Remember those summer days of yore, playing in the pool with your friends, and one of you would close your eyes and yell out Marco? And all your buddies, who got to keep their eyes open, yelled Polo!*
Now you can find wherever you’ve lost your iPhone in your house, car, or office cubicle by shouting at it with the nifty and useful new app, Marco Polo: Find Your Phone by Shouting MARCO!, which may be the longest name for an app, ever.
Marco! Polo! Marco! … Polo!
We’re mixing Sunday Tips a little for the next two weeks, with 10 great, quick tips for your iPhone, some of which hopefully you don’t know about yet.
Make sure to check back next week for the last 5 tips and visit our Youtube channel, for all great videos, 7 days a week!
Everyone with a car has tried using an iPhone holder in their vehicle at some point. Unfortunately, many of these gadget grabbers simply don’t cut it. Well, the Kenu Airframe is the solution.
Enter the Cult of Mac giveaway: We have three Airframes to give away to three viewers who like and comment on our video review and subscribe to the Cult of Mac channel on YouTube, thanks to the folks over at Kenu. Winners will be picked at random and entries end Saturday, May 31, 2014.
Stare deeply into the crystal ball ...
We get slammed 24/7 with new Apple rumors. Some are accurate, most are not. To give you a clue about what’s really coming out of Cupertino in the future, we’re busting out our rumor debunker each week to blow up the nonsense.
As another week passes your host Joshua Smith is here to give you a wrap-up on some of the latest and biggest news features. The return of cassettes, iPhone 6 release dates and Flappy Bird 2 are among just some of the featured stories in today’s rundown. Take a look at the video and be sure to return next week for another.
Subscribe to CultOfMacTV on youtube.com to catch new episodes of the roundup and other great video reviews, how-to’s and more.
Whether you’re listening to music or watching a video on your iPhone, sometimes you just want to have the volume loud. While your iPhone may have decent sound on it’s own, Speck’s new CandyShell AMPED case claims to have a fix to boost your volume even more. Advertised to have up to 2X louder sound and clarity, all while maintaining quality protection, will this become your new go-to iPhone case?
Take a look at the video to see what you think.
While the world has gone crazy over iOS games like Flappy Bird and 2048, it’s inevitable for a newcomer to steal the spotlight. The new app 100 Balls is a simplistic yet challenging new arcade game that has stormed the app charts. Tap to release balls into rotating cups making sure not to leave a cup amiss. How long do you think you can last?
Take a look at the video to see what you think.
Nintendo won’t bring its popular game franchises to iOS, and Apple won’t allow emulators in the App Store. In order to play titles like Super Mario and Zelda on your iPhone, then, you have to look at unofficial alternatives. GBA4iOS was one of the most popular — but after its creators received a DMCA notice from Nintendo this week, it is no more.
The iPhone has hit a new all-time high when it comes to market share in Japan: representing a massive 36.6% of all Japanese smartphones in the first quarter of 2014.
This increase, which is up from last year’s 25.5%, was driven by Apple’s deal with NTT DoCoMo, a.k.a. Japan’s largest carrier. Apple launched the iPhone 5s and 5c with NTT DoCoMo back in September, and sales have been rocketing upwards ever since. Sales have proven so good, in fact, that Apple recently moved Doug Beck, chief of sales for Japan and Korea, over to handle the North American beat — where it is hoped he can apply some of the same sales mojo to increasing U.S. market share.
A new survey, reportedly taken from a sample of 50,000 smartphone users around the world, reveals the reasons consumers made the phone purchasing decisions they did.
According to IDC’s findings, battery life is the number one most important factor when it comes to choosing a smartphone — coming above ease of use, screen size, camera resolution, and touch screen. When asked, almost half of all iPhone owners quizzed named battery life as the main reason for their selecting the device.
The iWatch may be set to mark Apple’s debut into health and fitness tracking, but one company is taking the concept of wearables a step further.
The forthcoming $199 OMsignal shirt promises to be the gym wear of the future — featuring a ton of health sensors sewn into its fabric, which constantly monitor the condition of the wearer. Sensors are capable of tracking heart rate, breathing rate, breathing volume, movement (including steps and cadence), movement intensity, heart rate variability, and calories burned.
“The data is sent via Bluetooth to a specially developed iPhone app, which lets you see all of it in real time,” says Dr. Jesse Slade Shantz, the firm’s Chief Medical Officer. “Your iPhone beams the data up to the cloud, and algorithms we’ve developed then push back various metrics — showing you information about your breathing during workouts, and information like that.”
It’s easy to quickly fill up your camera roll on your iOS device with tons of different photos. While you have photos of different types and categories, creating albums is good to maintain a sort of organization and sanity on your device. In today’s episode of Cult of Mac’s how-to learn how to add new photos to your existing albums and more.
Take a look at the video to see what to do.
This time on The CultCast: No, those rumored new EarPods won’t measure your pulse. Last week’s biggest Apple rumor was a fake made up by a guy on a toilet! Plus, why you shouldn’t expect new hardware at June’s WWDC; iPhone warns you when the NSA wants you for drug trafficking; Apple’s newest executive gets a HUGE payday; Katie Cotton, Apple’s long time PR lead and Steve Jobs confidant, calls it quits; Cupertino will take on Samsung with more Guerrilla-style marketing; and since you asked, we reveal the jobs we’ve always wanted on an all-new Get To Know Your Cultist.
Have a few LOLs while we catch you up on each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the audio adventure begin!
Our thanks to Smile Software for supporting this episode! If you haven’t tried TextExpander from Smile software, you’re missing out on one of the most useful apps available for the Mac. With TextExpander, you’ll save time and effort by expanding short abbreviations into frequently-used text and pictures. Try it out yourself for free at smilesoftware.com/cultcast.
Click on for the show notes.
It’s time to turn your living room into a fun-filled recreation room with this iPhone-controlled, missile-firing helicopter.
We’ve seen our share of flying machines, but this iHelicopter is – in terms of ease-of-use and fun factors – one of the best we’ve seen. And we’ve got it for only $9.95 for a limited time!
The best type of charging cable is the one you have on you. So stay prepared and leave that tangled mess behind with ChargeCard.
ChargeCard is your iPhone lightning cable, shaped like a credit card. It’s designed to fit into your wallet so you’ll always have a charging/sync cable on hand. And Cult of Mac Deals has it available for just $24.99 for a limited time.
Nokia’s incredible PureView camera technology is one of the reasons why so many Android users were desperate to see the Finnish firm ditch Windows Phone and bring Google’s platform to its flagship smartphones instead — and you could soon see the same technology in future iPhones.
Apple has used Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Nokia’s handset business as an opportunity to poach executives who are seeking new challenges, and the Cupertino company has just hired Lumia engineer and PureView camera expert Ari Partinen.
The CAZLET from KYNEZ is an iPhone wallet case like no other. It’s the only one I know of that provides military-grade protection for your beloved smartphone, and it’s one of the few that allows you to use your device — and almost all of its features and functions — without having to open the wallet up.
CAZLET’s design leaves your iPhone’s display exposed yet protected, so as soon as you pull it out of your pocket, your device is ready to be used. It’s made from gorgeous leather sourced from boutique tanneries in France and Southern Germany, and it boasts some nifty features you don’t normally get with smartphone wallet cases — including dedicated pockets for a spare nanoSIM and SIM eject tool.
KYNEZ also offers a number of add-ons that you can buy separately, including a coin pocket, a card band, a hand strap, and an ID sleeve. The wallet itself comes with a $65 price tag, which I think is very reasonable. Let me tell you why.
The smartphone wars are two company race and it’s not even close.
Apple and Samsung are dominating the competition so badly that a new report from Canaccord Genuity claims the two tech giants account for 106% of global smartphone profits.
Take a look at this chart:
Your usual prepackaged USB charging cable gets the job done for a short time. But after a month or so of life on the go, you find it damaged, knotted and unreliable. Cult of Mac Deals has a cable that will help you make that inconvenience a thing of the past.
The 10Ft Bungee Charging Cable features resistant nylon material is strong enough to keep damage away and the cord from tangling, so you won’t get the mess or the headache from for all your wild times. And Cult of Mac Deals has this cable available for only $11.99 for a limited time.
For many users, the quality and accessibility of the iPhone camera means that it is the only camera we need on a regular basis. It may be about to get a whole lot better, too, according to a patent application published by Apple on Thursday — describing a new “super-resolution” mode.
What makes the patent interesting (apart from that it promises higher quality images) is that it suggests that picture resolution could be ramped up without needing more megapixels.
As more and more smartphones are released with all new features, it’s not difficult for the average iPhone user to become slightly envious. In today’s how-to, learn how to use one of the iPhone’s coolest features that isn’t so commonly known. Click the home button, turn your volume up and down, and so much more by simply following these steps and moving your head.
Take a look at the video to see what you need to do.
The passionate affair burned for decades before Samsung came snapping celebrity selfies with Ellen at the Oscars and dishing out enough paid endorsements to finance the next Star Wars trilogy.
Apple plans to fight back with its own buzz marketer in New York to keep its products in the hands of the elite and glamorous. But Cupertino has never had a problem getting its products on the big screen and into the coolest TV shows — even though Apple swears it doesn’t pay a dime for product placements. Here are 18 of the most iconic Apple cameos to hit the screen.
Apple came out on top of its legal battle against Samsung in U.S. federal court last week, and even though the iPhone-maker was ordered to pay a small fee to Samsung, the jury came back to the courthouse in San Jose CA this morning to award more damages to Apple.
The federal jury awarded Apple $4 million in additional damages this morning, after it was discovered last week that one Samsung product violated one patent, but the jury failed to award damages.
Despite Apple’s claims that email attachments are safely locked away with data encryption in iOS 7, a new report has found that all your email attachments have been vulnerable and unencrypted for months.
This week we check out the best iPhone cases for using underwater. And seeing as the only reason to take an iPhone underwater is to snap pictures, we’re looking specifically at the camera capabilities.