iPhone - page 173

Isn’t it the most Samsung thing in the world to introduce a new technology that’s actually kind of interesting, and then ruin any originality points it picked up by blatantly ripping off Apple?

That’s exactly what happened when Samsung recently announced the SE370, the industry’s first computer monitor with integrated wireless charging function for mobile devices — only to “borrow” the exact same charging battery charging icon Apple used back in its skeuomorphic days before iOS 7 came along.

Oh, Samsung, will you never learn?

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The absolute worst part of buying an iPhone every year is having to deal with AT&T and Verizon in order to qualify for Apple’s latest device. That could soon be a thing of the past, though, as Apple is looking to launch its own wireless network so users wouldn’t have to deal with traditional carriers any longer.

The iPhone may not yet sport an ultra-tough sapphire display, but don’t think Apple’s handsets are by any means delicate.

A 74-year-old Texas businessman recently expressed his amazement after his iPhone fell 9,300 feet during a flight from Houston — and miraculously survived.

This week: why we might be in for big iPad upgrades this year; our expectations for the iPhone 6C; the one feature we hope iPhone 6S will get (but probably won’t); Woz is worried about Skynet again; and… is Apple building a machine for time travel? You’ll have to press play to find out…

Our thanks to HipChat for supporting this episode. HipChat’s team communication app helps all teams work together more effectively, and gets you the information you need faster than email. Get HipChat Plus free for 90 days at hipchat.com/cultofmac.

Show notes ahead, and they’re excellent.

Keeping enough iPhone cables around the house to your entire family’s devices charged can result in some unsightly blogs of tangled cables. Most charging stations look horrible, or too nerdy to keep in open sight, but the Foaster is hoping the solve that problem by disguising an iPhone charging station in the shape of one of the most ubiquitous kitchen appliances.

Foaster comes with two slots to charge two iPhones at the same time, but it also can be expanded to accommodate two extra iPads. With its built-in power supply, Foaster only uses one electric outlet on your wall, keeping a fresh minimal look.

Check out the full demo:

If you’re taking your iPhone 6 Plus on vacation with you, and you anticipate being near a large body of water like, say, the Pacific Ocean, it’s a good idea to take precautions. One kayaker’s ounce of prevention worked out for the best when his iPhone ended up at the bottom of the damned sea.

Months later, a scuba diver found the phone and returned it, and they could do that because both the waterproof bag the owner had bought and the phone inside of it were still working perfectly.

Would you buy an apparently new iPhone from a random person on the street without thoroughly checking out the contents of the box first?

If you answered “obviously no,” then you’re certainly smarter than the Detroit Metro PCS business which bought “iPhones” from a group of three Detroit-area teenagers only to discover, upon opening them, that they were filled with Play-Doh bricks instead of smartphones.

It is one thing to read about a madman. But what if you could feel like those were your hands around the victim’s throat, eyeballs bulging, his gasping breath brushing against your face?

Charles Dickens’ A Madman’s Manuscript feels all the more creepy when you experience the book in interactive form with the new iPhone and iPad app by iClassics.

If digital media is tearing us away from analog books, then the growing collection of illustrated works reimagined by iClassics ensures classic tails not only stay alive but get a new life with illustrations that move with the touch of your screen.

Apple business may be soaring in China, but not all of it is the legit kind!

According to a new report, police in Beijing have busted a factory which produced in excess of 41,000 fake iPhones, with a market value of around $19 million.

Every mobile platform now ships with its very own virtual assistant, and while they all offer a similar set of basic features, Google Now and Siri are way ahead of their rivals. Google Now knows what you want and when you want it, but Siri has sass and personality, and is about to get a whole lot better with the help of Proactive.

If you were to pit the two against each other in a virtual ring, which one would come out wearing the belt? Join us as we find out in this week’s Friday Night Fight between Cult of Android and Cult of Mac!

Do you mediate every bit of your experience through the cold display of your iPhone? Do you film concerts, text during dates, and spend more time looking at your screen than into the eyes of the people you’re hanging out with?

Are you addicted to your iPhone?

NoPhone may have the solution for you. In what seems to be a rather tongue-in-cheek product page, NoPhone touts its thin, light, wireless design. Which makes sense for a smartphone-shaped hunk of plastic.

What vaulted Apple from its humble Silicon Valley origins to the absolute top of the business world? From its first desktop computer in 1976 to today’s category-crushing Apple Watch, the company is intensely focused on creating technology that will delight the masses.

That vision is best exemplified by Apple’s five most important products, which I’ve rounded up in this week’s edition of Kahney’s Korner. Some made the list for reasons that might surprise you.

Get ready to spend your time chomping dots and eating ghosts with this amazing version of arcade classic Pac-Man, one of the most recognizable games of the past 35 years.

Designed by the original Pac-Man creator Tōru Iwatani, Championship Edition (CE) came out for the Xbox 360 in 2007, and it was the best ever remake of the arcade original.

Now Pac-Man CE DX, an improved version of the game that released onto Xbox 360 in 2010, is here for your iPhone or Android smartphone, and I’m betting you’ll spend some serious time playing it.

If you’ve been using iCloud to back up your iOS devices for a while like I have, chances are you’ve got a few older backup files crufting up your iCloud storage space.

If you want to maximize the space on your iCloud account, you might want to delete some of these older iCloud backups to make room for more.

Here’s how to do that.

We aren’t going to find out what the next iPhone looks like until Apple shows us (probably in September), but that isn’t stopping designers from dreaming up some concepts.

Here’s a pretty bold one that imagines the next Apple smartphone as a mix between a Samsung Galaxy Edge and a Club Cracker. You can check it out in the video below.

It seems like just yesterday in many ways that Apple released the first iPhone, but it was actually the better part of a decade ago. Even so, it took the better part of that “better part of a decade” for the competition to catch up, as this great video, showing the evolution of smartphones, shows.

Apple’s earnings fell just shy of Wall Street’s expectations for third-quarter revenue despite continued strong sales of the iPhone 6, which helped the company bring in $49.6 billion in gross revenue and $10.7 billion in profit.

Perhaps even worse for AAPL, the company’s fourth-quarter revenue forecast fell short of analysts’ best guesstimates.

A number of Silicon Valley technology giants have backed Samsung in its legal battle against Apple. Documents confirm Dell, eBay, Facebook, Google, and HP all took the South Korean company’s side in a “friend of the court” brief on July 1.

Give Aaron Johnson the chance to give you his elevator pitch and he just might convince you that you need a tabletop photo studio.

But even if you accept his points, you probably don’t have studio know-how or the room for the lights, the tripod, backdrops and a ladder.

Johnson answers with the SHOTBOX, a collapsable tabletop studio with seamless diffused lighting with a setup that can have you camera-ready in seconds. The SHOTBOX is designed for iPhone and other smartphone users who want to make simple product pictures, digitize family photos and copy documents.

Not long after debuting to a pretty successful launch, Filters for iPhone is up for sale. Developer Mike Rundle explains that he has a full-time job plus children to feed and his little side project of love deserves more attention than he can give. His asking price? $10,000.

You can charge your smartphone while cycling or running with an accessory also designed to keep you alive on the road.

Sounds like a lot to ask of a battery pack, but the Boost Pack by BSEEN does both with a rather simple design.

The Boost is a belt pack with an LED light panel that stays lit or flashes. It also holds your smartphone and a lightweight 4000 mAH rechargeable travel battery pack to keep your phone charged.

A 21-year-old Amazon employee in India has been arrested for allegedly stealing $12,500 worth of electronics — including numerous Apple devices — while working in the packing department of the company’s warehouse.

Pramod Bhamble placed orders himself, but instead of packing the correct products, he stuffed the container full of the equivalent weight of iPhones, iPads, cameras and high-end watches before mailing the order to his home.

Ahead of a probable announcement in September, it looks like we can already get a sneak peak at the iPhone 6s Plus – or at least the back of it. The rear housing leaked and there are plenty of photos to gaze at and of course scrutinize for months to come. Some very small differences in the casing have already garnered some attention.

iPhone cameras are getting better and better all the time, with the upcoming iPhone 6s reportedly set to receive one of the bigger camera upgrades in recent memory.

While most of us are happy about this, we’re assuming the guy pictured above is cursing the day Apple decided to include a front-facing camera on its handsets — since it’s caught him in the act of robbing an iPhone, and now gives the police a perfect mugshot it can use for identification purposes.

Four undergraduate students at UC Berkeley created a rocking chair called the Volta that stores kinetic energy from an attached pendulum.

At first, the team thought such a chair would be a novelty, a student project that had rocking chair users see how much energy they could generate from rocking back and forth.

Of course, once chair sitters interacted with the smartphone app that tracked the energy they were producing, they wanted a USB port to keep their iPhone charged up.