Four apps enter, but only one can reign supreme! Listen to us passionately pitch our favorite apps of the week then vote on which one conquers them all on the latest CultCast.
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I’m expecting some really cool iOS/Android stuff to pop out of indy dev First Post. The year-and-a-half-old startup is run by Jacob Robinson, the former art director at Sony Online Entertainment (who had a hand in forming legendary titles like the EverQuest series, DC Universe, Star Wars Galaxies and Unreal Tournament). It’s also completely self-funded, “which is not an easy thing to do at all,” says Robinson.
First Post’s debut game, Snacksss, may not exactly be the stellar breakthrough title one might have hoped for; the cartoony, Sonoran Desert-themed iPhone game has lots of pretty artwork but needs help in the gameplay department, which has the player listlessly flicking a hungry snake at rabbits ad nauseam.
May is Mobile Management Month at Cult of Mac,
Fiberlink’s Maas360 offers a range of management capabilities with an emphasis on app and information management. A document management app can be deployed to devices to provide secure on-device storage for business data with optional sandboxing to prevent corporate files from being opened by unapproved apps. App management includes an enterprise app store with granular policy options for determining app access as well as app blacklist capabilities. In addition to traditional mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, MaaS360 can also apply some management policies for MacBooks and Windows notebooks. This combination of available features making one of the more robust mobile management systems on the market. The company also has a strategic partnership with Verizon Wireless.
As it has said many times before, T-Mobile is eagerly awaiting the arrival of the iPhone on its network. The carrier has been largely unable to attract unlocked iPhone owners due to the fact that frequency incompatibilities make it impossible to use 3G data speeds on T-Mobile’s 1700 MHz AWS band. T-Mobile started transitioning part of its spectrum over to the iPhone-friendly 1900 MHz band last year, and scattered reports have said that a small number of iPhone users can now use 3G speeds in certain areas of the United States.
Not only is T-Mobile saying that its 3G network will be ready for the iPhone by Q4 of this year, but it also plans to offer HSPA+ 4G speeds on an iPhone-friendly frequency.
AirPlay and AirPlay Mirroring add a lot of value to the second and third generation Apple TVs. Paired with a recent iPad or the iPhone 4S, an Apple TV can instantly become a gaming solution and a theater for home movies – and will be amazing when combined with Mountain Lion when it ships this summer.
AirPlay also turns that Apple TV into powerful and extremely portable presentation system that’s a great fit for the classroom or the board room. The only challenge is that the Apple TV’s only output option is an HDMI port, which can be a big problem for connecting to older display technologies including many projectors and computer displays – a problem solved by cable and adapter maker Kanex.
It’s likely this would be an entirely different story if Steve Jobs was still at Apple’s helm, but the Cupertino company has now agreed to drop a number of its infringement claims against Samsung, roughly cutting the case in half, in a bid to ensure that a trial goes ahead this summer.
Likewise, Samsung has agreed to do the same — dropping five of its 12 complaints — but both companies continue to bicker over the “copycat products” that have made Samsung the world’s number one smartphone vendor.
NFC isn’t a new technology. Android and BlackBerry phones with NFC capabilities have been available for a while now and various companies have started looking at implementing NFC as a mobile payment or digital wallet solution. Google Wallet being the most well-known while MasterCard’s new PayPass Wallet Services, which the company announced on Monday is the newest and potentially broadest in scope
Apple, however, hasn’t shown much interest in adding NFC to the iPhone. The lack of NFC hasn’t kept mobile payment options off the iPhone – as we’ve recently reported T.G.I. Fridays and Tabbedout, Boston’s light rail commuter service, and AmTrak have all moved to offer mobile payments using the Starbucks app/virtual card model.
A new deal between Apple and location-based deals startup Pirq, to offer daily food and drink deals to the company’s employees in silicon valley could be a sign of Apple testing the waters with both a deals network and whether such ecommerce options make sense for iPhone users.
Back from when the internet was too slow for video, we had animated GIFs. Now, in the days of fiber connections and YouTube, we still trade GIFs. Or we would, if we actually knew how to make them.
Enter Gifture, an Instagram-a-like app which makes animated GIFs instead of still photos. It shoots sequences, puts them together and lets you apply filter before sending them off to the web to share.
Sprint CEO Dan Hesse has handed back $3.25 million of his own salary in a bid to appease shareholders who have been upset by the carrier’s iPhone deal with Apple. Shareholders spoke out against the arrangement when it was discovered that Sprint did not consider the financial effect of carrying the iPhone when it calculated employee bonuses.
Meet iCandy, a device with one, simple purpose: distracting children. The iCandy is a bracket that screws into the bottom of your SLR camera and holds your iPhone out in front of it, ready to entertain children and stop them from getting bored during portrait sessions. Think of it as a kind of digital version of the plush Mickey Mouses held up by ambidextrous photographers of the past.
Twitpic, the photo-sharing service for Twitter, has finally gotten its own standalone app. You can use is to post pictures to Twitter from your iPhone, and you can also browse previous photos you have uploaded to the service (and you probably will have some there already, as many Twitter apps use Twitpic).
You can also use the app as a client to browse photos taken by people you follow on Twitter.
Apple’s iPhone is about to be implemented into the American railroad system in a big way. Amtrak, the government agency that oversees the nation’s train services, will be adopting the iPhone as a digital ticket scanner. The 1,700 conductors who currently work for Amtrak have been undergoing training with the iPhone since November, and the new initiative will be fully rolled out by late summer.
May is Mobile Management Month at Cult of Mac,
Excitor produces the DME line of mobile management tools. The lineup currently offers a device management component that includes basic app management functionality and a secure messaging component. The secure messaging component offers companies a fully secured on-device message, contacts, and calendar data store that is separate from Apple’s Mail, Contacts, and Calendar apps – this helps ensure business data is not readable on a lost or stolen device even if that device is unlocked. Excitor has announced two additional DME components that, according to the company’s website, are not yet available. The first, is focused on creating an on-device secure data store while the second is a secure mobile browser.
Let’s hear that again. Apple is taking in 84 percent of all mobile gaming revenue in the US.
With all the fooferaw about how many more Android handsets are selling than iPhones, it’s easy to think that Apple may be on the way out. Not so, says a new report from NewZoo, a market research company in the gaming space.
There’s plenty of news out there about the way mobile technology, BYOD programs, and other facets of the consumerization of IT trend are reshaping the workplace and the IT department. The traditional daily routine of typing a username and password into PC in the morning, using that computer all day long, and shutting it down before heading home is gone for many of us.
Today, we use a mix of devices in the office, during meetings, on the road, and often from home. That mix of devices, a range of different apps, cloud services, and remote access empowers us in ways that were unimaginable a few years ago. In this new workplace, however, do we need something more than the old username and password to make resources available and keep them business data secure?
One of the surprising, and some might say disturbing, realities of today’s consumerized IT departments is that IT staff are being left out of the loop on technology projects. Nowhere is that more evident than when it comes to developing mobile app strategies, particularly customer-facing app strategies.
Instead many business and marketing managers are recruiting or contracting app developers directly, often bypassing CIOs and IT managers in the process. While this new trend is primarily focused on app development, it could easily be the start of a slippery slope that leads to more and more outsourcing of technology projects and management.
An update to the GPS photo-tagging app PlaceTagger brings support for the iPad, and also shows us exactly what iCloud was meant for. The v2.0 version not only lets you import photos via camera connection kit and then tag them right there on the iPad — it also syncs the GPS data seamlessly to the Mac version so you can tag photos right there. No tedious exporting of GPX files (unless you want to), nor even having to fix time discrepancies with the iPad and the camera’s clocks.
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If you’re a mobile gamer, then Gameloft is the development studio to keep your eye on over the coming months. In addition to the much-anticipated N.O.V.A. 3, the company has confirmed it is also working on the official Men in Black 3 mobile game, and Asphalt 7: Heat, the next release in its popular racing series.
Instacast, undoubtedly the best podcast manager for iOS, just got a whopping update that includes a long list of new features and improvements. In addition to a “revamped and improved” user interface, the update brings episode archiving, a sleep timer, a download manager, and lots, lots more.
Many have been wondering what Apple will call the next-generation iPhone. iPhone 5? iPhone 6? iPhone 4G Epic Touch? Or what about “the new iPhone?” After the third-gen iPad, it looks like Apple may be starting to abandon its traditional naming conventions for iOS devices altogether.
Interestingly, Apple has filed a claim with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to gain control of the iPhone5.com domain name.
Lego Harry Potter is finally back on iOS to play out his final years at Hogwarts, and he’s at the top of this week’s pick of must-have iOS games. Toothless from DreamWork’s How To Train Your Dragon also makes his App Store debut in a terrific physics-based puzzle game, and we’ve chosen one of the cutest adventure games you’ll ever play.
An innovate idea for iOS often gets introduced to high praises from the Apple community, and one of three things usually happens: 1.) Apple implements the idea, 2.) Jailbreakers implement it first and Apple eventually does the same, 3.) Apple ignores the idea entirely and jailbreakers enjoy it exclusively. We’re hoping that number 2.) will happen in this case.
Remember when we showed you the amazing concept video for easily editing text on the iPad? Put together by Daniel Chase Hooper, the concept showed how you could edit text with finger drags and gestures instead of the tedious ‘tap and drag’ method Apple currently implements. Many of us said we wanted to see Hooper’s concept in iOS 6.
As it is known to do, the jailbreak community has already heard our collective cry and answered with a new jailbreak tweak that just went live in Cydia today. Dubbed SwipeSelection, a new way of editing text is now available for jailbroken iPad and iPhone users.
Speculating about future Apple products is really hard to do well. That doesn’t keep everyone from trying. Even grizzled Apple-watching veterans often fail catastrophically with each new Apple announcement.
The reason it’s difficult is that “evidence,” which would normally be the best tool for predicting things, doesn’t work in Apple’s case.
The best criteria are strategic and cultural analyses. But even these are not perfectly reliable.
If you’ve struggled to accurately guess in the past what Apple will announce, don’t feel bad. Even Apple executives themselves don’t know until often very late in the game.
Here’s why predicting Apple products is so hard.
After months and months of waiting, Spotify finally released its iPad app this week, and it does not disappoint. It features a terrific interface optimized for the iPad’s larger screen, plus plenty of other great features. There’s no wonder why it’s at the top of this week’s must-have iOS apps roundup.
Other picks include a great little app for controlling Bluetooth from your home screen, an impressive photography app from Polaroid, an innovative new web browser, and more.
It’s always tempting to avoid the high prices of a Genius Bar screen repair and find a third-party repair center that can fix your iPhone for fraction of the price. I’ve done it. You might want to think twice before you take your iPhone repair off the grid, though.
Late last year news broke of an iPhone that ignited into flame on board an Australian flight. No one was hurt, and at the time no one knew what caused the iPhone to spontaneously erupt. After further investigation though, it looks like a careless third-party repair agent might be the one to blame.