iPhone - page 369

Almost all mic-equipped canalphones that can be had for about $100 use moving-coil drivers to produce sound, as is the case with all the previous IEMs in this review series. But the Ultimate Ears 600vi ($120) are different — this set employs a single tiny armature in each ear. Armatures generally allow for a more neutral sound with better definition than their moving-coil brethren, and that’s exactly the case with the 600vi. In fact, this set uses pretty much the same excellent drivers as in the now-discontinued, $180 SuperFi 5vi we reviewed early last year.

And yes, apart from the V-Moda Vibrato, the 600vi is $20 more than the other earphones in this review series — but we think the extra Jackson is worth it.

“BOOM!” That’s what Steve Jobs said when he demoed the Slide to Unlock gesture on the iPhone in January of 2007. Whether you’re on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, you always have to slide your finger across that slider to get past the Lock screen. It’s become a staple aspect of iOS and Apple’s mobile products.

The United States Patent & Trademark Office granted Apple the patent for Slide to Unlock today. This means that no other company can use the gesture without infringing on Apple’s new patent. Boom.

Friends sometimes tell me I have a hollow leg, but they don’t really mean it: they just mean that my rampant alcoholism is frequently imperceptible. If it were literally true that I had a hollow leg, I’d probably be tempted to do something crazy with it… like, say, run an Apple Dock Connector up through it and turn my upper calf into an easily accessible iPhone dock.

That’s why I’m so green with envy reading this Telegraph story about Trevor Prideaux, a British man born without a left arm who modified his prosthetic to be a smartphone dock. The only problem? He crammed a Nokia in there, not an iPhone!

Forty percent of Blackberry owners say they want to switch to another smartphone. Following a service outage and an upcoming move to a new operating system, business professionals surveyed in the U.K. see Apple as the preferred alternative to trouble-plagued Research in Motion.

A poll of over five thousand consumers aged eight to twenty-four has found that Apple is the most popular electronic brand in America today.

Not that it’s in particularly flattering company. In fact, just looking at the companies kids today like, it seems as if most of our nation’s youth spend the majority of their time gorging themselves on junk food. Go figure!

Tony Fadell is often referred to as the ‘father of the iPod’. He’s a former Apple engineer who helped develop Apple’s first portable music player along with Jeff Robbin, and he’s just announced a new 100-person startup called Nest Labs.

Having been a former DJ and overseeing 18 iterations of the iPod and the three generations of the iPhone, we’ve been keen to find out what Fadell and his company have been working on. But it isn’t a revolutionary new music player or communication device. It’s a thermostat.

While Apple is yet to open its iOS 5 Notification Center up to third-party widgets, developers have been hard at work creating awesome tweaks that can be installed on jailbroken devices. One of the best is a tweak called WeeSpaces, which makes it easier than ever to multitask on an iOS device.

First a China supplier of MacBook unibody cases was forced to spend millions on pollution cleanup, now an iPhone plant is under scrutiny for noise and gas pollution. Pegatron, just days from an investor conference, announced plans to update equipment and work closely with local residents.

One thing you can be sure that Apple will improve with every iteration of its iPhone is the device’s camera. The original iPhone packed a 2-megapixel camera that wasn’t all that great at taking photos; things got significantly better two generations later with the iPhone 3GS. The 5-megapixel camera in the iPhone 4 received a ton of praise, but its 8-megapixel successor in the iPhone 4S is even more terrific.

So terrific, in fact, that the developer behind the hugely successful Camera+ application for the iPhone, Lisa Bettany, says the device “outshines” many of the high-end compact cameras currently on the market.

The world’s largest carrier, China Mobile, has over 600 million wireless subscribers. 10 million of these customers have iPhones despite that fact that China Mobile is not an official Apple partner.

What’s even more surprising is that the iPhone isn’t currently compatible with China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA 3G network, meaning that these 10 million unofficial iPhone users are all limited to 2G data speeds.

A first-ever drop in smartphone sales could be good news for Apple but portend ‘ominous signs’ for the many companies tied to the Android mobile operating system. Despite launching several Android-based phones, carriers AT&T and Verizon both reported a drop-off in smartphone sales during the September quarter, one analyst noted Monday.

The growing importance of international iPhone sales, along with demand for Apple’s latest smartphone, should remove any Wall Street doubt that the fourth quarter was only a fluke. One analyst Monday announced bullish expectations for the first quarter of 2012, forecasting 42 million iPhones will have sold in December – more than double that of last quarter.

Maybe you’re not going to buy a pair of earphones based on the way they look; maybe you’d rather spend your moolah on a pair that came with exquisite performance. What if you could have both? In spades? Here you go: With their deep, bone-tingling bass and blue-blood looks and manners, the Klipsch Image S4i earphones ($100) is the Prince…of Spades.

Review by Kelly Keltner

Let me begin this review by saying, while I’ve found some love for certain models, I don’t really care for most canalphones: They’re uncomfortable, and while I love the idea of plugging a foreign object into my ear and having that object deliver magical sounds just like an owl delivers a Howler, I usually wind up being disappointed with either the sound or the fit. So, with that in mind, it was time to try the Etymotic mc3 ($100).

This set, with a three-button remote on the cable and four sets of super-sealing, deep-seating eartips (two flanged, two foam), was now tasked with being tested by me. May the Force, that I’ll probably have to use to shove them into my ears, be with them.

Imagine someone wanting to work for Apple, but saying “they’d have to pay me $1 million a week.” Sounds absurd, right? But T-Mobile is taking a similar tack in its attempt to sell iPhones. The carrier insists the tech giant support a little-known 4G spectrum, AWS.

We’re all looking forward to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, which will be released on Monday, October 24. But if you’ve been keeping an eye on the news over the past couple days, you’d have already seen some interesting stories from the book.

One of those details Steve’s initial opinion on third-party apps for the iPhone. In the beginning, Steve was opposed to third-party apps, and wanted developers to create web apps that could be used through the device’s mobile Safari web browser. According to Apple board member, Art Levinson, “Jobs at first quashed the discussion” of allowing apps on the company’s debut smartphone.

How well are U.S. carriers selling the iPhone? Verizon Wireless, the second domestic carrier to get the Apple handset, announced it sold 2 million of the smartphones during the third quarter. The company did not reveal how many of the latest iPhone 4S units it sold, however.

Apple has today opened up iPhone 4S pre-orders through its online store for an additional 22 countries, where the Cupertino company will launch the device a week today, on Friday, October 28.

Thanks to a leak through Apple’s own website, we’re all expecting a refresh to its MacBook Pro family to introduce faster Sandy Bridge processors. According to the latest rumor, they’ll be ready to purchase from next week.

I always feel like I should be wearing diamond-studded sunglasses, walking around in a silk bathrobe or drinking Cristal from actual Bohemian crystal whenever I sink a pair of V-Moda’s babies into my ears. This doesn’t have anything neccessarily to do with how they sound, but rather because V-Moda has a knack for creating earphones with exotic looks and a luxurious feel to them that also appeal to the other senses. And so it goes with the V-Moda Vibrato Remote earphones ($130).

On May 4th 2012, Marvel is scheduled to culminate its last four years of superhero movies with The Avengers, the Joss Whedon helmed ensemble super hero movie starring Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, Chris Evans as Captain America, Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk, Chris Helmsworth as Thor and Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow.

But did you know that parts of The Avengers were shot on an iPhone? Yup. Apple Fans Assemble!

Thought the iPhone 4S’s new camera is impressive, to say the least, it does share one issue with any other camera phone or pocket digicam: the tiny sensor means it simply can’t deep focus, making the background artistically blurry while the subject is kept crystal sharp.

If you want shallow depth-of-field like a SLR while using your iPhone, consider giving Big Lens a try. It will allow you to give your iPhone photos a super depth of field, just like those fancy pants pros use.

Apple once more outsold Nokia as the one-time cell phone giant bleeds more red ink. The Finnish cell phone maker is hoping the launch of its first smartphone based on Microsoft’s Windows Phone software will save it from further financial drubbing.

I think Apple fans watching the brawl between Cupertino and Samsung can sometimes just be confounded by what is going on. Why is Samsung taking a risk of alienating its biggest manufacturing customer just to release some crummy iPhone knockoffs? Madness, right?

Wrong. While not exactly ethical, Samsung is playing it smart: the Korean electronics giant knows that the potential margins on selling smartphones dwarf the margins on any parts it sells Apple. But the proof is in the pudding, so check this out: Samsung actually shipped more smartphones last quarter than Apple did.

A research team from the Georgia Institute of Technology claims to have discovered a keyboard keylogger attack that is performed using an iPhone’s accelerometer. However, the situation has to be so precise — and is so unlikely — that if you’re a victim of this attack you really are one of the unluckiest people on the planet.