What if Apple’s iWatch is’t an iWatch at all? What if it’s a spec, like CarPlay, that lets folks like Casio and Rolex put an Apple chip inside their watches to make them talk to your iPhone?
Problems solved:
Apple doesn’t have to get into the fashion watch game, or make “ladies” and “gents” watches.
The watch industry gets a shot in the arm (pun intended) as watches get useful again.
You don’t need a power-sucking display. The iPhone is the display.
Gross is an iPhone app that’ll tell you just how lazy you’ve been for the last week. And believe me, unless you’re managing to get out an exercise in the middle of this icy winter, then the first time you fire up the app you’ll probably find yourself saying it’s name out loud.
As we approach the end of 2013, it’s time to take a look back and pay some recognition to some of the finest apps that have hit the App Store over the past 12 months.
It’s not easy to build a successful iOS app anymore — with over 1 million of them in the App Store, competition has never been tougher — but some developers have proven it’s still possible to stand out among the crowd with titles that are either completely unique, or just far greater than their rivals.
I gave up on buying FitBits after my second $100 device dropped from my pocket and ended up who knows where. So I was interested in yesterday’s update to the iOS app which lets you track your steps using just the app and the iPhone 5S’s M7 MoCoPro.
But apparently this tracking doesn’t offer the full FitBit kit and caboodle, eliminating the useful functionality of recording individual activities. Thankfully, another app just added these features. It’s called StepTracker, and it’s free.
The Fitbit is one of the most popular fitness trackers out there, and today its companion iOS app was updated with an interesting new feature for iPhone 5s owners. By taking advantage of the new phone’s M7 co-processor (a chip also found in the latest iPads), Fitbit has turned the 5s into a health monitor without the need of an additional wrist strap.
MobileTrack uses the M7 to track the user’s activity throughout the day and distill it into helpful data, like miles traveled and calories burned.
Runtime stands out above other run-tracking iPhone apps thanks to its great design: it’s not – like most other apps – fugly as hell. It also use the iPhone 5S’s M7 MoCoPro to track you even when you’re walking.
Day One, the beautiful journaling app for Mac and iOS, has just gotten even more beautiful on iOS 7, and added features to boot. I roll my own nerd journal, but if I used a journaling app it’d be Day One. Especially now it has M7 support.
It’s finally here, folks — the iPad mini with Retina display is now available to order from the Apple online store. Prices start at $399 for a 16GB Wi-Fi model, which are currently shipping in 1-3 business days. Those equipped with LTE connectivity start at $529, and they’re shipping in 5-10 business days.
RunKeeper, one of the most popular fitness trackers for iPhone, now boasts a number of cool new features that take advantage of the M7 motion coprocessor built into the iPhone 5s — thanks to a new update that hit the App Store today. The app also supports AirDrop, allowing you to share your workouts with nearby friends.
Want to check out the new M7 MoCoPro in your iPhone 5, but don’t have an app to do it? Then check out David Smith’s Pedometer++, a free app which grabs data from the low-power motion-tracking chip and shows it to you.
Strava Run, the fitness-tracking app that records your runs and lets you compete against strangers who have use the same routes, might be the first fitness app to take advantage of the M7 Motion Coprocessor (MoCoPro) in the iPhone 5S.
Now the app will not only run for longer thanks to saved battery power, it’s more accurate too.
Presumably thanks to hangovers caused by excessive in-flight drinking on the flight formthe U.S to the antipodes, the iFixit folks managed to not find the M7 chip inside the new iPhone 5S during their teardown before the weekend, leading to speculation that the chip didn’t even exist. Conspiracy! And as with any drunken adventure, lost things start to reappear when the dawn finally rises. The M7 chip is there alright; it just doesn’t have a big "M7" label on the front. According to the Chipworks’ blog, the M7 still carries its factory label: NXP LPC18A1. <!–more–>
> Luckily, we’ve been able to locate the M7 in the form of the NXP LPC18A1. The LPC1800 series are high-performing Cortex-M3 based microcontrollers.
The M7 is a separate chip then, but (as Apple already made clear on the iPhone 5S product page) it processes the data from the MEMS sensors on the main A7 chip, letting the iPhone 5S’s big brain stay asleep while the low-power M7 works tirelessly in the background. These sensors – compass, accelerometer, gyroscope – are mostly the same as in previous iPhones, with the exception of the new Bosch Sensortech BMA220 3-axis accelerometer. According to Chipworks, this is the first time a Bosch component has been found in an iDevice.
The A7 is made by Samsung, just like previous iPhone brains, despite Samsung’s continued and shameless ripping off of Apple’s designs in all other areas. I guess there’s no decent alternative yet.
At the end of last night’s iPhone 5s teardown, the iFixit team still wasn’t sure who made the chips inside the latest iOS device, or where the brand-new M7 was, even. There was a lot of speculation as to who made the A7, Apple’s new, faster powerhouse of a main processing unit, as well.
That’s ancient history, now, as reverse-engineering and security firm, Chipworks, de-capped the various chips on the iPhone 5s logic board to find out precisely what’s what.
The M7 Motion Coprocessor (MoCoPro?) in the iPhone 5s is something of a mystery beast. It’s function is clear – it is an always-on low-power chip that processes data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass in your iPhone – but its eventual purpose is still a little unclear. So why don’t we do some speculation?
“In the past, when we’ve announced a new iPhone, we’ve lowered the price of the current iPhone making it even more accessible to more people. But this year, we’re not going to do that,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook during the company’s special event in Cupertino on Tuesday.
Instead, Apple replaced the iPhone 5 with the iPhone 5c, a device with exactly the same internals, but a different, more colorful design. But why did it do that? Could it be because the iPhone 5 is too similar to the iPhone 5s, and that dropping its price would have hurt sales of the newer model?
I think so.
I don’t think Apple made the iPhone 5c plastic to make it cheap; I think the company made it plastic to make it worse and to open up a bigger gap between the entry-level iPhone and the high-end model. Here’s why.
Tim Cook and company rocked today’s keynote. As expected, the iPhone 5s was announced with a new processor, fingerprint sensor and motion chip alongside the new cost-conscious and brightly-colored iPhone 5c.
Craig Frederhigi spent some time on Jony Ive’s upcoming iOS 7, running through the main features, most of which we’d heard back at WWDC in June, including Control Center, Search anywhere, more textured ringtones and the like.
The two new models of iPhone were the focus of today’s event. CEO Tim Cook said that the iPhone business was getting so big they decided to replace the iPhone 5 with two new models. The iPhone 5c looks to aim directly at kids and perhaps budget-conscious consumers with bright colors and the ability to purchase contrasting soft rubber cases. The iPhone 5s is a tour-de-force of new technology, including the much-anticipated fingerprint sensor, Touch ID, and the new A7 and M7 chips.
The keynote was even more densely packed with info, of course, so we’ve broken everything down into tasty, bite-size nuggets of information so you can get essentials of what happened today without having to read 30,000 different blog posts.
Here’s everything that Apple announced at today’s keynote:
We finally have an official release date for iOS 7, which means on September 18th, everyone’s iPhone and iPad is going to change dramatically and a bunch of iOS 6 skeuomorphic apps are going to look like crap in Apple’s new flat, parallax world.
To make the transition to iOS 7 easier, Apple has sent an email out to developers reminding them to reimagine their apps’ interface to match iOS 7 and submit them before launch. Apple also published a new developer guides on how to take advantage of the iPhone 5s’ 64-bit A7 processor, M7 chip, and OpenGL ES 3 capabilities.
Not only did Apple toss a desktop-quality 64-bit A7 processor into the iPhone 5S, but the company is introducing a new M7 motion coprocessor that works alongside the A7 processor to measure motion data, accelerometer, and gestural data.
A new CoreMotion API is also being introduced for developers to take advantage of the chip’s data to provide better information in health and fitness applications.
HTC is set to announce a new flagship smartphone at Mobile World Congress next month, and recent rumors have revealed it’s set to be called the HTC M7. We already know a lot about its internal specifications, thank to previous leaks, but we had no idea what the handset would look like — until today.
Now we’re led to believe the device is going to look almost identical to the iPhone 5.