iOS - page 133

Unlike most computers, the iPad isn’t designed to be a multi-user device. iOS doesn’t support multiple user accounts or profiles – that essentially means one set of device and application settings along with a personal collection of information like notes, email, browser bookmarks, and stored passwords for different online services. Sharing a device with that much personal data makes it easy for someone to snoop while using another person’s iPhone or iPad or on an iPad that is commonly shared between multiple users.

Passtouch is a web browser for the iPad that’s designed to offer at least some multi-user capabilities as well as to secure web-based information like bookmarks, cookies, and stored passwords. It doesn’t offer whole-device accounts or profiles but it does offer some extra security for devices that are regularly shared.

No one likes to be throttled — just ask Shep Smith — so when AT&T started sending throttling warnings to “unlimited” customers they considered to be the “Top 5%” data hogs, outrage and confusion ensued. After multiple complaints and an online petition, AT&T was forced to clarify their throttling policy and what it means to be in the “Top 5%.”

Camera Awesome is a new all-singing, all-dancing photo app on the iOS Store this week. But just how awesome is it?

Brought to you by photo sharing site SmugMug, the first noticeable thing about this app is the price: it’s free. There are no adverts inside it, you’ll be pleased to hear. But there are quite a lot of extras that can only be unlocked with in-app purchases.

The Grix is a cool new $5 pixel editor for iOS, with wide appeal for serious pixel artists and anyone looking for a creative way of killing a dull moment.

One of the big trends at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona has been announcements regarding NFC. While NFC has been supported in a handful of Android phones and BlackBerry models, till now there haven’t been many real-world applications for it. With several announcements around NFC, the technology’s time may be finally be coming.

Despite rumors, Apple has never shown an interest in adopting NFC in the iPhone or iPad.  Could Apple’s lack of NFC support could stick out like a sore thumb despite the fact that it managed to upstage every company at MWC with yesterday’s iPad 3 event announcement.

The GSMA has announced the winners of the 17th Annual Global Mobile Awards which took place yesterday at Mobile World Congress. The top mobile products and services were showcased and there was even some entertainment with comedian/songwriter Tim Minchine as the host. Categories ranged from Best Consumer Mobile Service to Best Mobile Innovation for Publishing and while we love hearing about innovative products, it’s really the hardware categories that had us talking.

Ever find yourself alone in your positive review of an app? Maybe you think the price of a mobile game is too high while others think it’s a steal. User satisfaction in the mobile ecosystem is quite a roller coaster of information and emotion. That’s why uTest, a software testing company, decided to crawl hundreds of thousands of apps and user reviews to see just how happy or unhappy users of the top two mobile operating systems were with their app experience. uTest has laid out this information in a nifty little infograph showing user satisfaction across Android and iOS with side-by-comparisons of the two. Check it out and tell us what you think.

Despite RIM’s reassurances to developers at this week’s Mobile World Congress, the mass exodus of its government customers continued as another U.S. federal agency announced that it would ditch BlackBerry in favor of the iPhone. The agency in question is The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which announced that it will be abandoning the BlackBerry and RIM services beginning this month.

As the agency revealed its plans, RIM attempted to cast a softer light on the situation by playing up it’s overall standing with the U.S. government.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — On the surface of things, Asus’s Eee Pad Transformer Prime is just a wonderfully swell idea. Why have both an ultrabook and tablet when you can have one that is both? What if you could take your iPad, snap it onto a keyboard + trackpad, and have a MacBook Air?

It’s a nice dream, and, in actuality, the Transformer Prime is a beautiful piece of hardware. But the challenges aren’t hardware: they lie in software. And in software, neither Android nor iOS is yet up to the challenge of driving both a mobile and laptop OS. But after Windows 8 sets the bar higher, they both could be.

Apple has been grilled for iOS security problems repeatedly over the last few weeks. Path started the firestorm when it was revealed that the popular iPhone app secretly uploaded a user’s entire address book to its private servers. Despite the fact that Apple is firmly against such practices, many apps continue to take advantage of Apple’s poor guideline enforcement.

The New York Times sounded the bell again earlier today with the revelation that an iOS app can collect your device’s entire Camera Roll (not just the location data) without your permission. A new report claims that Apple has acknowledged the bug and is working to fix it in a future iOS update.

Mobile customers have been waiting for what seems like forever for family shared data. One carrier that’s been slowly working on making it happen is Verizon. Not to long ago we saw leaked training material from Verizon that showed they were gearing up for some sort of family shared data plan. We now have a better idea of when to expect these changes as Verizon’s Communication CFO Fran Shammo spoke about them in an investors meeting yesterday.

I first heard about Launch Center from my old TUAW colleague Dave Caolo when he began writing a series of posts about it on his excellent 52 Tiger blog.

Read what Dave writes, and take careful note of his wise words: Launch Center is an ingenious little marvel that’s well worth having on your iPhone. Allow me to explain why.

Over the last few weeks, third-party iOS developers received a lot of heavy venom from the Internet after reports surfaced that apps are accessing users’ address book information without users’ permission. It appears that the situation is worse than first thought and that apps can access more than just address books without notifying users. Photos on iOS devices are also susceptible to apps once a user has granted an app permission to their location information.

ThumbTack is a Menu Bar utility for OS X that puts your most recent Pinboard bookmarks in easy reach, no matter what application you’re using.

In addition to iCloud, there are a number of other cloud services available to Mac and iOS users. Dropbox, Box.net, and Google Docs all come to mind immediately and each offers its own set of features. Another option that isn’t discussed so much by Apple users is Microsoft’s SkyDrive.

Although SkyDrive has offered a basic iOS app and web access from Macs and iOS devices, the functionality has been a bit limited. Newly leaked details of an OS X SkyDrive app, however, indicate that Microsoft may be planning to compete against iCloud on Apple’s home turf.

While Siri seems to get all the attention when it comes to voice actions, Motorola wants to remind people that Android not only does voice actions, but does them extremely well, if not better. At least that’s the message we’re getting out of Motorola’s latest campaign pitting Android’s voice actions against its top contender Siri. Motorola runs through a slew of voice action challenges using three different Motorola phones and the results are impressive. I’m blown away by how fast both OS’s perform the tasks given and it’s an excellent reminder of the fact that Android has been perfecting voice actions for quite some time. I’m betting there are a lot of you that didn’t even realize your phone could do the things your about to see. Check out the videos after the break.

https://youtu.be/W0ABfj0ydPA

I don’t consider myself to be a terribly vain individual, but one of the main reasons why I hate using FaceTime is because I’m forced to look at my self-portrait if I want to see the person I’m talking to. My double chin always decides to make an appearance whenever my sister and niece send a FaceTime request, and half the time I just angle the camera away from my face.

Maybe if I were wealthy and cared more about my wrinkles and extra flab I’d call up Dr. Sigal to fix my FaceTime face, because apparently that’s his specialty. No, this isn’t an article from the Onion. Dr. Robert Sigal is a Washington DC-area plastic surgeon who specializes in reassembling human faces so that they’ll look better while video chatting.

A recent study of finance chiefs at over 200 companies revealed that one in six expect the job of CIO to be gone within five years. More than twice that many (40%) expected that IT will eventually be folded into the finance department. This highlights the impact of trends like BYOD, the consumerization of IT, and the growing importance of cloud services.

As IT departments struggle to deal with an ever-increasing influx of iPhones, iPads, Android devices, and other “consumer” technologies, this raises big questions. Would handing management of IT over to a CFO with limited technical experience help or hinder Apple’s position as a business vendor? Would that drive BYOD programs or inhibit them? Would this ultimately be beneficial to most employees at a company?

It’s been rumored that Apple is looking to rid future iPhones of their traditional 30-Pin connector in a move to save space, but we have no idea what Apple would replace it with to handle the charging and syncing of iOS devices. iCloud has given us the ability to completely cut the cord for syncing, but recharging the device would still require a cable. Or would it? Thanks to some newly invented hi-tech fabric, it looks like future iPhones may possibly be charged using body heat in the not too distant future.

Popular web reading platform Readability has confirmed that it will finally be launching its native iOS app in the App Store on Thursday, March 1st. The release comes after Readability was rejected by Apple for not complying with the App Store’s in-app purchase guidelines.

When the iPhone and iPad app becomes available to the public later this week, users will be able to read and share web articles that have been beautifully reformatted for a mobile reading experience.

Let’s face it, RIM has been suffering from a serious personality conflict. The company is trying to cling to its enterprise business while also making its brand more attractive as a consumer alternative to iOS and Android.

Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the company’s PlayBook tablet. RIM initially pitched the PlayBook as being all about consuming content like movies and other media. At the same time, RIM was also trying to sell it as a business device when paired with a BlackBerry even though it lacked core enterprise apps (including email) that could run on the device when it wasn’t tethered to a BlackBerry – a fact that led to RIM hyping the PlayBook’s email app (introduced this week in PlayBook OS 2) as an exciting new feature.

RIM may be caught in this consumer/business identity struggle, but Netflix made it clear today that it doesn’t see RIM as a consumer company – or at least not as a viable one.

Are you still emailing contact cards and photos to your friends? Did you know that you can transfer them instantly with a fist bump using the free Bump app? The best thing about Bump is it’s not just available on iOS, so you can use it to send contacts and images to friends on Android devices and other smartphones, too.

Here’s how to get started.

The DRM restriction that prevents Apple’s iBooks from being opened on other devices can now be removed by the latest version of a free DRM removal tool. Requiem 3.3, a piece of software that is incredibly popular for removing the DRM from music and videos purchased from the iTunes Store, has been updated to crack e-books purchased from the iBookstore.

Denso is a little bit like Flipboard, but just for video content. Open it up, and you’ll see a selection of curated and branded channels that you can subscribe to on your iPhone or iPad.

We were looking forward to EA’s latest Battlefield title for iOS before it hit the App Store. But when it finally arrived, we couldn’t have been more disappointed. Battlefield 3: Aftershock offered only online gameplay, with just one map and a very limited variety of arsenal. Gameplay was frustrating at best, plagued by unbearable lag on top of server and connection errors.

It’s no surprise, then, that EA has now pulled the release from the App Store.