Touch
by John Biggs on November 13, 2009

OMWOW! Pocket-Lint has some red hot pix of the iPod Touch used in Apple Stores to enable on-the-spot check out. It’s a standard Touch with a barcode scanner and credit card reader but it replaces the old EasyPay systems from Microsoft they were using until now.

This year’s laptop and PC lines are touch-gasmic… but why?
24 Comments
by John Biggs on October 13, 2009


You may have seen a young man named Michael Arrington bemoaning the current state of touch technology on these very pages. While I tend to agree on the aggregate, I saw HP’s new touch line last week and came away impressed, at least in the quality of the interface HP built around the TouchSmart 300 and 600, 20 and 23-inch all-in-ones with touchscreens. Sony also dumped out some touchscreen Vaios in an event so-over-the-top that Mischa Barton was there (seriously!). OEMs are going touch-crazy.

But why now? Why touch?
Read More

by Jimin Brelsford on October 8, 2009

New games are always a cause for excitement. Ubisoft’s R.U.S.E. is a highly anticipated RTS set to release early 2010. But even cooler is the fact that you can play it on one of IntuiLab’s large multi-touch tables, and kill things just by touching them.

Whitoken, a beautiful iPod Touch theme
10 Comments
by John Biggs on August 21, 2009

500x_35817228_copy-1
Huh. This is actually an iPod Touch theme for jailbroken iPods and it’s just about the coolest one I’ve ever seen. It looks like a bear to implement, though, and the creator is posting it tomorrow as far as I can tell and it apparently works with WinterBoard, the theme system for jailbroken iPods.
Read More

Crazy scratch UI to create cheap, unpowered touch surfaces
5 Comments
by John Biggs on August 10, 2009

The same guys who brought you the bubble input have created a crazy scratch UI that allows you to scratch and tap almost any surface. By sensing the sound and the finding the peaks and valleys in the waveform the system can tell if you’re scratching a shape or tapping on the surface.
Read More

by Matt Burns on May 28, 2009

If you have ever wanted to plug in a pro-quality microphone and headphone to an iPhone or iPod touch, pay attention and read on.

OMG! Space Ace for iPhone!
3 Comments
by John Biggs on May 28, 2009

spaceace-2_jpg

Digital Leisure has just launched Space Ace for the iPhone/Touch. This game, for those of you too young to remember when games were groundbreaking and amazing and worth spending money on, used a laserdisc to display little cartoons that played when you tapped the buttons or controller correctly. Obviously this is about as intuitive as a do-it-yourself colostomy kit but dammit look at those graphics. Space Ace and Dragon’s Lair came at a weird point between consoles where “photorealistic” was becoming a distant reality but “ugly and blocky” was the status quo.
Read More

by Matt Burns on March 11, 2009

The Dev Team has released a seven step process to jailbreak the 2.2.1 iPod touch firmware. Sure, it’s not packaged up in a nice and pretty app, but the steps don’t look to hard. Just follow ‘em to the letter and hopefully – *fingers-crossed* – you will be able to run jailbroken apps.

by John Biggs on February 17, 2009

MuscleNerd has posted a video showing how he jailbroke the iPod touch simply by connecting a micro controller – in this case a DefCon badge with some crazy chips in it – and sending eight characters to the iPod Touch during boot, thereby allowing the new firmware to be uploaded.

by Peter Ha on February 16, 2009

As much as we wanted HTC to announce the G2 at MWC, we knew it would be too much to ask. But if you’re into Windows Mobile (6.1) or, more importantly, TouchFlo 3D then you’re in luck. It looks like HTC took a page from Palm’s playbook on these updated Touch devices, but more on that later.

by Matt Burns on January 14, 2009

Yellowsn0w, the illustrious iPhone 3G jailbreaking software, launched at the beginning of this month and the Dev Team is already toiling hard at their next release. Even though the group hasn’t officially announced that redsn0w is the iPod Touch 2G jailbreaking software, it more than likely is. When Apple stuffed a better CPU into the latest Touch, it broke the original jailbreaking software so a new release is likely to drop soon. Hopefully. More as we get it. Large image and coded message after the break.

by Michael Arrington on December 30, 2008

We’ve got this from three independent sources close to Apple: expect a large screen iPod touch device to be released in the Fall of ‘09, with a 7 or 9 inch screen. Prototypes have been seen and handled by one of our sources, and Apple is talking to OEMs in Asia now about mass production.

Apple has been experimenting internally with large form tablet devices for years, one source says, but there was concern that users wouldn’t like the device. The difference now is the iTunes app store, which has thousands of games and other applications that are perfect for a touch screen device with an accelerometer. Apple says more than 300 million applications have been downloaded since the App Store launched in July 2008. Combine the App Store, iTunes and a browser and you have one heck of a device.

RIDES Mac-powered Hyundai Genesis
2 Comments
by Matt Burns on October 24, 2008

It’s every Mac fanboys wet dream to embed an OS X touchscreen computer inside their ride. When RIDES does a mobile Mac workstation though, it’s more of an Apple Store on wheels with – get this – two Mac Mini’s, a MacBook Air, iPod Touch, iPhone 3G, 20-inch Cinema display, along with a bunch of car audio wares all within the surprisingly sexy Hyundai Genesis sedan. Words cannot do this car justice though. Even if you are on the PC side of things, head over and check out the car anyway; it’s a work of technology art.

Touchless touchpad detects inputs from 3cm away
1 Comment
by Devin Coldewey on September 26, 2008


How cool! While this touchless capacitive touchpad is not a usable technology at this point (”it often malfunctions”), it’s certainly promising. Not necessarily for notebooks, where tapping and precise multi-touch are key, but for perhaps public kiosks or interfaces that require more basic interactions and simultaneously are hotbeds for germs.

Its extra-sensitive capacitance detectors are specially designed to report minute changes in object position, and I’m hoping they’ll be able to tell how far it is from the sensors as well. They’re still working on the technology, but maybe you won’t need special gloves for Minority Report-style big computing after all. [via HardOCP]

PwnageTool and QuickPwn released for 2.1 iPhone Firmware
4 Comments
by Matt Burns on September 13, 2008

iPhone owners; if you still feel the need to Jailbreak and customize your Jesusphone in the modern AppStore era, the tools needed now work with the latest 2.1 firmware. Have fun!

Oh, and there is a GUI jailbreak option now for the iPod touch so you don’t have to do it manually.

How to crack open the three new iPods
1 Comment
by Matt Burns on September 12, 2008

This is kind of a tradition now: new iPods launch and some chump has to tear ‘em apart. RapidRepair happened to chronicle the whole thing and provides instructions for us common folk for when we need to repair our new iPods.

4G Nano, 2G Classic, 2G Touch.

HTC Touch Diamond, Touch Pro get official on Sprint
1 Comment
by Doug Aamoth on September 10, 2008

a7f441cb-89a2-401d-a0f7-9a6093cdfca6

We’ve gotten official word from HTC concerning the Touch Diamond and the Touch Pro release dates and prices for the Sprint network. We already kind of figured the launch date for the Diamond to be September 14th, although HTC just says it’ll be “available in September” while we now know that the Touch Pro (seen above) will be available on October 19th.

The Touch Diamond, as you’ll recall, will cost $249 after a $100 mail-in rebate. The Touch Pro will cost $299, also after a $100 mail-in rebate. Both will require a two-year contract with Sprint.

Review: iPod Touch 2G
109 Comments
by John Biggs on September 9, 2008

I was never a Touch man. I loved the iPhone but the Touch never drove me to drink in quite the same way. I am pleased, however, to report that I’m getting me a 32GB Touch as soon as the Apple Store opens tomorrow. Why? A few reasons.
scaled.IMG 4765scaled.IMG 4766scaled.IMG 4767scaled.IMG 4768scaled.IMG 4769scaled.IMG 4770scaled.IMG 4771
Read More

iPod Touch receives iPhone shape and NIKE+
3 Comments
by Matt Burns on September 9, 2008


iPod Touch is going up-scale with an iPhone shape, stainless steel backing and built-in NIKE+. Plus, Apple threw in a speaker and auto genius playlist, essentially making a radio station like experience. Other than that, the 3.5-inch screen, 802.11 b/g and App Store are going to remain the same. The ‘deets about the NIKE+ app is a little sketchy this early on, but at least with built in hardware, there is no need for a receiver. Expect 36 hours of music or 6 hours of video out of the new battery too. The new Touch comes with upgrade two-way headphones with the 8GB going for $229, 16GB for $299, and the 32GB for $399. The new model is available today.

HTC Touch successor, the Opal, leaks out
1 Comment
by Matt Burns on September 9, 2008

The innovative HTC Touch is getting a bit long in the tooth and it looks like HTC has the successor already lined up. The documents ’bout the Opal look legit enough, and if we are to believe them, the Opal appears a lot like the previous generation with same 200MHz processor, WiFi, MicroSD, Bluetooth 2.0, and a 2.8-inch 240 x 320 touchscreen. So it seems that the only upgrade is a refreshed TouchFLO 3D user interface that I would dare say some enterprising Touch owner could get to work on their surprisingly similar handset. Stay tuned for pricing and availability.

What A Smart Idea via CoolSmartPhone

bugbugbug