Category: E-Buzz

10 things to know about iPhone 4

Apple CEO Steve Jobs says the iPhone 4, which debuted on Monday, is the “biggest leap forward” the iPhone has made since it was introduced in 2007.

The newly announced phone has “one of the most beautiful designs you’ve ever seen,” Jobs said at a tech conference in San Francisco. “This is without a doubt the most precise thing and one of the most beautiful things we’ve ever made.”

Here’s a quick list of 10 things you should know about the iPhone 4, which goes on sale June 24, and costs between $199 and $299. Let us know if you have more questions and feel free to leave thoughts of your own in the comments section at the bottom of this story.

Sharper screen

In his Monday keynote address at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Jobs sounded more excited about the iPhone 4′s new screen than anything else.

With 326 pixels per inch — four times that of previous Apple phones — Jobs says the iPhone 4′s “retina display” screen is years ahead of anything else on the market.

“Text looks like you’ve seen it in a fine printed book — unlike you’ve ever seen on an electronic display before,” he said. “Once you’ve used a retina display you can’t go back.”

Gyroscope

“These phones are getting more and more intelligent about the world around them,” Jobs said. That’s true of the iPhone 4, which has five sensors, including a gyroscope.

What does that mean for users? Probably cooler games and apps. The iPhone 4′s internal gyroscope can sense motion on six axes. On Monday, Jobs showed a demo where he pivoted in a circle, and the stack of blocks in an app spun with him. The phone is basically more aware of where it is in the world, in relation to gravity, than it was before. It’s hard to say exactly what app developers will do with this, but likely something.

Thickness

The iPhone 4 will be the thinnest smartphone on the market, Jobs says. At 9.3 millimeters (0.37 inches) thick, it is 24 percent thinner than the previous iPhone model, the 3GS, he said.

“I don’t think there’s another consumer product like this,” he said. “When you hold it in your hand it’s unbelievable.” The iPhone 4′s screen remains the same size as before, 3.5 inches when measured diagonally. That makes it smaller than some Android phones, which are its main competitors. But that may not be a good thing. As people watch more video on their phones, they’re demanding larger screens, some analysts say.

Camera flash

In what’s largely seen as a catch-up move, Apple added an LED flash to the iPhone 4′s camera, which lets mobile photographers shoot photos and video more easily at night.

Better camera

The quality of the iPhone 4′s camera is improved over previous models. The iPhone 4 shoots photos with 5 megapixels of resolution, compared to 3 megapixels before. That’s still not the best on the market. The HTC Droid Incredible has an 8-megapixel camera, for example. The Nexus One, another competitor, has a 5-megapixel camera, too.

The iPhone 4 also shoots HD video, and a video-editing app called iMovie, which Apple will sell, allows people to shoot, edit and share videos with the phone.

Video conferencing

In addition to the back-of-the-phone camera improvements, Apple also added a second camera to the iPhone 4, which faces its user. This can be used for video conferencing, which Apple and Jobs expect to be an emerging trend in mobile phone use. For more on this.

Multitasking

The iPhone’s operating system, which Apple calls iOS 4, got an upgrade along with the iPhone 4′s hardware. Among the most-awaited changes is multitasking, which means that the phone can run multiple applications at once. Want to listen to internet radio and check e-mail at the same time? Starting on June 21, you can with the iPhone.

Several other smartphones have featured multitasking for some time. So Apple is not blazing new territory here. Jobs says the company waited to add the feature until it could do so without sucking down too much of the phone’s battery life.

Stainless steel antennae

The iPhone 4 is flat on the front and back, and a band of stainless steel goes around the edge as a trim. This isn’t just a design feature, Jobs said. It’s actually the antennae.

“It’s never been done before and it’s really cool engineering,” Jobs said.

Guts

The iPhone 4 has a new processor — the A4 — which Apple says makes the phone faster than competitors and faster than the processor in the iPhone 3GS. Apple debuted the A4 processor as part of the iPad slate computer in January.

But the iPhone 4′s capacity to store books, videos and music disappointed some. The high-end model stores 32 gigabytes of data, which isn’t any more than the iPhone 3GS.

Wireless carrier

The iPhone 4 is only available with a contract from the wireless carrier AT&T. That’s bad news for some people. Bloggers have been begging Apple to open the iPhone to multiple carriers — and specifically to Verizon — for some time. Some iPhone users, particularly those in bigger cities like New York and San Francisco, have complained that AT&T drops their calls and doesn’t handle data requests quickly enough.

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Bill Gates’ Lessons in Life

Here is a list of 11 things that many high school and college graduates did not learn in school. In his book, Bill Gates talks about how feel-good, politically-correct teachings created a full generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.

1. Life is not fair; get used to it.

2. The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.

3. You will not make $40,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice president with a car phone, until you earn both.

4. If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure.

5. Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.

6. If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

7. Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents’ generation, try “delousing” the closet in your own room.

8. Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades; they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.

9. Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

10. Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

11. Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

Five Free Must Have Social Media Apps for iPhone

The iPhone has come a long way since its inception. It broke barriers with its touch screen, web apps, and native apps. With over thousands apps available, it’s hard to decide which ones are worth your while. I’ve spent my fair share of time downloading iPhone/iPod Touch apps and, long story short, I’ve uninstalled a good portion of them. Why? Because they either sucked or I never used them.

Following are Free Five MUST HAVE social media apps on your iPhone:

1. TweetDeck

Perhaps the best free iPhone Twitter client on the market, TweetDeck is quick, has a nice and easy-to-user interface, gives you information about the number of updates right up front, and supports all of your basic Twitter functions. As an added bonus, TweetDeck also supports Twitter groups, so you can organize your tweets. Flipping between sections is easy, and the fast scroll of tweets is nice when flipping through updates.

2. Facebook

Facebook app offer nice and clean functionality on iPhone with features of Status Updates, Like and Comment on news feed including sorting option on it. User profile view is quite tiny but still good to have a idea what’s going on. It allow you to add favorite friends on new page within application to quickly access friends profile. Push notification can be annoying sometimes but can be managed through settings.

3. LinkedIn

LinkedIn app puts your professional network just a touch away. Walk into any interview or client meeting with the ability to look up the details and connect with over 50 million professionals worldwide, in real-time. I personally think that this application required a lot more improvements but still worthing having.

4. eBuddy

eBuddy allow you to have one single buddy list with all your friends from multiple instant messengers and social accounts including [MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk, AIM, MySpace, Facebook, ICQ]. On the move eBuddy can replace your traditional desktop clients with features of File Sharing and PUSH notifications (1 hour for free app).

5. Google App

One of most used app on daily basis, to me it seems like LITE version of google’s product which I am sure most of internet use most of their time including Google Mobile App, Earth, Gmail, Maps, Sync and YouTube. Free free to share your most best apps in comments.

Free free to share your favorite apps in comments.

The History of Programming Languages

For 50 years, computer programmers have been writing code. New technologies continue to emerge, develop, and mature at a rapid pace. Now there are more than 2,500 documented programming languages! O’Reilly has produced a poster called History of Programming Languages (PDF: 701K), which plots over 50 programming languages on a multi-layered, color-coded timeline.

How It Started

We first saw the “History of Programming Languages” diagram, created by Éric Lévénez, while visiting our French office. We were so taken with the level of detail and the visual impact of viewing 50 years of programming history that we wanted to come up with a way to share it more widely. We started big. We printed it out full-size, all 18 feet of it, on our plotter and ran it along a wall at our Mac OS X Conference last fall. So many people came by to make notations on the diagram that we knew there would be a lot more interest and discussion if we could only get it in a more manageable format. With Éric’s permission, we collected comments from our authors, editors, and friends, and rebuilt the file so we could print it at its current dimensions, 39″ x 17″. Éric maintains a site with his original diagram, change logs, an explanation of how he creates his charts, and links to additional resources such as Bill Kinnersley’s Language List of over 2,500 programming languages. Éric also has Windows and Unix historical diagrams that he makes available for non-commercial purposes, all at www.levenez.com

About the O’Reilly Poster

“Cool” is generally the first thing we heard from people who reviewed our poster. Then came reams of suggestions for additions to the diagram. We made only a small number of changes–in order to keep the file in a relatively manageable state that enables us to print and share the poster–but there is a high level of historical knowledge and personal experience of the events in this poster among our friends, authors, and editors. We hope to inspire and capture your comments and discussion here in our History of Programming Languages Wiki. Please note, however, that we do not intend to update the poster. Our walls aren’t big enough.

Getting Your Copy

The poster is available online in PDF format (701k). You can also find full-size copies, while they last, at O’Reilly conferences (http://conferences.oreillynet.com/).