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.
I was wrong about the iPhone 4s. I said it would be great. I predicted it would be the best phone ever built. The truth, it turns out, is that the iPhone 4s kind of sucks.
There. I said it.
And it’s not just the iPhone by itself. The iOS 5 upgrade, the design of some new apps and iCloud all add up to a degraded experience with using the iPhone.
Here are the 6 major things wrong with the new iPhone.
(Note: This is a promoted link to a story written by one of our writers for an outside site.)
Gameloft & Sega are getting into the Halloween spirit and offering tasty treats in the form of cheap iOS games. For a limited time you can grab a some of the most popular games for your iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad for just $0.99, including Order & Chaos Online, Driver, ChuChu Rocket!, and Virtua Fighter 2.
Here’s the full list:
Carbon weave has got to be the Miracle Whip of gadgets — it makes anything taste better. We reviewed Sound ID’s 510 Bluetooth headset in a BT headset head-to-head (try saying that fast) a few months back; and while it sounded great and was pretty much our pick of the week, it wasn’t the coolest looking kid on the block — and you couldn’t order it to do stuff, like you could some other headsets. Sound ID’s new Six fixes all that, and adds a trick for Siri too.
This is pretty wild: the Kogeto Dot ($80) is a 360-degree lens that snaps onto the back of an iPhone 4, shoots 360-degrees worth of video; then a player in the cloud (if you upload the clip) or on your iPhone 4 in the form of Kogeto’s free Looker app (if you keep the clip on your phone) allows you to play the app and change to any viewpoint in a 360-degree circle during playback.
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.