Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Gresso's iPhone 4 Time Machine edition packs six Swiss watches


Apple didn’t announce a new iPhone yesterday, so we have to look to Gresso to get our "new iPhone" fix. The Gresso iPhone 4 Time Machine features six Swiss mechanical watches on its back and yet is amazingly thin.


Gresso are well known for their tenacity to slap mechanical watches onto mobile phones - it matches their sense of classiness, we guess. Their new offering is not a new phone but a modified iPhone 4 called Time Machine (and yes, it has nothing to do with Apple's Time Machine).


The usual glass back of this new iPhone 4 is replaced by a mineral glass with diamond coating and houses six independent mechanical Swiss watches, each taking hundreds of man-hours to construct and days on end of accuracy testing. The watches keep the time at the six leading business centers from across the world - New York, London, Paris, Moscow, Hong Kong and Tokyo.



Amazingly, Gresso claim that the iPhone 4 Time Machine is only 1mm thicker than a vanilla iPhone 4 (which measures 9.3mm). Now, either this is some ad-speak that tries to conceal the actual thickness of the device, or Gresso has freed up some room inside the iPhone 4.


Or maybe it's just that we don't know anything about making mechanical watches, but 1mm for glass + watch mechanism sounds impossible.


Anyway, the Gresso iPhone 4 Time Machine is coming out in 2011 (vague, we know, but you can't rush perfection) and it will set you back $6000. Pricey but you can update it to iOS 5 and use iCloud - that's more than can be said about some of the other Gresso offerings.


And if the Time Machine isn't to your liking, maybe you'll find some precious 200-year old African Blackwood more attractive.













Apple iCloud is a syncer's dream, iTunes music store gets better

iCloud was the second major announcement today by Apple for their mobile devices - it's a collection of 9 apps that are all connected to the cloud to keep your content synchronized across your devices. First the good news - it's free! And no ads either.

Here's how iCloud works - one device gets a new bit of content, which it then pushed to iCloud and from there it rains down on all your other devices (iPhones, iPads, Macs, even PCs, anything). There's a total of nine apps that work with iCloud to handle the various types of content.
Those apps are: Contacts, Calendar, Mail (the original three from MobileMe), then App Store, iBooks, backup, Documents, Photo Stream and iTunes.
First up is contacts - add or change a contact and iCloud will copy that contact or change to the other devices. Calendar notes are synced the same way and you can share your calendar with other people.
Next up, Mail gives you a free @me.com account and 5GB of free storage. That storage is shared with a couple of other apps. Emails are synced to all devices


iCloud lets you look at a list of all the apps you've purchased and with a tap of a button, you can download them to the device if it doesn’t have it installed already. Buying a new app will push it to all devices, so that's only needed for apps you have right now, before the update.

iBooks has an equivalent function for books. Apps and books can be downloaded to up to 10 devices for free. Everything on the device is backed up daily over Wi-Fi, from settings through photos to application data.

Documents in the Cloud keeps your Pages, Numbers and Keynote documents synced across your devices. Documents and device backups count towards the 5GB storage limit. 









Photos also go in the cloud - Photo Stream lets you snap a photo on one device and before you know it, it's already available on your other devices. Photos that come in from Photo Stream have their own album. Photos are synced on your Apple TV as well, which will make showing them completely effort-free.


Note that up to 1000 photos are kept in iCloud and up to 30 days - mobile devices keep that many for that long too, but Macs and PCs keep all photos, always. If you move photos to another album (other than the Photo Stream album) they will be preserved after 30 days too. Photos here don't count towards your 5GB storage limit. 


Finally, perhaps the best feature in iCloud - iTunes in the Cloud. If you've purchased a song on another device, tap the cloud button and you can download it on the current device as well. This happens at no extra charge - a first in the industry, Apple says. Newly purchased songs are simply downloaded to all devices automatically.

But it goes beyond keeping your music library synchronized across all the devices. iTunes Match is a great feature if you have a large music library that's not from iTunes. Those songs are scanned and you can listen to high-quality copies of those songs from iTunes (256Kbps AAC, no DRM, same as songs you buy from iTunes). Match isn't free however, it costs $25 a year but that's for 20,000 songs. It's US only too.



Still, the whole scanning process isn't without merit even without Match - iCloud will sync only songs that aren’t already on the device, making the whole process much faster (it should be done in minutes, Apple claims).

Now, the whole of iCloud will launch in the fall with iOS5 - but iTunes in the Cloud can be had in beta form sooner, with iOS 4.3 beta.

Those are the 9 core apps of iCloud that Apple provides. But fret not third developers - your apps can also use iCloud to sync their own content across the various devices that have the app. That works for iOS, Mac and PC apps - cool!

Syncing videos is conspicuously missing - the press release says nothing about that and neither did Steve during the presentation.

By the way, the AppStore update is already live, you can now see the full list of apps you've ever downloaded and you can also see the apps you have downloaded on other iOS devices. Go check it out from your device!

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Apple unveils iOS 5, brings notifications but little else


This year's WWDC keynote saw no new hardware announcements and instead it was iOS that took center stage. Apple unveiled the next major release, iOS 5, for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, which packs over 200 new features or say they say.

The greatest new feature of iOS 5 is the notification area, which comes to replace the annoying pop-ups. Taking a leaf of Google's Android book, the company has added a dedicated screen that you open by pulling from the top of the screen downwards. It contains all your notifications and if you click one of them it takes you to the app responsible for it.


Clicking on the X icon on the right removes the notification. We didn't see an Android-like button for clearing all notifications, or quick radio settings (i.e. Wi-Fi, GPS or Bluetooth toggles) though. By the way the Notification center, as Apple likes to call it, also features stock updates and weather information. Also visually, it looks like quite a ripoff of David Ashman's popular LockInfo app available as an unofficial tweak from Cydia. But is Apple running out of fresh ideas?


Next came Twitter integration, which covers Contacts, Safari, Photos, Camera, YouTube and Maps. You can now Tweet from all those apps and your contacts are automatically synced with their Twitter accounts. It's a rather strange move from Apple adding Twitter integration, when fans have been asking for Facebook for what seems like ages. makes us wonder if perhaps there's some grudge going on between the two companies.


The company is also launching the iMessage service, which is basically an IM client built-in right into the Message app. It supports sending texts, photos, videos, contacts to both single users and groups over encrypted connection. And yes, this time it works over both Wi-Fi and 3G from the start.


Reminders were also unveiled, bringing all your to-dos together and allowing you to set-up, well, reminders. The good news is that the app is location aware so it can now remind you of events based on where you are. It’s nothing that you couldn't achieve with an app anyway, but it's always better when things come built-in (for free!).



The camera department got an upgrade, too, with a dedicated camera shortcut landing on the lockscreen and some settings finally making their way to the UI. You now get the option to add grid-lines to your viewfinder, lock exposure and focus by pressing on the screen and using the digital zoom by pinching in ala Galaxy S II.








Oh, and you can now use the volume key for taking photos - it's not as good as a dedicated two-position camera key, but it's way better than nothing. And yes, it's the same tweak that Apple banned from the AppStore a while ago.
The Safari browser was arguably the app to get the most significant update, but alas, those were mostly for its iPad version. The Apple slate got tabbed browsing, bringing it on par with the competition. The Reading list plug-in for both the iPad and the little iOS devices allows you to save pages for reading later. Those get synced between devices too.
A particularly cool-sounding new feature of the Safari, called Safari Reader, Safari Reader lets you see web articles sans ads or clutter so you can read without distractions. It also supposedly merges multi-page articles in one big page for more convenient reading.
Moving on, the iOS5 brings the Newsstand app - it gathers all magazine and newspaper subscriptions in one place, making it easier for you to access them.



The photos app got image editing, allowing you to crop and edit images straight on your iOS device. Editing boils down to red-eye removal and Auto-enhance so don't get your hopes too high, though.
Finally, Apple decided to break the computer-chains imposed on their iOS devices. You will no longer need to connect your iPhone/iPad/iPod to a computer before your first use or for each firmware update. Starting with iOS 5 updates will be pushed over the air and they will come in smaller sizes thanks to the implemented Delta encoding. While it sounds good, it sure sound like it's going to make the job of jailbreakers all the harder.
iOS 5 will be pushed to end users this Fall, which seems like a pretty long wait considering that it isn't the major step forward that everyone was expecting it to be. At least that gives us a rough estimation as of when we should expect the next iPhone - be it iPhone 5 or 4S. Obviously a late September release is the best we can hope for.
The iDevices eligible for an upgrade are the iPhone 3GS and 4, the iPad and iPad 2 and latest two generation of iPod touch - 3rd and 4th.
The good news is that Apple announcements didn't end with the iOS 5. The company introduced its iCloud online synching service, which might as well be more beneficial to iOS users than the firmware update. Check out what that's all about here.
In case you feel like getting a dose of video demos, you can check out the iOS 5 new features coverage in our blog.
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