A dead simple, easy-to-use, eye candy of an app for recording audio on your Mac.
Update: From early sketches to final product, Rogue Amoeba shares how Piezo came about.
I was pleasantly surprised by the UI smoothness on this third Prada Phone. The white icons flow around the black and grey UI swiftly and apps open up promptly.
That’s a good start.
For a 4.3-inch device, the Prada’s 800 x 480 resolution is now a bit behind the curve, but the 8.5mm thickness is right in line with the competition.
The Prada Phone by LG 3.0 packs a 800-nit 4.3-inch 800×480 NOVA Plus LCD with a resolution good for 217 ppi. An OLED display would have been perfect for this phone. The dark background means very little power consumption and if black is what you want OLED is the only game in town.
Update: Mat Smith, Engadget:
LG’s NOVA Plus display is a divisive beast. It’s not Super AMOLED Plus, but more like a very good TFT display. Viewing angles are respectable, although we’ve been spoiled by IPS. LG’s gone in a different direction and like on its Optimus Black; it’s a very bright direction. It can blast out up to 800 nits of brightness and we can honestly say you’ll have no problems reading this display in full daylight. In daily use, we kept brightness at around 50 percent, and it was hardly an issue in cloudy London. The WVGA (800 x 480) resolution will disappoint many — count us as one of them — and while we get that the high price does factor in that label, we’re approaching the next generation of smartphones. High-definition displays are here. Fortunately, there is a Gorilla Glass coating to maintain the screen’s good looks while in your pocket.
The contract-free price is £500. For that kind of coin I expect a state-of-the-art display. The Prada Phone by LG 3.0 fails to deliver in that regard.
Update 2012.04.06: Aaron Souppouris, The Verge:
The main problem with the display lies with its WVGA 480 x 800 resolution, which was already looking tired in Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S II this time last year. Everything you see on the display could just do with being a tiny bit sharper, and there are occasions where you’ll see individual pixels, most notably on the stock weather widgets clouds, which drove me insane.
Prada. That fashion brand conjures up the word luxury. Well the Prada Phone 3.0′s display is anything but. A premium 4.3-inch smartphone demands a Retina-class display with a pixel format of 1280×720.
LG’s Nova LCD technology produces an incredible amount of brightness (800 nits to be precise), but retains surprisingly deep black levels. Color reproduction and viewing angles are good, although when viewed from oblique angles the whole screen takes a slightly blueish hue.
An OLED display and the high-contrast UI would have been perfect. Though the latest and greatest LCDs do a fine job of deep blacks there is no way to beat OLED’s zero nits. LG fails to harness the Prada brand; the display looks like a knockoff of what could have been.
As previously discussed, the MacBook Air has become so good that it’s going to continue to eat into MacBook Pro sales. Apple needs something to differentiate the Pro — especially if there is a 15-inch Air. That something could well be a laptop with a “Retina” display.
I don’t think the 15.4-inch MacBook Pro will get the Retina treatment first. The 15-inch MBP comes in two pixel formats: 1440×900 and 1680×1050. Sooner than later my guess is the lower-end 1440×900 will no longer be offered. You wouldn’t want the latest and greatest to be associated with something that will be EOLed. Besides putting lots of pixels into a bigger display is much harder.
I think the 13.3-inch MacBook Pro will get the Retina treatment first. This might not make sense at first. The 13.3-inch MBP has a 1280×800 pixel format. Doubling the horizontal and vertical pixels will get you 2560×1600. That’s not what DIGITIMES rumored. But if the rationale for a Retina display on MBPs is to distinguish itself from the MacBook Airs then the 13.3-inch MBA, not MBP, should be the point of comparison. The 13.3-inch MBA comes with a 1440×900 pixel format. Double that and you get to the rumored 2880×1800. And that’s what I think will be the biggest difference between the two 13.3-inch MacBooks.
Apple will certainly gain considerable experience with the rumored 9.7-inch 2048×1536 Retina Displays for the next iPad, but going from 9.7 inches all the way to 15.4 inches seems too big a jump. My guess is for the smaller, easier to manufacture, 13.3-inch MacBook Pro to get the 2880×1800 Retina display first. Distinguishing it from the 13.3-inch MacBook Air would be easier, too.
Update 2012.03.02: Richard Gaywood, TUAW:
The first is that in order to achieve, or even handily exceed, the threshold for a Retina display, Apple does not need to double resolutions on most of its displays. Far from it. It would suffice to boost a 27″ Thunderbolt Display from 2560×1440 to something around 2912×1638.
The second point is that people shouldn’t get their hopes up for how much better a Retina display Mac would be compared to the current offerings. The iPhone 4 was a huge step forward from the iPhone 3GS mostly because the 3GS’s screen was comparatively poor. Existing Macs have much better screens to start with, so any improvement will be much more modest.
Makes sense.
The Financial Times: In 2006 Taiwan-based Proview Electronics chairman Rongshan Yang agreed to sell the global trademark for IPAD to IP Application Development for £35,000 without knowledge the company had ties to Apple. The IPAD trademark for the Chinese market was filed by Shenzhen-based Proview Technology, an affiliate of Hong Kong-based Proview International.
Proview Technology defaulted on loans worth US$400 million and a group of Chinese creditor banks seized the company’s assets, including the IPAD trademark for the Chinese market. Proview Technology shareholders and creditors planned to sell the trademark to the highest bidder. This is when Apple and IP Application Development sued to have the Chinese market IPAD trademark assigned to IP Application Development. The problem lies right here: Yang claims the purchase agreement for the global trademark for IPAD did not include the Chinese market.
Financial Post: On Tuesday, the Intermediate People’s Court in Shenzhen, China rejected Apple’s claim that Proview was infringing its iPad trademark.
FT: After the court’s ruling Proview Technology has sued Shenzhen and Huizhou based Apple resellers to block iPad sales. If Proview Technology successfully blocks the sales of iPads in these two cities the company may target Apple resellers in other cities in China.
There is Proview International, the holding company based in Hong Kong, Proview Electronics an affiliate in Taiwan, and Proview Technology another affiliate in Shenzhen. Proview Electronics sells the global trademark for IPAD to IP Application Development. But it’s the Shenzhen-based Proview Technology, a company that defaulted on millions of dollars worth of loans, who owns the IPAD trademark in China, which for some reason wasn’t included in the sale to IP Application Development. Sounds fishy to me, but this might be a simple case of Proview International/Electronics/Technology swindling Apple into buying a not-so-global IPAD trademark. If so Apple may be forced to pay dearly for its mistake, to the tune of US$1.5 billion.
Update: Mike Elgan, Datamation:
In order to squeeze Apple, the company has convinced authorities in several cities to send police into stores to confiscate iPads. So merchants are taking iPads off the shelves preemptively. The company is trying to do so in more than a dozen other major cities as well.
This leads to a strange reality in those cities: Police are cracking down on the sale of legitimate iPads, while counterfeit iPads based on Apple’s stolen intellectual property are sold freely in the same stores.
Welcome to China.
I see this as an opportunity for Apple to initiate building its manufacturing capabilities in the U.S. If Apple were building the iPad in the U.S. the only country that would be impacted by China’s pseudo-legal system would be China: Apple would be prevented from exporting iPads there, but other parts of the world would not be affected. If Proview continues to gets its way with judges and government bureaucrats in China, Apple’s global iPad business might come into jeopardy. And that point a couple of billions of dollars might be the price Apple is forced to pay to sell iPads in China, and only for the time being.
Update 2: Wang Huazhong, Cao Yin, and Yuo Yannan, People’s Daily Online:
“We bought Proview’s worldwide rights to the iPad trademark in 10 different countries several years ago,” according to a statement Apple sent to China Daily on Wednesday.
“Proview refuses to honor their agreement with Apple, and a Hong Kong court has sided with Apple in this matter,” according to the statement, which also said the case is still pending on the Chinese mainland.
Unfortunately, what happens in Hong Kong might not have much relevance in mainland China:
Yu Guofu, a Beijing-based lawyer specializing in intellectual property rights, said the verdict of the Hong Kong trial or that of the mainland will not have any influence on one another or vice versa.
“The root cause of the dispute is Apple’ underestimation of the legal complications in China,” the lawyer said, adding the case also serves as a warning to companies in China to think twice about risks before “going abroad”.
Update 3: John Paczkowski:
In it, Judge Hon Poon writes that Proview’s conduct smells of conspiracy driven by financial desperation, and that there’s reason to believe that it acted in breach of its agreement with Apple by wrongfully refusing to honor its obligation to hand over the iPad trademark in China.
In this particular case, it seems law in mainland China is enforced based on the strength of personal relationships, for financial gain. And have a look at the additional documents AllThingsD acquired; to me it’s clear: Proview sold it’s rights to the iPad trademark to Apple.
Update 2012.02.18: Proview’s iPAD was an iMac ripoff.
Update 2012.02.23: Mat Smith, Engadget:
According to Chinese news outlet Xinmin, a Shanghai court has rebuffed Proview’s demand for an injunction halting the sale of the Apple tablet due to licensing issues. The Pudong New Area People’s Court made the decision yesterday, stating that while the Guangdong court case has yet to make a final decision on who owns the “iPad” trademark, there wasn’t enough evidence on Proview’s side to honor an injunction.
Here’s the link to Xinmin (Chinese). With the imminent announcement of the next iPad this trademark fiasco with Proview is cutting it pretty close. I’d like to see Apple take this as a warning and start building manufacturing capabilities elsewhere, just in case.
I downgraded. It wasn’t about saving a few bucks ($7 per month), though that helps over time considering I plan to live where I currently live for the foreseeable future with an Internet connection. No, it was about squandering a lot of precious time.
With 12Mbps, which isn’t really all that fast compared to the $20 per month 100Mbps connections that are the norm in South Korea, I downloaded and/or watched a lot of videos on Hulu, Vimeo, YouTube, etc. Fun and interesting videos, but videos I didn’t have to watch. Videos that wasted my time. With 12Mbps I downloaded a lot of other stuff I didn’t really need, but downloaded them anyway because it didn’t take that much time. I got habituated to the speed. Streamed videos came down the pipe fast enough I didn’t have to wait at all before pushing the play button. That was cool. The blue pulsing progress bars in iTunes raced toward the right as apps pop pop popped on my MacBook Pro. I downloaded a lot of apps and a lot of them I’ve never synced to my iPhone.
I used to have 3Mbps six months ago. AT&T U-verse had a deal: If you upgraded to a faster plan AT&T gave you a discount for six months. That six months will be up at the end of this month so instead of paying more (the regular price) for the faster pipe I decided to downgrade.
I thought, like many of us, a faster Internet connection would save me time. I wouldn’t have to wait for streamed videos. Apps, music, and software updates would download faster. Instead, what really happened was a lot of time got wasted doing things I wouldn’t have done if I had a slower pipe to the Internet. I ended up wasting a lot of time with a faster connection. Ironic, isn’t it? With a slower Internet connection I want to be more mindful of what I do on the Internet, save a few bucks while I’m at it, and to save a lot of what is most precious: time.
Update 2012.02.17:
It’s been about two months since I downgraded to 3Mbps. It wasn’t too painful. Big software updates took quite a bit longer. And I don’t watch movie trailers as often; it’s not fun when the trailer stops to buffer half a dozen times. In general I’ve been doing less things that waste my time so that’s a good thing and exactly what I wanted to accomplish. I saved some coin too from paying $45 to $38. Not a whole lot but after a year the savings add up to $84. But recently I’ve been thinking.
We have a landline and connected to it a phone, the kind that doesn’t need a battery. My wife and I agreed that it would be good to have in case of a power outage. We correctly assumed that we wouldn’t be using the landline all that much and so had the cheaper metered service. Well, it hasn’t been all that cheap and my distaste toward AT&T grew every time I got the bill. With a dozen or so incomprehensible tax items the total was around $27 per month. That’s expensive power outage insurance. So I started looking.
I wanted a better deal and luckily there was Sonic.net with an unbelievable offer. The offer is a 20Mbps Internet connection and an unlimited long distance POTS for $40, $50 with taxes. I knew going in the connection would be closer to 1.5Mbps, and I was right: I’m getting 1.2Mbps. I’m also happier because I use the landline phone, with almost zero electronic radiation, more often and for long conversations. The connection stability as well as audio quality is so much better than using a mobile phone. But there is one thing going down to 1.2Mbps: YouTube videos stall from time to time. With Jeremy Lin doing his thing and the fact that we don’t have any TV service, the frequent video stalls aren’t sitting well with my wife. I’m hoping Lin continues to do well, but it won’t last forever, so I’m not worried, too much. Aside from that one exceptional niggle, the 1.2Mbps pipe serves 99% of our needs and starting this month we are saving quite a bit on our phone and Internet services, reducing our radiation exposure from our mobile phones, and spending less time doing things that waste our time.
Oh yes, I almost forgot: The reason why I decided to update this post. Stuart Miles, Pocket-lint:
Apple has confirmed that the next version of its desktop operating system, OS X Mountain Lion, will be available to customers only via the Mac App Store when it comes out this summer.
It will take a long time for me to upgrade to OS X Mountain Lion, if I try it at home. OS X 10.7 Lion was about 3.7GB. I’m assuming Mountain Lion will be smaller just like Snow Leopard was compared to Leopard. So let’s say 2GB. Can you imagine downloading 2GB on a 1.2Mbps pipe? I don’t want to, so when the time comes I will go to a friend’s house with a much faster Internet connection or to a nearby Apple Store. Wouldn’t it be nice if Apple Stores had FireWire 800 or Thunderbolt external drives, to quickly transfer the Mountain Lion install file to our Macs?
A dead simple, easy-to-use, eye candy of an app for recording audio on your Mac.
Update: From early sketches to final product, Rogue Amoeba shares how Piezo came about.
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