iPhone - page 387

As my colleague Mike Elgan points out, the iPhone has changed the world in profound ways.

Now an ex-colleague, Brian Chen of Wired.com, has just published one of the first books to take an in-depth look at how, exactly, the smartphone world is shaping up.

Always On: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future — and Locked Us In is an excellent overview of how the iPhone is changing the computing landscape.

I follow Apple closely, yet I was surprised at how much I learned about the world of mobile from Chen’s well-reported book (Full disclosure: I provided a blurb).

The iPhone turned 4 this week. And in that short amount of time, Apple’s smartphone has made a huge impact on the world as we know it. In fact, the iPhone is probably the most influential consumer electronics product ever made.

Here are the 12 ways iPhone has changed the world in only four years.

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This tops any list of back-handed compliments: a woman leaves her iPhone 4 on the roof of her car. Drives away.

The New York Times has issued an update to its iOS apps today that now allows users to subscribe to paid content through in-app purchases. The change comes a day later than the June 30 deadline Apple imposed on subscription apps that must now provide a way for users to sign up without being redirected to a website.

For this week’s giveaway we’ve partnered up with the friendly folks at Appular to bring fans a great package of iOS gaming apps, for free. We’ve got codes for five of the hottest games in the iPhone App Store right now and we’re ready to dish em out to our awesome fans to liven up your iPhone gaming lives. Today’s package of apps includes Cars 2, Tiny Wings, Hanging With Friends, The Game of Life, and Sea Battles. If you want a chance to win all five games then hurry up and enter the contest.

It’s become a pattern for consumers – word of a new Apple device puts the brakes on purchases of the current version. Verizon Wireless is now seeing that as Apple fans hold off buying the iPhone 4 to wait for the iPhone 5.

iPhone apps are live streaming the trial of a mother accused of killing her 2-year-old daughter.

Casey Anthony, 25, is standing trial in Orange County, Florida on a charge of first-degree murder. Her 2-year-old daughter Caylee’s disappearance in the summer of 2008 became a national obsession.

Apps, those tiny games and other bits of code on your iPhone or iPad, are adding up to serious money. After doubling to $14.1 billion this year, revenue from apps will generate more than $36.7 billion by 2015. But can web apps cash-in on this goldmine?

Apple — not Android — has the momentum in the United States, a new study finds, and their powerhouse move was the Verizon iPhone, which flattened domestic Android growth.

One of Windows 8’s key tablet features is the ability to run two apps on the same screen side-by-side. It’s a feature that iOS 5 has yet to adopt, but that hasn’t stopped one jailbreak dev from swiping the idea and creating a hack that can allow two or more iPhone apps to run side-by-side on any iPad. Sick.

Today is the fourth anniversary of the release of the original iPhone, and for Cult of Mac’s writers, it’s a particularly important birthday: not only does June 29th mark the anniversary of one of our most all-time beloved gadgets, but it’s also a day so momentous that it has rippled through every aspect of our professional lives as both Apple fans and writers.

To mark the occasion, five of Cult of Mac’s writers got together to talk about where we were when the first iPhone came out, what it meant for us then and what it means for us now. Check out our stories, then please feel free to hop in and leave a comment telling us where you were when the iPhone was born.

As we prepare to welcome iOS 5 to our devices, a look back finds iOS 4 is used by nearly all iPhones just a year after its release. Unveiled a year ago for the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G, iOS 4 is on 95.59 percent of Apple handsets, an advertising firm announced Wednesday.

To mark the fourth anniversary of the original iPhone, Mashable has put together an incredible infographic covering the four years of iPhone. You can see it below, and it really puts into perspective what a momentous event the release of the first iPhone was.

In many ways, it’s hard for me to remember my first iPhone without wincing a bit — no apps? Only 4GB of storage? —but Mashable has it dead right when they say “when we look at the mobile industry, there is a very clear line between what happened before June 29, 2007, and what happened after.”

Although it seems antiquated now in a lot of ways, the original iPhone is easily the singly most important cell phone of the last twenty years.

Happy Birthday, iPhone, and thanks.

Will Apple offer two handsets later this year, the iPhone 5 and an unknown option? So far, the answer to the question is yes, no, and both — and its only Wednesday.

Apple has just added three new pages to its website which highlight why its Macs and iOS devices are the perfect companions for those heading off to college. Well, actually, the Mac gets a bit of a soft sell… but Apple’s really banging the drum when it comes to their iOS devices, and as usual, it all comes down to apps.

Google launched its latest attempt at social networking yesterday dubbed Google+, a service which is said to focus on sharing content with groups of people that you place into “circles.” At the moment the service is available by invitation only, but by the time it goes public, there may be an official iPhone app for you to run it on.

Remember that Lulzsec hack the other day that showed that AT&T was already testing iPads on their next generation 4G network?

Well, there’s even more interesting information in the leak than that. Complete details about AT&T’s proposed LTE data plans make it clear that when Apple does release an iPhone or iPad 4G, prohibitive data caps, massive overage charges and automatically throttled bandwidth will be the rule of the day.

Undoubtedly the most simple jailbreak solution to ever be available for the iPhone is the JailbreakMe online exploit from Comex. Apple quickly patched this hack shortly after its release, but Comex has updated the JailbreakMe page with a teaser its upcoming relaunch… reminding people that this was a jailbreak a LONG time in the making.

Contrary to yesterday’s rumors, a new analyst report suggests that the iPhone 3GS will remain the low-end iPhone even after the iPhone 5 drops in September… making it the first iPhone to spend over three years on the market.

Short of Sprint’s WiMax, Verizon LTE has no actual competition to speak of in the 4G market. AT&T and T-Mobile’s “4G” is really just supercharged HSPA+ 3G technology, after all. So the results of PC Mag’s nationwide mobile bandwidth test shouldn’t be much of a surprise: Verizon LTE just mops the floor with the competition.

That’s not going to last though. Here’s why.

Now that the iPhone has sent the the common point-and-shoot camera the way of Kodachrome, there’s no excuse for bad pics.

Designer and photographer Dan Marcolina wrote a well-received book on iPhone Photography called iPhone Obsessed. Now he’s got an iPad app companion to the book, which teaches even more tips and tricks.

There’re absolutely zero reasons not to get this incredibly slick, fly-by-the-seat-of-you-pants remake of the 90’s classic racing shooter Death Rally iOS game unless you hate fun or you’re dead.

iPhone and PS3 hacker extraordinaire George Hotz, also known as GeoHot, has gone establishment, but the Limera1n hacker wasn’t scooped up by Apple or Sony: instead, the famously anti-establishment jailbreaker is now employed at Facebook. Say what?

It’s been a great week for iOS gamers, with fantastic new releases from Gameloft, Chillingo, Sega and Telltale Games. Picking our favorites has been some task.

Here’s this week’s roundup — featuring the return of Sonic in a brand new arcade kart racer, an iPad platformer that uses your iPhone as a controller, and the final episode of Monkey Island.

Sick of juggling multiple data plans across your iPhone and iPad? That could soon be coming to an end, as US carriers stroke their chins and openly muse about shared data plans.