iPhone - page 276

 SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/iWORLD 2013 – I don’t believe in covering my gorgeous iPhone with a case. I want it to be naked. Free. Yes, it might gather some battle scars in the process, but I think those give it character. I also don’t use a case because I just don’t want any extra bulk in my pocket, and most cases add a half inch of thickness to my svelte iPhone 5.

TwelveSouth has heard the complaints of iPhone users like me who hate using cases. They know that some of us don’t want to hide the iPhone’s beautiful design. They know I just want to be able to slip it in and out of my pocket with ease. But they also know I worry that my screen is going to get scratched or shatter, and they think they have the perfect solution.

The upcoming evasi0n jailbreak that will will allow users to hack iOS devices running Apple’s latest iOS 6.1 firmware has been completed for Mac and Windows ahead of its public release. The team behind it the exploit confirmed the update on Twitter this morning. All that remains is the Linux client and “some testing.”

The new year is well underway, and we’ve got a bundle lined up for you here at Cult of Mac Deals that will help you make the most of your Mac over the months to come. And the best part is that you’ll get all 8 of these time-savings apps for free as part of The Mac Freebie Bundle.

I did something really dumb in Vegas last month — I forgot my sunglasses in a Starbucks. A couple of hours after trapsing through a mall, I realized what I’d done, and panicked; they weren’t cheap. I anxiously retraced my steps, ending up back at the cafe. Some fabulous Samaritan had turned them in.

If I’d left my phone behind instead — or something else large enough for a FinderCodes tag (sunglasses aren’t) — the good guy (or girl) could have easily FedExed it to me anonymously.

For all those unilingual schmos who’ve thought they were telling some lucky foreigner “hey, I like the cut of your jib” in another tongue, but instead said something like “you chicken dance the burning planets,” I sympathize. And also laugh. To make up for the laughing, here’s a tip — a trick app to pull out next time: Sendboo. It’s a free app that automatically translates your “hey, baby” to “olá, bebê” — or into 29 other languages besides Portuguese. Fantástico.

Despite the fact that she uses an iPhone, Alicia Keys joined BlackBerry’s CEO onstage today to announce her new position at the company as “Global Creative Director.” After giving a creepy analogy about her and BlackBerry “exclusively dating,” Keys skirted a question about what phone she used before her BlackBerry. That’s probably because she was a self-proclaimed “iPhone junky.”

The idea of a famous artist/non-technology expert like Alicia Keys getting in bed with BlackBerry may seem weird, but this isn’t something new. For years struggling tech companies have been using faux-celebrity partnerships and endorsements as a desperate plea for attention.

RIM’s European managing director, Stephen Barnes, was interviewed on BBC Radio 5 this morning about the new BlackBerry 10 system and phones coming down the line.

The host of the interview repeatedly asks direct, clear questions about what RIM has learned from Apple’s iPhone.

Barnes hilariously refuses to even acknowledge the word iPhone, let alone that RIM has obviously taken several pages from Apple’s smartphone book. Even, worse, he sounds scared.

Ok, get it out of your system. I’ll wait.

Ahem. So, by one-handed reading, I’m really talking about being able to hold your iPad mini or iPhone in your left or right hand, much like you can with a dedicated eReader device, like a Nook Simple Touch or a Kindle. The ones with buttons on them allow you to hold the reader in one hand, like you would with a paperback while lying in a sun chair by the pool, or in bed at night.

Here’s how to make your iPad or iPhone work more like that.

Apple’s Find My iPhone led San Francisco police on a 90MPH car chase last night which ultimately led to the arrest of three suspected armed robbers.

My normally sleepy neighborhood in San Francisco has been plagued recently with a string of violent and scary armed street robberies.

For the last week or so, a gang of violent perps have been robbing people of gadgets like their iPhones at gunpoint. But last night, an iPhone hit them back.

It’s official: the BlackBerry Z10, the first smartphone to ship with the new BlackBerry 10 operating system, and what many believe is the last chance for BlackBerry (formerly RIM) to save itself from complete irrelevance.

The early reviews of the Z10 aren’t bad, but aren’t great, pretty much agreeing that the smartphone is just good enough to buy BlackBerry some time. But how does it stack up, spec-for-spec, against the iPhone 5 and some of Android’s top phones? We’ve put together a chart for you to see for yourself.

Want to know why a carrier like Sprint is willing to promise Apple almost $16 billion to get the iPhone on their network, or why carriers put up with paying astronomical subsidies just to get a single iPhone customer on their network?

As usual, it all comes down to the crisp, president-branded cabbage. According to a new study, almost 60% of iPhone users spend more than $100 a month on their wireless plan, compared to only 53% of Android users.

Mextures are free 2000px x 200px images for adding textures to your iPhone photos. Mextures come from photographer Merek Davis, hence the name: Merek; textures: Mextures!

It can be easy to get “unlocking” and “jailbreaking” confused, but the two terms mean totally different things. Unlocking refers to freeing your phone to work on any carrier instead of just the one you bought it on. Jailbreaking is the process of circumventing Apple’s security measures in iOS to install tweaks, hacks, and mods that aren’t allowed in the App Store.

The U.S. Library of Congress has ruled that it is now illegal for you to unlock your smartphone if it was bought after January 26th, 2013. Carriers can still legally unlock your device for you, but it’s illegal to go through a third-party unlock vendor.

Jailbreaking your iPhone has been kept legal through 2015 under an exemption in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The crazy catch is that jailbreaking the iPad has technically been made illegal, while the iPhone and iPod touch both remain exempt. So jailbreaking is safe mostly, but unofficial unlocking is not. This is important to mention as the iOS 6.1 jailbreak approaches.

Keeping up with the U.S. legal system is very confusing, so what does all this unlocking and jailbreaking legal jargon mean for you?

Apple is famous for its attention to detail and making the smallest tweaks to hardware and software most people wouldn’t even notice. It’s kind of silly to get excited about tiny animation details in iOS, but to us, they’re a sign that Apple really cares about its products.

Along with the new lockscreen music controls for iOS 6.1, Apple added some new light reflection details on the lockscreen as well.  Now, instead of the music player bar being a flat surface, there is a small amount of light reflecting between the Pause button and Volume slider that moves as you tilt your device. Apple added a similar light feature to the volume slider knobs in iOS 6.0, so and it looks like it’s slowly creeping its way through the rest of iOS.

Here’s a video of the tiny feature in action:

Sorting your photos into albums is a great way to only show off the photos you want to to the people you want to show them off to (follow that?). It’s also the way some third party apps, like Instagram or Camera +, will sort the photos you edit within them. Renaming those albums, however, isn’t entirely intuitive. Here’s how to do it, simply and quickly, right from the comfort of your own iOS device.

If you’re an iPhone lover, this video of an excavator destroying one hundred and twenty-seven iPhones underneath its treads is sure to stand your hair on end. It’s like watching a bulldozer dig a mass grave.

Don’t worry, though: these aren’t real iPhones, convincing as they might seem. They’re merely convincing replicants.

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.