One of the cool new functions of iOS 5 is the ability to set the iPhone’s LED to flash for various system level alerts… but how useful is that functionality when the LED is on the back of the phone?
Not very. That’s why sources are now saying that the iPhone 5 will boast dual LEDs, one on the front, one on the back. Like a Blackberry!
With the Gold Master of Lion now released, the question becomes: when will end users be able to download the latest version of OS X 10.7 through the Mac App Store. We’ve heard July 6th, we’ve heard July 19th, but now a new source is positing a new date: July 14th.
Guess what’s just been seeded to developers? The Gold Master of OS X 10.7 Lion… the last developer seed before Lion becomes available for download to all Mac users through the Mac App Store. What a way to start off the holiday weekend!
Apple’s developer betas of future versions of iOS are just that, betas, which means that there’s all sorts of problems that can come up when you install one. Total device meltdown, though? That’s the sort of thing that ought to be ironed out in alpha, yet that’s just what at least one iOS 5 Beta user is reporting after installing the dev preview on his iPad: massive, device crippling overheating issues. And Apple says it’s a known issue.
A series of interviews with retail employees conducted by a labor movement website paints a scathing picture of what it’s like to work at the Apple Store: underpaid, demoralized, physically drained and with no way to secure full-time benefits without turning your personal life over to Apple.
Following rumors that Facebook was planning its first iPad app, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has told everyone to stay tuned for the world’s largest social network to ‘launch something awesome next week.”
A senior manager at Research In Motion, utterly embarrassed by the travesty that was the BlackBerry Playbook, has published a public plea to the press. Stop selling Flash. Look at how Apple is working its mobile business. And fire those two joined-at-the-hip bozos running the company.
Today’s June 30th. That’s an important day for app developers. It’s the day Apple expects app makers to comply with new guidelines saying you can no longer link directly to a way to buy in-app content out of app. Hulu Plus has already jumped through that hoop, but you know who hasn’t? Amazon with its Kindle app.
HP will be releasing its own would-be iPad killer on Friday. Called the HP Touchpad, it’s the first tablet running webOS 3, the tablet-sized operating system HP picked up from Palm last year. But what is the critical consensus? Is the HP Touchpad a viable competitor to the iPad?
Across the board, the answer is no, but most critics agree that six months from now, webOS 3 — if not the Touchpad itself — could be a viable threat to iPad. Right now, though, the HP Touchpad is unpolished and messy.
Here’s the only review of the HP Touchpad you need, glommed together from the Internet’s gadget blogging hivemind.
One of Windows 8’s key tablet features is the ability to run two apps on the same screen side-by-side. It’s a feature that iOS 5 has yet to adopt, but that hasn’t stopped one jailbreak dev from swiping the idea and creating a hack that can allow two or more iPhone apps to run side-by-side on any iPad. Sick.
It’s not official until Apple makes it so, but expect this blip to pop up Apple’s July 19th financial results call: the iPad now has more than 100,000 native apps available for it.
Apple’s currently in the process of sprucing up their New York retail locations, most notably taking down and reinstalling the 5th Avenue Store’s iconic Glass Cube. But the slate of renovations won’t end there: Apple will also close its landmark SoHo store this summer and replace it with a temp location somewhere else within Manhattan to compensate.
We know the release of OS X Lion is imminent, not just because Apple said it was coming in July, but because supplies of MacBook Airs and MacBooks are dangerously constrained, yet Apple is holding back new models.
So when’s Lion dropping? The latest rumor says right after this holiday weekend… and we’re inclined to believe it.
As if on cue, the first teardowns of Apple’s Thunderbolt cable have hit the Internet, and prepare to be surprised: that $49 retail price isn’t just the usual Apple tax, but a fair asking price for the advanced circuitry within!
Today is the fourth anniversary of the release of the original iPhone, and for Cult of Mac’s writers, it’s a particularly important birthday: not only does June 29th mark the anniversary of one of our most all-time beloved gadgets, but it’s also a day so momentous that it has rippled through every aspect of our professional lives as both Apple fans and writers.
To mark the occasion, five of Cult of Mac’s writers got together to talk about where we were when the first iPhone came out, what it meant for us then and what it means for us now. Check out our stories, then please feel free to hop in and leave a comment telling us where you were when the iPhone was born.
The folks over at Yanko Design put together these extremely attractive mock-ups of what they imagine the next iPhone might look like when it’s released in September.
Four years ago today, after having announced the pregnancy six months before, Apple finally gave the first iPhone to the world… and changed the mobile landscape forever. There’s much serious beard stroking to be done about the ramifications of that epochal birth on the smartphone industry as a whole, and we’ll do some of that later today, but right now we’d rather throw the iPhone a birthday bash… and what better way to do that than to serve up a nice slice of birthday cake?
As you know, making and frosting cakes in the shape of the iPhone has become quite a movement in the baking world since the iPhone’s debut. It’s probably a little creepy to serve up an iPhone-shaped cake at the iPhone’s own party —how would you like to eat a big, frosted slice out of yourself on your birthday? — but let’s not think it through too much. Here’s four years of the best iPhone birthday cakes we could find. Dig in!
To mark the fourth anniversary of the original iPhone, Mashable has put together an incredible infographic covering the four years of iPhone. You can see it below, and it really puts into perspective what a momentous event the release of the first iPhone was.
In many ways, it’s hard for me to remember my first iPhone without wincing a bit — no apps? Only 4GB of storage? —but Mashable has it dead right when they say “when we look at the mobile industry, there is a very clear line between what happened before June 29, 2007, and what happened after.”
Although it seems antiquated now in a lot of ways, the original iPhone is easily the singly most important cell phone of the last twenty years.
Happy Birthday, iPhone, and thanks.
By punching a big, conspicuous button on an iPad, Pope Benedict XVI has just launched the new official Vatican news site. Then he sent a tweet from the official Twitter app and afterwards a bunch of old men kissed his knuckles. Between this and Google+, it was a big day for technology.
[via Rome Reports]
By most accounts, Google’s new social network Google+ at least looks pretty good.
As it turns out, there’s a reason for that: it was designed by the guy who designed the original Macintosh.
Google’s just helped put another nail in Adobe Flash’s coffin. Their new tool is called Swiffy, and it allows you to easily convert simple SWF Flash animations and games into HTML5 compliant code, viewable and interactable on any iPhone or iPad.
Remember that Lulzsec hack the other day that showed that AT&T was already testing iPads on their next generation 4G network?
Well, there’s even more interesting information in the leak than that. Complete details about AT&T’s proposed LTE data plans make it clear that when Apple does release an iPhone or iPad 4G, prohibitive data caps, massive overage charges and automatically throttled bandwidth will be the rule of the day.
Google’s just launched their biggest attack against Facebook yet with Google+, a new social networking service that emphasizes the sharing of content and updates to groups of people instead of Facebook’s universal wall spooge approach. But is Google+ destined to be just another wanna-be failure like Buzz and Orkut, or could it instead finally lead to Apple and Facebook to put their differences aside and strike a deal for iOS 6?
The first non-Apple laptop supporting the new Thunderbolt standard has now officially been announced in the Sony Vaio Z, and it’s an impressive machine… for a Windows PC. Unfortunately, though, Sony’s implementation of Thunderbolt is hobbled by a hubristic decision to use a different connector than Apple, , along with a petulant refusal to adopt Apple’s Thunderbolt brand name.
Even as Apple starts issuing refunds to developers angry that Final Cut Pro X leaves out some of the features upon which they depend most, new evidence suggests that those must-have features are already in Final Cut Pro X’s source code, just waiting to be turned on.