• Apple Gets Early Access to Unreleased Samsung Prototypes Over Copy Infringement

    // Gradly // Apple, blog, Featured, Gadgets, iPad, iPhone, Mobile, News, Patents, Rants & Raves 1 Response

    The legal battle between Apple and Samsung has taken a new ride. Apple is suing the Korean corporation over alleged copying the “look and feel” of the iPhone and iOS with its Galaxy range, and a federal court is forcing Samsung to hand over samples of new phones for Apple to pore over. Only Apple’s legal team for this case will see the products, so no-one from Apple or even Apple’s in-house lawyers will see the rival devices.

    Samsung Galaxy S 2 and Infuse 4G are on sale now, the other three devices Droid Charge, Galaxy Tab 8.9 and Galaxy Tab 10.1 aren’t yet on the market. As noted by Cnet UK

    Apple’s legal battle with Samsung has taken a new twist. The California outfit is suing the Korean corporation over alleged copying of Apple products in Samsung’s Android range, and a federal court is forcing Samsung to hand over samples of new phones for Apple to pore over.

    Normally, there’d be three months before Samsung had to hand over samples, but San Jose Judge Lucy Koh has decided that Samsung has already been shooting its mouth off about the unreleased phones and can’t claim they’re secret models, Courthouse News reports. Apple points out that Samsung even gave away a Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet to all 5,000 people at the recent Google I/O developer conference.

    Apple claims Samsung is causing confusion in the minds of the phone-buying public by copying the look and feel of the iPhone and iPad in the design of phones and tablets, the interface and even the packaging. Samsung even has its own version of the iPod touch, which strips out the phone functions — the Galaxy S WiFi 5.0 and Galaxy S WiFi 4.0.

  • 500,000 iOS apps in the App Store and Counting

    // Gradly // Apple, blog, Featured, Infographic, News, Rants & Raves, Rumors 1 Response

    The App Store has apparently crossed 500,000 app approvals in two years and ten months since its inception. The news came from Chomp, 148apps and EA-owned games publisher Chillingo. They posted an awesome infographic which you can see below. According to Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt:

    Sometime after midnight Tuesday morning,  the iTunes team pushed through a batch of app submissions that sent the total over a six-figure milestone. In 34 months, Apple has approved more than 500,000 iPhone, iPad and iPod touch apps for the company’s U.S. store. (Through attrition, replacement and withdrawal, number of apps currently available for download is 20% lower, around 400,000.)

    To celebrate the event, three app-related companies — mobile app blog 148apps, search company Chomp and game developer Chillingo — have issued a jumbo-sized infographic, a portion of which is reproduced above. The fact-packed poster includes a timeline, loads of factoids and a best-seller list topped by Angry Birds, which spent 275 days in the No. 1 spot.

    As of January, more than 10 billion apps had been downloaded from Apple’s App Store. Its closest competitor, the Google Android Marketplace, launched 8 months later, currently boasts 294,000 apps and 3 billion app downloads.

  • Glasses Free 3D App For iPhone 4 & iPad 2 Free Download

    // Gradly // 3D, Apple, blog, Gadgets, iPad, iPhone, Rants & Raves, Tech. No Responses

    Do you remember the Glasses Free 3D on iPad 2 and iPhone 4 via Head Tracking Demo? If you don’t, no worries the video is embedded below, but in short, a research team came up an amazing tech demoes by combining head-tracking technology that uses the iPad’s front facing camera to deliver glasses-free 3D experience that doesn’t require the accelerometer, but it’s entirely based on the camera and the movements of a user’s head in front of the screen. The position of the user will give the illusion of tridimensional objects moving on the display. Now that team has released the free i3D app, so you can see the 3D illusion effect yourself.

    Apps official description:

    i3D is an overview of Head-Coupled Perspective (HCP) on iOS devices. HCP uses the front camera of the device to track the face of the user in real time. This information tells the app how the user is looking at the display. The app updates the perspective of the 3D scene accordingly, giving the user the illusion that he looks at a small window.

    i3D contains several 3D scenes that you can observe with HCP. It only relies on face tracking. It does not use the accelerometers or the gyroscopes.

    The face tracking system does not detect and track the face in every lighting condition. Read the instructions in the app to get a good tracking.

    Head-Coupled Perspective does not create a stereoscopic display! It provides a kind of monocular 3D display: the same picture is seen by both eyes. In the future, it might be combined with a stereoscopic display for a better 3D effect.

    i3D has been developed by Jeremie Francone and Laurence Nigay at the Engineering Human-Computer Interaction (EHCI) Research Group of the Grenoble Informatics Laboratory (LIG), University Joseph Fourier (UJF).

    Here is the original video to watch it again:

  • Stream YouTube Videos Faster on iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad with TCP Optimizer Cydia Hack

    // Gradly // Apple, blog, Cydia, Download, How To, iPad, iPhone, Jailbreak, Youtube No Responses

    TCP Optimizer is a new and free Cydia tweak that modifies your iDevice’s settings to increase streaming speeds and improve its overall internet connection, including Wi-Fi.

    How To install TCP Optimizer:

    • You must have a jailbroken iDevice
    • Add http://cydia.pushfix.info/ repository to Cydia.
    • Search for and install ‘TCP Optimizer‘. No Restart needed.

    This actually will:

    • Increase theTCP Receive Buffer from 131072 to 292000,
    • Disable TCP delayed ACK’s
    • Double the number of possible un-ACK packets from 8 to 16 packages
    • Increase the size of un-ACK packets

    TCP Optimizer is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, running iOS 3.1.2 or above; however, Its not recommended to be used on second generation Apple TVs.