iPhone - page 406

Eager to keep your nubile teenage daughter from using the new iPhone she got for Christmas as a sexting terminal? Cupertino’s just patented technology to keep her blossoming libido as virginal as the App Store.

For the iPhone user who has everything except his arms, meet the NoseDial, a new app that makes your contacts larger so that you can dial them using simply your face’s bulging proboscis. You don’t have to be a double amputee to use it, though: it’s also good if you’re trying to call someone with gloves you don’t want to take off.

I automatically love any story about a robber who tries to stick up a restaurant, only to have to deal with the armada of cooks in the kitchen arming themselves with cleavers and knives and preparing to go to war. I was once in a restaurant in Malden, Massachusetts that avoided being robbed in just the same manner.

That said, it’s rare that I get a chance to write about these amazing incidents of robbers vs. line cooks on Cult of Mac, but here we have an exception, when 20-year old Jerome Taylor made the mistake of falling afoul of a blade-wielding kitchen crew when he tried to rob a New London, Connecticut restaurant using only his iPhone.

Needless to say, the robber — 20-year old Jerome Taylor — failed. Although he brandished his iPhone like a gun, the cooks quickly flooded out of the kitchen, ready to slice and dice. Terrified by the charge, Taylor suddenly “became apologetic and told the cooks he was only kidding and that he needed money for his child.”

He seems to have convinced the staff, because they begged the police not to file charges. It didn’t work, though: Taylor was still charged with attempted robbery and interfering with an officer.

Next time you need money for Christmas for your child, Jerome, maybe try selling that iPhone on eBay instead of robbing a restaurant. Don’t you know they shove all the disreputable, violent lots back in the steamer of the kitchen? Those guys would cut you sooner than look at you.

You might not agree with her position, but you’ve got to admit that this is one precocious kid: a thirteen year old iPhone owner is set to go into court next month to contest what she and her family claim was an unjust charge levied by Apple Korea to fix an iPhone 3G which they claimed had been water damaged.

Even if Apple thought Antennagate was overblown, let’s face it: their last attempt to put the iPhone’s antenna into the exposed edges of the device didn’t work out so well, prompting a PR catastrophe so bad that Apple was actually forced to hold an emergency press conference… something they never do.

That in and of itself suggests pretty strongly that Apple’s going to try something new for the iPhone antenna in future handsets, and if a new patent is any indication, that new approach to hiding the iPhone’s antenna may be by hiding it under the iconic Apple logo.

The upcoming Jack Black comedy, Gulliver’s Travels, which opens Christmas Day, will be one giant Apple ad.

When Gulliver travels to Lilliput, he brings his iPhone, which when used by the Lilliputians appears gigantic.

The movie has multiple MacBooks and other Apple products, and Apple logos galore.

Apple is easily the most successful company ever in getting its products into movies and TV shows. Some 41% of the movies that hit number-one at the box office featured Apple products.

Part of the reason for this success is that Hollywood is Apple-obsessed. Another is that Apple works at it. The company proudly boasts that it never pays for product placement. But it’s likely that there is some string pulling, proactive offers of devices to use and other actions that are kept secret by the company.

Whatever Apple is doing, it’s working.

Need a last-minute stocking stuffer, or wondering how to keep that New Year’s resolution? Digifit is giving away its $80 ANT+ Digifit Connect — just download their free Digifit app, then pop for the $15 in-app upgrade (which allows the app to connect with the dongle).

The idea is pretty much the same as with the Wahoo Fisica dongle (also $80): Attach the Digifit Connect to an iPhone (or iPad or iPod) and it’ll communicate with any ANT+ heart-rate monitor, footpod, bicycle cadence or speed sensor; then workout data can be tracked and analyzed through the Digifit app, or download the data to one of several websites, like New Leaf Fitness.

What’s better than that horrific, buck-toothed, Tiny-Tim-loving Porifera Spongebob SquarePants perched atop a birthday cake lovingly baked and frosted in the shape of an iPhone? That horrific, buck-toothed, Tiny-Tim-loving Porifera Spongebob SquarePants perched atop a birthday cake containing a real-life iPhone.

Meanwhile, for my last birthday, I got a pie that contained nothing but rhubarb, and I was damn lucky to get it.

Boy those social networks are sticky: a pair of iPhone thieves were caught thanks to Facebook.

Brittany Busby, 19, and Todd Beede, 28, strolled into an AT&T store in downtown Montpelier, Vermont at around 2 p.m. and started checking out the phones.

They grabbed a $700 iPhone and ran off – but were caught because they couldn’t resist logging into Facebook on another phone in the store but forgot to sign off.

Need an external battery pack that doesn’t just dangle from the foot of your phone like a bulbous, electrically-charged bunion? The Octopus might be just what you’re looking for.

Taking its name from the suction cups of a cephalopod’s tentacles, the Octopus sits in your gadget bag until your iPhone runs out of juice, at which point it can be slapped onto the back of your device and connected to the Dock Connector thanks to a flexible cable.

If you allow the Octopus to fully charge your iOS device, you can expect your iPhone to comfortably juice to about half power, which should give you either ten hours of extra video or four hours of extra talk time.

Not a bad idea compared to some of the bulkier combo battery cases, and cheap to boot: the Octopus will only cost you $30

You probably know of Instagram, the hipster app du jour which allows you to easily apply a number of attractive, quasi-Polaroid-esque filters that spruce up your iPhone or iPod Touch pictures to give them a more artistic and sometimes twee look.

But you probably know more than of Instagram. You probably use it. After all, they just racked up one million users.

According to Instragram co-founder Kevin Systrom, Instagram started with just 80 users, and their ultimate “audacious goal” was just to let people share media in open community. The growth they’ve seen is phenomal, though: since mid-October, they’ve lured in over a million souls.

“We’ve just been amazed at the growth of the service,” Mr. Systrom said in a phone interview. “My partner and I had a bet the first day about how many downloads we would get and I was off by an order magnitude.”

How big is Instagram? Users are now collectively uploading three photos per second, to contribute to a library of almost ten million photos.

I may sound dismissive, but I’m not: Instagram undeniably allows users to take more interesting looking photos than the iPhone’s built-in sensor can natively produce. I guess I just wish that the iPhone and iPod Touch’s camera hardware was capable of taking interesting images without needing a filter app. It can’t, but that’s not Apple’s failure: it’s a limitation on the technology of digital sensors. Here’s hoping that changes.

Here’s our 2010 Year in Review of the best 10 hardware peripherals for your iPhone or iPad that we’ve come across in the last twelve months.

If you missed any of these or didn’t get a chance to check them out for some reason or another, don’t fret — all of them are still available and worth a look.

10. AR Drone Parrot

It’s going to be one lucky kid who gets this iDevice-controllable wonder

The AR Drone Parrot is a quadricopter that’s controlled by the iPhone, iPod touch or the iPad. It can be flown indoors or outside and features many sensors, including a front camera ,vertical camera and an ultrasound altimeter. High-tech sensors make it simple for kids to pilot. The AR Drone can also be used in video games, such as AR FlyingAce, a dogfight between two AR Drones.

The AR Drone Parrot is available from Amazon for $299.99

Behold! An iPhone fit for a Brobdingnagian! This is the world’s biggest iPhone, located in the heart of London’s famous St. Pancras International Train Station. But while it is impressively enormous, a Bunyan-sized handset for the on-the-go colossus, it’s something of a cheat: it’s made up of 56 interconnected iPads.

Ever since the Wikileaks dumped hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables up on their site for everyone to see, traditional companies have been trying to disassociate themselves from the whistle-blowing wiki. In rapid order, Wikileaks lost the support of its host, Amazon, their DNS provider, PayPal, and MasterCard.

Now Apple’s App Store Review Team has . But is it censorship?

With the holidays now only days away, we are all starting to think about the true meaning of the holidays – food and drink, and copious amounts of the stuff! Whether you are in charge of the full roast on Christmas day, or just the cranberries, having a helping hand is always appreciated.

Being the lovely people we are, we have put together a list of the best apps and accessories for both iPhone and iPad that can help your holiday season be as full flavoured and stress free as possible!

FaceTime. Email. Text Messaging. Twitter.  Your iPhone is your personal communicator, allowing you to keep in contact with friends, family and your social network.  The web, the internet – gateways to information and productivity.

But technology has a downside, and anyone who’s battled internet addiction or just taken a weekend off from being plugged-in understands the need for balance.  My colleague Professor Sherry Turkle, Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, has been studying this phenomenon for decades and researched how relentless connection can lead to a new solitude:

Thirty years ago we asked what we would use computers for? Now, the question is what don’t we use them for? Technology promises to let us do anything from anywhere with anyone. But it also drains us as we try to do everything everywhere.

With the CultofMac so chock full of bike geeks, it’s no wonder we pretty excited to see the arrival a few months back of one of the first gadgets that fall into the app-enhanced category — a gadget/app mashup that manufacturer New Potato Tech cleverly calls an “appcessory.” In this case, the $99 LiveRider combo of an iPhone bicycle mount and sensor/receiver package with its own dedicated app turns the iPhone into a flexible, jumbo-screened bike computer.

It’s not the only sensor/app combo on the market; Enki Sports offers a more complete and expensive solution, and newcomer Wahoo Fitness recently arrived with a flexible, modular approach (with sensors that look remarkably similar to Enki’s). But we figured New Potato’s kit would provide a simple, relatively inexpensive setup for intermediate-ish cyclists wanting their data fix. We were mistaken.

According to a recent Houston Chronicle story an iPhone has once again saved the day and solved a crime. This particular iPhone was stolen from a female jogger, who was jogging with a friend, during an armed robbery that occurred in the 700 block of Brittmore on the west side of Houston, Texas.

The alleged robbers exited a pickup truck and confronted the two women according to Houston Police Department (HPD) spokesman John Cannon.  An Apple iPhone was turned over to the robbers by one of the women and fortunately neither of them was hurt.

The iPhone’s impressive GPU is supplied by Imagination Technologies, and it’s already powerful enough to run advanced 3D graphics engines like the Unreal 3 Engine. Unbelievably, though, it’s slated to get a lot better, after it was announced that Imagination has just acquired Caustic Graphics, a company with even more impressive 3D graphics technology to boast of.

The US Army wants to equip soldiers with smartphones as a part of their standard equipment – leaving it up to individuals to decide which one they want.

The Army would issue these smartphones just like any other piece of equipment a soldier receives and pay the bills, too. Two types would be offered, the iPhone or an Android phone.

“One of the options potentially is to make it a piece of equipment in a soldier’s clothing bag,” said Lt. Gen. Michael Vane, director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center.

Piper Jaffrey analyst Gene Munster has a spotty history of prediction, but we think his latest pronouncement is probably right: if Verizon’s the next network that gets the iPhone, it will only be at AT&T’s expense.

Combining equal doses of high tech gadgetry and holiday schmaltz, members of the North Point iBand in Alpharetta, Georgia staged an entertaining performance of holiday classics utilizing only iPads and iPhones as instruments. An infectious selection of holiday ditties, combined with Casio’esque sonic fidelity, ensured that a good time was had by all!

Classics performed include Carol of the Bells, Rockin Around the Christmas Tree, and Feliz Navidad. Apps used include SoundGrid, NLogFree, Melody Bell, Guitarist (Nylon String & Electric), iGog and Bassist.

Apparently these guys also didn’t get the memo about iPads being only for consumption…

[via VisualNews]

1. Follow Cult of Mac on Twitter
2. Follow True Power on Twitter
3. Tweet and replace *color* with your fav: “@cultofmac and @truepowerinc are giving away 25 ThinSkins for iPhone. I want the *color* one”
4. We’ll choose 25 freaking winners who gave us twitter shoutouts and Direct Message you for your deets (so you HAVE to follow CoM). Contest ends 11:59 PST Wednesday, December 14th.

What You’ll Win

Each winner gets their favorite color ThinSkin FREE. Again, the Gremlin Green one is legendary.

Giveaway Details

This giveaway is void where prohibited and there is no purchase necessary to enter the giveaway.  Prizes will be shipped directly from ThinSkin.  Cult of Mac is not responsible for shipping/handling of the prize.  Please provide an accurate physical address if contacted that you are a winner.

We report with reservations, because this rumor — while titillating — is clearly absurd. That said, if you don’t hear it from us, you’ll hear it from someone more breathless: Mac Daily News is claiming that the Verizon iPhone is coming to a Verizon outlet near you as soon as December 26th.

When a company with as fabled a name as Bowers & Wilkins proffers up an iPod dock, one expects nothing less than enough oomph to satisfy even the most discerning audiophile, and enough svelteness to elicit a smile from even the most ardent aesthete. B&W’s first shot at a dock, the Zeppelin, certainly turned heads when it debuted in 2007 (at least, once word got out about it). But its sprawling, bulbous shape — and sprawling, bulbous, $600 pricetag — limited its appeal. Two years later the company followed with the Zeppelin Mini, a much smaller, less expensive dock that nevertheless tried to maintain the aesthetic and sonic reputation the company was known for.

But at $400, the Mini was still significantly pricier than almost any other dock sitting on, say, an Apple Store’s dock table. Then earlier this year B&W brought the price down to $300, placing it on a level field with other upper-mid-end docks — a league that seems to be gaining players at an almost alarming rate — and allowing it to stand out among its peers as the compact, high-performance star it is.