Best Free iPad App of the Week: Jasmine –YouTube Client

One of the best things about using an iPad is all the great apps that we can run on it. There are excellent apps for just about any purpose you can think of. Better still, there are lots of great free apps for the iPad. Our Best Free iPad App of the Week posts highlight these apps.

This week’s pick is Jasmine – YouTube Client. Just as the name indicates, Jasmine is a superb YouTube client app for the iPad (and iPhone). If you sign in, it supports your favorites, playlists (and managing playlists), and subscriptions, and lets you post comments and replies on videos.

The app also has AirPlay support, lets you share videos via Facebook and Twitter, and remembers your place when you return to a longer video.

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Analysts cut Apple price targets on company’s weak margin outlook

“At least three brokerages cut their price targets on Apple Inc by up to $50 a share after the iPhone maker surprised analysts by forecasting lower gross margins for the current quarter,” Supantha Mukherjee reports for Reuters. “For the December quarter, Apple forecast revenue of $52 billion, below estimates of $55 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. It expects margins of 36 percent, far lower than analysts’ expectations of 43 percent.”

“Apple’s forecast decline in gross margin, even assuming it was deliberately aiming low, still pointed to an unusual decline, Evercore Partners analysts Rob Cihra and Edison Yu said in a research note. Evercore cut its price target on the stock to $775 from $800,” Mukherjee reports. “Nomura Equity Research said it expected production costs to rise in the current quarter, after Apple redesigned so many of its products at once. ‘The iPhone 5, iPod Touch, iPod nano, iPad mini and iMac all feature new form factors and our checks with the supply chain indicate that many of these are very complex to manufacture and are likely resulting in reduced production efficiencies,’ Nomura analysts said in a note as they lowered their price target to $660 from $710.”

Mukherjee reports, “Apple said it expects 80 percent of revenue in the current quarter to come from new products but did not increase the product prices to offset higher costs and maintain its margins. Analysts, however, expect gross margins to recover by June next year as rising volumes trim manufacturing and component costs. When the iPhone 4 was launched, Apple suffered a 480 basis point decline in corporate gross margins but it recovered entirely within two quarters, Raymond James analyst Tavis McCourt said. He cut his price target on the stock by $30 to $700.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: New products cost more to make initially and Apple expects 80% of revenue to come from brand new products, hence the company’s margin guidance. Nothing could be less mysterious. There’s no reason to cut 12-month price targets on Apple Inc.

Related article:
Apple beats Street on revenue, misses on EPS – October 25, 2012

Left 4 Dead 2 Is Free To Play This Weekend

Fans of the Left 4 Dead 2 game or anyone wondering what the game is like will be able to get involved in this whole experience this weekend via Valve. Players have until Monday morning to get as much free gaming in as they possibly can, looks like the weekend has been cancelled then!

According to posting by the L4D Team on the official blog, they say;

Left 4 Dead 2 is now free to play this entire weekend. If you are new to the Left 4 Dead world, we have a list of tips below. If you have been around for a bit, do not forget we have the Good Guy Nick achievement for you to earn starting today.

Source [Geeky Gadgets]

Quickly Add Multiple Filters to Your Photos with Gridditor – iPad App Review

Gridditor is a photo editing app with a fantastic layout that makes it quick and easy to make the adjustments that you’re looking for, because it shows four different filters at once and allows you to apply multiple layered effects.

While there are hundreds of photo editing apps in the App Store, sometimes a new app comes along that just does something special, something you can’t live without, and Gridditor is one of those apps.

When you open the app you’ll need to tap the camera icon to import a photo. Once you’ve chosen a photo, you’ll need to choose a focal point by tapping, which orients the effects on the picture.

From there, Gridditor will display a grid of different effects with a different feature at each side, including dark, contrasty, bright, and vibrant. These effects intersect, so at the bottom right of the grid you’ll have examples that are vibrant and bright, while at the top left, you’ll see images that are dark and contrasty.

It’s a neat way of organizing photo effects, and it lets you immediately see what different effects have on the photos. You can tap on any photo in the grid to see it close up, which makes it easy to decide what looks best.

So far, I’ve been talking about the default effects that the app opens with. You can also tap on any of the four corners of the screen to change the filters that are offered.

The app has several different filters, including toy camera, monochrome, 1970s, soft, focused color, gloomy, sepia, saturated, black and white, crumpled, focused control, and more.

You can combine up to four different effects to see what combinations work best, which is a fun and quick way to improve your photos. Because you can quickly combine so many effects, you get a lot of interesting photo results with this app.

This is strictly an effect app – you won’t be able to crop photos, do touch ups, or improve individual aspects light brightness and contrast. You’ll need another app for those tools, but even though this app is limited to filters, it’s still well worth downloading.

When you’ve finished up with your photos, you can export them in mail, share them on Twitter, print them, or open them in other apps like Sketchbook, Photogene, PhotoToaster, iPhoto, and Dropbox.

What I liked: The grid layout of this app is innovative and makes it fun to combine effects and filters.

What I didn’t like: The app could have more intuitive instructions, especially when it comes to opening photos and starting it up. While this app has a lot of effects, it could definitely use a few more, and it is in need of an update to fix some crashing issues.

To buy or not to buy: This app is $1.99, and worth purchasing if you take a lot of photos or do a lot of photo editing on your iPad.

• App Name: Gridditor
• Version Reviewed: 1.1
• Category: Photo & Video
• Developer: Tai Shimizu
• Price: $1.99
• Score:

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iFixit Tears Down Apple’s Fifth-Generation iPod Touch

The teardown experts at iFixit have turned their attention to Apple’s fifth-generation iPod touch, moving quickly to examine the internals of the company’s redesigned device

The teardown reveals few surprises, but offers a good look at how Apple has been able to pack all of the components into a body that has 20% less volume than the iPhone 5. With a lack of cellular communications technology, the iPod touch carries fewer components and consolidates them into just a handful of parts. Most notably the logic board and battery are smaller than seen in the iPhone 5 and carry a top-and-bottom layout as opposed to the side-by-side layout seen in the iPhone.

One aspect of the teardown that did catch our eye is the Lightning connector and headphone jack assembly, which contains a long ribbon cable extending from those ports at the bottom of the device up to the logic board at the top. This part was seen several times back in August and was at the time claimed to be for the “iPad mini”.

Those claims led to confusion over whether the iPad mini’s headphone jack would be located at the bottom as on the iPhone 5 and the iPod touch or on the top as in the full-size iPad and as seen in mockups and cases reportedly based on leaked iPad mini design specs. With the appearance of this part in the iPod touch, the discrepancy has now been resolved and signs are pointing to the iPad mini’s headphone jack being along the top edge of the device.

Other aspects of the device are fairly standard, with the logic board revealing Apple’s A5 system-on-a-chip, flash storage from Toshiba, and the usual assortment of chips for handling Wi-Fi, touchscreen functions, gyroscope, and more.

Overall, iFixit found the new iPod touch to be difficult to repair, with many components soldered together and the device held together with adhesives and clips that make it difficult to open. The revelation is not a surprise, as Apple does not intend its mobile products to be user-serviceable and the company’s efforts to push the limits of design and size reduction have led it to sacrifice accessibility.

Japan’s Softbank in advanced talks to acquire Sprint Nextel for $13 billion, sources say

“Japanese mobile carrier Softbank Corp. is in advanced talks to buy U.S. wireless carrier Sprint Nextel Corp. for roughly $13 billion, a person with knowledge of the negotiations said Thursday,” Daisuke Wakabayashi and Anton Troianovski report for The Wall Street Journal.

“It wasn’t immediately clear whether Softbank would buy all of Sprint, which has a market capitalization of $15 billion, or a two-thirds stake, the person said,” Wakabayashi and Troianovski report. “There was also no assurance the talks would result in a deal.”

Wakabayashi and Troianovski report, “Softbank’s deal with Sprint, the person said, would likely involve a multibillion-dollar cash injection and possibly a tender offer to buy shares on the secondary market. Then Sprint could use its stronger balance sheet to consider buying other carriers, the person said. One target could be Clearwire Corp., a wireless-broadband network in which Sprint already owns a large stake. Shares of Sprint and Clearwire jumped in morning trading. Clearwire owns large chunks of spectrum in the U.S. and is planning to start a next-generation network using TDD LTE technology. Softbank is working to build a similarly structured high-speed network.”

Read more in the full article here.

Aluminum choice being blamed for delays with iPhone 5 availability

The decision to go with aluminum in the latest iPhone 5 is now being blamed for the poor availability and shipping times. The iPhone 5 has been on sale for just over two weeks now and Apple is still quoting availability for new devices at the time of writing of 3-4 weeks. According to a report by Bloomberg, the reason for the slow availability is all down to quality control problems with the aluminum used in the banding around the iPhone 5 and the back cover.

Stricter benchmarks have hampered production of the iPhone 5’s anodized aluminum housings, forcing Foxconn’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. (2317) to idle factories, the person said. The slowdown is heightening supply concerns that have cost Apple about $60 billion in market value since the iPhone debut — a shortcoming of the drive to imbue products with qualities that make them alluring yet more difficult to manufacture.

The scrapes, which sparked complaints with the iPhone’s debut last month, are due to Apple’s decision to use a type of aluminum that helps make the smartphone thinner and lighter. Senior Apple managers told executives at Foxconn near the end of September to tighten production standards, said the person, who asked not to be named because the matter was private.

For those working on assembly lines with enough anodized aluminum housings for production, the pressure has intensified, because the iPhone 5 is more delicate and easier to scratch during the assembly process, said five factory workers interviewed by Bloomberg News outside the Zhengzhou plant. They spoke on condition that their full names not be used.

Last week, it was rumored that a strike had taken place at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou factory, the strike was supposedly called because workers were unhappy with being asked to work during holidays and overly strict demands on product quality without necessary training. Foxconn denied that the strike had ever taken place and that production was continuing as normal.

It will be interesting to see how well the iPhone 5 wears over the next few months and if it is as easy to scratch and scuff as many are claiming; if it doesn’t wear well then there will be a lot of unhappy customers. Apple prides itself on producing beautifully designed products that are functional as well as highly fashionable. If the iPhone 5 looks like it’s been dragged through a hedge backwards after a few months of use then this will clearly be a problem for many.

Source: Bloomberg

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