This is what goes into Apple 's $29 wall-charging unit.

(Credit:
Ken Shirriff)

No, it’s not the first thing people gravitate toward when tearing open their brand-new iPhone or iPad. Heck, it’s probably not even the second or third thing (the USB cable and the Apple sticker are more popular I’m sure).

But, hidden deep within that pretty box is a cube that makes the whole thing work. It’s an AC wall-charging unit, and it’s as technically impressive as any other component in that box.

Ken Shirriff, a technology buff and blogger, has a complete teardown of Apple ‘s tiny technical wonder on his blog, detailing (exhaustively, I might add) why exactly Apple can charge $29 for it.

The details are fascinating if you have a mind for tech speak and electronics, but the basic summation of what Shirriff found is that Apple has gone through an immense amount of effort to create a safe, effective, and, yes, beautiful wall charger for its products.

Related storiesiPhone case, wall charger combo arriving sooner than planned… [Read more]

Google has updated the iOS Search app with a feature to swipe directly from a Web page back to search results.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Google just updated its iOS Google Search app (iTunes link). I have always preferred searching for Web content on the iPhone using Google’s dedicated search app, compared to the search box built in to Safari. Now the experience is better.

The updated app focuses on speed — both in terms of how quickly it runs (faster, especially autocomplete) and with a few user interface tweaks that make using it feel a lot better. On a mobile device, like my underpowered iPhone 4, these little things matter. For example, if you’re viewing a page you got to from the search app (it has its own browser), swiping your finger left to right on the page pops you back in to your search result list. It makes sorting through results much less of a chore.

There’s a nice easy feature to search within a page, something that’s buried in Safari.

The image search in the new app is also much faster, kind of magically so. On the iPad, scrolling among image results gives you a slick Coverflow-like animation.

The app doesn’t have the greatest feature of the original Google Search app, where you could lift the phone to your face to activate the voice search option. Voice search is st… [Read more]

The digital gTar never needs tuning.

(Credit:
Incident Technologies)

At first glance, a digital guitar with the brains of a super-powered smartphone and illuminated fretboard seems like a product that could change everything about guitar instrumentation. The digital dynamo by Incident Technologies aims to work as “the first guitar that anybody can play,” as noted in description of the gTar on Kickstarter.

To start, one merely needs to plug an iPhone 4/4S in to the digital guitar. After selecting a song in the gTar app, illuminated frets await your fingertips to help you start playing along.

We admit this rocks, but still recommend you learn about music theory, tab reading, and so on. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit:
Incident Technologies)

Selectable modes of difficulty make it easy to learn progressively. For example, budding musicians merely need to pluck the right strings in easy mode, while the medium setting requires the player to press down on the right notes. Both of… [Read more]