Before the touchscreen iPhone was revealed at MacWorld in 2007, Apple had a team of engineers working on a click-wheel phone that was kind of like a mashup of an iPod and a phone. It was never released, but the work that went into it is pretty fascinating.
In an interview with TechCrunch, former Apple engineer and Nest co-founder Matt Rogers talks about what it was like to work on the click-wheel iPhone when no one else at the company even knew Apple was developing a phone.
There’s so much wordplay to be had in this post that if I start now, I might just forget to write about the product itself. So if you want dick jokes and Star Wars references, you’ll find them at the end of this post. In the meantime, let’s take a look at Richard Solo’s horribly-named FreeWheelin Audio System For Helmets.
Sick, enraged or just plain glum about the fact that your new iPhone 5 won’t work with your multiple and expensive speaker docks? Then you should probably lose that sense of entitlement.
Or you could move to Brazil (where an iPhone costs the same as a small private plane, more or less) and start buying paper magazines. Because a recent Coca Cola ad turns a copy of Capricho magazine into a passive cylindrical speaker dock.
Remember those novelty retro cellphone handsets? The ones with curly cords that attached to your handset’s proprietary connector and made it look like you were making a call on a rotary telephone circa 1970? In the pub?
Well, the Swissvoice ePure is something like that, only more useful, and way, way cooler looking.
A study conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found a massive boom in tablets over the last 12 months, with 25% of American adults now owning a tablet of their own. As you might expect, the iPad is the most popular device out there at the moment, claiming more than 52% of the market. But that may not be the case for too long.
Android tablets are rapidly catching up, and in the not-so-distant future, there’s a good chance they will be king.
To celebrate its twentieth anniversary, Slashdot persuaded former Apple co-founder and everyone’s favorite geek Steve Wozniak to answer some questions thrown at him by the site’s readers. Woz took the time to answer a number of questions on Apple and his thoughts on how the company is doing without Steve Jobs at the helm, jailbreaking, the iPhone, and more.
Here are some of his best responses.
We had a sneaking suspicion Samsung would add the iPhone 5 to its patent infringement complaint against Apple shortly after the device made its debut. And the Korean electronics giant has now done exactly that, asking Judge Paul Grewal for permission to include the device in its latest countersuit against Apple.
Having spent far too much time and money trying to mount an iPad onto the handlebars of my bike, I know all about fastenings both simple and complex. And I also know when to quit with the DIY and just drop some cash.
The Satechi Bikemate Slim 3 isn't big enough for the iPad, but it will fit iPhones both tall and fat, and its mounting is both simple and easy to use.
In a post by Jeff Atwood over at the excellent Coding Horror, there’s this brilliant chart showing the “hyperbolic performance improvement” of the iPhone since it first debuted in 2008. As Jeff points out, in just five years, the iPhone has seen a factor of 20 performance improvement in Browsermark and a factor of four improvement in GeekBench, at least doubling performance every year.
Apple has issued its first software update to the iPhone 5 just over a week after the handset was released — but you’ll only see it if you’re on Verizon. No, the update doesn’t make Maps work. Instead, it “resolves an issue in which, under certain circumstances, iPhone 5 may use Verizon cellular data while the phone is connected to a Wi-Fi network.”
SAN FRANCISCO, JailbreakCon 2012 — Apple has Twitter and Facebook integration in iOS 6, but for some reason you can’t easily share the music you’re listening to with friends. Apple has never been great at social music discovery (just ask Ping), but it’s surprising that there’s still no sharing integration in the native Music app. Sometimes you just want to tweet a song you’re enjoying or email the track listing to a loved one. That’s where Scale, a new jailbreak tweak for the iPhone, comes in.
Unveiled by Joshua Tucker at JailbreakCon, Scale adds a new button in the Music app for sharing your tunes over Twitter, Facebook, email, or iMessage.
Kicking off this week’s must-have apps roundup is an awesome new Twitter client that reminds me of the old (and awesome) Tweetie app — before Twitter bought it and ruined it. It’s accompanied by Camera+, which now supports the iPhone 5’s larger display, and comes to the iPad; an awesome new update to Mixel; and more.
You’ve heard the collective judgement by the tech echo chamber: The new iPhone was just like the old iPhone, only taller.
The iPhone 5 is boring. Apple is too conservative. They didn’t really change the phone, but only made minor tweaks.
And that’s what’s wrong with the iPhone 5: It’s just not radical enough.
Here’s the problem: The echo chamber not only got this wrong, they got it backward.
The trouble with the iPhone 5 is that it’s too much, too soon.
Let me explain.
Siri has been updated along with the rest of the iOS in the new iteration from Apple. The personal voice assistant can take dictation, help you plan your wardrobe around the weather, keep track of your buddies, inform you on all sorts of sports information, and help you choose the best movie to go see, all using basic spoken English. You can discover more siri tricks to help you get the most out of your device in this article.
Of course, it helps to know what kinds of questions and commands you can actually say to produce the desired results. Here’s five things you can do with Siri the right way, so you can spend less time repeating yourself and more time going to those movies and meeting up with those friends.
FIFA 13 kicks off this week’s must-have games roundup, delivering a much-improved version of everyone’s favorite soccer sim. In addition to new visuals and optimization for the iPhone 5, FIFA 13 finally boasts an online multiplayer mode, allowing you to play against friends and random opponents over the Internet.
We also have Rovio’s latest release, Bad Piggies; a stunning adventure RPG called Lili, a new Monsters Ate My Condo game, and more.
Apple silently updated the iOS 6 App Store today, adding more accessibility features to its VoiceOver interface for users who experience blindness and low vision. The new changes are in response to user complaints about accessibility in the iOS 6 App Store, and will help those users perform faster searches when interacting with the App Store via the VoiceOver system.
I have to admit, I was intrigued by Passbook when I first heard of it. An app that keeps my airline and movie tickets together with my coupons and customer loyalty cards seems like a good idea. For now, however, Passbook in iOS 6 seems like a placeholder to me, an app with no real purpose in and of itself, a place to link to other apps.
Apple quietly added a little explanation in the form of a paragraph in the iTunes Store page for Passbook apps which shows, at least, that they’re planning on more and that they understand that we all might feel a bit nonplused about one of the bigger features of the new iOS.
The iPhone 5 has been a massive success for Apple. It’s only been out a week, but it’s already the fastest-selling iPhone in history, racking up 5 million units sold during its first three days of availability. But this isn’t just having a positive affect on Apple’s revenue; it’s also big business for iOS developers, who are seeing massive boosts to their download figures.
If you’ve ever managed to spill liquid on an electronic device, then you’ll know that it doesn’t take too much to kill them completely; liquid and electronics simply do not mix. But you might be surprised by how well your iPhone 5 fares when it comes into contact with its biggest enemy.
One of the improvements Apple made to Safari 6.0 was to take the search and address bars and roll them into one — just like a lot of popular web browsers do. The change hasn’t been made to the mobile Safari app,
But there is a good reason for that omission.
Mixel, a wonderful collage and photo sharing app for iPhone designed by Khoi Vin, has just received what is quite possibly its best update yet. In addition to support for the iPhone 5’s larger display, Mixel boasts a number of new features, the biggest of which is the ability to send real postcards, including your own photo collages, from right within the app.
Apple added a nifty new feature to iOS 6 that adds a splash of color to the status bar. Rather than being just black or silver, the status bar now changes to match the color scheme of the app you’re running. In Skype, for example, it goes bright blue, while in the eBay app it goes grey.
I’m a big fan of this feature, but I know a lot of users don’t. With that said, if you’d like to kill it, you’ll be delighted to hear there’s a new tweak for jailbroken devices that does just that.
Stories about valuable items going missing at airport TSA checkpoints are worryingly common, but it’s not often you can prove your possessions have indeed been stolen by the people employed to protect you. Fortunately, Apple has made iOS devices easy to track when they go missing, and ABC News recently took advantage of this feature to catch a thieving TSA officer red-handed.
Quietly, and with not so much as a dedicated press release to mark the occasion, Apple has started selling the iPhone 5 in new markets. As midnight rolled around last night (or this morning, depending on your point of view) online Apple Stores opened up for business.
And boy is this thing expensive.
Because a lot of the current attention around iPhones has to do with the latest and greatest iPhone 5, it’s easy to forget that there are plenty of older devices to be dealt with around the world. While recycling may be an option for much older devices, the iPhone 4 and 4S, at least, are helping to create a second-hand market that is both robust and global.
The market, says The Wall Street Journal, tends to be mostly US to overseas in direction and is growing in response to the high visibility of the iPhone brand via the iPhone 5. An entire industry has grown up around the resale of older iPhone devices.
“We are supply constrained. There is insatiable demand for this product,” said Israel Ganot, chief executive of buyback service Gazelle Inc.