Police Investigating iPhone Prototype Leak

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Police are investigating the loss of what appears to be an iPhone prototype, purchased and originally published this week by the tech site Gizmodo.

A law enforcement official told CNET today that the incident could have violated criminal laws.

In an unprecedented security leak for the Cupertino-based corporation, one of its engineers reportedly took the prototype to a local bar in Redwood City and left it there. Gizmodo claims the two unnamed individuals who found the device attempted to return it to Apple before selling it to the publication for an alleged sum of $5,000.

It’s unclear whether the police are focusing on Gizmodo, the people who found and sold the prototype, or both. Apple has spoken to the local police about the incident, who are now trying to determine whether criminal charges should be filed. The Santa Clara County district attorney’s office is believed to be taking charge of the investigation.

After publishing the photos and videos, Apple contacted Gizmodo and asked if they could have their product back. Gizmodo complied.

Famously secretive, Apple has been known to go after rumor sites that published information on its upcoming products. In a previous lawsuit filed against Apple rumor blog Think Secret, Apple alleged that the website’s owner, Nick Ciarelli, was violating trade law by encouraging and inducing people to provide product information in breach of agreements. After a three-year court battle, Apple and Think Secret reached a settlement, and Ciarelli agreed to cease publication of his blog.

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Photo: Gizmodo

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Video: 99-Year-Old Enjoys Her New iPad

The latest YouTube star is Virginia Campbell, a 99-year-old Lake Oswego, Oregon resident who’s in love with her iPad.

Campbell suffers from glaucoma, which makes it difficult for her to read. Now, with the help of the iPad, she’s reading books and writing limericks.

“The thing that’s so neat is there’s nothing between you and the screen,” said Ginny Adelsheim, one of Campbell’s daughters, in an interview with Oregon Live. “You can enlarge the print, and it has a much brighter screen so you can read on it more easily than with a regular computer screen.”

What’s more, Campbell never owned a computer prior to the iPad, so it’s fascinating that she’s already become comfortable with the device.

The iPad also features a tool called VoiceOver, which reads any text out loud that you place your finger on. The feature works for reading e-books as well. The National Federation of the Blind has applauded Apple for including VoiceOver in the iPad.

Campbell’s incident highlights a lesser-seen facet of technology, in which data can be used to compensate for people’s handicaps. Wired.com last year reported on three blind photographers using technology to help them snap photos. The most interesting example was Alex Dejong, who uses assistive software on his Nokia N82 to translate sounds into visuals in his mind, as well as his iPhone to snap and edit photos.

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Gadget Lab’s New Comment System

Comments are an integral part of new-media publishing. As bloggers and journalists, we’re conversation starters, not just reporters, and we judge our success in part on the volume and quality of the conversations that our stories kick off.

We know that the comment system on Wired.com leaves something to be desired. It’s too easy for spam to sneak in, trolls and fanboys can easily drown out intelligent conversation, and the system doesn’t make it easy to follow a thread of arguments and counterarguments.

So, starting today, we’re testing a new comment system on Gadget Lab that, we hope, will make the conversation easier and better.

It’s powered by Disqus. If you have a Disqus account, you can log in using that; it will also let you log in using your Facebook or Twitter profile, if you’d like.

The new comments give you a few benefits:

  • Threaded commenting for posting replies to specific comments
  • A “Like” button so you can vote up the comments you think are the best
  • Facebook and Twitter integration for sharing your comments on your Facebook or Twitter account
  • A “Flag” button for reporting spammy or abusive comments

Bear with us while we test this out. Some older comments have disappeared: This is a bug, not deliberate censorship. We’re working on it.

Also, the Disqus login is not synchronized with the Wired.com login yet, so you’ll have to log in to Gadget Lab separately from the rest of the site. This is something we hope to fix if we roll this system out to other blogs here. In the meantime, I hope the benefits of the new system outweigh that inconvenience.

Let us know what you think of the new system: Post your comments below. Or, if it’s just not working, send me e-mail at dtweney@wired.com.

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Official: Target to Stock Kindle from Sunday

After speculation and rumor, Target has at last confirmed that it will sell Amazon’s Kindle in its bricks and mortar stores. It will cost the same $260 as Amazon would charge you, but you at least get to try before you buy, and you don’t have to wait for the mailman to show up.

And this is likely the whole point. The e-reader market has shifted from early adopters to the mainstream, and if you want to interest people like my mother in buying a brand-new kind of device, you’ll have to put it in their hands first. Us gadget freaks may be happy to pre-order $500 devices without even seeing them, but we’re the weirdos here.

The Kindle will be available in “select” Target stores from this Sunday. In reality, this means the flagship store in Minneapolis plus another 102 stores in South Florida. Putting the Kindle in real stores will also showcase it against the iPad (although not in the same store of course - iPad is currently in Best Buy only, which also sells the Nook), which is going to prove the main rival for the Kindle.

It’s an unusual move by Amazon, though, especially as it pioneered the idea of trustworthy online shopping. It’s also proof that the online retailer is willing to take a cut in profits to push its hardware, despite the availability of Kindle software on most modern platforms.

Target Stores to Sell Kindle [Businesswire]

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Photo:Charlie Sorrel

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Nook Software Update Adds Web Browser, Chess

mediumBarnes & Noble has updated the firmware of its Nook e-reader to v1.3. The update tweaks existing features and adds a few brand new ones.

The most exciting is the addition of a web browser, classified as “experimental”, just like the one on the Kindle. It uses the e-ink screen, not the touch-sensitive color one at the bottom, but it will let you choose bookmarks from the LCD, as well as using its virtual keyboard to enter urls.

There are also chess and sudoku games, which both seem perfect for a slow-updating grayscale display. The chess game offers a computer-controlled opponent with three skill levels. This is one of those things that seems obvious once you hear about it, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see chess on the Kindle in the future, if its non-Android OS is up to it.

There are also a few interface and menu tweaks, but the addition B&N seems most proud of might actually be the lamest, which is why I have shifted it to the end of this post. The Read in Store feature has been updated to let you read entire books when in an actual B&N store. You know, just like you can do with a real paper book. Why is this lame? From the blurb: “you’re free to read any parts of any available eBook for **up to an hour** per day!” [emphasis added, excited exclamation mark in original].

Yeah, one measly hour. What is the point of limiting reading time when the person in the store can just go and pick up the freaking paper book? This, rather than being a feature is just a way to piss off Nook buyers. Way to annoy your most loyal customers, B&N.

Despite this, the update looks to add a lot of extra stuff, and free. Your Nook should update itself over the next week when connected to Wi-Fi. If you’re desperate to grab it right now, you can use the “Check for new B&N content” command the under “My Library” section, or download it to your computer from the update page.

New to NOOK: Version 1.3 Available Now! [Barnes & Noble]

Support and download page [Barnes & Noble]

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iPad Camera Connection Kit Delivered, Un-Boxed

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IPad owner Jerrod H finally received his iPad Camera Connection Kit and did what any self-respecting geek does with brand new kit: He posted un-boxing photos.

The kit is one of very few accessories which use the USB-ness of Apple’s Dock Connector to hook up to external hardware. In the box, as you can see from Jerrod’s snaps, you get a pair of dongles, one an SD-card reader and the other a USB-adapter for plugging cameras in direct. Once hooked up, the Photos app pops over to the “camera” tab and from there you choose which pictures, both RAW and JPEG, you want to import. The app will detect and ignore duplicates if you like, and you can also choose to have the app delete the images from your card after import. I’d advise against this – to avoid screwing up the card’s file-system, I always format the card in-camera.

From the shots, it also appears that you can pull movies into the iPad, and presumably play them back. The connection kit will be the first accessory I buy when I eventually get an iPad over here in Spain, and I will put the RAW tools to the test. I’m also interested to see some full-scale photo-editing apps on the big-screen iPad. If they’re anything like the excellent iPhone movie-editor ReelDirector, photographers are in for a treat.

iPad Camera Kit received and working [TwitPic/Jerrod H]

Picture 2 [TwitPic/Jerrod H]

Picture 3 [TwitPic/Jerrod H]

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IPad Desktop Runs Multiple Apps Together

desktop-app

Let’s be honest. When most people moan about the lack of multitasking on the iPhone or iPad, what they really want is multiple windows. IPhone OS4 won’t fix that, but Desktop, an appropriately named iPad app from Aqua Eagle, has a pretty good try.

The App is actually an application suite, offering a split screen interface that lets you choose any two of the included applications to run alongside each other. Here’s the list:

Web Browser
English Dictionary (powered by Wiktionary)
Calculator
Language Translator (46 languages)
Currency Converter (60+ currencies)
Maps
Email Composer
US Weather
Unit Converter
Device Stats (Memory and Disk)

It looks pretty handy, letting you compose an email while keeping a browser window open, for example, or quickly pop open a currency converter or translation widget when you need it. You can split the screen in portrait mode or landscape, and there is a text editor coming soon, which could actually be very useful.

For lightweight tasks, the $1 app looks ideal. But we do wonder whether any of these utilities will be as good as purpose-designed, standalone apps, especially as the whole bundle comes in at a rather worryingly small 1.6MB. What we do know is that this a smart use of the iPad’s extra screen-space, and replaces a few of the widgets that Apple decided to drop for the iPad, like the calculator.

Desktop [iTunes]

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The BeetleCam: Remote Controlled Camera-Car Survives Lion Attack

beetlecam

There’s more than one way to shoot a cat, as Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas proved when they went on safari to Tanzania. Instead of loading up on giant lenses to project their eyes artificially into the middle of the animal action, the brothers chose to get their cameras up close to the African wildlife. But how to do this without a Siegfried and Roy style disaster? The BeetleCam.

The brothers wanted to shoot close up with wide-angle lenses, but waiting for animals to approach hidden cameras is slow, boring and requires luck. So instead they built a tough, off-road remote control buggy to carry a camera and couple of flashes to help fill the shadows of the harsh African sun.

If you are loading up a remote control buggy with a DSLR, a heavy lens and a couple of strobes, you can’t just pick something up from Walmart. Instead, the boys built their own, and from the start it was designed to last:

We [...] ordered the most powerful motors we could find and large off-road tires. BeetleCam had to be able to operate for long periods without being charged, so we stuffed the vehicle with the biggest batteries we could squeeze in.

Once built, the brothers figured out how to trigger the camera remotely using the same controller that drives the BeetleCam, and they loaded it up, covered it in protective camouflage gear to keep the dust out, and headed off to track down some big game.

The rig worked great. There were some surprises: Elephants, for instance, were “impossible to sneak up on” due to their super-sensitive hearing. Parking up in front and then waiting for the giants to walk by proved to be the solution.

Some things were less surprising. Lions attacked and mauled the BeetleCam, completely trashing the on-board Canon EOS 400D, although miraculously they managed to “retrieve an intact memory card from the mangled Canon 400D body”. They got the shot. Try that with film.

A quick MacGyvering later with string and wood and the BeetleCam was back in action, this time with the second (much more expensive) expensive body, an EOS 1D MkIII. The bigger camera managed to survive the rest of the trip.

The guys have gotten some fantastic shots, photos which would be impossible any other way, at least without putting themselves in the same lion-bait position as their poor 400D. And this project also points to the new ways we can take photos with digital, not least because you can destroy a camera without exposing the film inside, and that you’re not limited to just 36 shots.

In fact, a BeetleCam-Lite could make a great weekend project, using that cheap Walmart car we mentioned earlier and a cheap old compact rigged for remote-shooting. It might not survive the Veldt, but it would certainly be a lot of fun.

The Adventures of BeetleCam [Burrard-Lucas via Flickr]

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Apple Makes MagSafe MagSafer

magsafer

Apple’s plastic MagSafe power adapter is certainly a big improvement on the old bullet-tipped model, but it is still prone to breakage. Exhibit A: My own power-adapter, which frayed internally and eventually stopped passing precious electrons to my MacBook a few weeks back.

Apple has hopefully fixed this with updated MagSafe tips for the 85 Watt adapters which come with the 15 and 17-inch MacBooks, and the 65 Watt versions for the 13-inch MacBook and MacBook Pro. The tip is aluminum and puts the plug in parallel with the cable instead of at right-angles, just like that of the MacBook Air, only with this new design the aluminum extends past the rectangular tip and into a cable-coddling tube. This tube alone should fix a major failing point of the adapters.

It’s just a shame (for me at least) that these didn’t come out a little earlier, so I didn’t have to drop my $80 on yet another piece of plastic junk. Than again, maybe Apple’s adapters just seem to fail more often because the computers themselves last so long?

Apple 85W MagSafe Power Adapter [Apple]

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Recycle Your Old Gadgets on Wired.com With YouRenew

wired-yourenew-widgetIt’s Earth Day, which makes it a good time to announce a new partnership between Wired.com and YouRenew, a start-up that buys back old gadgets and recycles what it can’t resell.

Lots of companies these days provide take-back programs that let consumers get rid of old gear responsibly. We’ve got nothing against that, and more companies ought to be doing it. And there’s always EBay.

Still, navigating all of the various recycling policies can be a problem. Even if we all know recycling is the right thing to do, it can be a hassle. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got at least four cell phones in my drawer I no longer use, not to mention old junk at home. (Tivo Series One, anyone?)

YouRenew is one of a number of start-ups looking to turn that old junk into cash, while also diverting harmful discards from the landfill. (Disclosure: Wired gets a percentage of each sale.)

Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, we’re kicking off a challenge aimed at recycling 40,000 consumer electronics devices between April 22 and May 21.

Participating is easy. Look for the Wired YouRenew widget (displayed above) on Wired.com. Find some old gear you no longer want, and enter the device into the widget. Answer some questions about the condition of your gear, and you’ll get an offer.

Homepage picture courtesy a.drian/flickr. Used via a Creative Commons license.

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