There’s a lot of talk about Apple going back to plastic for the budget iPhone, and while we’ve already seen some very attractive ideas about what that could look like, concept designer Ran Avni has another notion: an iPhone 6 that keeps the stark classicism of the current monotone iPhone color schemes, but adopts a plastic back which borrows design elements from the iPad mini. It’s an interesting look, and very Apple-like, but only time will tell how close this is to what Apple actually delivers.
Mother’s Day is in just a few days, and if your way of saying “I love you” is gadgetry, then T-Mobile thinks they have the perfect gift for you by heavily promoting its deal to get an iPhone for $0 down.
The deal has been running since April 12th, when the carrier rebranded itself as “The Uncarrier”. T-Mobile will ramp up the promotion by displaying prominent ads Mother’s Day iPhone 5 ads in the top 20 markets, along with 3 National ads in USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times.
The security features built into Apple’s iOS software are so good that the police are unable to gain access to defendant’s iPhones when they need to. Apple itself is able to bypass the security software and decrypt locked devices — and it do so when the police request it. But the company has so many requests that it has to add police to a lengthy waiting list.
Google has been forced to hand over Android source code documents sought by Apple in an ongoing patent-infringement lawsuit against Samsung.
The search giant initially argued that it was not required to give up the documents and that it would be too burdensome to collect them, but U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal in San Jose, California, has given the company two days to give them up.
One enterprising soul over on the Apple boards at Reddit has taken a bunch of comparison photos from the Camera+ app website and put them together to show just how far the iPhone camera has come, with the same image taken with the original iPhone, the iPhone 3G and 3GS, the iPhone 4 and 4s, and then the iPhone 5.
The difference between the first and last photos is stunning, but there’s an initial ratio of improvement between two models of the iPhone that’s simply stunning.
Switch 8 by Goal Zero Category: Solar Chargers Works With: Anything with a USB port Price: $99
As travel chargers go, The Goal Zero Switch 8 kit is about as convenient as it gets. The two panels fold into one easy-to-carry pack, and on the back is a zippered mesh bag in which the battery pack and USB converter sit. There’s space in that bag for a phone or other small device, and there are enough paracord loops around the edges to secure the pack, open or closed, to just about anything.
T-Mobile’s latest iPhone 5 ad is thoroughly in “The Internet is a series of tubes” territory. It’s kind of weird.
The advertisement shows fluorescent gak blasting from two massive PVC sewage pipes. These pipes are meant to represent “the Internet” while the gak itself is supposed to be, I guess, the brightly colored slime of the Internet’s data streams. T-Mobile says more electric kool-aid sewage can spray through their pipes because they aren’t as clogged up.
I guess what I find so weird about this ad is that not only does it pick a visual metaphor for data that was widely mocked when Senator Ted Stevens used it to describe the way the Internet works, but T-Mobile’s whole argument here seems to be: “No one subscribes with us, so you’ve got our whole LTE network all to yourself.”
Doesn’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence, does it?
For the last couple months the Internet has been chalk full of rumors that Apple is losing its edge, and that the iPhone isn’t as cool as it once was. Maybe some of those rumors are right, maybe not, but Apple’s ex-Ad Guru, Ken Segall, predicts that the iPhone’s biggest years are still ahead of it.
In a recent blog post, Segall speculates that the iPhone will follow a similar development cycle as the iPod. For the first few years Apple has worked on evolving and perfecting the device, but 2013 will be the year that Segall thinks we’ll finally get an iPhone Mini, iPhones in color, and maybe even a big iPhone.
If you’re in the market for an iPhone 5, this is intriguing: Twitter user evleaks, who has good sources on upcoming Android devices and carrier deals, is saying that Verizon will start offering the iPhone 5 for $100 off starting in the middle of this month. That means that instead of paying $199 upfront for a 16GB iPhone 5 on two year contract, it would only cost $99. Not a bad deal at all, if true: we’ll let you know when and if the deal goes live.
Last year, electronics supply company ETrade Supply lucked out and was one of the first companies to obtain parts of the iPhone 5 before release: first the FaceTime cam, then the front panel and then the back panel.
Whatever ETrade Supply’s sources, then, they clearly have a solid connection inside Foxconn. And now that source is telling them that the ‘budget’ iPhone is a very real product.
![Goal Zero Switch 8 Solar Charger Is Small, Tough And Just Powerful Enough [Review]](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/IMG_1079.jpg)
