Pop quiz: what color is the mirror inside your camera? If you answered “No color. It’s a mirror. What the hell are you on about this time, Sorrel?” then you’re dead wrong. Kinda. It turns out that mirrors are ever-so-slightly green.
Rumors surrounding Apple’s next iPhone have reached a fever pitch in the weeks leading up to the expected announcement date, September 12th. With pre-orders rumored to begin on the same day, Apple is expected to see record sales this holiday season. Anticipation for the next iPhone is higher than it’s ever been, and smartphone sales from the past quarter reflect that fact.
Gartner’s results for Q2 show slowed iPhone growth, with Apple sitting behind Samsung and Nokia in worldwide smartphone sales.
Forget old-timey fake film effects -- Meta is as modern as it gets.
Meta is yet another photo filter app for the iPhone, but if you have any interest in this kind of thing, you should just go and buy it right now (it’s just one lousy buck).
Meta gives you a bunch of live filters through which you can snap pictures, and lets you share and upload to the usual places. The difference here is that the filters are genuinely new, and that you’re going to love them.
With Nintendo adamant it’ll never bring its games to iOS, the only way to enjoy your favorite titles on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad is to jailbreak your device and download an emulator. But that’s no longer the case. You can now enjoy more than 100 NES and Game Boy games in your iPhone’s web browser.
Apple claims that its internal research shows that the main reason US smartphone consumers purchased an Android phone instead of an iPhone was in order to stay with their current carrier. The study only covers the US smartphone marked and was brought up by Samsung today as court evidence in the patent infringement trial between the two companies in Northern California.
The study was published at Apple in January of 2011, and shows that 48 percent of those surveyed said that they had went with an Android phone because they “wanted to stay with current wireless provider.”
36 percent said that they “trusted the Google brand,” while 30 percent just like bigger screens. Sometimes, bigger *is* better, according to these folks.
Photos take up a lot of space on our iOS devices. It’s important to many of us with the lower end iPhones to leave enough room on the device to capture new photos, let alone apps and music and books.
With the advent of Photostream, it’s easy to have the photos we take on our iPhone show up on our Macs or iPads, so deleting them from the iPhone makes a lot of sense and is much less of a scary proposition. Here’s how.
Get your checkbook ready for the new iPhone next month.
Apple is expected to unveil the next iPhone at a rumored media event Wednesday, September 12th. Today iMore reports that Apple will start U.S. pre-orders for the sixth-gen iPhone on the same day as the announcement. International customers will reportedly have to wait until the first week of October to place pre-orders.
The Highline is like a leash for your iDevice. Photo Charlie Sorrel (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)
When I first glimpsed the Highline, I teased, calling it “an almost spectacularly misguided idea.” The Highline is a curly cable which hooks into your iDevice’s 30-pin dock connector and keeps it safe from drops and attempted snatch-and-grabs. Despite my conclusions, the kind folks at Kenu sent one over to the Cult of Mac test labs to check out. And while I’d probably never have a use for one, it turns out that it does its job just fine.
Your iPhone contains a whole lotta information about your personal life. You got your bank apps, email, text messages, phone calls, browsing history, plus all those embarrassing songs you listen to on Spotify you don’t want people to know about.
You don’t expect to get hardcore encryption security on a tiny iPhone, and when the iPhone was first released in 2007 you didn’t. Huge security holes allowed hackers to easily take over the device, but Apple learned from their mistakes, and now your iPhone is like a freaking Fort Knox for data. Even the NSA is having a hard time breaking iPhone encryption, and it’s frustrating the hell out them.
Scientific instruments usually look crazy weird and aren’t designed to be user-friendly for the every day, non-scientist man. Lapka is looking to change that with their beautifully designed, semi-affordable Personal Environmental Monitor.
Lapka allows iPhone users to attach four different measuring instruments which can test for radiation, nitrates, humidity, and electromagnetic frequency, so you can create a perfect climate in your home, make sure your food is truly organic, find the perfect spot for your router, and make sure you’re not going to get cancer.
That 8-pin dock connector is really a 9-pin one upon closer inspection.
Will the next iPhone have an 8 pin or 9 pin dock connector? The iOS 6 beta says 9, but if you count the pins on the leaked dock components, there are only 8. Which is correct? Both: according to a new report, the new dock connector’s aluminum shell teams up with the 8 gold pins to make a ninth pin, resulting in 60% less real estate than the existing 30-pin connector, and better transfer rates with a fraction of the electrical contacts.
App updates appear to be snappier in the latest iOS 6 beta.
While Apple’s latest iOS 6 beta didn’t make any significant changes to the platform’s front-end — aside from removing the YouTube app — it did make some changes under the hood. In addition to “bug fixes,” it appears the fourth beta has made some improvements to App Store download times that make updating your apps super snappy.
Mobi-Lens: Like the Olloclip, only more promiscuous.
If I owned an iPhone, then I’d already have bought the Olloclip lens, a clip on widget which adds fisheye, macro and wideangle lenses to the iPhone using a slip-over clip. It’s impossible to line it up wrong, and it fits in a pocket or bag. But I don’t have an iPhone. I have an iPad. And I hate futzing around with all the magnetic lenses I have: they’re easy to lose, easy to get dirty and impossible to line up. What I need is a Mobi-Lens, a universal clip-on lens from Kickstarter.
There's a good reason why this new dock connector won't be coming to all iOS devices this fall.
It seems like Apple’s sixth-generation iPhone will be the first iOS device to boast a brand new, mini dock connector when it launches this fall. But there have been rumors that claim Apple will refresh all its iOS devices to make the new connector a standard across its entire lineup.
Not only does this seem highly unlikely, but there’s one reason why it’s an impossibility: Apple’s supply chain just couldn’t handle a refresh that big.
BBC iPlayer is finally Retina-ready for the new iPad.
The BBC has updated its iOS today, finally delivering high-resolutions visuals for the third-generation iPad. It also introduces “improved video performance,” better accessibility with VoiceOver controls, and more.
This is the part that will be the brains for your next iPhone.
As we edge closer towards the unveiling of Apple’s sixth-generation iPhone next month, component leaks have hit their peak. Last week we showed you images of some of the handset’s internals — including a number of flex cables and a display shield — and today we get our first glimpse at what appears to be the iPhone 5’s logic board.
Kicking off this week’s must-have apps roundup is a brand new Twitter client called Slices, which claims to be the world’s first Twitter app that allows you to break your timeline into individual streams, follow live events, browse Twitter by category, and more. We also have a “magical” app called Cardiio that accurately monitors your heart rate simply by looking at your face; the best blogging app for iPad yet called Pages; and more.
Heading up this week’s must-have iOS games roundup is a brand new Ghostbusters game that promises to be the best augmented reality game in the App Store. We also have a great online strategy game in the form of Tiny War XD, Activision’s legendary Pitfall!, and more.
Seriously, don’t. Why encourage the developer of this sneaky Trojan horse of an app when it’s only going to be pulled from the App Store, whether tonight, tomorrow, or on Monday? Paying $1.99 to a developer who’s fairly obviously hiding tethering features within a app isn’t the way to advocate for a loosening of the restrictions on such features.
The app, called DiscoRecorder, was released today by developer Michael Leatherbury. The screenshots uploaded to the App store (see above) show only a black and white skeuomorphic cassette tape recorder interface and some innocuous recorded voice memos. What the app really does is completely different.
Even with the iPad eating away at the time we spend in front of the bigger screens — in my case, the iPad is my screen of choice when watching Netflixed TV shows — cable subscriptions still have a ton of appeal. Want to watch the Olympics live on your iPad via the official NBC app? You’ll need a cable subscription; and then there are all the recent great cable shows: Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, etc.
But you’ll need a guide to sort through the mire, and that’s where the i.TV app and your trusty iPad or iPhone comes in.
Never forget that you wanted to watch a movie again.
If you’re like me, you like to watch a lot of movies and trailers. As a bit of a self-proclaimed movie buff, I’m always doing my best to stay on top of the latest developments in Hollywood, and I like to follow favorite directors and actors as they move from project to project. I’ll often see a trailer for an upcoming film and think, “Oh, I’ve got to see that when it comes out!” More often than not, the movie will come and go in theaters and I’ll forget to see it. Very rarely will I then stumble across it in Netflix later, and that’s mainly because there are a ton of movies I want to watch that aren’t available for instant streaming.
When I stumbled across Taphive’s TodoMovies app, I anticipated finally being able to keep track of the movies I wanted to watch on my iPhone. With a beautiful and simple interface, the app did not disappoint.
Don’t you hate it when you start to download a song file, or a podcast, or an app and it just sits there, mocking you? When the little progress bar just refuses to move, no matter how you scream at the front of your magical iOS device? Yeah, me, too.
One way to fix this problem with apps is to tap the icon to stop the download, and then tap it again to resume the download. If that doesn’t work (and it won’t with a media download), then you’re not out of luck. There is another way.
Yes, this is yet another iPhone tripod thingy, but this one is a little different. First, it’s not a Kickstarter project, so you can order it right now should you choose to. And second, it fits onto your keyring, so you will always have it with you when you need it – handy, because nobody every pats there pockets as they leave the house and thinks “You know, I really should take that iPhone photo stand out with me today. Y’know – just in case.”
Remember that Chinesee teen last year who sold his kidney for an iPad 2? He wasn’t the only one: earlier this year, another Chinese teen named Wang swapped his kidney for an iPhone and iPad. Now the butchers who operated on him are in court, awaiting their verdicts.
Downcast, my favorite podcatching app, has added a rather handy new feature with its latest update. Now it can automatically check for new podcasts when you arrive in a certain location. This clever use of iOS’ geofencing tech was first used by Instagram to grab unread articles, but now works for podcasts, too.