Who rides around in an armored Cadillac and likes to take retro-filtered photos? The President of the United States, of course! That’s right, President Barack Obama is now Instagram.
As the campaign season starts to ramp up, Obama’s staff is covering all the bases. Fellow Instagram addicts can follow the president’s staff from his official account for plenty of hipster filter goodness and behind-the-scenes peeks along the campaign trail.
You don’t need to know anything more about the state of the mobile industry than the fact that the worst mainstream smartphone OS, Android, is the number one smartphone platform by numbers, while one of the best — Windows Phone 7 — justy can’t get any momentum.
That’s a real shame, because short of iOS, WP7 is the best mobile OS out there: it’s got an innovative tile-based interface, slick hardware, and a cogent design philosophy. But not only is Windows Phone 7 not getting any traction in the market, but Microsoft is going so far now as to reportedly bribe retail store employees to recommend WP7 over Android or iPhones. Yikes.
Owners of Apple’s iPad quickly adopted the App Store as their home, downloading three billion apps in 2010 and virtually obliterating Android alternatives. The iPad accounted for nearly one out over every five Apple apps downloaded, according to new research.
More proof that the iPhone is the 21st century analogue to the venerable Swiss Army Knife: a hiker lost in the woods on New Year’s Eve was able to alert and flag down rescuers using his iPhone’s flashlight app.
Still waiting for the iPhone 4S in your territory? Well, you could be one of the lucky ones who are set to receive Apple’s latest smartphone on January 13. The company has announced in a press release issued this morning that next Friday will see the launch of the device in 21 additional countries.
Finland is far from the minds of most iPhone users. However, the frigid, Nordic country is huge on carriers’ radar because it is there that text messaging was born and where it could very well die. The number of Christmas Eve texts in Finland fell off a cliff, plummeting to 8.9 million from 10.9 million in 2010. With text messages accounting for 20 percent of carrier revenue, its enough to give companies nightmares — but this bad dream is far from over.
Apple plans to announce how well it did during the holiday buying period later this month. A conference call to announce the tech giant’s first quarter of 2012 financial results is set for January 24. Wall Street consensus forecasts a blowout quarter with Apple earnings up 43 percent on $38.16 billion of sales.
Do you ever wish that you could get quick access to your iOS apps from your device’s lock screen? With LockLauncher installed on your jailbroken iPhone, you can.
Did you know that you can easily record your jailbroken iOS device’s screen with an app called Display Recorder? Thanks to a recent update that introduced iOS 5 compatibility, jailbreakers running the latest version of Apple’s mobile OS can record screen activity and share it with the world.
Display Record is a fantastic Cydia app that has been around for years. Version 1.2.5 introduces the ability to record your screen on iOS 5, save the movie file, and share it with YouTube or your desktop computer.
A Canadian technical consultant by the name of Ade Barkah has uncovered a particularly weird bug in iOS 5 that lets anyone see a locked iPhone’s Camera Roll from the device’s lock screen. The only catch is that viewable photos must have a time stamp that’s newer than the iPhone’s internal clock.
If an iPhone’s clock were to ever roll back or get manually set to a time in the past, any photo taken after that date can be easily seen by means of the Camera app shortcut on the iOS lock screen.
Thanks to iCloud and iOS 5, we no longer have to plug our iOS devices into our computers to back them up. With iCloud backups enabled, all of our precious data is sent to the cloud and is easily retrievable when we need it — providing we have a data connection.
But we only get so much cloud space, so we need to look after it. If you’ve got backups saved from old devices you’re not using anymore, it’s important to delete them so that your existing devices have plenty of storage for their own data. Here’s how to delete iCloud backups on your iOS device!
See that iPhone 4 above? If you click here, you can see it in its full, remarkable glory on the website of its creator, HTML5 and CSS3 maestro Vasily Zubach.
Why is it so remarkable? Because in its original incarnation, it was accomplished entirely in Javascript and CSS. That’s right: there’s not a single image file in the whole shebang.
Following a report that claims Nintendo is set to open up its own app store for its upcoming Wii U console, there are now suggestions that the Japanese gaming giant is “actively courting” iOS developers in a bit to lure them over to Wii U game development. One developer reports that the company even offered “assistance” with porting their title from iOS to be played on the console’s new controller, which features a 6.2-inch touchscreen.
Imagine having your iPhone stolen while you’re out with your friends one night, then discovering that the thief who stole it had the audacity to return it to an Apple retail store for replacement after you had it blocked. Thanks to Apple’s policies on theft, that’s exactly what happened to Scott Barkley from Toronto.
This is it, people — this is the year your New Year’s resolution to get fit really takes hold. This year, you’re going to stick it, and we’re going to show you how.
A bizarre official app from Apple called GameStore popped up in the App Store on New Year’s Eve, apparently by accident. The 99 cent app, which functionally does nothing, appears to be some sort of test app or prototype for a Newsstand-like games service that has yet to get off the ground.
PostSecret has been around since the earliest days of the Internet. The online collaborative art project allows people to anonymously submit secrets on postcards to share online. Multiple PostSecret books have been made from the submission, but while the site has flourished on the web, it appears it was too hot for the App Store, as PostSecret founder Frank Warren has said they will be pulling the PostScret app because of problems with online bullying.
Right now, if you want to get an iPhone with unlimited data, your only option is to sign up with Sprint… but given how slow Sprint’s 3G speeds are, unlimited data isn’t really saying much. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get unlimited data on a faster network? Say, Verizon’s?
Well, thanks to a little bit of CSR hacking, you can add unlimited data to any Verizon iPhone plan. Better act soon, though. The VZW is likely to shut down this exploit as soon as their engineers get back from holidays.
Known developer Steven Troughton-Smith has been able to run iOS App Store apps on the Apple TV fullscreen at the device’s full, 720p resolution. Troughton-Smith also worked on the Siri port that was demoed months ago and made available for jailbroken iOS devices last week.
With the help of another developer by the name of TheMudKip and Grant Paul’s MobileLaunchpad launcher, Troughton-Smith has been able to run iOS apps natively on the Apple TV without using AirPlay.
As 2011 comes to a close, it’s interesting to look back on Apple’s accomplishments throughout the year.
In this video, Cult Of Mac takes a look back at the top Apple events of 2011.
The popular jailbreak tweak vWallpaper has received a pretty significant update that finally brings live home screen wallpapers to iPhones running Apple’s latest iOS 5 software.
The Sennheiser HD 650’s ($500) audio performance is among the best available, but they won’t be worth their high price tag unless you’re willing to listen to them correctly, and for some, the hassle may not be worth it.
When we install new apps on our iOS devices, they don’t just take up the storage space needed for the app itself, but they also consume space needed for storing “documents & data.” This can be all sorts of things, including save files for your games, pictures, videos, and content downloaded through in-app purchases.
Here’s how to see how much storage space each of your apps is using for “documents & data,” and how you can reclaim that precious space.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwwWqRV2RsI
(Warning: video is NSFW)
All I wanted for Christmas was an iPhone. That’s it. But my parents went off and bought me a stupid Kindle Fire…those dumb bastards. Actually I’d be pretty happy with receiving a new Kindle Fire, and I already have an iPhone 4S with the fancy camera and everything so I don’t need a new one of those, but apparently a lot of people were disappointed on Christmas morning when they didn’t unwrap a shiny new iPhone. Taking the audacity of privileged consumerism to new heights of hilarity, comedy writer Jon Hendren compiled the stream of dejected tweets into a music video to express the world’s ingratidude.
“WTF?! I Wanted An iPhone” is a catchy (but NSFW) tune that captures little treasures of bitterness that bloomed on Christmas morning. The enormous display of ingratitude is a bit shocking. Hey @SamStandsFoSwag we’re sorry mom and dad got you the black iPod Touch instead of the white one, but maybe when you graduate high school and get a job you’ll realize, “Oh dang, spending $200 on a silly music player is not the funnest thing to do in world.”
Just how popular were Kindles as Christmas gifts? Amazon said today it sold at least 4 million of the devices in December, or 1 million each week. Sounds great until we check Apple numbers and find the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant demolished the Internet retailer’s sales hype in about one day.