iPhone - page 316

Here’s the typical course of a couple of world-changing new technologies:

Printing press. Steve Guttenberg created the moveable type press back in around 1400, shortly after the invention of beatboxing. At first it disrupted the monks' monopoly illuminated manuscripts (books with built-in reading lights), then came the pulp paperback, then comic books, and then people started typing letters to prison inmates.

Postcard. This innocent vacation staple was introduced in the 1800s. It’s a letter without an envelope which can be read by anybody as it travels from sender to recipient, and in this way was the inspiration for the inventors of email. Later, it was used to mail contest answers into Saturday morning TV shows, and in England a smutty variety emerged which is still available today. Then people started sending postcards to prison inmates.

Today, we have the iPhone. I’ll skip the last five years of its history and arrive at today. Now, people can send paper postcards to prison inmates using their iPhones.

Apple’s new Podcasts app, with its skeuomorphic tape reels and beautiful interface, is an absolutely brilliant way to discover, manage, and listen to podcasts. And on our newest CultCast, we’ll tell you how Apple’s new gem will finally bring podcast entertainment out of the shadows and into the hands of the masses.

And then, did you know Google just released their beloved Chrome browser for iOS? We’ll tell you what we think and if it’s going to give Safari a run for its money.

All that and our answers to your Twitter questions on an all-new CultCast! Subscribe now on your shiny new Podcasts app, then catch the show notes after the jump!

I was the biggest Siri fanboy ever both before Apple launched the iPhone 4S with Siri integration, and immediately after.

For example, I wrote this in September and this in October. I was certain that Siri was going to change everything.

But since then, it’s slowly dawning on me that Siri isn’t what I thought it would be, at least not yet. Worse, I’ve been confused by events and facts related to Siri that have emerged since the iPhone 4S launched.

So here’s what I would like to ask Siri.

Today marks the 5th anniversary of the launch of the original iPhone, the phone that undoubtedly changed the world forever. To celebrate 5 years of iPhone, I’ve put together a little video showing just how much the iPhone has impacted not only our culture, but our everyday lives. Check out the video after the break.

Are mobile payments safe? That was a question that the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit posed to various finance officials earlier today. The subcommittee didn’t get a particularly clear answer.

According to written testimony provided by Stephanie Martin, associate general counsel for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, defining what protections apply to mobile payment systems is complicated by the fact that many businesses involved in the transfer of money through mobile devices aren’t banks. Companies involved in mobile payment systems that don’t meet the established definition of providing banking services aren’t subject to certain scrutiny, regulation, or consumer protection laws.

“You can’t take it with you.” This is a saying usually uttered by those people who are bitterly jealous of their richer friends' and relatives' success. It refers to the fact that your money is no good when you’re dead.

But it could equally apply to many external battery packs for the iPhone, which you can’t take with you because they’re too big, and you’re not carrying a bag.

Enter the Gum, a tiny 2200mAH battery pack which fits in your pocket, and while it won’t help you in the afterlife, it will help you where it counts: in the actual real world of too-short battery life.

Read enough articles about NFC and its potential for mobile payments and you’ll find yourself thinking the technology is the inevitable mobile payment platform. Every major mobile platform except iOS already includes or will include support for NFC-enabled devices. There are lots of partnerships being announced between key players like device manufacturers, carriers, and banking or credit card companies. It also just seems to make sense that this is the future.

Until you look up from all the stories about what NFC and look at what’s really happening in the  world. You don’t see much evidence of NFC payment systems in everyday life. NFC isn’t yet emerging into mainstream commerce, but there is ample evidence that mobile payments are taking off without it. Those options becoming mainstream are decidedly low tech by comparison, but that’s precisely why they’re succeeding.

There’s no point in exercising if you can’t tell your friends all about it afterwards, right? Well, if you’re a Nike+ FuelBand user, you now have yet another outlet through which to broadcast your latest jog. Version 1.2 of Nike+ FuelBand for iPhone introduces Path integration, background syncing, offline browsing, and more.

Today is the fifth anniversary of the release of the original iPhone, and for Cult of Mac’s writers, it’s a particularly important birthday: not only does June 29th mark the anniversary of one of our most all-time beloved gadgets, but it’s also a day so momentous that it has rippled through every aspect of our professional lives as both Apple fans and writers.

To mark the occasion, Cult of Mac’s writers got together to talk about where we were when the first iPhone came out, what it meant for us then and what it means for us now. Check out our stories, then please feel free to hop in and leave a comment telling us where you were when the iPhone was born.

Following the iPhone’s prepaid debut on Cricket Wireless just a week ago, Apple’s hugely popular smartphone is now available on Virgin Mobile. Like Cricket, Virgin is offering the handset on a prepaid basis, with prices starting at as little as $31 per month on the company’s Beyond Talk plan — which includes unlimited data, and unlimited texts.

Take advantage of the company’s offer and you could save yourself around $800 a year.

Google finally released its hugely popular Chrome web browser for iOS yesterday, and just as we had expected, it’s the best third-party browser so far. In fact, in many ways, it’s also better than Apple’s built-in mobile Safari browser. And you can now use Chrome as your default browser on your jailbroken iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches, thanks to the BrowserChooser tweak.

Despite the fact that BYOD is often perceived as a way to reduce technology expenses, nearly three-quarters (73%) of IT managers expect that BYOD will have the opposite effect. The big fear is that BYOD will cause IT spending to spiral out of control.

That’s the news from enterprise technology vendor Damovo UK. The company recently surveyed100 IT directors from organizations with more than 1,000 users about their feelings on BYOD and how it is being implemented in their organization.

One major reason for potentially uncontrolled expenses boils down companies losing bargaining power with carriers as employees begin purchasing their own iPhones or Android handsets. While the cost of the device isn’t likely to be passed on to an employer, monthly costs for voice and data service may be a different story. With unlimited data plans slowly going the way of the dodo, many workers may not want to shoulder data bills associated with their jobs, which may lead to a shared expense model.

If you live overseas, you can now download Google Chrome for the iPhone and iPad at the link below. It’s on the Danish store only right now, but it’s obviously in the process of rolling out, so keep on refreshing, and watch for our early look and video tour of Chrome shortly after it hits the US App Store.

Update: It’s now available in the U.S. Store! Get downloading!

Source: iTunes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7d-AGMMcsQ&feature=player_embedded

It’s hard not to love Louis C.K. Behind his pale ginger flab and profanity-laced stand-up comedy is a guy with a heart of gold: a comic who knows how to temper his masturbation jokes with compassionate commentary on the family and American values. He’s an amazing guy. But he doesn’t have an iPhone.

On a recent appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Louis C.K. explained why, saying that he got rid of his iPhone because he was too immersed in it. “It’s like having a pencil you can $@%!,” Louis C.K. told Kimmel, going on to jokingly express his concerns about geo-location and the Cloud, which he ultimately sees giving us all wafer thin devices that, apparently, will allow you to smear Tom Cruise all over your face.

Hilarious, but Louis C.K. always is. This is a comic at the top of his game. If you haven’t already, buy some tickets to see him on his next tour: he’s cutting out all the middlemen and selling them directly to fans, effectively doing his best to cut out the scalpers and the extortionists like Ticketmaster. This is a guy who deserves your money.

Source: FunkySpaceMonkey

Various reports indicate that Apple is working on a major overhaul of iTunes that it plans to launch later this year. Those reports indicate that the update will be focused on consumer-oriented features like improved app/content discovery, music and media sharing, and greater iCloud integration. There’s also the possibility that Apple might split out some iTunes features into separate apps much like the company has done in iOS – the most recent example being the Podcasts app that it launched earlier this week.

Splitting iTunes into discrete parts is an attractive prospect, particularly for businesses and IT professionals. iTunes has become a bloated hodgepodge of functionality over the years. As a result, IT departments typically face a conundrum about whether to support or even allow employees with iOS devices to use iTunes on workplace computers.

Tech journalists make bad calls all the time, but few tech writers have made such a blisteringly bad call as seasoned columnist John C. Dvorak, who famously predicted back in 2007 that “Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone… [because it is just] going to be another phone in a crowded market.”

D’oh. $150 billion in revenue later, the iPhone is the biggest success Apple has ever had, and revolutionized pretty much every single aspect of the smartphone and even telecom business. That’s quite the missed prediction, even by tech journalist standards.

So what does Dvorak have to say to explain himself? Was it just a brain fart, or what? Five years later, Dvorak has explained why he said the iPhone would be a dud, and his excuse is fascinating: he claims he got it wrong because of a conspiracy against tech journalists like him who were too honest about Apple for their own good.

SSDs are great! They make your computer run as if they were filled with greased lightning. That spinning beach ball stops spinning quite so much, and those apps struggling to load quit doing so much bouncing. Your computer gains instant-on functionality, better battery life, and ridiculously quick boot times. Win-win!

There’s only one problems: SSDs (like those found in the Retina MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iPhone or iPad) don’t have the same high capacity as physical spinning drives. That’s a problem if you’re the kind of user who carries around a terrabyte of media with him at all times. Luckily, it looks like SSDs limitations when it comes to capacity sizes is about to change.

One of the first tweaks I used to install after jailbreaking previous iPhones was Safari Download Manager, a terrific little package that does exactly as its name suggests: allows you to download files right within mobile Safari. The downside to this tweak, however, has long been its lack of support for iOS 5. That is, until it got updated today.

We got all excited about The Amazing Spider-Man earlier this month when developers Gameloft released the title’s first teaser trailer. And today the official game of the 2012 blockbuster has hit the App Store. As you’d expect from Gameloft, the 3D visuals look terrific, and they promise to “make Spider-Man more realistic than ever before!”

In what has to be one of the most ridiculous scams in recent memory, a crook in the UK is selling unsuspecting buyers boxes of potatoes and bottled water, claiming that they are receiving an iPhone.

No matter how careful you think you are, there’s always a chance that when you send an e-mail, text message, or make a call on your iPhone, someone could intercept it. For those who are concerned about security on their phones, a new suite of applications called Silent Circle will provide just the peace of mind you need to use your iPhone without worry.

As more and more companies move forward with BYOD programs and/or mobile strategies centered around streamlining workflows for mobile professionals, the idea of the enterprise app store has gone from being a nice add-on feature to being seen as necessity for businesses, schools, and government agencies.

Developing a strategy around mobile apps is seen as a core need by a solid majority of companies – 66% of organization are considering or implementing internal app stores according to a Sourcebits survey of over 6,000 enterprises. That doesn’t mean that actually pursuing an enterprise app store strategy is an easy prospect.

Despite some advances in volume purchasing by Apple, many companies feel that mobile app options are still sub-par for their needs, particularly when it comes to the purchasing process and volume licensing.

The Metropolitan Police have released a new smartphone app for Android, iOS and BlackBerry devices that allows Londoners to identify suspected criminals. Called Facewatch id, the free app allows you to enter a post code and then presents a collection of CCTV images of people wanted for questioning by the police, including over 3,000 people involved in last year’s London riots.

Most discussions around BYOD and costs focus on one of two areas. The first is the cost reduction that a company might see if employees provide their own iPhones (or other devices) and pay for their own mobile plans. The second is the cost for mobile management solutions to secure and manage those personally-owned devices along with the apps and data stored on them.

Those are major concerns, but research company ARCchart recently identified a completely different cost of the BYOD trend – the revenues that device manufacturers and carriers are likely to lose as BYOD becomes a standard practice across the business world. According to ARCchart, the worldwide mobile industry could take a hit as big as $40 billion over the next four years as a result of BYOD.

Our iPhones and iPads are fast little beasts, but it can still take a long time to load up an app you need in a pinch. A new team of engineers, however, have figured out a way to allow iOS to read your mind and start launching the next app you need before you even tap its icon.