It’s lunch time on the West Coast. I’m starving. Like, I could eat a zebra-porcupine hybrid right now, that’s how hungry I am. Things are only getting worse after I ran into this trove of beautiful iPhone app icon concepts that make my iPhone and iPad good enough to eat. The steak icon looks so tender. So succulent. I’m going to go grab a burrito before I start trying to eat my iPad like that poor little Taiwanese girl, but you should definitely check out these gorgeous app icons.
Most companies grappling with the BYOD trend think in terms of allowing personal iPhones, iPad, and Android devices. Virtualization heavyweight VMWare looked at the situation quite a bit differently. Instead of allowing personal devices, VMWare’s CIO Mark Egan decided to require employees to use their personal smartphones in the office.
The move, unorthodox to say the least, seemed to Egan the best option when he found himself sandwiched between the rock of corporate-owned smartphone expenses and the hard place of users clamoring for the choices of BYOD.
Apple and Samsung are neck and neck when it comes to U.S. smartphone market. In Japan, which represents roughly 5% of the global smartphone market, however, the iPhone is significantly beating Samsung’s range of Android handsets. Apple, in fact, has a more than 20% lead over Samsung in Japan – significantly higher than its current 5% lead over Samsung in America.
Next week, the iPhone will launch on three additional U.S. regional carriers. This move follows last month’s roll out to five regional carriers plus last year’s addition of C Spire and Puerto Rico-based Claro Puerto (Apple’s first deasl with regional carriers).
Apple’s regional expansion prompted Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty to issue a note to investors saying that the new partnerships will help ensure sustained iPhone growth. She also noted that she doesn’t expect to see carriers dropping subsidized pricing for the iPhone – a concern that has also made investors hesitant when it comes to Apple.
Following Apple’s acquisition of several mapping companies over the years, it has always seemed inevitable that the company would one day wave goodbye to Google Maps in iOS in favor of its own, in-house service. That’s exactly what will happen when iOS 6 makes its debut later this year, according to one report.
Apple is expected to launch its own maps service, which offers an innovative 3D view mode, allowing you to view city stunning cityscapes in all their glory.
When you build a robot or an artificially intelligent machine, there’s always going to be a fear that one day it will turn against you. That’s what Siri has done to Apple today, labeling one of the iPhone’s biggest rivals, the Nokia Lumia 900, the “best smartphone ever.”
One of my favorite jailbreak tweaks for the iPhone 4S (before I updated to iOS 5.1 and lost my jailbreak) was called Lingual, which enabled Siri to connect to Microsoft’s Bing Translate API and immediately translate words or phrases into a number of different languages.
Thanks to iTranslate Voice, you can now get the same functionality and more for any iPhone from the App Store. This excellent $0.99 app listens to you speak, then quickly translates your sentences into one of 31 languages. It’s super quick and incredibly accurate.
Talk to Beasty Design. Unfortunately they don’t actually slide to unlock. That’s patented.
4G mobile broadband provider FreedomPop has started taking preorders for a $99 case/sleeve that gives free 4G data speeds to an iPhone 4/4S. Backed by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom, iPhone owners who purchase FreedomPop’s case will be given 500MB of free 4G data each month. Full data packages will also be sold in the future, but those details have not been given at this time.
We know what you’re asking: Will this thing actually work? Take a look at this video and find out:
Rumors saying Apple is planning a smaller version of the iPad won’t die, and a new report sheds more light on the rumored product. Fueling past rumors that Apple is interested in creating a 7-inch iPad at a cheaper price point, iMore claims that the company is planning a 7-inch iPad for release this October alongside the next-gen iPhone.
But that’s not all! The most interesting claim is that the upcoming 7-inch iPad will be priced between $200-$250. Also, the tablet will feature a Retina display like the third-gen iPad, keeping the same 2048×1536 resolution, according to the report.
Businesses and individuals thinking that they have mobile security covered, may need to think again. That’s the message from a new report on mobile security shows that nearly half of people using a personal device like an iPhone, iPad, or Android device are doing so without their company’s knowledge or permission. The same report showed that users frequently access sensitive or confidential data from mobile devices but would stop after a security breach.
Adding to concerns around personal mobile devices and BYOD programs, one third of IT professionals in the survey said that their company has already experienced a mobile-related security incident.
SynchroCam is an app that uses the cameras of two iDevices to snap a stereo photo. It then combines the two images into one animated GIF, the kind that flick back and forth and give a trippy 3-D effect.
Foxconn chief executive Terry Gou has confirmed that Apple will use some of its cash to help improve the labor conditions for more than 1 million workers in Foxconn’s Chinese factories, where devices like the iPhone, iPad, and iPod are assembled.
Gameloft has blown us away with its N.O.V.A. 3 teaser trailers over the past few weeks, and today one of the most anticipated iOS games so far this year makes its App Store debut. The series has always been up there with the best first-person shooters for iPhone and iPad, but this release promises to deliver a new benchmark for graphics and gameplay on iOS.
N.O.V.A. 3 could be the best $7 you’ve spent on mobile gaming to date.
Instapaper 4.2 has just hit the App Store, and it’s a pretty big update. The headline feature is a new iBooks-style page-turn animation, but there is a lot more in there besides.
If you’ve ever used AirPlay to connect speakers or your AppleTV to your iPhone, you’ll know that you’ve got to be diligent about disconnecting your device afterwards, lest you suddenly start piping sounds or video to somewhere else accidentally.
How bad can it be if you don’t remember to do that? Really, really bad. In fact, this is pretty much the worst case scenario we could think of: one Redditor who forgot to disconnect his iPhone from his Apple TV via AirPlay ended up showing his in-laws a homemade pornographic film featuring their daughter.
May is Mobile Management Month at Cult of Mac,
Although Good does provide device and app management, its primary focus is securing business data. To that end, the company effectively segregates all business information and documents on a device from a user’s personal content. To accomplish this Good’s iOS app delivers the same features as Apple’s Mail, Calendar, and Contacts apps – a move that ensures business messages event data are always secure. Good also includes a secure web browser and secure on-device document and data storage. The secure data store is sandboxed and can restrict users from copying data to unapproved apps as well as prevent such apps from accessing business documents or files.Good also provides a government agency solution that has been certified to meet various government and military standards for secure access including two-factor authentication.
Good leverages these technologies through a new solution called Good Dynamics that allows other companies, including mobile management vendor Boxtone who we profiled earlier in this series, to take advantage of Good’s secure data store. See our Good Dynamics coverage for more details.
Sprint’s plans to migrate its 4G server from its current WiMax standard to the more common LTE already in use by Verizon and AT&T. The move should allow Sprint to offer LTE iPads as well as future LTE iPhones. That’s good new for the carrier and Sprint customers.
Unfortunately, there’s also some bad news. Sprint’s LTE network won’t be able to match the performance of its competitors.
The Limb.al is a very simple yet very clever idea. It’s a USB charging cable for your iPhone (or micro-USB device) which is stiff enough to work as a dock. Plug the Limb.al into a USB port on the side of your MacBook or monitor and it will be held, hovering in space, by the bendable, pose-able cable.
There are plenty of iOS apps that deliver the core functions of Microsoft Office – Apple’s iWork, Quickoffice, Documents 2 Go, and Office2 being the most common selections. There are, however, gaps in what all these products deliver.
From a business and collaboration standpoint, the biggest missing features are integration with Microsoft’s Track Changes feature and the ability to access Sharepoint. While there hasn’t been any progress on the Track Changes front (OnLive Desktop and CloudOn are still the only real options), there are options for Sharepoint – the most recent being harmon.ie Mobile.
Speaking of Polaroid, the ailing-but-once-awesome instant photo company has come out with its own iPhone app. And guess what? It’s yet another Instagram clone, only it’s not free and it even has extra in-app purchases.
The app is called Polamatic, and it lets you snap photos, add filters and grames, and then upload them to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr or Instagram (just like Instagram!). The schtick here is that the frames aren’t just any old Polaroid-ish
frames. No, they’re actual scans of “new, used, and vintage Polaroid frames.”
Before we read any further into these claims, let me just reveal where they came from: DigiTimes. While the site has published a few accurate reports on upcoming Apple products in the past, most of its rumors are worryingly farfetched.
The latest claims sources in Apple’s supply chain have detailed the Cupertino company’s launch plans for 2012, promising three new iOS devices between now and the end of the year. One of those will, as you’d expect, be the sixth-generation iPhone, but before that, we will see a new, 7-inch iPad.
What’s more, that new iPad you just bought will apparently be replaced by an even newer one during the fourth quarter.
If you’ve updated your iOS devices past iOS 5.0.1, then you would have lost your untethered jailbreak. Hackers are working on a solution for Apple’s latest firmware, but it’s expected to be at least several months before it makes its public debut.
Fortunately, there is hope. The upcoming Redsnow release will allow you to downgrade your A5-powered devices — the iPhone 4S, iPad 2, and the new iPad — so that you can reinstate your untethered jailbreak.
Just hours after announcing its acquisition of Penultimate, Evernote has released an update to its iOS app that promises to deliver some major improvements to note taking on the iPhone. It has improved the way in which the app handles attachments and checkboxes, added support for Photo Stream, redesigned the audio recorder, and more.
Apple’s effort to make the future iPhone smaller and thinner has caused it to focus once again on making SIM cards even smaller. The Cupertino company has designed a new “nano-SIM” that is even smaller than the micro-SIM that was introduced with the iPhone 4 back in 2010.
However, rival smartphone vendors like Nokia have publicly voiced their concerns over the new standard, calling it an attempt to devalue its rivals’ intellectual property. Apple has now amended its design slightly to quash some of those concerns, and ETSI is set to case its vote on the design this month.