iPhone - page 398

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.

If you want to find a Symbian owner in Australia, the best place to look might be in line at the Apple Store. Apple is now Australia’s No. 1 mobile phone vendor as Symbian maker Nokia lost nearly half of its market share during the first quarter of 2011.

All that’s left for BlackBerry-maker RIM is to rearrange the deck chairs. After losing its smartphone market, its smartphone subscribers, and Wall Street, the Waterloo, Ontario handset company now sees its developers manning the lifeboats headed for Apple’s iOS. Coders say they’re tired of inconsistent interfaces and applications that just won’t work.

Starting in 2012, if you want to see Samsung and Apple together, your best bet is in a courtroom. The two rivals’ “frenemy” status apparently has reached the breaking point, with a “deafening” roar of leaks indicating the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant will dumping Samsung built A5 and A6 processors as part of a larger purge that could completely eliminate the Korean manufacturer from Apple’s entire supply chain.

When Apple releases the new iPhone in September, which is it going to be: a modest speed bump called the iPhone 4S or a major update called the iPhone 5? Both, according to one analyst. Is he nuts?

This week’s roundup of must-have applications features one of the most unique video apps we’ve ever seen for the iPhone, a fantastic new note-taking app from tablet-maker Wacom, and a simplistic calendar app that aims to bring old-school desktop calendars to your iPhone.

Check out all of this and more below!

Here’s an interesting idea: Take a thoughtfully designed, well-rounded, high-tech Bluetooth headset and mate it to a dedicated iPhone app (called EarPrint) with a boatload of mostly useful functions, and — voila, the dazzling result would look exactly like the Sound ID 510 Bluetooth headset ($129).

Apple has initially ordered 15 million iPhone 5 handsets from two manufacturers say reports. If correct, the first-month figure is about five times the number of iPhone 4 units the Cupertino, Calif. company sold during the same four-week period in 2010. Could the iPhone 5 be Apple’s first truly international launch, or merely the launch where supply is least lopsided compared to demand?

A worker for China’s largest mobile carrier has confirmed that the iPhone 5 will launch on China Mobile in September. What does that mean for Americans? An iPhone 5 as early as August.

Shortly after Apple released the first beta of iOS 5 earlier this month, some users went hunting through its internals and found references to the next-generation iPad and iPhone. However, there was one thing missing — and that was any mention of a new iPod touch.

The news led some to believe that Apple may delay the launch of the fifth-generation device until 2012, but it seems those first perusing the iOS 5 files just didn’t look hard enough.