Apple Gives iPhone a Touch of Multitasking Magic

Apple  has introduced iPhone OS 4, the operating system for the next iteration of the iPhone and iPod touch. It sports more than 100 new features, said CEO Steve Jobs — most notably the long-anticipated multitasking functionality that most other smartphones already provide to some degree.

Another long-awaited new feature is drag-and-drop Folder functionality. The mail client…

Apple Edges Into Selling of App Ads

On Thursday the company gave a preview of a new version of the basic software for its mobile devices, including the iPhone. The software has a built-in advertising system, meant to be used by the developers who have created the more than 185,000 applications in Apple’s App Store.

Speaking to reporters and developers on Apple’s campus here, Steven P….

Across the Country, Fans Gather for iPad

Apple’s most devoted fans congregated on Saturday morning at stores around the country to pick up their latest object of desire: the eagerly anticipated iPad.

Lines stretched for a few blocks in the morning hours at Apple stores in New York and San Francisco. Blue-shirted Apple employees passed out free snacks in the chilly early air. At…

Looking at the iPad From Two Angles

In 10 years of reviewing tech products for The New York Times, I’ve never seen a product as polarizing as Apple’s iPad, which arrives in stores on Saturday.

“This device is laughably absurd,” goes a typical remark on a tech blog’s comments board. “How can they expect anyone to get serious computer work done without a mouse?”

“This…

Ads Posted on Facebook Strike Some as Off-Key

Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, is selling more ad spots to big companies like Wal-Mart Stores, Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo.

But the site’s pages are also home to countless ads from smaller companies that can be funny, weird or just plain creepy — those suggesting you are, say, eligible to get a free iPad because you are exactly…

Apple Sues Nexus One Maker HTC

Apple has relied on slick applications, and even slicker advertisements, to promote the iPhone and maintain its advantage over rivals like Google in the battle to rule the next generation of smartphones.

But the fight may come down to something more provincial: who has the best lawyers.

On Tuesday, Apple sued HTC, the Taiwanese company that…

Stephen Wozniak Biography (1950-)

Electrical engineer and computer inventor, born in San Jose, California, USA on August 11, 1950. The son of an engineer at Lockheed who worked on satellites, Stephen Wozniak enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley in 1971, the same year he began to collaborate with Steve Jobs in building “blue boxes” that allowed people to make free long-distance calls.

The…

Will Apple Open the Window for Opera’s iPhone Serenade?

Opera  on Wednesday announced that it will preview a version of Opera Mini 5 for the iPhone at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, next week.

Perhaps Opera, which already makes a popular line of mobile browsers for several other phone platforms, wants to increase its reach by leveraging the iPhone’s rapid growth.

Opera claims its Mini 5 browser, which…

iPad Blurs Line Between Devices

For all the hoopla surrounding it, however, the question is whether the iPad can achieve anything close to the success of the iPhone, which transformed the cellphone and forced the industry to race to catch up.

Apple is positioning the device, some versions of which will be available in March, as a pioneer in a new genre of computing, somewhere…

Apple’s Tablet Is Coming – Get Ready for Disappointment

I find it amazing and crazy that a company that hasn’t even acknowledged that it has a tablet-like computing device in development is getting more news coverage and attention than products that are already here or have been actually announced. How many e-readers and tablet devices were publicly announced at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month? I’m already…

With Apple Tablet, Print Media Hope for a Payday

Almost all media companies have run aground in the Internet Age as they gave away their print and video content on the Web and watched paying customers drift away as a result.

People who have seen the tablet say Apple will market it not just as a way to read news, books and other material, but also a way for…