Posts tagged with "iPhone"

Kickstarter: Thermodo by Robocat - The Tiny Thermometer for Mobile Devices

Robocat, a Danish software studio co-founded by Michael Flarup and Willi Wu, has been building unique digital products out of Copenhagen for the last 3 years. They’ve created several weather-related apps like Outside, Ultraviolet, Thermo and Haze, which was featured by Apple as Editor’s Choice a few weeks ago.

Today, Robocat launched a Kickstarter project based on weather – but this time as hardware, not software. It’s called Thermodo. Thermodo is a tiny electrical thermometer that lets you measure the temperature in the exact location where you are by using a piece of hardware that connects to the headphone jack on your mobile device. It’s for iPhone, iPad, Android & more. They’re looking to get $35,000 in 33 days to pay for the further development of Thermodo.

Thermodo consists of a passive temperature sensor built into a standard 4 pole audio jack enclosed by a sturdy housing. This allows your mobile device to read Thermodo’s temperature straight from the audio input. Thermodo sends an audio signal through the temperature sensor. This sensor will then attenuate the signal amplitude depending on the actual temperature. This attenuation can now be detected on the microphone input and through software we calculate the corresponding temperature. Easy peasy! We call this the Thermodo Principle™. Simply plug Thermodo into your device and start the companion app or any other Thermodo enabled apps of your choice. The temperature reading takes place instantly. Thermodo is powered by your device. No external power is required, it can even run in the background while you do important stuff.

You can measure the temperature indoors as well as outdoors. Track the temperature and see how it rises after you turned on the radiator or check how the temperature drops during a summer night. No network connection required. Thermodo comes with a neat little keyring so you’ll always have it with you.

Video and more after the break. Read more

Twelve South Releases SurfacePad for iPhone, with Smart Cover-like Protection

Twelve South, makers of excellent Mac and iOS device accessories, have announced today the latest product in their family of accessories for the iPhone: the SurfacePad. Made of Napa leather and weighing less than an ounce, the SurfacePad is a modern, minimal design that beautifully complements the stylish design of iPhone.

What makes SurfacePad special is what it’s not: a military-style rubber grenade for your iPhone. SurfacePad is an ultra-thin, luxury leather cover that shields iPhone 5 or 4/4S from the more typical hazards of life, like the change in your pocket, jump drive in your backpack or the nail file in your purse. It allows you to set your iPhone down on rough spots like a concrete bench or stone tabletop without worrying about scratching the sleek surface of your iPhone.

Check out more photos of the SurfacePad here, and a video below. Read more

Measuring iPhone 5 vs. iPhone 4S availability→

Measuring iPhone 5 vs. iPhone 4S availability

Horace Dediu of Asymco today wrote and shared data on the availability of the iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S by potential buyers - measured by the subscriber counts of the carriers that sell the iPhone. It’s an important and valuable extension of an article I wrote last week, discussing the international rollout of each generation of iPhone and iPad. That analysis had a weakness in that I treated all countries as equal which isn’t necessarily true (depending on why you’re looking at the data).

Announcing availability in Mauritius is not nearly as important as announcing Madagascar. A better measure would be to track the countries’ populations being added, or, better still, the populations which subscribe to operators who have a distribution contract with Apple.

So instead, Dediu looked at which carriers held the iPhone in each country and what their approximate subscriber count was. By calculating the availability this way, you can now see the potential number of iPhone buyers, as seen in Horace’s graph here.

That’s a handy measure: the iPhone 5 was 30% more available than the iPhone 4S. The big contribution was having China and Indonesia available during the fourth quarter rather than in January 2011.

Make sure to head over to Asymco to read the full article and all of Horace’s observations, it’s an interesting read. If you didn’t catch my article last week, it’s also available to read here. Just note that if you are trying to compare Dediu’s graph with the one in my article (shown here), Dediu went with actual dates whereas I went with relative time. This is because I wanted to look at the first 110 days of every iPhone, Dediu was specifically looking at the fourth quarter availability.

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Could Apple Be Moving To Twice-Yearly iPhone & iPad Releases?

Just over a month ago, Horace Dediu of Asymco penned an article entitled ‘Does S stand for Spring’ in which he hypothesised that perhaps Apple might be moving to a biannual (twice-yearly) release cycle for the iPhone and iPad. Over the past month I’ve gone back to read Dediu’s hypothesis as news articles and analyst opinions surfaced and I did some analysis of Apple myself. It’s got to the point that I really think Dediu’s hypothesis has got real potential to become reality. So I decided to take some time to present Dediu’s evidence in a slightly different way, elaborating on some of his evidence and hopefully add to the discussion. But if you haven’t read the Asymco article yet, I’d highly recommend you do so before proceeding:

‘Does S stand for Spring?’ - Asymco

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Mapping Apple’s International iPhone & iPad Rollouts

Apple has on three seperate occasions announced that the iPhone 5 will have the fastest international rollout of any iPhone ever - at the announcement keynote, during the Q4 earnings call, and in their press release announcing opening weekend sales of the iPhone 5 in China. The claim was, no doubt, meant to impress investors, press and the general public, but I was curious as to how fast it really was compared to previous iPhone rollouts. So I decided to track down the launch schedules of all the iPhones to date and then again with the iPad. In the end I found a few trends, some oddities and that Apple’s claim was (mostly) true.

iPhone 5 will be available in more than 100 countries by the end of December, making it the fastest iPhone rollout ever.

- Apple Press Release

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Apple: iPhone 5 First Weekend Sales in China Top Two Million

Apple has just announced that they’ve sold over two million iPhone 5s in China since it launched three days ago on Friday, December 14th. That compares to the more than five million that were sold in the first weekend of the iPhone 5’s availability back in October (where it was available in nine countries).

“Customer response to iPhone 5 in China has been incredible, setting a new record with the best first weekend sales ever in China,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “China is a very important market for us and customers there cannot wait to get their hands on Apple products.”

Apple has also re-iterated that the iPhone 5 will be available in more than 100 countries by the end of December, which Apple says will be “the fastest iPhone rollout ever”.

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StatNut for iPhone

I’ll admit it: I am crazy about the details. I enjoy numbers, statistics, and as much info about my interests as humanly possible. Sometimes I wonder if my brain will collapse with all the data I try to absorb. I’m one of those people who reads the manual every time I get a new gadget because I want to know the ins and outs of how everything works.

Most of us enjoy seeing stats for our social networks; we like to know how many followers, clicks, etc. we have across the Internet. There are a few iOS apps out there that do so, like Ego or Birdbrain, but I’m always curious to try something new. StatNut is a new iPhone app from Shiny Frog and FFFABS that lets you add accounts from many social services and displays them in one easy to read mobile interface. Services include Instagram, Twitter, Dribbble, Facebook, Tumblr, Vimeo and YouTube.

Setup is easy: just enter your usernames and you’re ready to go. Once you enter your accounts you can access the settings for each by swiping to the right to reveal an animated gear icon; from there you can change your username or delete the account. Swiping to the left reveals more details like follows, lists, tweet counts, likes, shots, and favorites. A full swipe to the left reveals an animated opening eye, and this will take you to the mobile site of each service except Instagram; StatNut will open the Instagram app if you have it installed.

If you want to reorder the services, simply tap and hold to move them up and down. Some services will let you enter more than one username if you have multiple accounts, like Twitter or Dribbble. We have included a promo video below so you can see it in action. Read more

Review: Kuvva for iPhone

I recently posted a longer review about a cool app called Kuvva for Mac OS X. The app automatically displays series of cool, professionally designed desktop wallpapers for you. By setting up an account on kuvva.com you can select your personal favorites from the constantly growing database of tremendous desktop art. These are then displayed as your personal series of desktop wallpapers in a set timespan on your desktop in order to make your working day at the computer a bit more beautiful. Kuvva also works with your Twitter profile background wallpaper.

Last week, Present Plus, the developers of kuvva finally published an iPhone version of their very popular app. I was lucky to be one of the app’s beta testers, and as I now hold the final version of the app below my fingers I again have to admit that this is a truly great app.

Kuvva for iPhone (watch a cool demo video made by my friend Joost Van Der Ree over at Vimeo) adopts the same basic features from the web service for wallpaper discovery like the Mac client does. You can view all wallpapers published on kuvva.com (of course in an iPhone-optimized scale and resolution) in the main screen sorted by release date, artist, and popularity.

Tapping on one of the wallpaper previews in the main view brings up the single-wallpaper inspection interface. In this view you can smoothly bring up a small interaction menu by tapping on the small arrow laid over the (now scaled up) wallpaper covering the full screen. If you have a Kuvva account, you can mark the wallpaper you’re currently looking at as a favorite (and thus add it to the list of wallpapers which are also also displayed on your Mac desktop). Additionally you can tweet about it, preview it (which is done via a cool transition effect bringing up the lock screen interface to show you how the wallpaper looks in the iOS- context), and download it right from the app into your device’s camera roll.

Via a paneled side menu you can access all the mentioned sorting categories as well as all of you favorites. If you find a wallpaper you like a lot, you can tap on the button in the top right corner in the preview window to get more information about the artist who made the respective wallpaper, which not only includes all of the artist’s wallpapers on kuvva and a photo of him or her, but also a link to his/her twitter account and website for immediately getting more information if desired.

The app works well, more or less without any performance flaws on my (now considered very old) iPod touch 3rd Gen on iOS 4.1. All subtle UI gimmicks like transitions or moving effects (e.g. the aforementioned navigation menu in the wallpaper view) work just as they should and make Kuvva fun to use.

If you’re already a user of Kuvva (like I am), consider this to be a must-have (it also includes wallpaper optimized for the new iPhone 5). The app extends your wallpaper “workflow” perfectly as you now can like and view wallpapers on the road for usage on your Mac. And of course this is a great, handy resource for new wallpapers on your iPhone if you’re a fan of eye-catching, vividly designed backgrounds. If you are a lover of minimalist wallpapers or photography on your lockscreen though, Kuvva probably won’t suit your tastes. But for everyone else, it is a perfect, easy to use resource for getting new wallpapers for your iPhone without any hassle. I can’t wait to see if the app will be available for iPad as well in the nearer future; it definitely should be a great app as well.

Kuvva for iPhone is available for purchase on the App Store for $1.99.