WhatsApp has come a long way from its early days, when creators Jan Koum and Brian Acton were inspired to create a cross-platform messenger app by Apple’s addition of push notifications to iOS 3.0.
Having been snapped up by Facebook for a cer-azy $19 billion almost a year ago, the popular app has now announced a personal record-breaking 700 million monthly active users — a whole 100 million more than were using the service back in August.
Remember when just a couple days ago, mobile marketing firm TapSense said at CES they would release a service for the Apple Watch that allowed developers to push ads to your wrist?
Well, it turns out it’s not as bad as all that. Yes, you’ll probably have ads on the Apple Watch in one way or another. But they’ll be super limited.
A lot has changed at Apple in the years since Steve Jobs died. While much of it is good (record-breaking iPhone sales, work on the new Apple campus, the stock-split leading to new share price highs), it’s unavoidable that one or two (or, indeed, 7) things would slip through the cracks, which Apple’s notoriously perfectionist late CEO would have hated.
The recent publishing of a patent for an iOS stylus — an accessory Jobs was vocal about opposing — got us thinking about other aspects of Apple, circa 2015, that likely would have rubbed the company’s late CEO the wrong way.
Here’s what we came up with.
We’re coming up to four months since the public release of iOS 8, and according to Apple’s own stats, 68 percent of users are now running the latest version of its mobile operating system. This is up five percent from one month ago — most likely buoyed by the massive number of iOS device activations which took place over the holidays.
iOS 7, meanwhile, fell 3 percentage points to 29 percent of the total active iOS user base, while earlier versions of the OS now hover around 4 percent. (Yes, we know those numbers add up to slightly more than 100 percent: it’s likely due to rounding-up the figures involved.)
When Apple comes up with an iconic design for an Apple Store, it often likes to replicate it elsewhere.
Just like the glass cube created for the company’s Fifth Avenue flagship store in New York has also popped up in other Apple Stores around the world, so too is the company reusing the glass cylinder entrance architecture design first created for its Pudong brick-and-mortar store in Shanghai.
The stunning 30-foot glass structure design will make a reappearance for Apple’s forthcoming Chongqing Apple Store, located in the city’s upmarket Guotai Plaza.
The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus has been an enormous success for Apple, and a new report from Kantar Worldpanel demonstrates just how true this is.
In the month of November, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus represented 47.4 percent of all smartphones sold in the United States. For those keeping track at home, that’s a 4.3 percent increase from the same time in 2013, when the iPhone 5s and 5c were the latest iPhone models on the market.
The iPhone 6 was also the best-selling smartphone three months in a row in the U.S., with an overall market share of 19 percent. Verizon and AT&T made up 57 percent of all iOS sales during this time.
And it’s not just the U.S. where the iPhone’s taking over, either.
A game which asks you to literally throw your iPhone in the air to make it perform extreme sport-style tricks sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Nonetheless, that’s the concept behind Gyro Skate, a new $1.99 iOS title that aims to replicate the skateboarding experience by asking gamers to perform stunts like the 360 flip by physically rotating your iPhone.
Monster Inc, the company that help co-design the original Beats by Dr. Dre headphones, is suing Beats Electronics along with cofounders Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine for allegedly stealing its headphone technology.
The company, known for its overpriced audio cables, filed a lawsuit this week in San Mateo California, claiming Beats and its founders screwed the it out of millions of dollars before the company was sold to Apple last year for $3 billion. According to court documents obtained by USA Today, Monster says Beats concealed its role in the designing and engineering the headphone line, as well as its part in the manufacturing, distributions and selling of the headphones.
When we first saw the new Jurassic World trailers, we were stunned and excited. Then, after it sunk in that the actor that plays doofus Andy Dwyer on NBC’s hilarious Parks and Recreation would be fighting dinosaurs, we sort of imagined a mashup of the two.
Apparently, Thanks Mom Productions had a similar thought, as they’ve taken footage of Chris Pratt from both the movie trailers and the TV show and edited them together for a funny video that’s all kinds of awesome.
Check it out.
LAS VEGAS — With its wide base and gently sloping sides, the Archt one speaker looks a little like an egg pod from Alien or the business end of a bomb.
Its outer shell is sleek black plastic, with a flat ring around the top that gives it a space-age feel. If the killer looks aren’t enough to grab your attention, the speaker’s ground-thumping bass will.
“It gets really loud,” Archt CEO Evan Foo told Cult of Mac.
While the all-in-one wireless speaker is certainly loud — it was ballsy enough to cut through the background noise here at the International CES trade show — the goal is to deliver CD-quality sound, no matter the source of the audio.
He is an Eagle Scout, a versatile bar-band drummer and a senior GUI designer for a company that creates mobile apps for the health care industry.
But Scott Wade is famous for drawing dirty pictures.
It’s not the content that raises eyebrows but the canvas on which Wade creates. Present him with a dirty car and see why some call him the “da Vinci of Dust.”
Who hasn’t walked by a car coated in dirt and used their finger to scrawl the message, “Wash me”? Wade, inspired by the dirt roads of his home state of Texas, uses a car’s dirty window as an opportunity to create elaborate landscapes, detailed portraiture with subtle shading and re-imagined classic works like The Mona Lisa or Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
LAS VEGAS — I’ve had a standing desk for two years now, and while it’s practically the greatest piece of furniture to ever enter my life, I somehow forget to actually stand at it while working.
HumanScale is all too familiar with lazy people like me using their ergonomic desks without reaping the full benefits, so the company teamed up with Detroit startup Tome to create a standing desk solution called OfficeIQ that syncs with HealthKit to tell you when you’re being too damn lazy.
LAS VEGAS — The wait for the world’s first Lightning headphones is almost over.
Philips’ upcoming Fidelio M2L bypasses the analog headphone jack, instead sending the digital audio signal through the Lightning port used in late-model iOS devices.
“You keep the digital signal as far as possible until you have no choice,” Benoit Borette, a Philips audio engineer, told Cult of Mac.
Apple did amazing things in 2014, but when it comes to growth, the iPad wasn’t exactly a blockbuster success. In fact, they’ve been slumping. Although Cook views slowing iPad growth as a “speed bump,” iPad upgrades are inarguably closer to the upgrade rate of laptops than smartphones.
Cook’s optimistic. “Because we’ve only been in the market for four years, we don’t know how long the upgrade cycle will be for people,” Cook said during the October earnings call. “So that’s a difficult thing to call.”
So what does 2015 hold for the iPad? Sadly, it’s not clear.
LAS VEGAS — On the surface, there’s nothing very exciting about a portable flash drive. It doesn’t excite me at all. But make that drive a sleek, Lightning-equipped, 256GB beast of a thing, and now we’re talking.
The Leef iBridge, on display here at International CES, packs the most storage of any iOS-compatible hard drive on the market. But all that space comes at a steep price.
$399.99, to be exact. Certainly jaw-dropping, but something in me, and obviously in the Leef team, believes there’s at least a few people out there who will buy it. If not, the cheaper 128GB ($200), 64GB ($120), 32GB ($80) and 16GB ($60) models should appeal to the layman.
There’s a nice companion iOS app that reads what you’ve stored and even lets you shoot photos/video directly to the drive. Not a bad thing to have for a photo adventure in the wilderness. Or if you still don’t have enough storage available to install iOS 8.
Throughout December, we heard a lot of rumors that said Apple might be bringing back the 4-inch iPhone form factor. My colleague Luke categorized these rumors as “unlikely,” and yet they continued, perhaps buoyed by the crossed-fingers of women and the tiny-handed. But now a new report says they were unlikely after all.
The role of Steve Jobs’ eldest daughter Lisa Jobs in the upcoming Universal movie biopic was previously described by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin as the story’s “heroine.”
Given some of the A-list names that have been associated with the project, it’s therefore something of a surprise to hear that the role has apparently been awarded to 17-year-old actress Perla Haney-Jardine.
If your reaction to that news is “who?,” you’re most likely not alone. Up until she won this part, the Brazilian-born American actress is best known for playing the four-year-old daughter of Beatrix “The Bride” Kiddo and Bill in 2004’s Kill Bill Vol. 2.
Not exactly bad training for playing the daughter of the often steely tech-ninja Steve Jobs, perhaps!
Want to buy an iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus without a SIM card, or locked to a specific carrier? You finally have your chance: unlocked iPhones have just gone on sale through Apple’s brick-and-mortar and online stores for the very first time.
LAS VEGAS — Taking a urine-analysis test to check your most vital and private health stats usually requires an hour-long visit to the doctor. But in 2015, you’ll be able to pee on a stick and get 12 vital health measurements without having to leave your bathroom.
Scandu, the Silicon Valley-based medtech company behind the tiny Scandu Scout analyzer, has created an at-home urinalysis device called the Scanaflo that bridges the gap between the medical community and consumers.
The iGrow Hair sounds like some kind of comical mishearing of iPad Air. In fact, the iGrow and iDerma are the latest wacky gadgets to show up at this year’s CESB — or not so wacky at all if you listen to its creators.
The fully-adjustable, FDA-approved devices boast a proprietary Low-Level Light Therapy (LLLT) technology. According to its makers, a combination of red laser and LED light diodes is used to “stimulate and energize cellular activity” to reenergize the natural function of the hair follicle.
If your hair is thinning (although you’re not yet bald), iGrow offers a 4-to-6 month process which could give you back a head of hair that is demonstrably thicker, fuller and more vibrant than ever.
Oh, and just in case you’re wondering, yes, it does come with a 6-month money back guarantee.
LAS VEGAS — An iPhone battery case is kinda like insurance: You don’t really want it, but you know you need it. It’s been months since Apple started selling the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, but we have yet to see any battery cases from established brands … until now.
Otterbox unveiled its Resurgence power case for the iPhone 6 at International CES this week. The case packs a 2,600-mAh battery that will charge your iPhone’s battery twice over. And, like everything Otterbox makes, it’s designed with military-grade drop protection.
The case charges itself via a micro-USB connector, and it has a button on the back that needs to be pressed when your iPhone requires more life. Otterbox is offering four colors, and the case should be available in a couple weeks for $100.
The so-called Bendgate incident might have done Apple no favors in 2014, but according to a new patent published today, Cupertino is far from done when it comes to flexible iPhones — this time, purposely so.
Apple’s newly-granted patent covers an invention related to flexible housing for future iOS devices. As described, these devices would be capable of being bent or even folded with no damage to the internal components.
To pull this off, Apple would likely ditch the milled aluminium used in current iPhones for more easily deformable materials such as soft plastics and fiber composites able to withstand repeated flexing.
LAS VEGAS — The first full day of CES if starting to wrap up and if there’s one trend starting to emerge, it’s that there are no trends. Nowhere was this more apparent than Samsung’s keynote, where the company threw everything and the kitchen sink into its announcement of new home appliances, a vacuum, a Virtual Reality service called Milk, a cute portable SSD, and of course, one of the craziest TVs we’ve ever seen.
Dropping ridiculous TVs has become something of a tradition for Samsung at CES, and this year is no different with the SUHD S9W TV that’s touted as ‘the most seductive TV ever made.’ It’s just too bad you’ll never get to use their beautiful gimmick.
AAPL shares have been tanking the last few weeks after reaching a record high in 2014, but Apple is looking to stop the bleeding later this month by announcing what’s expected to be another record breaking earnings report for Q1 2015 on January 27th.
LAS VEGAS — Gardening isn’t easy. Especially if you leave home for weeks at a time and your plants go unwatered.
You could hire a gardener, but Parrot is ready to make it easier and cheaper with their new automated watering pot. The device will keep your leafy friends hydrated with just a tap of your phone.