Is Apple Price Gouging Early iPod Touch Adopters
June 20, 2008
I am one of those happy early iPod Touch adopters. I went and bought my unit the day it came in stock at Best Buy. Ever since I have not stopped carrying my iPod Touch all around with me.
The unit, just like the iPhone, is small enough to be carried all day long in my pants front pocket. I carry all my contacts on it, all my calandar events, pictures, music and TV shows. I use it so much that I have left behind my Windows mobile smartphone to switch back to a smaller Nokia flip phone that does a better job of being a phone.
When Apple released the iPod Touch upgrade for $20.00 to bring the applications on par with the iPhone I updated mine the day it went live on iTunes. I was not happy of paying $20.00 especially that new iPod Touch would come bundled with the update soon after…
None the less I have been happy until Apple announced at WWDC 2008 that current iPod Touch owners will be able to upgrade to the version 2 of the OS for $9.99. OK, so how is this going to work exactly? Will Apple allow 1st wave iPod Touch to be upgraded to the 2.0 version for $9.99 even if they have not paid the original $20.00… or will they charge $29.99 for it? Read more
Boring weekend in Joost IRC channel
September 23, 2007
Since the announcement of OnTheToob acquisition by Joost a cold wind has been blowing on the “not so secret” Joost IRC channel (do some Googling to track it down). Many Joost developers are hanging in it and are chatting about various subjects.
Recently things got really quiet. Some would say that development get this quiet before major releases. If the level of “quietness” is proportional to the level of “change” in the next client release then one might say that it will be huge.
At the same time you might have noticed the large quantity of new content showing in the Joost database. There has also been more activity going on it the Joost blog with multiple posts per week… Joost also did some minor adjustments to it’s content search result page. So work is going on behind the scene… it is just not echoing as it use to in IRC.
I do not have much to report as far as Joost news today… but keep an ear on possible chatter between the team at IOSpirit (Remote Buddy) and Joost. As you might have noticed I found this nice gem of AJAX based remote control interface in the Remote Buddy beta software. This does some of what I had described in previous post regarding using an iPhone/iPod Touch as a super remote control (search my previous post).
I sincerely hope that something nice come out of this. If Remote Buddy was Windows compatible I would say that Joost should acquire them to kickstart the development of the Joost iPhone/iPod Touch remote control interface.
So that is it. I have no idea when the next major release of Joost client will be… but I am sure looking for it.
Apple confirm issues with some iPod Touch screen
September 20, 2007
Apple has confirmed widespread reports complaining at the manner in which the iPod touch displays video with deep black areas, warning that some early units have “defective screens”.
At issue are reports claiming that video playback on the iPod touch is significantly darker than on the iPhone, suggesting inferior screens are deployed on the former unit, and reducing the value of the video playback experience.
For example, dark scenes in the classic Roman Polanski film, Chinatown, were really dark – lacking detail that the iPhone nicely detailed. Mossberg’s otherwise glowing review observes, “my two test units displayer beautiful images”.
Source: MacWorld
Control Joost with your iPhone/iPod Touch today!
September 18, 2007
You might have read one of my previous post regarding remotely controlling Joost from you iPhone or iTouch. Guess what! Someone is already making this a partial reality.
While reading various post about the iTouch this weekend I stumbled on a link to a nice iPhone/iTouch remote control application. OK, before you go saying that you can’t install applications on the iTouch because it has not been cracked yet I will state that this is an AJAX based application. Therefore no need to install anything on the iPhone/iTouch. The only thing you need is a WiFi connection back to the computer (Mac… sorry Windows users) running the server side software.
The software is called “Remote Buddy” and the beta release is adding iPhone/iTouch support. Remote Buddy allow you to control more than 70 applications, system parameters and Remote Buddy itself - just like with any other supported remote. One of those supported application happen to be Joost! Cool. But you won’t get the type of integration I described in my earlier post. For this Joost would have to make some more API available.
To make this possible Remote Buddy uses AJAX to create a virtual remote control on the iPhone/iTouch. The AJAX Remote is a virtual remote control, that is integrated into Remote Buddy and gives you access to Remote Buddy’s menu and functionality through a web browser.
The mini webinterface Remote Buddy dynamically generates is loaded into a browser - for example that of an iPhone™ - and offers direct access to the diverse functions in Remote Buddy. The webinterface is delivered to the browser by a webserver, developed from scratch by IOSPIRIT and which runs directly on your Mac®. The direct integration into Remote Buddy offers significant advantages such as a very high speed, efficiency and extremely low reaction times in a (W)LAN of often just a few milliseconds.
I have not been able to test the software myself just yet since I don’t have an iTouch yet… but when I get it I will certainly report on how well it work!
By the way, this is NOT a paid advertisement! But I am always open to advertise great IPTV related products on my blog!!
