing the new firmware to be uploaded. → Read More
Yellowsn0w, the illustrious iPhone 3G jailbreaking software, launched at the beginning of this month and the Dev Team is already toiling hard at their next release. Even though the group hasn’t officially announced that redsn0w is the iPod Touch 2G jailbreaking software, it more than likely is. When Apple stuffed a better CPU into the latest Touch, it broke the original jailbreaking software so a new release is likely to drop soon. Hopefully. More as we get it. Large image and coded message after the break. → Read More
We’ve got this from three independent sources close to Apple: expect a large screen iPod touch device to be released in the Fall of ’09, with a 7 or 9 inch screen. Prototypes have been seen and handled by one of our sources, and Apple is talking to OEMs in Asia now about mass production.
Apple has been experimenting internally with large form tablet devices for years, one source says, but there was concern that users wouldn’t like the device. The difference now is the iTunes app store, which has thousands of games and other applications that are perfect for a touch screen device with an accelerometer. Apple says more than 300 million applications have been downloaded since the App Store launched in July 2008. Combine the App Store, iTunes and a browser and you have one heck of a device. → Read More
It’s every Mac fanboys wet dream to embed an OS X touchscreen computer inside their ride. When RIDES does a mobile Mac workstation though, it’s more of an Apple Store on wheels with – get this – two Mac Mini’s, a MacBook Air, iPod Touch, iPhone 3G, 20-inch Cinema display, along with a bunch of car audio wares all within the surprisingly sexy Hyundai Genesis sedan. Words cannot do this car justice though. Even if you are on the PC side of things, head over and check out the car anyway; it’s a work of technology art. → Read More
How cool! While this touchless capacitive touchpad is not a usable technology at this point (“it often malfunctions”), it’s certainly promising. Not necessarily for notebooks, where tapping and precise multi-touch are key, but for perhaps public kiosks or interfaces that require more basic interactions and simultaneously are hotbeds for germs. Its extra-sensitive capacitance detectors are specially designed to report minute changes in object position, and I’m hoping they’ll be able to tell how far it is from the sensors as well. They’re still working on the technology, but maybe you won’t need special gloves for Minority Report-style big computing after all. [via HardOCP] → Read More
