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The iPhone was introduced at Macworld 2007 without one mystery app. Apple later revealed that mystery app only 9 days before the iPhone launch to be YouTube which propelled iPhone hype into orbit.

With 52 days to go, and the iPad rumor mill kicking into gear, the question of the day is, “what is the iPad’s mystery icon?”

So, if you think it’s crazy for Apple to be hiding mystery iPad software and hardware, remember that history tends to iRepeat itself.

Personally, I’m looking forward to iChat and Dashboard widgets on iPad.

Update: Felipe makes a good point in the comments. On June 18, 2007, 11 days before the iPhone launch, Apple also upgraded the display hardware from plastic to glass. Glass display parts are $16 today, while camera parts are roughly $10.

Technorati Tags: iPad, YouTube, Apple

Revisiting my predictions from December 2008, here’s what I think we’ll see tomorrow. Guesses, instead of insider intel.

• 1440 x 960 10″ multi-touch display – Even multiples of iPhone OS resolution for easy app scaling up
• ARM Cortex A9 CPU – Fast with long battery life
• PowerVR SGX 545 GPU – OpenCL, baby!
• iPhone OS 4.0 – With tablet frameworks and multitasking
• $599 / $699 – Quoting Steve Jobs, “We don’t know how to make a sub-$500 computer that’s not a piece of junk”.
• Names: iBook, Canvas… or iDroid XP 2010 Tablet Edition

Technorati Tags: Apple, tablet, finally, PowerVR, GPU, iPhone

From watching videos of JooJoo, UI latency and scrolling performance look awful.

It seems that all rendering is done on the CPU, when it should’ve been on a GPU accelerated compositor or tiled surface manager.

That would save significant battery life (which we haven’t heard anything about) and really kick ass at performance.

Offloading rendering to the GPU also frees you up to, oh, say, reliably detect touch input events.

System on Chip GPU + CPU combos are fairly inexpensive parts these days. Even with a GPU as simple as the first gen iPhone PowerVR MBX lite would’ve had reasonable performance.

UI latency and scrolling performance make all the difference in multi-touch form factor devices. A true multi-touch contender needs to get this right.

Update:

I just realized that JooJoo plays video smoothly at 1080p. So they definitely have a GPU or DSP in there. They’re so close, they just need to get the software up to snuff, maybe with Clutter?

More Reading: On Mobile Phone OS Design and GPUs

Technorati Tags: JooJoo, GPU, CrunchPad, Arrington, TechCrunch

Mobile phones have really big screens.

Tablets will have even bigger screens.

If you want your mobile phone OS to matter in 2010, you’d better optimize for rendering graphics on the GPU.

GPUs are far more power efficient and faster at drawing graphics. As mobile device screens get really large, drawing the graphics “old school” on the CPU is moving from “unacceptable” to “impossible” pretty quickly.

Today, Motorola Droid runs at about half the frame rate of iPhone 3GS. The GPU in both is a PowerVR SGX 530 series chip.*

A PowerVR SGX 530 has a fill rate of 200 million pixels per second. That means Motorola Droid’s GPU could theoretically drive 8 full screen refreshes at 60 fps on a Droid-sized (WVGA) screen. All without the CPU’s help.

Parts of Android’s graphics subsystem seem to be GPU accelerated, but more is needed.

Imagine if the Android UX ran at a rock solid 60 fps. Then, I think we’d have something pretty sexy.

I wonder if Apple’s PA Semiconductor unit is designing GPUs instead of CPUs?

* It’s unclear what the exact model of the iPhone 3GS GPU is, and so the exact fill rate is not known… (though if it were, say, a PowerVR SGX 535, its fill rate would be 400 million pixels per second)

Technorati Tags: Android, Droid, Motorola, Apple, Google iPhone, GPU, PowerVR, graphics

I’ve just finished my port of Chocolux for WebGL (click for demo page).

Chocolux is a real-time recursive GPU raytracer using four spheres by Auld. Today, Chocolux now can run in your web browser.

The implications of this are pretty mind blowing. WebGL now allows compiled code to run on the GPU. Imagine what games, image processing, and applications will be possible with compiled shaders and general GPU computing (OpenCL?) now in the browser. And with WebGL gaining widespread adoption, it’s going to be here fairly soon.*

For more information about cutting edge fragment shader GPU raytracing and rendering, check out Rendering Worlds with Two Triangles (PDF).

*pending completion of a stable WebGL spec, naturally.

Technorati Tags: OpenGL, WebGL, graphics, GPU, raytracing, OpenCL

Google Chrome Frame is huge.

Revisiting my post on Google Chrome Lite from February:

In 2009, Google should embed Google Chrome into Google Toolbar, which has a HUGE install base. This would be a huge driver to accelerate Google’s web platform, convert more folks over to a modern browser experience. Imagine a Chrome “Lite” running inside Toolbar inside IE, billed as a “web accelerator”.

(Insert humorous smug remark here. Okay, it’s out of my system.)

This is the right strategy for Google to use against Microsoft in the browser wars. Google’s 2009 playbook probably looks similar to this:

1. Let Google Chrome Frame mature in open source into a completely awesome (and hopefully secure) web plugin. Web developers get excited and really start using HTML5 instead of talking about it. Security issues are vetted and addressed.
2. Bundle Chrome Frame 1.0 into Google Toolbar (hell, Google everything), with huge established (and unpublicized to date) distribution.
3. Launch both as part of a multi-prong “death by a thousand cuts” attack (Chrome standalone, OEM, Chrome OS, Chrome Mobile, YouTube HTML5 video, etc.) on Internet Explorer.
4. ???
5. Profit!

What should Microsoft do? Get busy. Find a differentiator (graphics, JavaScript, sync, hardware port, XBOX, etc.), stop looking at WebKit and start shipping it already.

Technorati Tags: Google Chrome Frame, Chrome, WebKit, Microsoft, Internet Explorer

So, was John Gruber right? This is what I found while browsing the new iTunes Store (cool stuff, btw!):

User-Agent: iTunes/9.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.5.8) AppleWebKit/531.9

Survey says: Yes.

It’s important to understand that iTunes is only using WebKit to render the iTunes Store and iTunes LP. The rest of the iTunes UI still remains native in Carbon.

Previous versions of iTunes had a custom native UI for viewing the iTunes Store and were definitely not WebKit based prior to iTunes 9.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iTunes, WebKit

Just remember that CrunchPad, a Michael Arrington company, competes with Apple in the portable computing market. TechCrunch, a Michael Arrington company, is likely biased when reporting Apple and Google portable computing news, especially when reported by Michael Arrington.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Google, CrunchPad, TechCrunch

A good friend of mine, Fai Leong has built a cool, really simple blogging service called SmugBox.

SmugBox is in Alpha at the moment, but it’s already got some nice features. Just write something you want to post in an e-mail and send it to post AT smugbox DOT com. You can even attach pics or video. SmugBox posts it for you online and can also auto post stuff to Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed.

Please give Fai your feedback as well, he’s working hard on polishing SmugBox.