Apple toughens iPhone screen, boosts battery life

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By Tony Smith [More by this author]

18th June 2007 20:18 GMT

Apple has upped its claim for the iPhone’s battery life, now saying the touchscreen smart phone will offer an eight-hour talk time. It’s also decided to ship the machine with a glass front in a bid to beat the scratches spotted by so many early iPod Nano buyers.

Apple’s iPhone: will it fall on its glass?

Both changes undoubtedly come from real-world testing and the development work that’s gone into the iPhone hardware since Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the handset in January. Comments allegedly made by folk who’d had their hands on the iPhone earlier this year highlighted issues with both battery life and screen resilience, and Apple’s statement today certainly lends verisimilitude to those claims.

So what’s changed? Apple originally had the iPhone’s single-charge longevity down as five hours’ talk time, video playback time and web browsing time, and 16 hours’ music playback. Today’s revised figures up those number by up to 60 per cent: eight hours’ talk time, six hours’ browsing time, seven hours’ video playback and 24 hours’ music listening.

It’s all highly theoretical, of course, as were Apple’s original numbers. We’re sure, under lab conditions, with the screen dimmed right down, the iPhone can deliver those new figures, but if the handset actually delivers them in the real world, it’ll be the first smart phone that ever did match the promised spec.

As Apple admits: “All Battery claims are dependent upon network configuration and many other factors; actual results may vary.”

Apple now has a better idea how many iPhones it’s going to sell, and punching that into the company’s humungous iPhone Excel spreadsheet reveals it can afford to fit a pricier, “optical-quality glass” panel on the front and either a bigger or a more advanced battery without too many negative effects.

Or it’s simply decided it can’t risk the reputation of a $600 handset on such factors and is taking the hit.

Apple iPhone Demo

Posted by Andrew on January 9th, 2007
Viewed 14550 times

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I think I just had a tech orgasm.

Touted as “a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod, and a breakthrough Internet communications device”, the Apple iPhone uses a touchscreen navigation and comes with the Safari browser, integrated Google search and maps, free Yahoo push IMAP email (a la BlackBerry), runs OSX and widgets. The big let-down is that Apple struck an exclusive deal with Cingular Wireless, which will start selling the phone in June 2007 with a binding 2-year contract. Worse, it won’t reach Asian markets till 2008! But I’m sure the black market will somehow get its hands on it soon enough, IMO. iPhone will set you back $499 for the 4GB model and $599 for 8GB. For sure, this is the phone that’ll replace my Sony Ericsson W800i.

Apple and Sony, like peas in an iPod

by Thomas Ricker, posted Oct 25th 2007 at 1:15AM

Funny huh? We knew something was a tad too familiar with those Sony DSC-T2 Cyber-shot cameras announced yesterday. Now, Engadget Japanese reveals why. Those pictures are official, un-doctored press shots from both Apple and Sony. The former (and we mean former) comes courtesy of archive.org since it’s been supplanted by Apple’s new nano. Of course, Apple’s no saint in these matters either. Flattery at its finest, eh? Sony, like.no.other.

 

John Travolta User Type: Actor OFFLINE John Travolta Male 54 years old Englewood, New Jersey United States Profile Views: 27937

ABOUT ME

John Joseph Travolta (born February 18, 1954) is a two-time Academy Award, BAFTA Award and Screen Actors Guild Award-nominated and Golden Globe Award-winning American actor, dancer, and singer, best known for his leading roles in films such as Saturday Night Fever, Grease, and Pulp Fiction.

Travolta played a messenger on the CBS soap opera The Edge of Night. He also appeared on another CBS serial The Secret Storm. Travolta’s first California-filmed television role was as a fall victim in Emergency! (S2E2) in September 1972, but his first significant movie role was as Billy Nolan, a bully who played a prank on Sissy Spacek’s Carrie White in the horror film Carrie (1976). Around the same time he landed his star-making role as Vinnie Barbarino in the TV sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter (1975–1979) in which his sister, Ellen, also occasionally appeared (as Arnold Horshack’s mother).

Around this time he also had a hit single entitled “Let Her In” peaking at number ten on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. In the next few years, he appeared in some of his most memorable screen roles: Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever (1977) and as Danny Zuko in Grease (1978). These two films were among the most commercially successful pictures of the decade and catapulted Travolta to international stardom. Saturday Night Fever earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. At age 24, Travolta became one of the youngest performers ever nominated for the Best Actor Oscar though he lost to Richard Dreyfuss in The Goodbye Girl. His mother and his sister Ann appeared as extras in Saturday Night Fever and his sister Ellen appeared as a waitress in Grease. Travolta performed several of the songs on the Grease soundtrack album, that eventually went on to sell more than 10 million copies. In 1980, Travolta inspired a nationwide country music craze that followed on the heels of his hit film, Urban Cowboy, in which he starred with Debra Winger.

After Urban Cowboy came a string of flops that sidelined his acting career. Staying Alive, the sequel to Saturday Night Fever, Perfect, co-starring Jamie Lee Curtis, and Two of a Kind, a romantic comedy reteaming him with Olivia Newton-John, were all commercial disasters severely beaten up by critics. Some suggest that he was typecast as a disco stud or 1970s icon, which could be the reason his agent intervened on several occasions to turn down acting roles. During that time he was offered, but turned down, lead roles in what would become box office hits, including American Gigolo, Flashdance, An Officer and a Gentleman, Splash and Fatal Attraction. Disenchanted, Travolta pursued flying and eventually earned his license to command aircraft. His only hit film was Look Who’s Talking with Kirstie Alley and a baby voiced by Bruce Willis.

It was not until he played Vincent Vega in Quentin Tarantino’s hit Pulp Fiction (1994), for which he received an Academy Award nomination, that his career was revived. The movie shifted him back onto the A-list, and he was inundated with offers. Coincidentally, before Travolta took the role he visited Tarantino, who was living in the same ramshackle apartment in Los Angeles that Travolta had inhabited when he got his start. Notable roles following Pulp Fiction include a movie-buff loan shark in Get Shorty (1995), an FBI agent in Face/Off (1997), a desperate attorney in A Civil Action (1998), a Bill Clinton-esque presidential candidate in Primary Colors (1998) and a military detective in The General’s Daughter (1999).