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Apple Delivers Latest iPad — 4G LTE Connectivity and Tremendous Resolutions are Hallmarks

March 7, 2012 by

Apple has taken the wraps off of its latest iPad, chock full of new features from a high end display to faster 4G connectivity as the company seeks to maintain its huge lead in the tablet market, a space that had languished for years until Apple’s entrance two years ago.

With typical panache Apple did not give the latest offering in its iPad family a name such as iPad 3 or iPad HD as had been expected but rather called it the iPad all day as the company laid out the newest features in its latest offering.

The iPad is powered by an A5X quad core processor, similar to what powered the iPad 2 and the iPhone but which has been modified to better run high end graphics. It will need that graphics power with the Retina display that enables 2048 x 1536 pixel resolution. To give you an idea of how this compares to earlier models, this is 4x the number of pixels in the iPad 2.

It includes a 5MP iSight camera that has the ability to capture 1080HD video and the iPad can play back 1080p video. There is also a second, much lower end rear facing camera that has 0 .3MP capability for video chat.

Two of Apple’s carrier partners, AT&T and Verizon will be selling 4G LTE versions of the iPad but no word yet if its third iPhone partner, Sprint will sell one when its network is up to that level. The coverage now available includes support for HSPA+ and DC-HSDPA, so that both CDMA and GSM iPad users have the ability to easily roam internationally.

Apple did not port Siri, its voice technology so popular on its iPhones to the iPad but the device does support diction and note taking verbally. Apple claims that a user should be able to get 10 hours of battery life.

The new iPad Wi-Fi models will be available in black or white on Friday, March 16 for $499 for the 16GB model, $599 for the 32GB model and $699 for the 64GB model. iPad Wi-Fi + 4G for either AT&T or Verizon will be available for $629 for the 16GB model, $729 for the 32GB model and $829 for the 64GB model. In addition Apple has cut ithe price of its existing iPad 2, which will now start $399.

As Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO took center stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco he received a very different reception that the late Steve Jobs did just about two years ago when he debuted the original iPad.

Hard to remember now the cynicism and disdain that the original was greeted with. Remember all of the bad iPad jokes? People claiming that they could see no real use for them? Now flash forward a bit more than two years and market researchers are claiming there is a pent up demand for this product.

Apple now refers to this as the post-PC world and well they should. Cook said that the company sold 172 million post-PC products which accounted for 76% of the company’s revenue.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, Apple, Apps, AT&T, iPad, iPhone, Sprint, Tablets, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi Tagged With: ,

Can ‘Gridiron Grunts’ Grow? App That Lets Players Talk to Fans Getting Pictures, Videos for 2nd Season

March 6, 2012 by

After a self-proclaimed successful rookie year, the team behind the “Gridiron Grunts” app — which lets NFL players and fans talk to each other via recorded voice messages — is beefing up for its second season with plans to add picture- and video-sharing capabilities.

According to ex-NFL lineman Jeb Terry Jr., who is co-founder and CEO of Grunts parent company Gridion Ventures Inc., adding picutre and video sharing is just another way of adding value to an app that was “built just to talk about football.” If you’re not familiar with the Grunts app, a “Grunt” is a short (less than 45 seconds) audio message that can be recorded from a phone to the app.

The big attraction are “Grunts” left by NFL players, though fans who download the app can send Grunts to players, as well as “Grunt” to other fans. Fans pay 99 cents per month to listen to grunts of a specific player, or $4.99 a month to listen to all pro grunts. Fan-to-fan grunting is free, and the app is available for both iPhone and Android devices.

The “Grunt” label comes from the way football players talk on the field, a language Terry and his co-founder Ryan Nece used often as teammates on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. “We used to knock heads in practice and then go out and have steaks afterward,” said Nece, who was a linebacker for Tampa from 2002-07.

After leaving the NFL following the 2008 season Terry went back to school to get an MBA, and then hit his old training partner with an idea for bringing fan-player interaction to a wider audience.

“It’s all about giving the fans the ability to engage with a player at their convenience,” said Nece. Terry said the pick-up-a-phone-and-grunt also makes it easy for players to participate.

“It’s convenient and easy to do, and gives players another way to control their own brand,” Terry said. “And fans can listen to a grunt at their leisure. You can’t always listen to radio talk shows when they are on the air.” The Grunts app can also deliver alerts to a fan’s phone when there is a new grunt to listen to.

Nece added that Grunts is a way for players who aren’t Tom Brady or Aaron Rodgers to get some air time.

“There are a lot of players like we were, with shares of the limelight that were pretty small,” Nece said. “You could be a big fan of a certain player but never hear from him on ESPN. Now everyone can develop their own personality.”

According to Terry the Grunts app kicked off the season with just 15 pros participating, but ended with almost 80 players at the end of the season. One grunter who Terry really liked was Green Bay Packers breakout star Randall Cobb, who scored on both a kickoff return and a punt return last year.

“After that first game when he scored on the kickoff return he was very engaging, with some great postgame grunts,” Terry said. “He was perfectly candid and very excited for the fans.”

The Grunts team said it attracted 20,000 paying customers during the first year, a “beta” season total that Terry is happy with. For this year, after adding photo and video sharing later this spring, the Grunts team is still considering where to expand next, with perhaps a Grunt website and other sports on the drawing board. But first and foremost, the Grunt app will remain simple and powerful, like a blitz: A place to talk and listen football.

“Twitter is fun but tweets might be from friends or associates [of an athlete], so you never know,” Terry said. “We built our app to talk about football, and not about shopping or going to the club. We just wanted to erase the clutter and bring fans content that’s strictly from the players.”

Filed Under: Apps, ESPN, iPhone, NFL, Social Media, Sports Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: , , ,

Toshiba Delivers Excite 10 LE Tablet as Market prepares for War

March 6, 2012 by

Today marks the official start of the ‘Is it an iPad killer’ season, spring edition. Toshiba has the honor of kicking off this event with the release today of its Excite 10 LE tablet, beating Apple’s latest iPad announcement by a day.

Now I do not believe that a tablet has to be an iPad killer, look at the success of both the Barnes & Noble Nook and the Amazon Kindle. Now some might argue that they are e-readers and not really tablets but so what? They found a market segment and are thriving.

There is undoubtedly a huge market segment that is currently underserved by the tablet market in the 10-inch space. Not because Apple’s iPad is not a great product but because not everyone wants an Apple iPad. Some want an Android; some may just not like Apple.

It does not really matter, the issue to date has been that no one has really tapped into that market successfully yet, but that day is nearing. Expect to start seeing available for purchase tablets that were announced last year, at this year’s CES and last weeks’ Mobile

Back to Toshiba, it has a stellar offering in its latest design, originally announced at CES, that at least of today is the lightest 10-inch tablet available and is available in two models starting at $530.

It features a backlit 10.1-inch color display with 1280 x 800 resolution made with Gorilla Glass to help prevent scratching. It is powered by a Texas Instruments 1.2GHz dual core OMAP 4430 processor and is only .3-inch thin (or 7.7mm) and weighs in at 1.2 pounds.

While it currently runs Android version 3.2 operating system the company has said that when Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) is available the tablet will be upgraded to that OS. The Wi-Fi enabled tablets are available in a 16GB version for $530 and the 32GB version for $600.

The tablets feature a 2MP front camera and a 5MP rear facing camera as well as featuring the ability to record 1080p video. It features a variety of interfaces including microUSB, microSD and HDMI ports. Toshiba said that the 10 LE will have an expected battery life of 8.5 hours.

It is interesting to see how much Toshiba has changed its design philosophy from its last generation Thrive models, which compare very poorly to the 10 LE. It is probably that the company simply rushed the delivery of the first generation and would have been better served to sit back and wait to deliver a better product and let others make the mistake in delivering poorly designed ones. Ah hindsight is such a wonderful thing.

Now that Toshiba is out, with the iPad tomorrow and a number of others expected in the following weeks the drum beat will start about iPad killers rather than asking the more important question of which tablet meets your price range and meets your usage needs.

Filed Under: Amazon, Android, Apple, Barnes & Noble, iPad, Kindle, Tablets, Toshiba, Wi-Fi Tagged With: , , ,

Mobile Sports Report TechWatch: The Almost iPad III Edition

March 5, 2012 by

Apple is expected to deliver its heavily anticipated next generation iPad later this week. Rather than print all of the massive amount of rumors we are just noting at this point and will fill in the gaps when the company takes the wraps off its latest product.

It is likely that this week will mark the start of a number of tablet releases within the next month or so including a Toshiba offering expected the day prior to Apple’s announcement and we will try and stay on top of all of the noise and news.

Archos aims at kids market with Child Pad tablet
Speaking of tablets, Archos has unveiled the Child Pad, a 7-inch tablet running Android 4.0 that is designed for the children’s market. With a $129 SRP it is significantly lower than most tablets, aside from eReaders; the Child Pad has a number of features designed for the young consumer.

Archos is using what it calls a kid-friendly user interface and it will come preloaded with 28 kids’ apps and will have access to a Kids App Store that has 10,000 apps including games, entertainment and communications. No word on educational apps.

The tablet will feature a 1GHz processor and have 1GB of RAM and will feature parental controls. Archos said that it will be available by the end of March.

RSA Panel suggests enterprise ban smartphone BYOD
If an enterprise wants to truly have secure data it should ban the cost effective method of allowing employees to use their own phones and tablets as work devices. It said that the cost of supplying employees a smartphone that can be controlled by the organization is much smaller that the potential cost to the corporation if sensitive data is lost.

Security officials speaking at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco last week said that patches and bug fixes are hard to apply to a fragmented phone market and that it makes more sense to have control over the devices but that often execs and other individuals push back on IT.

AT&T caves in on ‘unlimited data’ plans-sort of
After a spate of negative stories around the nation about how its attempt to throttle back the top 5% of data users who had its unlimited plan, AT&T has relented and changed its policy, at least somewhat.

One of the complaints was that users with unlimited plans would get throttled, or have their data download speeds greatly reduced, well before they hit the level that was available to users of lesser plans from AT&T, 3GBs.

While it has retired the ‘unlimited plan’ existing plan members were grandfathered in, and they pay $30 more than the 3GB tiered level, but have often found that they would be throttled as the closed in on 2GB. A recent small claims court award of $850 to a member that had his plan throttled might have had some impact on this deal. However the company said it will continue to slow down data for users’ as they near 3GBs.


Patent News: It was a busy week for Apple, Motorola, Samsung, Microsoft and a host of lawyers

Apple wins latest round in German Patent ruling
Apple has won a preliminary injunction against Motorola Mobility that could force Motorola to recall smartphones that infringe on Apple patents. I think two weeks ago it was the exact opposite-maybe they will open the door to rivals as both companies phones will be banned?

Anyway a German Court has ruled that Motorola has violated an Apple patent that deals with “portable electronic device for photo management” which apparently is something that Motorola uses with its photo gallery implementation in its phones.

According to Foss Patents, Apple has the option of having the injunction enforced which would mean a ban on Motorola smartphones in Germany. Apple has won an injunction against Motorola two weeks ago on a different topic in Germany and won on this won in a Dutch court as well. Be interesting to see if Motorola changes its tune on licensing deals for its technology to Apple.

Apple and Samsung get a split decision
Also in Germany, the Mannheim Regional Court issued a pair of rulings involving Apple and Samsung regarding patents. The court threw out a Samsung vs. Apple lawsuit, the third in a row, which has to deal with 3G/UMTS patents.

At the same time it threw out one of the two slide-and-lock patent disputes that Apple has filed against Samsung, and a decision on the second of the two is expected within a few weeks. Samsung has said that it will appeal the ruling and it is expected that Apple will do so as well.


Microsoft/Motorola ruling to be reviewed
The U.S. International Trade Commission is undertaking a review of a judge’s decision that said that Motorola infringed a Microsoft patent in Android smartphones. The ruling comes from a complaint that was originally filed in 2010 claiming that a total of 9 patents were infringed.

Two patents were dropped from the case and the judge found that one of the remaining seven did in fact infringe on a Microsoft patent. A final decision is expected sometime this spring and both Microsoft and Motorola said that they look forward to the results.

For fans of Futurama only
A group of hackers from the University have broken into the e-voting system in Washington D.C. and gotten their write in candidate to the 2010 school board elected-one Mr. Bender Bender Rodriguez, the robot from the cartoon Futurama.

The effort, from a few years past, was not some group seeking to over throw the will of the people but rather to answer a dare to see if anybody could break into the system and so was engineered by a Professor and a team of students. They found that they could change all existing and future votes in the system.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, AT&T, FTC, iPad, Motorola, Samsung, Tablets Tagged With: , , , ,

The Big Ten Network expands to Mobile Devices with BTN2Go

March 2, 2012 by

Fans of Big Ten sports who are on the road can now take a piece of the conference with them, a sporting piece as the conference has expanded its Big Ten Network (BTN) presence to cover both mobile users as well as expanding its footprint on the Internet.

The BTN2Go features the live sports feed of the programming that fills BTN, it is simply made available to users of smartphones, tablets or access the site via the Internet. The BTN has done a staged rollout of the program, it debuted with the start of the football season last year as an Internet-only feature and then expanded to the iPad and iPhone quickly afterwards. A version for Android-based phones is expected within the next month or so.

The goal of the effort to provide fans of Big Ten sports access to games anywhere, at any time on any device, said Michael Calderon, BTN’s vice president of digital and interactive media. The network is currently looking at other platforms such as Windows Phone and connected devices including game consoles and expects to launch a new platform with the start of next year’s football season, Calderon said.

Users have to be subscribers of the participating cable or broadband providers, a list that includes Bright House Networks, Charter, Cox Communications, DIRECTV, Dish Network, Time Warner Cable and Verizon.

If you fall into that category then BTN2Go is free with no addition subscription needed and this gives you access to a huge amount of both current and past programming. First and foremost for many fans is the ability to watch live games. However games that are broadcast by BTN’s partners such as ABC and ESPN will be available the following day on-demand.

Calderon noted that a real benefit the program brings is for fans that do not live in the Big Ten area, where a game that are interested might not be broadcast, it will still be available on BTN2Go. Also when an event runs long, say the first of a basketball doubleheader, a user can still go to BTN2Go to watch the opening of the second game if that is the one they are interested in viewing.

The BTN has benefited from its founders foresight. When it was founded five years ago in ensured that it had control of all its digital rights so that the licensing issues that have the potential to stymie a program such as this do not exist.

Then there is also access to archival footage from earlier this season broadcast by both BTN and its partners. Of course there is highlight reels and coaches shows on a regular basis. The BTN also creates home grown series such as Original series such as The Journey, Big Ten Icons, Big Ten’s Best and The Big Ten’s Greatest Games that are also available for viewing.

Going forward the network is looking to add additional features to BNT2Go including possibly a social media module for Facebook and Twitter users, but for the first generation of the platform it focused on delivering a top video experience, Caldera said.

Filed Under: ABC, Android, Apple, Apps, Big Ten Network, ESPN, Facebook, iPad, iPhone, Live sports via mobile, Live Sports Video Consumption, NCAA Football, NCAA Hoops, Time Warner Cable Television Tagged With: , , , ,

Friday Grab Bag: ESPN3 and Facebook Team for Hoops Tournaments

March 2, 2012 by

Facebook and ESPN Team on Conference Tournaments
For much of the next two weeks ESPN3 and Facebook will combine to show coverage of all of the myriad college conference basketball games in both the men’s and women’s brackets. This means that users will have access to all 225 live broadcasts.

ESPN3 has indicated that while this is its first partnering with Facebook it will not be its last as it seeks to leverage the huge audience that the social media giant commands. As ESPN3 vice president Damon Phillips said “We see this as a big opportunity. You fish where the fish are.”

However in keeping with the mantra that there is no such thing as a free lunch not all users will be able to access the games from Facebook. If you have a cable TC carrier or a broadband hookup from a carrier that broadcasts ESPN3, then you get the games for. If not, you are on the outside looking in with no games.

Siri now more insufferable?
I actually like Siri and have found the voice to be very helpful when I have used someone’s iPhone that has the technology, it is just the people showing me how many tricks that they can make it do that really annoys me.

Well now they have a new venue as Mercedes-Benz has integrated the Siri into it’s a-Class cars. The Drive Kit Plus will integrate the iPhone with the cars’ electronic platform. This will allow the Mercedes-Benz’ Digital DriveStyle App to display iPhone apps on the infotainment system screen, according to Cnet.

It will be at Mercedes-Benz’ discretion as to which apps the user can add and control but there will be some such as Twitter, Facebook and Aupeo Personal Radio will be available.

Yahoo joins in the patent fun!
Yahoo has been meeting with Facebook to resolve issues regarding a group of Yahoo patents that it asserts are being used by Facebook in a variety of applications including ads, privacy controls, news feeds, and messaging services.

The exact number of patents is not clear and has been reported as being between 10-20, now is the dollar value that Yahoo is placing on these patents. Yahoo has not taken the step of filing suit and the move is being widely viewed as an attempt to paint a positive picture of Yahoo’s overall patent portfolio as a positioning move in case the company can find a suitor to buy it.

Apps can steal your photos?
It is starting to seem that every new day brings a new manner in which data can ‘leak’ from your smartphone. The latest, courtesy of the New York Times, is that there is a group of apps that can copy a user’s entire photo library with no alert.

The problem is, at least so far, confined to iOS devices such as the iPad and the iPhone and appears to ask a user for location information and if that is approved it not only gathers that information but also downloads photos as well to a remote server. I hope it gets mine in focus, I never can

Mozilla helps you track who is tracking you
In a case of turning the tables on data trackers, Mozilla has created a Firefox add-on called Collusion, an experimental program that is designed to enable you to see who is tracking your activity across the web.

The program uses a simple, easy to understand format. As you browse the web a graph is produced showing sites represented as dots. Red for ones that are known trackers, gray for ones that might track you. You can hover your cursor over a dot for more information. It is interesting to see the interplay between sites and how fast sites that you do not visit are now tracking you. The program also allows you to turn off tracking.

Intel Capital Launches Connected Car Fund
Intel Capital has launched a $100 million fund that is dedicated to developing new technologies in automobiles. The Connected Car Fund will invest across the board in hardware, software and service companies that are developing technologies for cars.

The range of areas is large with the company expecting to invest in areas such as information and entertainment systems, wireless connectivity, mobile devices and driver assist technologies. The global fund will seek to invest in all stage companies over the next three to five years.

Filed Under: Apple, Apps, ESPN3, Facebook, Intel Capital, Live Sports Video Consumption, NCAA Hoops, Smartphone, The New York Times, Yahoo Tagged With: , ,
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