Stephen’s Untold Stories

I certainly hope so. I’m getting one!

The 3G iPhone will be announced June 9, the likely date of Apple CEO Steve Jobs‘ keynote at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference, analysts said in research notes on Thursday.

The 3G iPhone will be the “first of an impressive wave of new products” from Apple, wrote Citi analysts Richard Gardner and Yeechang Lee. They also expect an updated Mac laptop and iPod lines. The Apple conference is scheduled for June 9-13 in San Francisco.

Those predictions are consistent with a February prediction Gardner made that 3G iPhones will be announced by midyear. The 3G iPhone release will help Apple meet its target of shipping 10 million iPhones in 2008, Gardner wrote at the time.

Apple is confident it will sell 10 million iPhones this year, officials said during a conference call on Wednesday to discuss the company’s second-quarter earnings.

When asked about the possible release of a 3G iPhone, Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer declined comment. Apple has new products in the pipeline that the company is excited about, Oppenheimer said.

Link to article

Looks like the folks in Cupertino are on the upswing.

Signs of a consumer slowdown abound in the United States, but Apple customers appear not to have noticed.

Buoyed by unusually strong Macintosh sales, the company grew notably faster than the rest of the computer market worldwide in the first three months of the year. Revenue increased 43 percent from the same period a year ago, the company reported. Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, characterized the quarter as the strongest in Apple’s history.

He attributed the growth to higher traffic in the company’s 181 stores in the United States. The company reported that it had 33.7 million visitors to its stores in the United States, up 57 percent from the same quarter a year ago. Mr. Jobs said that belied the gloom that was being expressed about the American economy.

“We’re not economists, so we don’t have any more insight than everyone else, but there were sure a lot of people in our stores last quarter,” Mr. Jobs said in an interview.

Link to article

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

I wonder how many other schools have one of these.

• iPhone Portal at Vanderbilt University

Great stuff from Apple.

iPod in the Classroom Resources

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

My contract with Spring is up in May, and I have pretty much decided that I’m going to get an iPhone. I am very excited about the possibility of the 3G version with GPS capability. I’ve been playing around with an iPod Touch, and it is an amazing device. The new iPhone should be even better.

A June introduction of the 3G iPhone could tie in with Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference to be held in San Francisco from June 9 to 13, especially if that event also sees the arrival of the finished version of the iPhone SDK, which is currently in beta.

What’s going to be packed into the new iPhone? GPS seems likely, as well as a dual-camera arrangement to allow 3G video calls as well as taking photos with the screen as a viewfinder. The industrial design of the handset is likely to change, as Apple and handset buyers are both particularly style-conscious.

Link to article

Great story about a guy who just won’t stop learning. Nice to see his being able to take advantage of these opportunities.

Baxter Wood is going back to college. But the 62-year-old truck driver won’t be quitting his day job or going to discussion groups with kids 40 years his junior.

Instead, he will have his pick of professors from elite universities like Columbia, Yale, MIT and Stanford — and his tuition will be $0. How’s that for financial aid?

Wood is one of the thousands of students attending iTunes U, downloading lectures available free of charge on the iTunes Web site to his MP3 player.

“It’s amazingly realistic,” Wood said. “The sound of the pages rustling, chalk on the board … I’m convinced that the best way to learn something is to get a professor who knows more than you do to explain it to you.”

More than 50,000 lectures are downloaded every week from almost 30 universities whose professors offer their teachings to anyone with a computer.

Professor Hubert Dreyfus of the University of California at Berkeley, Wood’s current teacher, is one of the most popular picks among iTunes U students.

“I’m podcasting my course on Heidegger, ‘On Time and Being,’ which is the hardest philosophy book of the 20th century, I think, and the most important,” Dreyfus said. “That surprises me that Heidegger has such an audience.”

Link to article

This is the first college to try this. I expect more will do so before long.

An Apple iPhone or iPod touch will become a central part of Abilene Christian University’s innovative learning experience this fall when all freshmen are provided one of these converged media devices, said Phil Schubert, ACU executive vice president.

At ACU - the first university in the nation to provide these cutting-edge media devices to its incoming class - freshmen will use an iPhone or iPod touch to receive homework alerts, answer in-class surveys and quizzes, get directions to their professors’ offices, and check their meal and account balances - among more than 15 other useful web applications already developed, said ACU Chief Information Officer Kevin Roberts. ACU’s vision for technology has been captured in a forward-looking film called ‘Connected,’ found online - along with information about ACU’s other ground-breaking mobile learning efforts - at www.acu.edu/connected.

“We are not merely providing cutting-edge technology tools to our incoming students,” said Roberts. “We are also providing the web applications that ensure these tools will become critical to the students’ learning experience. Because 93 percent of ACU students bring their own computers with them to college, we are choosing to take them to the next level by providing converged mobile devices.”

Dr. Dwayne VanRheenen, ACU provost, said, “This is exciting to me, not only because we’re giving students new tools, but because we are transforming the learning environment. The extensive research that’s been done on campus in the past 10 months has prepared us to launch with freshmen this fall, and research will be ongoing as we expand the program in the future.”

Link to article

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Interesting story about a traveler who had to miss a flight because the security people didn’t realize that his MacBook Air was an actual computer.

They pull my laptop, my new laptop making its first trip with me, out of the flow of bags. One takes me aside to a partitioned cubicle. Another of the endless supply of TSA agents takes the rest of my bags to a different cubicle. No yellow brick road here, just a pair of yellow painted feet on the floor, and my flight is boarding. I am made to understand that I should stand and wait.  My laptop is on the table in front of me, just beyond reach, like I am waiting to collect my personal effects after being paroled.

I’m standing, watching my laptop on the table, listening to security clucking just behind me. “There’s no drive,” one says. “And no ports on the back. It has a couple of lines where the drive should be,” she continues.

A younger agent, joins the crew. I must now be occupying ten, perhaps twenty, percent of the security force. At this checkpoint anyway. There are three score more at the other five checkpoints. The new arrival looks at the printouts from x-ray, looks at my laptop sitting small and alone. He tells the others that it is a real laptop, not a “device”. That it has a solid-state drive instead of a hard disc. They don’t know what he means. He tries again, “Instead of a spinning disc, it keeps everything in flash memory.” Still no good. “Like the memory card in a digital camera.” He points to the x-ray, “Here. That’s what it uses instead of a hard drive.”

The senior agent hasn’t been trained for technological change. New products on the market? They haven’t been TSA approved. Probably shouldn’t be permitted. He requires me to open the “device” and run a program. I do, and despite his inclination, the lead agent decides to release me and my troublesome laptop.  My flight is long gone now, so I head for the service center to get rebooked.

Behind me, I hear the younger agent, perhaps not realizing that even the TSA must obey TSA rules, repeating himself.

“It’s a MacBook Air.”

In case you’ve missed it, Apple just released a new operating system called Leopard. Here is a good comparison of Leopard and Windows Vista.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

The iPod skeptics are upset to see this kind of article. I’d love to work with a school on an implementation of these.

A ban on iPods is so strictly enforced at José Martí Middle School that as many as three a week are confiscated from students — and returned only to their parents.

But even as students have been told to leave their iPods at home, the school here in Hudson County has been handing out the portable digital players to help bilingual students with limited English ability sharpen their vocabulary and grammar by singing along to popular songs.

Next month, the Union City district will give out 300 iPods at its schools as part of a $130,000 experiment in one of New Jersey’s poorest urban school systems. The effort has spurred a handful of other districts in the state, including the ones in Perth Amboy and South Brunswick, to start their own iPod programs in the last year, and the project has drawn the attention of educators from Westchester County to Monrovia, Calif.

The spread of iPods into classrooms comes at a time when many school districts across the country have outlawed the portable players from their buildings — along with cellphones and DVD players — because they pose a distraction, or worse, to students. In some cases, students have been caught cheating on tests by loading answers, mathematical formulas and notes onto their iPods.

But some schools are rethinking the iPod bans as they try to co-opt the devices for educational purposes. Last month, the Perth Amboy district bought 40 iPods for students to use in bilingual classes that are modeled after those in Union City. In South Brunswick, 20 iPods were used last spring in French and Spanish classes. And in North Plainfield, N.J., the district has supplied iPods to science teachers to illustrate chemistry concepts, and it is considering allowing students in those classes to use iPods that they have brought from home.

Link to article

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

I hope Steve Jobs doesn’t want to kill us all!

A Douglasville, Ga., man said he had flames coming up to his chest when his iPod Nano suddenly burst into flames while he was working.

Danny Williams, who works at a kiosk at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, told WSBTV.com that he had the iPod and a glossy piece of paper in his pocket at the time. He said it was the piece of paper that saved him from being badly burned.

The iPod Nano uses a lithium-ion battery, the same kind that has been recalled for spontaneously setting laptops on fire.

Link to article

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Man, I wish we had iPods when I was prepping for the SAT!

High school students cramming for the SAT test have traditionally relied on thick books full of practice exams, sharpened No. 2 pencils and intensive tutoring sessions. But now a traditional test preparation company is offering some options for the iPod generation.

Three interactive programs from Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions are for sale at iTunes for downloading to iPods with video screens. The programs were released last week, giving vacationing students plenty of time for practice quizzes before the next test date in October.

The three programs, in critical reading, mathematics and writing, correspond to the three graded sections of the exam. The programs cost $4.99 each and are available in the iPod games section of the iTunes store alongside slightly more entertaining, if less educational, options like Tetris, Pac-Man and Lost: The Game.

“Learning styles have changed a lot since Stanley Kaplan founded Kaplan in 1938,” said Kristen Campbell, the national director of SAT and ACT programs for Kaplan. “Students take their iPods with them all the time, whether they’re in a car driving to baseball practice, or at home, or sitting at school waiting for their parents to come and pick them up.”

The programs include about 1,000 practice questions and hints and strategy sessions on subjects like “Top 10 Test-Taking Tips” and “SAT Math Basics.” They can be used only after being downloaded to an iPod, not in iTunes.

Link to article

That’s right. We educational technology types are already looking for ways to use these things to educate our kids. It’s just what we do!

This is a short five minute video from Elliott Masie after our first few hours of use and testing.  Elliott details the aspects of the iPhone that are high potential for learning (instructional videos, collaboration and more), some of the challenges (no current use of Flash Video) and a few trends in the mobile learning arena.

Link to site with video

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

If you haven’t seen any of Kige Ramsey’s videos, you are really missing out. In this installment, Kige gives us his thoughts on the iPhone.

I wonder if he likes French Fried potaters.

I never would have imagined this benefit from an iPod. I hope more and more helpful uses are discovered as well.

Doctors can greatly improve their stethoscope skills and therefore their ability to diagnose heart problems by listening repeatedly to heartbeats on their iPods.

Previous research has shown that the average rate of correct heart sound identification by physicians is 40 percent.

In a new study, 149 general internists listened 400 times to five common heart murmurs during a 90-minute session with iPods. After the session, the average score improved to 80 percent.

Proficiency with a stethoscope—and the ability to recognize abnormal heart sounds—is a critical skill for identifying dangerous heart conditions and minimizing dependence on expensive medical tests, said lead researcher Dr. Michael Barrett, clinical associate professor of medicine and cardiologist at Temple University School of Medicine and Hospital. “It’s important to know when to order a costly echocardiogram or stress test,” Barrett said.

Barrett believes the skill of learning heart problems is best learned through intensive drilling and repetition, not by traditional methods, usually a classroom lecture or demonstration in medical school and then on the job.

Link to article

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Thanks to Steve Dembo for this. (Click image for larger version)

Link to site

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Apple CEO has some very interesting thoughts on music and digital rights management (DRM). It is refreshing that a man with such power and so much at stake is so brutally honest.

With the stunning global success of Apple’s iPod music player and iTunes online music store, some have called for Apple to “open” the digital rights management (DRM) system that Apple uses to protect its music against theft, so that music purchased from iTunes can be played on digital devices purchased from other companies, and protected music purchased from other online music stores can play on iPods. Let’s examine the current situation and how we got here, then look at three possible alternatives for the future.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

Read the rest here

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Great idea on their part. I have a Mac laptop from work, and I am getting more and more used to it.

Macs inside Google

Google Software Downloads for the Mac

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Thanks to the A Feed is Born blog for this one. This allows you to create custom RSS feeds for Apple’s iTunes. You can be kept up to date on new releases in any genre.

iTunes RSS generator

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Maybe waiting was a good thing for me.

If the thought of buying a Core Duo Apple machine that can boot Windows XP is making you itchy to go buy one, hold your horses.

The price of Intel Core Duo chips is set to plummet on the 28th of May, and there’s faster chips coming along anyroadmap. Those include the 2.33GHz T2700, but this is only the start of better things from Chipzilla later this year.

Link to article