What a crazy 10 years, right guys? It’s really flown past; the highs, the lows, the stuff in the middle that didn’t seem very impressive one way or another. For our final Engadget Show of the decade, we asked site founder Peter Rojas to join us for a look back at our picks for the most important and / or interesting gadget developments since 2000. A hardcore crowd came out just after a gigantic snowstorm to witness the proceedings, and now you get your chance to see how it all went down. This is a long one folks, so grab some popcorn and settle in for the show!
Note: The HD download below is on its way, so hold tight. The iPhone / iPod version and RSS versions are all fine.
There’s a flurry of rumors this morning that Apple is planning an event as soon as this January, though exactly what they’ll be showing us is still in question. Most of the buzz (along with our buddy Gene Munster) says we will finally see the long-awaited tablet, and that after a January showing, it might actually be released as soon as March. Which means, of course, that by August, it’ll completely revolutionize whatever industry it happens to fall into. That’s usually how these things work.
But while a tablet is still only being bounced around, we’ve at least heard that a bigger screen is involved in some way, whether that be in a netbook style computer or something else. A few developers have reportedly been asked to ready their apps for a “full screen” resolution, which would seem to suggest that even if the new device is larger than an iPhone, it’ll still run apps off the App Store.
Breaking news, everybody: Apple’s working on some stuff. The rumors are flying in all directions today, starting out fairly innocently with word from the oft-innacurate DigiTimes of an iPhone-destined 5 megapixel camera sensor. Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster piled on with an investor note saying they’re giving an Apple January event a 75% chance of happening, and the tablet is squarely at 50 / 50. The most interesting word, however, comes out of the Silicon Alley Insider, who is quoting a “plugged-in source in the mobile industry” who says that Apple is working with some select app makers on prepping high-res apps to demo on a “new, larger mobile device.” The device would be shown in January but not available at that time — presumably in wait for these redesigned apps to mature (at WWDC, perhaps?). While that rumor is being piled in with the ever-present tablet hubbub, if we were to read between the lines we’d say it sounds more like a higher-resolution iPhone in the style of Google’s Nexus one or Motorola’s Droid — both of which are making the iPhone’s 320 x 480 screen look a tad archaic. Certainly more likely than Apple releasing “several tablets” to match up with all the disparate rumors we’ve seen of the 7-inch / 9-inch / 10-inch unicorn device.
It’s a problem worthy of an episode of Intervention. Yes, I’m ashamed to admit that my wife is addicted to the Live Cams app on her iPhone.
It all started when she was searching for new apps in the App Store, and she noticed a little app called Live Cams [US$0.99, iTunes Link]. It sounded innocuous enough — the app provides a way to search, browse, view, and in some cases, control live web cams all over the planet. At a price of less than a buck, Live Cams couldn’t harm anything or anybody, could it? We were both sure that the developer, Barry Egerter, couldn’t have any evil intentions, so she bought Live Cams and installed it on her iPhone.
As we reported last week, Apple is again rolling out their ‘12 Days of Christmas’ promo for almost all of Europe. From December 26 to January 6 anyone with a iTunes account in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, Finland, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, and Ireland can download a free song, music video, app, television show, or film from ’some of the biggest star performers’ on iTunes.
To help you remember to download the daily giveaway, Apple has created a ‘12 Days of Christmas’ iPhone app [UK iTunes link]. It uses push notifications to alert you when the new download is available and also allows you to connect to Facebook and recommend the download to your friends. So if you live in Europe, get downloading! The promo starts December 26th, but the app is available now!
The live video streaming application Qik has just been approved in the App Store and should be available shortly, we’ve learned. The company submitted the app a couple weeks ago following the approval of UStream’s live streaming application, and as expected, Apple also had no problem with it now. This marks a change from Apple, which previously was blocking all apps that did live video (recording) streaming.
Apparently, the way these streaming apps work is using a restricted API (a screen capture API) to get around the fact that Apple doesn’t grant them access to the video APIs for live capture and streaming. But Apple has suggested that it will no longer enforce protecting this API and in the future should open more that allow for live video streaming.
Six months ago I wrote about a startup called Shopkick (it was then called MOBshop). The company won’t disclose much of what their eventual product will be, but they’ve attracted some of the most high profile investors in Silicon Valley: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Reid Hoffman.
Here’s what CEO Cyriac Roeding will say about Shopkick which is scheduled to launch in 2010: they aim to aims to bridge the gap between the mobile phone and the physical shopping worlds.
Vienna, Austria-based tunesBag is opening up the public beta version of its social music service today, after allowing access by invitation only for the past year or so.
The launch has been a long time coming, considering the fact that the startup has already produced a fully functional web client, and Adobe-AIR powered desktop client and applications for iPhone, Facebook and Boxee since its founding in late 2008.
We’ve written about the social city and nightlife mobile app, buzzd, which pulls its data from Twitter and other buzzd users, for a bigger picture of the places that are hot in a given location. The mobile app, which has been available for iPhone and BlackBerry users, is launching an Android app as well as rolling out new versions of its existing smartphone apps.
The buzzd network compiles information from its base of over a half-million users, Twitter, and other real-time sources to provide users with activity updates for almost half a million venues across the United States and Canada. You download the app and it will bring up a list of venues close to you that are currently popular based on people talking about them on Twitter and Buzzd. Using Twitter’s new Geolocation API, the app can even pull the exact locations of your friends on Twitter.
Cc:Betty, a free service that helps organize group email threads, has rolled out an iPhone app to help declutter your email on your mobile device. Cc:Betty’s app is a group based email application that breaks email conversations into collated, threaded discussions.
An account can be created right from the app, and new group discussions can be created, using the iPhone address book to access your contacts. Photos can be easily attached as well and new contacts can be added to discussions via your address book. Any discussions, or other content such as attachments a person has in their Cc:Betty.com account are automatically synced to their iPhone. When one of your discussions is updated, you’ll get a push-notification to your iPhone so you can access important information on the go.