Apple : Moga Ace Power gaming pad for iPhone pictured, bringing own battery power |
- Moga Ace Power gaming pad for iPhone pictured, bringing own battery power
- Fighting Talk: WTF is this iPad Air thing?
- Week In Tech: Air we go: iPads slim down and Mavericks goes free
- Mavericks adoption rate mauls Mountain Lion as Mac users enjoy the free ride
| Moga Ace Power gaming pad for iPhone pictured, bringing own battery power Posted:  Help appears to be on the way for ardent iPhone gamers keen to ditch the touchscreen and preserve battery life for other activities, according to snaps and information leaked online on Friday. The first pictures of the anticipated Apple-certified game pad from accessory manufacturer Moga have emerged courtesy of @evleaks, along with a name - the Moga Ace Pro. The notorious Twitter leak artist also revealed a few details, the most pertinent being the presence of an 1800mAh battery, which will allow gamers to play at leisure without draining their iPhone's lifeforce. Judging by the photos, the Moga Ace Pro will be extended out to accommodate the iPhone, with the Apple handset handily docking into the Lightning connector Look out, Nintendo and SonyMoga has developed a host of similar peripherals for Android smartphones, such Bluetooth-powered Pro and Hero Pro controllers but this will be the company's first iOS-friendly gadget. The docking accessory has been on the cards since Apple's WWDC event this summer when it first revealed third-party controllers would be supported. Earlier this month we saw purported pictures of Logitech's planned solution (also courtesy of @evleaks), the other manufacturer on board with Apple's certification program. No news yet on when either peripheral may be released, but the likes of Sony and Nintendo will probably be hoping it won't be until after Christmas. |
| Fighting Talk: WTF is this iPad Air thing? Posted:  Apple fans, you better duck. I'm taking aim. And you know what's coming. iPad Air? iPad Mini with Retina display? Is that it?! OK, I'll admit it - I will probably get one. But before you call me a hypocrite, hear me out. The fact is, I'll probably end up taking it back, too, thanks to that 14-day returns period. Let's be honest here. Apple seems to have lost the plot. I watched the announcement like everyone else, waiting for a shooting star to appear on stage. Instead, I got the splatter of a wet lettuce - albeit one that's significantly lighter with a smaller bezel. Circle of strifeI'll give Apple its dues - the iPad Air is a great step forward. But look at what it is replacing - the iPad 4, which was not much different to the iPad 3. There is nothing really innovative here. Yeah, the bezel has been slimmed. Yay! It's lighter. Whoop! But it still can't do the laundry or make me a frickin' cup of tea, can it? Can it? The first iPad was a revolutionary product. It may have initially been derided as a large iPod Touch, but it set the tone. I'll give Apple that. And the second iPad was pretty damn pleasant too - because it changed the dimensions of what we already had. But the thing is, right from iPad 1, there's been another strategy Apple's been working on... and that is to only give 90%, dressing it up as one hundred. To always keep something back. Holding backWhat am I talking about? Hands up if you screamed, kicked, bit and threatened to torch the joint because the first iPad came without a camera. Why? It was such an obvious omission. The theory was Cupertino was keeping that for iPad 2 to give us reason enough to upgrade. Then iPad 2 came along, a lot sexier with a camera, but packing a crap display at a time when Retina was just taking off. WTF Apple? You're better than this. And so, for the last two iterations, we've got little improvements and now, we're told something lighter will make it all OK? Give me a break! And don't get me started on the missing Touch ID. What is that about? Clearly, it's being kept for the next model, to give us extra incentive to upgrade next year. You can see this strategy all over - the iPad Mini only just got a Retina display. Why? Why did it not launch with one 12 months ago?! I'll tell you why - because then there would have been nothing to set it apart for customers come October 2013. This is an appalling strategy, smacking of desperation from a company that is anything but. And before you shoot me down telling me the specs are higher internally, remember that for many people who are sold on looks, that's insignificant. A cuter design or a nicer screen will shift infinitely more units than the difference between an A1 chip and an A9000000 chip when you're pitching to someone asking "Does this thing do Facebook?" World leader's woesApple's pride was evident on stage. We were told in reverential tones that "Apple has listened". Here's an idea: how about you don't listen, Apple? How about you shut your ears and get to work on something that's going to wow us. Like the day we got the first iPad announcement? Like the day Steve Jobs pulled a MacBook Air out of an envelope? Apple doesn't listen. Apple leads and we listen. Or that's what's meant to happen. I know the iPad is the biggest selling tablet line on the planet and I completely get that it's the best - in some people's eyes. The iPad Air is beautiful. But it's not amazing. That gap between iDevices and competitors is getting narrower every day, and Apple's got to innovate if it wants to stay in the lead. I can't help thinking that aspect - the real innovation - died with its co-founder, two years ago.
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| Week In Tech: Air we go: iPads slim down and Mavericks goes free Posted:  This week, we sensed a disturbance in The Force. Maybe it was a broken autocue. Maybe something catastrophic happened immediately before it began. Whatever the reason, Apple's latest keynote was the kind of thing you watch from behind your fingers. As execs fluffed lines and made a hash of their obviously scripted banter, we all had the same thought: "This is about as cool as Microsoft!" The launch may have been a horror show, but Tim Cook's World of Charts was mercifully short this time around and we quickly got to the meat: new products. OS X Mavericks was released for free, new versions of iLife were released for free, and new versions of iWork were released for, you've guessed it, free. Never mind the software, though. What everybody wanted to see was the hardware. There were new MacBook Pros with spec bumps and price cuts and the new Mac Pro was teased again: you still can't buy it - you'll have to wait until December - but at least you now know how much you'll need to save.
Prices start at a hefty $2,999 (about £1,846, AU$3,088), and as with previous Mac Pros a few minutes messing around with the options list will produce a price so high even a Russian billionaire might balk at it. Air raisingWhat everybody really wanted to know about wasn't the Mac Pro, though: it was the iPad 5, whose new name - it's the iPad Air - caused some red faces in newspapers the following morning when it became obvious who'd written their in-depth guides before the product was actually launched. It's 64-bit and boasts the usual improvements: twice as fast, twice the graphics power, and so on. It's also significantly thinner and lighter, but surprisingly there's no Touch ID sensor like the one you'll find in the iPhone 5S.
Is it any cop? Over to you, Patrick Goss: "It's hard to put into words how much Apple has improved the iPad, offering a stunning level of detail and power with a build quality that's unrivalled," he says. "But the reduction in thickness, and especially weight could well ensure that the iPad Air is the finest tablet on the market." Not everybody agrees. Our phones and tablets expert John reckons that it "fails to bring anything groundbreaking to the table," while news editor Kate reckons that it's "probably the nicest of the pointless devices available." Our total knee-jerk score? 4.4 out of 5. We also wanted to know how the latest iPad stacked up against the competition. To the compare-o-meter! Here it is against the Surface 2; and here it is against the Nexus 10, the Xperia Tablet Z and the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9. The iPad Air wasn't Apple's only new iPad. There's also the iPad mini 2 with Retina Display, which - yes! - is an iPad mini with a Retina Display. It's a big step up for the little tablet, as Patrick Goss explains: "A much-improved screen, a huge step up in processing power (hello A7, glad to see you could join us) and connectivity, and improvements to the camera make the iPad mini 2 with Retina a hugely improved tablet on the original." Can Nokia light up tablets?You've got to be pretty confident to launch a new product on the day of an Apple event, and you need to be doubly so if the new product is a tablet and the Apple event is for new iPads. Say hello to Nokia, who decided that this week would be a great time to unveil its Lumia 2520 tablet. We love the design and the price and, as your correspondent points out, Nokia is great at getting its hardware into the high street, subsidised by carriers and sold by salespeople.
Of course, there's a but - and it's a but so big that even Sir Mix-A-Lot might find it a bit much. The 2520 runs Windows RT, and some of us fear that "the problem with Windows RT tablets isn't the 'tablets' bit of the equation."
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| Mavericks adoption rate mauls Mountain Lion as Mac users enjoy the free ride Posted:  The best things in life are free, according to Mac users who have installed the new free-for-all OS X 10.9 Mavericks software in droves since the update went public on October 22 According to new figures from Chitika, in the first 24 hours, 5.5% of Macs it tracks were running Mac OS X 10.9, which made headlines as the first major Aple update to be available without charge. That's compared to just 1.6% of machines that were running its paid-for predecessor Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion after the first day. In fact, Chitika claimed, it took the previous version four days reach the same level. Not so fast...While it's no shock the offer of free software, which gives all compatible Macs built since 2007 the chance to get up to speed with the new features in one jump, is being well received by users, it's actually a bit surprising the adoption figures aren't higher than 5.5%. Reports following the launch of iOS 7 in September claimed that the adoption rate was as high as 35% after day one. It grew to over 50% in the first week. Of course, the mobile operating system boasts a much higher profile than the computing platform these days, while iOS 7 brought a much larger revamp than Mavericks and carried a larger weight of expectation and excitement. However, is it outlandish to think more Mac users may have jumped on board at this stage? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below. |
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