iPhone - page 338

One of the problems with modern glass displays on smartphones, tablets, and computers is screen glare. If you’ve ever tried to use your iPad out in the sun or check your iPhone on the beach during a bright, sunny day, you know what it’s like — any kind of light creates a glare that can be almost unbearable. Amazon has touted the Kindle’s E-ink display for its anti-glare technology, while all of Apple’s products with glass screens, including the non-matte MacBooks, are notorious for their tendency to collect smudges and reflect ambient light.

MIT researches have developed a water-repellent, self-cleaning glass that “virtually eliminates” reflections of any kind. The new glass will hopefully start making its way into the technologies we use on a daily basis, especially our beloved Apple devices.

This morning Samsung announced their newest high-end Android phone, the Samsung Galaxy S III. With a release date of May 29th, the new phone comes with a lot of crazy new features, like Smart Stay, that uses facial recognition to determine if you’re looking at it, and if not, it’ll turn the screen off. But topping the list of awesome new features is the “innovative” voice recognition feature. It’s innovative because you can say things like, “Hi Mr. Galaxy phone, what’s the weather gonna be like today?” and S Voice will pop-up a screen that looks exactly like Apple’s Siri feature does on the iPhone 4S.

Keep it up Samsung.

Source: Sebastiaan de With

Via: Rene Ritchie

May is Mobile Management Month at Cult of Mac, where we will be profiling a different mobile management company every weekday. You can find all previous entries here  and read our Mobile Management manifesto here.

Boxtone offers a range of mobile management capabilities for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. The company has strategic partnerships with multiple carriers as a device and expense management solution. Boxtone also has partnerships with companies like Good and Accellion for secure on-device data storage as well as a range of other enterprise technology vendors. These relationships can help integrate services that Boxtone doesn’t provide one its own. The company also offers a support and operation management capabilities that go beyond traditional mobile management.

Incase’s Box Case for the iPhone is just that: a boxy, sharp-cornered rubber case with a brutalist minimalism that wouldn’t look out of place on London’s South Bank. And not only does the thing look awesome, it also offers quite a bit of protection thanks to all the extra rubber at the corners. It’s probably not a good idea to start tossing your iPhone on the floor, but if it does accidentally drop, then it might at least bounce to a safe end.

When analysts and companies compare mobile devices, the big number everyone focuses on is how much market share each platform or product has in relation to its competitors. While this makes for a good overall view of the playing field, it doesn’t always give a clear or accurate picture of which companies are doing well on a single metric as a model for success and ignores others, like whether a platform or manufacturer managed to turn a significant profit.

This is, of course, a very big point when discussing Apple’s iOS succes compared to Android as a whole or to individual manufacturers – and something that Asymco’s latest review of the mobile phone market in which Apple accounts for a small 8.8% of handsets but reaps a whopping 73% of the industry’s profits.

The world’s first iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, is no longer an iPad-only newspaper after making its debut on the iPhone today. Launched back in February 2011, the publication is optimized for the digital age, and provides the latest breaking news for a whole host of topics, including business, the arts, technology, and sports.

iLounge has had decent luck predicting new iOS devices recently, managing earlier this year to correctly prophesize most of the details about the new iPad (although consensus had pretty much agreed upon them already).

Now iLounge is doing the same for the iPhone 4S, and while they echo a lot of the current speculation about a thinner iPhone 5 with a longer 4-inch display, the professional renders iLounge has put together are absolutely top-notch. This would be an incredibly attractive iPhone.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jNJOd3muQg

Although several rather bizarre rumors have claimed Apple will integrate a projector into a future iPhone, it seems a little unlikely — at least for many years. But thanks to PoP Video, you can add your own projector that displays 960 x 540 video for just $99.

Deep down in my soul, I want to believe that Apple is going to come out with a holographic iPad and iPhone someday just so I can watch three dimensional Lady Gaga dance parties unfold in Lilliputian fashion. CES totally sold me on the idea, and even if we have to wait 15 years for a holographic iPad, I’m cool with that.

LA-based 3D artist Mike Ko decided to take it up a notch though, and envisioned what it would be like if three dimensional objects could blossom into life from the iPhone’s screen. Objects like, say, a miniature city with whimsical little cars zipping around the streets. Check out Mike’s iPhone 3D video masterpiece below and let us know what you think.

Saving up for that widely-rumored Apple television set? Well, according to one analyst, you have plenty of time. J.P. Morgan’s Mark Moskowitz issued a note to investors this week in which he states there is no indication Apple’s TV will make its debut during 2012, and that the current economic climate just isn’t suitable.

Moskowitz believes we’ll be waiting until 2014 instead, but suggests we could see an exciting new Apple TV set-top box before then.

Jiggle mode. That’s what we call the moment you hold an iOS app icon until it starts wiggling uncontrollably on your home screen. There’s no technical name for when you tap, hold, and drag icons around, so jiggle mode it is.

Now that we’ve defined that comical term, meet AlwaysArrange. This new jailbreak tweak lets you arrange app icons on your iPhone without having to enter jiggle mode, and the experience is actually better than it sounds.

Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram secured the social networking giant ownership of the largest and fastest growing mobile photography network on the planet. Instagram has 50 million users, and Facebook is already the top site for image hosting on the internet.

There were rumors that other companies, like Google, were also in talks to buy Instagram before Facebook could sink its teeth in. The New York Times even said that Twitter was trying to court Instagram at one point. According to a new report, Twitter ended up approaching another hugely popular iPhone photography app after Facebook swooped in and stole Instagram.

RunKeeper makes fitness apps for a variety of smartphones and is widely considered the premiere platform for tracking and sharing workout information. Today the company announced that it will be the first third-party service to partner with the Pebble watch, a record-breaking Kickstarter project that has collected over $8 million in funding. Pebble sports a customizable interface that can connect with apps and smartphones like the iPhone and Android.

Thanks to the partnership with RunKeeper, Pebble owners will be able to see live fitness data and control RunKeeper without touching their smartphones during a workout.

Rumors have been flying about Apple’s next-gen iPhone featuring a liquidmetal alloy casing, unlike the glass backing that currently cradles the iPhone 4 and 4S’s precious internals. Liquidmetal would assumedly create a lighter iPhone that’s also more durable and scratch resistant. There’s also been rumors that the next-gen MacBooks will be made of liquidmetal, but no hard evidence has surfaced to support the speculation.

Two years ago Apple bought exclusive rights to use material from Liquidmetal Technologies in its products, but we have yet to see a liquidmetal iPhone. The only liquidmetal material to be incorporated was the pin used for ejecting the iPhone 3G SIM card. Will 2012 be the year Apple’s product line goes liquidmetal? Sadly, the odds don’t look good.

May is Mobile Management Month at Cult of Mac, where we will be profiling a different mobile management company every weekday. You can find all previous entries here  and read our Mobile Management manifesto here.

AirWatch provides a full range of mobile management features and implements all of the iOS 4 and iOS 5 management and monitoring capabilities. The software integrates with a range of enterprise technologies including directory services. The service works with a wide range of clients including small and mid-size businesses, large and enterprise organizations as well as government agencies.

The BYOD movement has transformed the relationship between IT staffers and other employees in a wide range of companies. While there are benefits to BYOD, there are also headaches – and securing data on personal devices and/or securing the devices themselves is one of the biggest. While there’s an ongoing discussion about whether to manage data, apps, or devices, right now most companies are developing a strategy that has a mix of approaches.

All that could change if the mobile management industry unfolds the way Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney expects. Dulaney is an advocate of creating what he calls “beneficial viruses” that companies can layer into apps and data itself – the idea being that the data could delete itself if it becomes compromised.

Scott Forstall, Apple’s Senior Vice President of iOS Software, has sold 65,151 shares of his Apple stock — the equivalent of 95% of his stake in the company — for a staggering $38.7 million. He now owns just 2,988 Apple shares, worth around $1.8 million, but if he sticks around, there’s plenty more where they came from.

“Unopened! Still sealed in original retail box!” cry the Craigslist ads advertising “new” iPhones and iPads at lower-than-retail prices, but the truth is far more insidious: many of the “new” iPhones you see on Craigslist and eBay are actually old, used iPhones repackaged and sold as new using the hardware equivalent of meat glue.

Many of us are dreaming of a liquidmetal casing for the next iPhone which will sport a tapered, teardrop design that will help make the sixth-generation device thinner than its predecessor. However, a SIM tray that is believed to be destined for the new device suggests it could feature a box-like design similar to the iPhone 4S.

The jailbreak community has always been striving to improve the way iOS handles system settings. iOS 5 failed to introduce a quicker way of managing preferences like screen brightness and Bluetooth, and jailbreakers still use tweaks like SBSettings to toggle prefs without popping into the Settings app.

More elegant solutions for enhancing iOS have started coming out in Cydia over the last year or so, and a jailbreak tweak called Swipebright brings very useful functionality to the status bar.

Siri is already about as simple as it gets, but that hasn’t stopped freelance journalist and TV host Marc Saltzman from creating Siri For Dummies. The 192-page book “shows you all the cool things Siri can do for you, so you can get the most from your iPhone’s voice-activated personal assistant.”

We here at Cult of Mac just can’t get enough of Instagram. It’s really hard to not love the little photo sharing app, even after it got bought by Facebook for $1 billion.

Have you ever wondered why images upload so quickly in Instagram? The whole app feels super snappy, and images can seem to upload instantly after you take a picture and apply a filter. What kind of magic is going on in the background?

As it turns out, the app’s design tricks you into believing its working faster than it really is.

Notifications on the iPhone are annoying. There, I said it. They drop at the most inopportune times, and I always end up activating them, while the iPhone is more than happy to hop over to the application that sent the Notification in the first place. There is, however, a couple of cool ways of dismissing them without activating them, short of waiting for them to go away, which is what I’ve done since they appeared in iOS 5. Today’s tip shows you how.

The iPhone and iPad are revolutionizing business as we know it, causing companies to throw out old playbooks that mandated strict control over every piece of technology in the workplace. That revolution is liberating workers everywhere to choose their own devices, pick the best apps, and enjoy using technology in the office for the first time since… well ever.

All this month, we’re going to spend time highlighting the businesses helping to power that revolution: companies that take iPhones and iPads into the office and let them drive and control all the enterprise systems in place in your workplace.

Do you carry a backup battery, a camera connection kit and a charger with you in your man-sack? Yeah, me too, and it’s really no big deal as even together they weight almost nothing. But if you’d rather combine these items into one easy-to-lose box, then the Cellink I is just the thing for you.