iPhone - page 266

Macworld/iWorld 2013 is coming in just two days, and Cult of Mac will be there, reporting live from the showfloor.

Macworld has an amazing history of being the launching pad for some world changing products.  The iPhone debuted at Macworld. So did the MacBook Air. And iTunes. Again and again, products announced at Macworld have shifted the very pillars of technology.

Macworld is more than just a celebration on everything that is wonderful about iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apps, and the people who use them. It’s a summit that measures the very pulse of Cupertino’s incredible impact upon the world around us. With Apple at the top of it’s game, it’s more important than ever.

Not convinced? Here’s a ten minute history of the last 15 years of Macworld.

Apple and the U.S. carriers have always had a bittersweet relationship. Carriers love Apple because the iPhone brings people into their stores, but carriers are also pressured by Apple to pay high subsidies so that Apple can maintain its high profit margins.

Given that there’s way more competition for the iPhone these days, Apple’s chokehold on the industry is starting to loosen. Carriers are trying new business models for selling smartphones. T-Mobile recently announced that it would be doing away with subsidized two-year contracts altogether. Instead, customers will pay a cheaper price up front for a device like the iPhone and then pay monthly installments towards the full price of the phone.

Carriers want to drive retail prices down on smartphones so more people will buy, and Apple may have to adapt to that model in the near future.

Fact: I was once taking some notes about an exhibit in a gallery/museum in Berlin and a guard told me to stop using my cellphone. It was in fact an iPod touch, but whatever – try explaining that to a German security guard when you can’t speak German.

If I’d been in Gabriele Meldaikyte’s art exhibit, though, I could have continued pinching, tapping, swiping (and giving the finger to the guard) without even touching my “phone.” How? Interactivity.

We all know dealing with PDF files can be a pain. We’ve all had a PDF file that we’ve wanted to modify in some form or another and found ourselves only to be left with no real way to do it. But thanks to iPhone Hacks and PDFPen, those days are over.

PDFpen is your simple solution to making all of your PDF dreams come true. It offers a powerful editing capability – one that is unmatched at this price! With this Cult of Mac Deals offer, you can get PDFpen for only $30 (50% off) you can get this stellar piece of software that will become an integral part of your document workflow.

A mobile phone in the hands of your kid can be a liability. But it can also be guardian angel — it all depends on how it’s used. MobileKids is a free iPhone and Android app that enhances a phone’s guardian angel-like qualities while putting the liabilities on lockdown.

This is the Scandock, a $480 stand that turns your iPhone or Android handset into a better scanner. There are already some great scanner apps out there — here’s an iOS example, and here’s one for Android, both of which are around $5. The Scandock is almost a whopping 100 times more expensive, but claims improved results.

George Hotz is known to his legions of online fans as “geohot,” the infamous hacker who was the first to unlock the iPhone and crack the Sony PS3. Hotz has been flying under the radar lately, but he’s about to make his first foray into the App Store with a new iPhone app.

The app is called Reactions, and it’s currently being reviewed by Apple. The idea is relatively simple, and it has the potential to either be a massive flop or make it big. It’s photo sharing with a twist.

There are weather apps, and then there are weather apps; Nooly is, apparently, the latter. Nooly is so accurate, its press release claims, the app “is capable of predicting the exact minute it will rain or snow and can do so effectively, wherever you are, for every 0.4 square miles.” That’s pretty precise.

Are you the kind of person who jumps up at the end of a movie, skipping the credits to get to the parking lot (or restroom – thanks, giant soda tub) before everyone else? If so, you’ve probably missed some pretty neat after credit experiences, called stingers. These are extra little bits of movie, teasers, or even bloopers, that are shown after the credits roll to reward the die-hard movie goers for their patience. The recent run of Marvel movies, for example, all teased the eventual Avengers movie at the end of Captain America, The Hulk, and Iron Man. If you left early, you’d have missed it.

Luckily, now, there’s an app to make sure you never do, and, conversely, you don’t sit around for an entire credit roll for no reason.

You’ve probably seen quite a few headlines today about Twitter’s new Vine iPhone app displaying pornography. Vine went live in the App Store last week, and the video sharing service has garnered quite a bit of attention due to its parent company, Twitter.

Vine was made an Editors’ Choice by Apple in the App Store, but the app has been de-promoted following all the porn hubbub. Apple has yet to give an official comment on the issue or pull Vine from the App Store completely.

What does all this mean for Vine, and more importantly, the App Store’s policies on porn?

You should never steal an iPhone while wearing pink shoes. It doesn’t sound like a piece of vital information, but in the hard streets of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park it is, because those pink little things are going to get you caught.

One thief learned that lesson the hard way, after he stole an iPhone from a girl, and then the iPhone he stole was stolen, and then both of them got busted. It’s a crazy story, but it goes something like this:

Jailbreaking your iPhone gives you the ability to tweak and customize nearly every facet of iOS, but new jailbreaks are few and far between these days. For example, there still hasn’t been a full jailbreak for iOS 6 from last summer, although one is on the distant horizon.

People jailbreak their iPhones for all sorts of reasons, whether it be free tethering, themes, or quick access to settings. The most common reason to jailbreak is actually more of a philosophy. There are millions of iPhone owners out there who want to be able to have greater control over their iOS experience. What if you want to hide stock apps you don’t use, or even just get rid of your carrier logo?

Fortunately, you can actually do those last two things on a non-jailbroken iPhone with relative ease, and here’s how:

We’ve been waiting a long time for an iOS 6 jailbreak to be released, and hopefully we won’t have to wait much longer. The iOS 6.1 jailbreak sounds like it’s going to be awesome because almost everyone will be able to use it, and it will be an untethered jailbreak which is always nice.

Making things even better, Evad3rs, the team behind the upcoming jailbreak, let it be known today that the upcoming iOS 6.1 untethered jailbreak will work on every device that can run iOS 6.1. That’s a whopping 22 devices in total, and maybe even 23 if the Apple TV 2 update is out in time.

Sometimes you see product concepts that straight blow your mind or make you scratch your head. The UpperCup does both.

This iPhone case comes from Amsterdam-based company Natwerk, and the creators are trying to raise $25,000 on Indiegogo to begin production. It will retail for $35, and backers get $5 off.

Source: UpperCup

Everything is amazing and nobody is happy.

When comedian Louis C.K. famously expressed that notion on Conan, he was making a commentary on the public’s instantly acquired sense of entitlement when confronted with new technology.

His observations are also applicable to the assumptions underlying nearly all the stuff you read about consumer electronics by bloggers, journalists and financial analysts.

The gnashing of teeth and ripping of hair over with everything Apple these days is a perfect example. 

For the first time, we’re rolling our weekly must-have apps and games features into one to make them a little easier to digest. Kicking off this week’s roundup is an awesome new Ghostbusters game in which you’ll be freeing New York City from some creepy spooks and spirits. We also have a brand new video sharing app from Twitter called Vine, a great little app that’ll help you pack for your next trip, and more. Read on for this week’s best iOS releases.

The iTunes library on your Mac can get a bit unwieldy at times, right? It can become disorganized, with duplicate tracks, multiple spellings for one artist, and a bunch of other oddities that can keep it from being in the bast shape possible. There’s nothing worse than having to go through a messy iTunes library – and that’s where this Cult of Mac Deals offer comes in.

Leawo Tunes Cleaner for Mac is the intelligent iTunes cleanup tool that will allow you to transform your iTunes to perfection with only a couple of clicks. And for a limited time you can get it for just $5 – 83% off the regular price!

This morning we told you about how the iPad 5 will look a lot like an iPad mini with a 10-inch Retina display. iLounge’s report also said that Apple is preparing the rumored less-expensive iPhone to sell in China at a significantly cheaper price.

Now iLounge has shared some additional details regarding the iPhone 5S, namely that one of the next-gen device’s flagship features will be an upgraded camera. Apple’s internal code names for the iPad 5 and second-gen iPad mini have also been revealed.

This is what I wrote earlier this month, strung out on CES and showing it at the edges:

“With irritating regularity, my girlfriend and I dance the same dance. She, or I, go to bed with our iPhones. She, or I, lose it somewhere within the ocean of the bedfolds. She, or I, find ourselves apoplectic. She, or I, demands that the other calls the phone to locate. And then she, or I, realize that we’ve lost our phone too. And then we murder each other into a spattering of bloody chunks in our festering rage, somehow to reconstitute ourselves, temporarily find our iPhones and begin this amphisbaena dance anew.”

The guys behind HipKey, a keychain dongle that can track your iPhone (and vice versa), were paying attention, and so they sent me over a unit for review. I’m not sure it’s revolutionized my life, but it sure has simplified it: now, instead of constantly worrying about misplacing my keys or my iPhone, I only have to worry about misplacing both at the same time.

We rarely think of frequency spectrums to be a finite resources, but some of the wireless carriers in the U.S. are already bumping into their limits. Spectrum issues can lead to a network slowdown, like the one we saw last summer, and the only way to get more is to buy it.

To beef up their network, AT&T announced today that they have agreed to acquire spectrum in the 700 MHz band from Verizon Wireless. The deal covers 18 states and will cost AT&T $1.9 billion in cash.

Apple’s fifth-generation iPad is expected to finally ditch the existing design and adopt a new form factor that’s said to be much like the iPad mini’s, according to a new report that has surfaced today. A physical model of the device indicates it will be significantly smaller in almost every way, with virtually no bezel down the sides of the display.

As for the iPhone 5S, that’s expected to be very similar to the iPhone 5 — as you may have guessed; while Apple’s new low-cost iPhone, which will reportedly launch some time this year, will be built with China Mobile’s 700 million customers in mind.

From Saturday, January 26, you’ll have to ask your carrier to unlock your smartphone if you wish to use it on another network. It will become illegal to do so yourself using unauthorized unlocking methods — even if your contract has run its course and you no longer have a commitment with the original provider.

Google Currents 2.0, the latest edition of Google’s magazine-like news reader, has today arrived on iOS — just over a month after it launched on Android. The update brings a whole host of new features and improvements, including the edition sidebar, fast scan, and breaking stories ranked by Google News.

The official YouTube Capture for iPhone and iPod touch has today been updated to introduce support for 1080p video uploading — a feature which many felt should have been included from day one. Prior to this update, which also promises improvements to audio sync and upload speeds, users were limited to uploads in 720p resolution.

Siri has enjoyed mild success since her debut on the iPhone 4S. She’s not the world’s greatest personal assistant, but she gets the job done most of the time, which is better than a lot of other voice recognition options out there.

Now Amazon is preparing to do battle with Siri thanks to a new digital assistant they just bought. Her name’s IVONA, and we’re pretty sure it’s not the same Ivona from Austin Powers.