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iPhone - page 190

Steve Wozniak calls Apple Watch a ‘luxury fitness band,’ says bigger iPhones are 3 years late

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Photo: HigherEd Web / Flickr
Photo: HigherEd Web/Flickr CC

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has long been an unabashed believer that Cupertino should release a bigger iPhone. Around the time of the iPhone 5, he said Apple should have released two different models, one “regular” and one jumbo-size, to better compete with Android superphones

Now that the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are here, Woz is glad. But he’s still being hard on Apple, saying they’re three years too late with the big phones. And he’s not too crazy about the Apple Watch either.

First malware targeted at non-jailbroken iPhones spreads in China

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I've loved every iPhone, from the first model onward, but they all seem impossibly small now. I haven't owned the iPhone 6 Plus (starting at $299 with two-year contract) for long, but already it feels like the right size for a phone that's more like a portable computer — that is, gigantic.


All the things the naysayers said would be a problem — small-pocket-syndrome, bending, looking like an idiot holding it to my face — weren't true (except the looking like an idiot part).


I keep it in my back pocket, and I have sat on it heavily every single day getting into my car or collapsing on the couch. I get a sickening feeling, but the iPhone's yet to show any damage. It's tougher than Bendghazi would have you believe.


I love the long battery life, the bigger screen, the Touch ID. Even Siri is better, thanks to faster Wi-Fi and LTE. I can even use the 6 Plus one-handed (but I have unnaturally long chicken fingers).


The biggest problems so far are the lack of a wallet case and finding the earphone speaker during a call. The phone's so big, it's easy to position the speaker beyond your ear, muffling the sound. I have to jigger it around my head until it gets loud. And if these are the biggest problems, there's not much to complain about. — Leander Kahney


Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
WireLurker is "the first known malware that can infect installed iOS applications similar to a traditional virus." Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

(Updated with Apple statement below.)

A new class of malware targeted at OS X and iOS is spreading like wildfire in China, according to new research by Palo Alto Networks. Dubbed WireLurker, the trojan hides itself in apps distributed through a third-party Chinese app store for OS X and side-loads itself onto iOS devices via USB.

What sets WireLurker apart from other malware is that it is capable of infecting non-jailbroken iOS devices, and it heralds “a new era in malware attacking Apple’s desktop and mobile platforms.”

Bendgate redux: Grassroots site posts pictures of 300 bent iPhones

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Hundreds of bent iPhones. Photo: One of the Nine
Hundreds of bent iPhones. Photo: One of the Nine

Bendgate is back. A new website is spotlighting the malleability of Apple’s new super-slim smartphone by posting hundreds of pictures of bent iPhone 6 and 6 Plus units.

More than 350 images of deformed Apple phones have been posted by grassroots site One of the Nine, and the submissions keep on coming despite Apple’s claim that a bend in the iPhone 6 is “extremely rare” with normal use.

The iPhone just made room keys obsolete at Starwood hotels

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Apple Wallet hotel
Your iPhone is now a hotel key too: Photo: Starwood Hotels
Photo: Starwood Hotels

The dream of replacing all the pieces of plastic in your wallet with your smartphone got a little closer to reality today as Starwood hotels announced that its new keyless entry system – SPG Keyless – is rolling out to hotels worldwide.

Guests at Aloft, Element, and W Hotels around the globe can now use their iPhone and the SPG app to skip the hotel front desk altogether, walk straight to their room, and unlock it, no key required.

It’s a type-off: Here’s how Apple’s Newton PDA fares against the iPhone

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Photo: Wohba/YouTube
Photo: Wohba/YouTube

Almost two decades after Apple shuttered its Newton MessagePad platform, a new video compares the device’s handwriting recognition to today’s touchscreen-based typing on the iPhone.

The fact that you had to plug your Newton into your Mac to manually transfer information makes it seem incredibly outdated. But the handwriting recognition, which was way ahead of its time in 1993, still impresses in terms of speed, as shown in the video below

iPhone may have to find a new name in India

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iPhone 6 Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

India is a huge growing market for the iPhone, but a trademark dispute brought by a local Indian company called iVoice Enterprises could throw a wrench in those plans — by attempting to bar Apple from using the handset name it made famous.

You see, as it turns out, back in early 2007 iVoice Enterprises tried to tap into what was then the start of India’s mobile revolution.

Their name for an affordable cellphone? iFon, phonetically pronounced “iPhone.”

Tim Cook’s announcement, White House hacked and the rest of this week’s hottest news

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Since Steve Jobs’ passing plenty of changes have occurred within Apple. In spite of all its differences, Tim Cook has managed to keep the essence of the company the same. With new iPhones, iPads, iMacs, Apple Watches and more more already announced, Tim Cook opened up his personal life to the public in a way we’ve never seen from an Apple CEO.

In today’s episode of Cult of Mac’s news roundup find out what exactly Cook revealed that got the world talking and every detail in-between. Hear about this story and more in this episode of the roundup.

Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV for all our latest videos.

This Notification Center widget is like iStats Menu for your iPhone

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Photo: Omnistat

On my aging 2009 iMac, one of my favorite apps is iStats Menu, which lets me see at a glance which of the various programs I have running has slowed my desktop down to a crawl. And I have to admit, it’s gotten me a little performance obsessed: I spend a bunch of time every day checking out iStats Menu, just to see if there’s something I can close to maybe drop CPU usage another half-a-percent.

Because of this, I’ve always sort of wished that there was a similar program for iPhones and iPads. And now there is.

Android founder quits Google to build robots

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post-301733-image-ff9e34d0f11685ddaa2ce31d29ecf6bc-jpg
/Flickr CC

Andy Rubin, co-founder and former head of Android, has left Google to start up a hardware incubator dedicated to building robots.

Rubin helped establish Android as the world’s most widely-used mobile operating system after it was bought by Google in 2005, before switching to run Google’s robotics business last year.

Apple plans to drill for iPhone sales in Iran

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Photo: Quixotic54/Flickr CC
Lotf Allah Mosque, Iran. Photo: Quixotic54/Flickr CC

With China, India and Korea all representing growing markets, Apple’s expanding into more countries than ever here in 2014. One place you’d be forgiven for not expecting Tim Cook and co. to show up in, however, is Iran.

It seems that this assumption may be wrong, though, as according to the Wall Street Journal, Apple is in preliminary contact with U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, as well as Iranian distributors, about possibly entering the country should Western sanctions ease sufficiently.

Apple Watch UI comes to jailbroken iPhones

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Apple Watch UI comes to the iPhone. GIF: Lucas Menge.
Apple Watch UI comes to the iPhone. GIF: Lucas Menge

iPhone owners who can’t wait for the Apple Watch can now change their home screens to a fresh interface inspired by Apple’s wearable UI, thanks to a hack for jailbroken devices.

This new tweak replaces the existing iOS look and feel — which has remained conceptually unchanged since the debut of the iPhone back in 2007 — with circular, bubble-looking icons that users can zoom in and out of to find their apps easier.

While the mod started out as nothing more than a concept, another developer has taken the idea and run with it, constructing a tweak called WatchSpring that replaces a jailbroken iOS 8 device’s SpringBoard with a working Apple Watch-style home screen.

Here’s how you get hold of it.

Cheaper iPhones? Don’t bet on it, says Apple exec

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Photo: Re/Code
Apple exec Greg Joswiak at the Code/Mobile conference. Photo: TechCrunch

Particularly as Apple extends its tentacles overseas into new markets like China and India, many pundits have suggested that Cupertino needs to make low-cost iPhones to compete with lower-end Android devices.

So will it? According to Apple’s product marketing executive Greg Joswiak the answer is a resounding, emphatic “hell no!”

Speed is the secret sauce in Taco Bell’s tasty new app

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Photo: Alex Heath/ Cult of Mac

It’s not like bagging a burrito at Taco Bell takes a long time, but the fast-food chain’s hot new mobile app makes ordering unbelievably fast and frictionless.

The app promises that you’ll be able to order anything off the menu, pay for it, and have it prepared for you when you arrive. Not quite revolutionary, but a deliberate stab at modernizing the drive-thru experience. Order from your iPhone, and you get to skip the line.

It’s not every day that I get to write about Taco Bell, so I jumped at the opportunity to give it a test drive. Here’s my experience with the Taco Bell app from start to finish:

This picture of a wet monkey using an iPhone won a prestigious award

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This picture won a Wildlife Photographer Of The Year award. Photo: Marsel Van Oosten
This picture won its photographer a Wildlife Photographer Of The Year award. Photo: Marsel Van Oosten

The top awards for the 50th Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards have been announced at London’s Natural History Museum. More than 42,000 entries from 96 countries were submitted this year, making it the biggest event in the history of the awards.

There were many incredible entries, but the one that really grabbed us was the beautiful photo you see above, taken by Marsel Van Oosten, an extraordinarily talented photographer from the Netherlands. It shows a Japanese monkey submerged in water, using an iPhone.

iOS concept imagines the iPhone with Apple Watch’s bubbly interface

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Apple Watch UI comes to the iPhone. GIF: Lucas Menge.
Apple Watch UI comes to the iPhone. GIF: Lucas Menge.

The user interface for iOS hasn’t changed much since the introduction of ‘iPhone OS’ back in 2007. Sure, Jony Ive has added some tweaks over the last few years, but you still swipe around between rows of tiled icons.

Apple’s UI for the Apple Watch though is radically different that iPhone, with circular app icons on a homescreen that can users can zoom in and out of to find their apps easier, so Lucas Menge decided to take the pretty bubbly design and bring it to the iPhone. The results are pretty amazing and bring an entirely new look to the iPhone homescreen.

Check out the full demo below:

This app turns your iPhone into a handheld 3D scanner

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GIF by Dacuda.
GIF by Dacuda.

Do you take pictures of all your meals to share with your friends on Facebook and Instagram? Wish there was a way to share even more of it with your FOMO-ing virtual friends?

Well, you can’t share the taste, or the smell, but 3DAround is an upcoming iOS app that lets you share the food you’re eating in all of its three-dimensional glory. And you can do it with other things too.

How to use OS X Yosemite to send texts from your Mac

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In the past, using the Messages app on a Mac could be an irritating experience. And what if a friend dared to send a green-bubble text from an Android phone? When texting from your Mac, messaging those friends wasn’t possible until now.

In today’s Cult of Mac video, find out how to enable Text Message Forwarding between your iPhone and Mac. With iOS 8.1 and Yosemite installed, enjoying this seamless feature is just a few short taps and clicks away. Find out how to do it all in this speedy tutorial.

Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV to catch all our latest videos.

Facebook reinvents the chat room with Rooms for iOS

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Create a Room for whatever you're into. Photo: Facebook
Create a Room for whatever you're into. Photo: Facebook

It turns out that the rumored app that Facebook has been working on isn’t an anonymous chat app, but rather a platform that lets you create your own chat room right on your iPhone.

Basically, Rooms is an iPhone app — soon coming to Android — that lets you make tiny message boards to post photos, videos, and text to. You’ll create a different username and identity for each Room you create or visit, and you’ll let other people join via a QR code you can generate and share via the internet or in real life.

Head developer Josh Miller told The Verge, “We’re not trying to build the next Snapchat — we’re trying to build the next WordPress.”

Is Apple building James Bond’s car remote into your iPhone?

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James Bond takes his BMW for a spin in Tomorrow Never Dies. Photo: United Artists Pictures
James Bond takes his BMW for a spin in Tomorrow Never Dies. Photo: United Artists Pictures

Your iPhone can make payments, control your smart home, and track your health — and soon it might be able to control your car, as well.

A new patent published Thursday describes a way of using the iPhone’s geo-location capabilities to intelligently monitor and control certain car functions, based on “geofences.”

Likely pairing with Apple’s vehicle-based OS, CarPlay, the patent notes how your car could be tracked in relation to your iPhone — with appropriate signals, sent using Bluetooth LE, to execute functions like locking your car and arming its alarm when you are a certain distance from the vehicle.

Apple could sell record-breaking 62 million iPhones this quarter

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iPhone
iPhone 6 and 6 Plus Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Photo: Jim Merithew

The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus may be Apple’s best-selling iPhones in history, racking up a massive 10 million+ sales in their first weekend alone, but how does this massive success translate into numbers going forward?

Ahead of today’s Apple earnings call, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has taken a shot at forecasting how the rest of the year may play out, in a research note to investors. His guess? All in, Apple can expect to sell between 56.7 million and 62.7 million iPhones this quarter.

If Munster’s on the money, that means unit sales of the iPhone could leap between 25 to 45% compared with the previous quarter last year. Not bad, huh?

iPhone 6 lines in NYC are still bigger than big a month after launch

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One month after the iPhone 6 launched and the lines in NYC are still massive. Photo: Walter Piecyk

Tim Cook called the iPhone 6 the fastest-selling smartphone in history during yesterday’s Apple event. It’s set a new high-water mark for the most first-month orders ever, and if you need any more evidence, just look at this line outside the Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York City today.

It’s been a month since the iPhone 6 launched and the line is still down the street. Unlike a month ago, Asian resellers can’t be blamed for the length, as China just got its fingers all over the bigger-than-big displays this morning.

Apple didn’t announce how many iPhones it sold in the first month – although we might find out during Monday’s earnings call – but with 32 countries accepting orders in the first few weeks, and another 36 getting it this month, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are poised to be Apple’s biggest cash machines ever.

Check out this amazing ‘working’ iPhone in Minecraft

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Photo:
Photo: SHUFFLE/YouTube

In a game where you can build anything you want, it was only going to be so long before someone constructed an iPhone in Minecraft.

Even with that said, however, the version of Apple’s iconic handset which one player put together is impressive; being not just a block-based reconstruction of the iPhone’s outward appearance — but a slavish recreation of the iPhone UX, complete with iOS apps.

Just add iPhone to these costumes for total Halloween domination

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I can *see* you. Screengrab: Digital Dudz
I can *see* you. Screengrab: Digital Dudz

You know you hate showing up to the Halloween party with that lame generic pirate costume. We all do, but we all end up doing it.

Then there’s those of us who want to make the coolest, most unique costume ever. But we never do, because, let’s face it, we just don’t have the time.

Your solution, then, just may be these amazing just-add-iPhone costumes from Digital Dudz. You buy the mask or shirt, download a free app, and you’re suddenly the best costume at the party. Check out the video below to see how it all works.

Finnish prime minister accuses Apple of crashing his country’s economy

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Photo: Estonian Foreign Ministry/Flickr
Finnish prime minister Alexander Stubb. Photo: Estonian Foreign Ministry/Flickr

People blame Apple for the craziest things: from crafting metal devices that bend if you apply enough pressure, to giving out free albums, to — now — crashing national economies.

Today’s “gate” incident (Finnishgate?) comes from Finland Prime Minister Alexander Stubb, who blames the iPhone maker for bringing down two of his country’s biggest exports: Nokia and paper.

“The iPhone killed Nokia and the iPad killed the paper industry, but we’ll make a comeback,” Alexander Stubb told an interviewer for CNBC.