Posted without comment because it really doesn’t need a comment. I mean, it’s the new Arrested Development trailer — just watch it and count down the days until the Bluth family returns to Netflix on May 26.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today, Roku is launching the newest version of its streaming media box, the $99 Roku 3. While keeping a similar form factor to previous Roku set-top boxes, the latest in its series should be much faster and more responsive, thanks to hardware upgrades. It also comes with a new remote control with a built-in headphone jack for private listening, as well as a new user interface for navigating its hundreds of channels.

Available for sale on Roku.com and Amazon.com, the new Roku 3 is the next evolution in the company’s streaming set-top box hardware. While the Roku folks wouldn’t go into specifics about the hardware in the new box, they said it represented a significant upgrade over the Roku 2 XS, which was the previous $99 box. (No worries — I’m sure there will be a teardown of the Roku 3 within the next few days.)

Anyway, the updated hardware under the hood should mean a faster browsing and navigation experience for Roku users, as they click through all the various content choices on the box. The Roku 3 also supports up to 1080p video and has dual-band wireless connectivity and Ethernet and USB ports. It also has an available MicroSD slot for extra storage.

The Roku 3 also added an interesting new feature to its remote control — a headphone jack and in-ear headphones to allow users to privately listen to the TV without disturbing others around them. It has more or less the same form factor as the one that shipped with the Roku 2, and like it, the new remote also serves double duty as a game controller. That’s important, since the Roku 3, like the Roku 2 XS, comes with Angry Birds Space pre-installed.

All that said, the biggest new change to Roku’s offerings probably isn’t the hardware, but the addition of a new interface for navigating its Channel Store, apps, and settings. There are more than 750 channels available to Roku users worldwide, the previous up-down-left-right navigation scheme for the Roku Channel Store wasn’t very good. It also resulted in a lot of navigating around different channel information screens to determine whether or not you wanted to install them.

With that in mind, Roku has updated the streaming box’s user interface, with an easier-to-navigate flow for scrolling through categories of apps, finding out information about them, and installing them. With an average of 15 channels installed per box, Roku also needed to improve the way that users got around the apps they had already chosen to watch. As a result, the new Roku UI also has an updated grid interface for users to scroll through the channels that they’ve already installed.

Rather than scrolling left-to-right like in the previous interface, users now can see nine tiled apps on the home screen. The interface provides a view of more detailed information for the apps that users are looking at on the left side of the screen. Viewers can also set their favorites and see a stream of apps as they scroll down below the top nine.

In addition to the new UI, Roku has added a universal search feature, which will allow users to quickly find their favorite pieces of premium content. Like other streaming devices, the new search works across multiple apps, highlighting TV shows and movies that are available through subscription services like Netflix or Amazon Prime Instant Videos, as well as electronic sell-through or video on-demand services like Vudu.

New Roku 3 owners will have the new UI and search functionality immediately, but Roku plans to make the same features available to existing Roku boxes through an update in the coming weeks.

Last summer, Roku raised $45 million to help expand into new markets and get its devices adopted as secondary set-top boxes in pay TV homes. The company has been working with partners like BSkyB and Time Warner Cable to make their programming available for streaming on the box. In fact, Time Warner Cable released its Roku Channel earlier today, just in time for the new hardware.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Another consumer milestone of sorts for Apple, and one more sign of how competitors are going to have to raise the bar yet again: the new iPad is proving to be highest-rated yet of the three versions of the iPad tablet released so far by the company, according to the latest report from ChangeWave Research.

In a survey from the last week of March, more than four out of every five owners — 82 percent, to be exact — said they were “very satisfied” with the new device, with 16 percent saying they are “somewhat satisfied.” And while the high-resolution Retina display has proven to be the biggest hit with new owners, one of the more high profile drawbacks, claims that the device was getting too hot during prolonged use — turned out to be not such a hot issue after all.

The caveat in this research is that it only covers 200 people. 200! That’s nothing, and only a small piece of the 25,000 that ChangeWave says that it has access to for surveys. On the more constructive side, this is one more indicator of how this newest tablet from Apple will progress in sales in the months ahead.

Another are stats from Apple itself, which noted that it sold three million of the new tablet in the first three days it was on sale.

ChangeWave says that owners of the new iPad have rated it higher than any other iPad yet, as based on the research group’s surveys. In comparison, when ChangeWave surveyed new owners of the iPad 2 after it launched, 74 percent of iPad 2 owners said they were “very satisfied”, and a further 23 percent said they were “somewhat satisfied”.

This time around, ChangeWave noted that the Retina display was named by 75 percent of users as the best feature of the new tablet, with the extended battery life only coming in at a distant second at 22 percent. That may be because users might not have noticed a particularly bad battery life with the older model in comparison. Third most-liked feature was the 4G/LTE capability, although other data from Localytics seems to indicate that this is not a feature much used by most new iPad owners (and outside of the U.S., where there is still little in the way of LTE services, the number of people using that capability might be even lower).

Although Consumer Reports made a big deal about the heat generated by the new iPad, a claim that got amplified by others, Apple has deflected a lot of that criticism, and it appears that most consumers have not taken the bait, either.

When asked by ChangeWave what they did not like about the new device, only seven percent named the heat issue as a bad point. Asked for more detail, these users also said that they didn’t see the heat issue as a safety concern.

To put this in context, seven percent is the same proportion that cited lack of integration with other devices as a problem with the new iPad. Apple has taken precious few steps to solve the integration issue — and in some ways has built an ecosystem to make sure that when users do want to “integrate” it will be with other Apple devices and services.

ChangeWave says that no other dislike picked up more than five percent of user response, meaning that heat scored very low indeed, and no one — 0 percent — said heat was a big issue. Also, comparing the heat issue with “antenna-gate”, the latter issue around iPhone 4′s antenna and cellular reception apparently found a lot more users noting this as a problem — with seven percent calling it a “very big problem” — something even Apple itself had to eventually address.

In contrast, the biggest negative was the cost of the new iPad (26 percent), followed closely by the cost of a new data plan to use it (23 percent). The iPad’s pricing begins at $499 for the most basic 16GB model.

Given that device makers have yet to be able to make anything that has matched or beaten the iPad on a specs level (at least where consumer mindshare is concerned) it will likely be price that continues to be the force that helps competitors like Amazon (with its $199 Kindle Fire) and others compete against the iPad.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Attention George Foreman: report to an Apple Store near you immediately. There’s a hot (literally) product, you simply must buy the entire inventory of to keep your grilling empire alive: the new iPad.

Or at least, that’s what the latest nonsense from Consumer Reports would have you believe.

We’ve seen this ridiculousness from Consumer Reports before. In June 2010, at the height of “Antennagate”, Consumer Reports figured out the art of click-bait. If you say something outlandish, even if it directly contradicts something you previously said (and sometimes that’s even better!), you must harp on a story to keep those precious pageviews flowing in. And so harp they did.

The reality of the Antennagate situation was always this: it was real, but it really wasn’t a big deal. The fact that the iPhone 4 went on to sell tens of millions of units — record numbers for Apple at the time — bringing in billions of dollars for the company with very few returns, sure seems to suggest Consumer Reports blew the situation way out of proportion. And what they’re doing today is arguably worse.

To be clear, it is true that the new iPad gives off more heat than the previous models. We were among the first to report this in our initial review of the device last week. Guess who didn’t note it in their initial report? Consumer Reports. A week ago, everything was peachy keen:

Nine teams from the new Ignite100 accelerator based in the North East of the UK, which launched with a £1m fund that invests up to £100k per team – are presenting to investors in London today. Here’s a quick rundown.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As part of the new Google+ service came Huddle, a group texting app available to Android users. This makes mobile group collaboration easier, says Google. So far so good. Except…

There’s already a five-year-old group collaboration startup called Huddle, which has to date raised $14.2m in venture capital and has office in Chicago and London.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Could his beautiful, svelte, and decidedly black laptop be the new Macbook Pro that should land in stores on or around the ides of March or early April?

Probably not, but a girl can dream. Why does it look fairly convincing? Well, as 9to5mac points out, Intel has leaked future MacBooks before and there is some evidence of new MacBooks in the pipe for Best Buy and others.

Read more…

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s official. Palm’s new WebOS state is device is called the Palm Touchpad. It has a 9.7-inch screen, front 1.3-megapixel camera, and comes in 16 or 32GB models. It runs a 1.2GHz Snapdragon Processor processor and the screen resolution is 1024

It’s been an eventful day all around. All but the most outlandish rumors we’d heard were confirmed, including the marriage of OS X and iOS, FaceTime coming to the Mac, a revamped iLife, and a pair of new MacBook Airs with iPad-like flash storage. We’ve gotten our hands on both the new Air and Facetime, our impressions of which you can read separately, but here are our blurb-sized weigh-ins on the new today’s event and the new Apple products.

Continue reading…

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today, following Apple’s Back to the Mac event, we got some hands on time with the new products unveiled. Of those, the biggest announcement was the new MacBook Air. Pretty much, it’s almost exactly what I said I was looking for a few days ago.

Check out the pictures of it in action below.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch