iPhone - page 375

Siri is a tremendous addition to Apple’s latest iPhone. But if you’ve already had the pleasure of making it your own virtual assistant, you may have noticed that without a data connection, Siri goes quiet. That’s because the feature connects to Apple’s servers every time you make a request in order to retrieve your answers, or perform the task you have requested.

If you’re a regular Siri user, then, you may be worried about the dent it’s making in your monthly data allowance. But there’s no need to worry, because it’s hardly anything.

Two iPhone apps tied for first place won the top two spots in a national challenge on safety and emergency for young adults.

There were a total of 33 entries in the “Apps Against Abuse Technology Challenge,” but the top two places went to iPhone apps. Both will be available for free download in early 2012.

An interesting report from Bloomberg takes a look at 5 million iPhone users on the largest and most valuable carrier in the world, China Mobile. What’s surprising about China Mobile’s iPhone user base is the fact that Apple’s smartphone isn’t officially offered on the carrier.

Millions of Chinese Apple lovers are using their iPhones on a network that can’t even offer 3G data speeds for the device due to frequency incompatibilities. If that’s the case, then why are so many people content to use the iPhone on China Mobile? The answer: Wi-Fi.

GarageBand is one of the best apps you can show off on your iPad 2 to convince even the most ornery skeptic, and it just got even better: with the 1.1 update, GarageBand is now a $4.99 universal app, and can run on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.

Apple has seemingly missed its iTunes Match launch date after promising at its ‘Let’s Talk iPhone’ event early last month that the new service would be up and running in the United States at the “end of October.” Developers who have been testing the service in beta are discovering today that the iTunes 10.5.1 beta has now ended, with no replacement in sight.

Samsung is currently drafting up a crafty plan to get Apple’s new iPhone 4S banned from Australia, and to help its case it is requesting “the source code for the iPhone 4S firmware” and details of the company’s subsidy agreements with carriers Down Under.

The App Store is yet to offer any third-party email clients, but that’s all about to change thanks to Google. The company is reportedly “on the verge” of launching a “fantastic” Gmail app for the iPhone that may have already been submitted to Apple for approval.

Up until now, Apple’s Siri voice-recognition system has been shown in a humorous light. However, what if Siri could save your life? People remaking next-generation 911 services see Siri as the voice of emergency victims, not just a locator of the nearest sushi joint.

It may sound like something out of an Isaac Asimov novel or a James Cameron film, but the parent company of iPhone maker Foxconn is working to build an “empire of robots” to replace over a million Chinese workers.

The official Apple Store app is already a useful tool if you have to sally forth into meat space, allowing you to schedule appointment times at your local Genius Bar, reserve items for pickup at your local Apple Store and the like.

Come November 3rd, though, the Apple Store iOS app is set to gain some cool new functionality: the ability to check your own purchases out at Apple’s physical retail locations.

The most wonderful time of the year isn’t Christmas, it’s Halloween. No other day on the calendar gives you an excuse to dress up like Han Solo and go out on the prowl in search of the sexiest version of Princess Leia you can find. A lot of our readers decided to celebrate Halloween with a tribute to their favorite computer company, so we asked our Twitter followers to tweet us pics their Apple inspired Halloween costumes and jack o’-lanterns.

If you have a picture of your Apple themed costume or jack o’ lantern and would like for us to include it in the gallery, tweet it over to us @cultofmac

Here are some of the best pictures from last night:

Nokia may finally have found its answer to the iPhone, a pair of new Lumia Windows phones that one analyst tells investors is ‘competitive’ with the Apple smartphone.

If Apple was hoping to unveil its iPhone for customers of China’s third-largest mobile carrier in the world’s largest cell phone market, it may have to wait. China Telecom may have to delay introducing the handset until mid-2012, according to a Friday report citing supplier checks.

Don’t underestimate the power of China when it comes to the cellphone market. ZTE, based in the populous Asian nation, became the world’s No. 4 maker of mobile phones, overtaking Apple, which held the spot in the previous three-month period.

Apple’s Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) was integrated into the company’s Mac OS X platform back in 2004, and made its way into QuickTime and iTunes software shortly afterwards. Today, Apple has released the audio codec as open source project.

We’ve seen a shedload of Steve Jobs tributes since he passed away on October 5, but when it comes to paying tribute with one of the devices Steve created, this is the most impressive we’ve seen so far. This iPhone 4 mod was devised by a Chinese student, and it’s a tribute Apple would be proud of.

Wizardry has to be one of the longest lived franchises in gaming history — and is especially beloved by us, because the dungeon RPG’s first-ever appearance was on an Apple II. Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls will be the newest title in the 30-odd-year lineage when it debuts on November 3 for the iPhone.

The BlackBerry is popular again. Ha ha ha. Sorry, just kidding. That popularity extends only to owners rushing to trade them in after a recent nationwide service outage.

Indeed, one firm specializing in buying your unwanted phones says BlackBerry trade-ins are up 80 percent this week — and it can be entirely attributed to long beleaguered Blackberry owners trading in their devices for the iPhone 4S.

If Apple needed another argument in favor of the iPhone, Sprint’s CEO Wednesday offered up a whopper: iOS devices are 50 percent more efficient than Android handsets when it comes to slurping up 3G data. The comment seems to confirm previous reports that devices running Google’s mobile operating system are the data hogs, not iPhones.

If you use your iPhone or iPad in a speaker dock, you’ll understand that the ability to control it from across the room would be just awesome. Apple may already be working on a solution, according to one of the company’s patent applications, which suggests future Macs and iOS devices could be controlled from afar using special gestures.

Adobe has today launched a set of new applications for its Carousel photography service that allow users to gain access to their images, and edit them, from their Mac and iOS devices. Both applications are free and are available now in their respective App Stores.

Let’s face it: Chess is pretty geeky. Then again, so is the iPad (c’mon, it is). Blend the two though, and you’ve got…well, let’s just say that playing chess on an iPad at your local coffee hangout is a Wookie’s fingernail-width less geeky than insert-hyperbolic-geek-stereotype-here.

Who cares though; with its portability, large screen and potential to reach all 600 million chess players around the world, the iPad is the ultimate gadget for playing electronic chess, and the free Social Chess app is the way to play.

Most of us are hopefully unfamiliar with the prison scene, so Gizmodo has taken an interesting look at technology in California’s San Quentin State Prison. The series is called “Lockdown,” and the latest installment focuses on how smartphones are used behind bars.

Phones in prison are a hot item, going for $300 to $700 behind bars. Inmates use them to communicate with the outside world and orchestrate nefarious activities like drug drop-offs. Prisoners will do basically anything to keep an iPhone from being confiscated. And we do mean anything.

It appears the wave of early disappointment in the iPhone 4S that washed over U.S. consumers has now made it to the United Kingdom. A third of UK consumers were “disappointed” Apple’s new handset didn’t offer more features, according to an Internet survey.

You can hear a collective sospiro of relief from Italian Apple fans today after a judge in Milan denied a request by Samsung to block sales of the iPhone 4S in a preliminary hearing.

At stake was the launch of the iPhone 4S on October 28, the device that some Italians have already been buying on eBay  just to say they’ve established intimate relations with Siri before anyone else.