News - page 1380

Beats Music is in an interesting spot as a new service, mainly because we don’t know when (or if) it will be swallowed by Apple.

After it was revealed last week that Apple plans to buy Beats for billions, the company’s fledgling music subscription service has received a new level of attention. But that doesn’t mean its growth has been healthy.

According to a leaked royalties report, Beats Music only had around 111,000 subscribers as of last month.

Those are incredibly low numbers for a startup with a lot of funding, aggressive advertising, and a juicy promotion in place with AT&T. But to Apple, stagnant growth isn’t an issue. It’s about what Beats Music can do for iTunes.

The second charity auction to offer a sit-down with Tim Cook has closed, and $330K has been raised by the winning bid for the RFK Center for Justice & Human Rights.

The winner, who’s identity has not been disclosed, will get to have lunch with Cook at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California. Another perk was added by Cook before the auction closed, but even that failed to garner as much interest as the previous auction.

At a price of $3.2 billion, Beats Audio is the most Apple has ever paid to acquire a company in its 38 year history, but even after writing that fat check Apple will have nearly $148 billion in cash burning a hole in its pocket.

Tim Cook says he’s not afraid to go on a shopping spree, so what else should he buy while he’s tossing around mountains of cash at companies? The folks at Funny or Die have a few ideas of their own, including a $13 billion acquisition that could finally bring the iToilet to your bathroom in classic Apple white.

Check it out:

Apple’s rumored iWatch could give the watch industry a much needed shot in the wrist once its finally revealed, but what if Apple decided to make iWatch a platform like CarPlay instead of an actual product?

It sounds crazy but putting Apple’s tech in the hands of the world’s classiest watchmakers could yield better results than if Cupertino dives into the fashion world alone. In its newest concept, Curved imagined what Rolex could do with the iWatch and the result is the manliest smart chronometer a non-geek could want.

Checkout the full concept video below:

When it comes to getting sued over U.S. patent infringements, no one gets targeted more than Apple.

A new study from legal analytics firm Lex Machina found that in 2013 Apple was the most frequent target of patent lawsuits, followed by Amazon at No. 2, as both companies came under heavy fire from a group of 10 “patent monetization entities” that were responsible for a staggering 13 percent of the 6,092 patent-infringement suits filed last year.

Here’s a breakdown of the top 10 most-sued companies:

Sliding two distinctive iRings between my middle and ring fingers on each hand and then conducting the bouncy electronic beat coming out of my iPad mini and into my big fat headphones made me feel less like a conductor and more like an awkward boxer, punching at a touchscreen.

Once I relaxed into it, though, the music started to flow and my hands began to dance; this is one cool iOS music-making peripheral.

The iRing is made for making music, but the potential here is stunning: Imagine a video game controlled with your hands, a webpage that scrolls at a speed you define with your fingers, or an e-book that turns pages with a swipe through the air. This is a truly innovative new product.

iOS still beats Android when it comes to quality apps and games. But lots of us use Android tablets and smartphones for one reason (price) or another (freedom), so we might as well make the best of it.

You can find some great games on the Android platform, many of them free or low cost, too. So don’t settle for the same old free-to-play crap — download these great Android games today.

A list of links and prices follows.

A new survey, reportedly taken from a sample of 50,000 smartphone users around the world, reveals the reasons consumers made the phone purchasing decisions they did.

According to IDC’s findings, battery life is the number one most important factor when it comes to choosing a smartphone — coming above ease of use, screen size, camera resolution, and touch screen. When asked, almost half of all iPhone owners quizzed named battery life as the main reason for their selecting the device.

As if the reported $3.2 billion Beats deal isn’t enough evidence, Apple seems to be quite big on this “music” thing.

According to new reports, Apple will introduce high definition audio playback in iOS 8, alongside new versions of its In-Ear Headphones. The iOS rumor corresponds with earlier reports that Apple will announce high-fidelity iTunes music downloads at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). As it currently stands, iOS 7’s standard Music app can’t play high quality 24-bit audio files which contain a sampling frequency beyond 48 kHz.

Apple might be among the companies which settled the Silicon Valley anti-poaching dispute out of court last month, but one plaintiff isn’t happy — calling the $324 million settlement “grossly inadequate.”

The trial was supposed to begin at the end of May, which would have potentially led to months of revelations about Apple’s anti-poaching practices. Ultimately the four tech companies involved, including Apple and Google, settled for $324 million: a figure substantially lower than the $3 billion in damages requested by the suit, or the $9 billion which could have been awarded if the defendants were found to be guilty in court.

Microsoft Office for iPad only landed six weeks ago, but Microsoft claims it’s already been downloaded a whopping 27 million times.

The figure was thrown out by Julia White, the general manager of Microsoft’s Office division, who mentioned it during a keynote speech on Monday at Microsoft’s TechEd customer conference in Houston.

Look, making an app that will run on your iPhone is hard.

Luckily, adsy.me just made it chimp simple for normal folks like you or I to make a mobile app right on your iOS, Android or computer. You don’t need to download anything, learn to code, or even leave your touchscreen.

Make an app to show off your disco band, complete with links to Soundcloud, or share recipes with your friends, linking them to your favorite chef sites. Explain your passion project and connect your Twitter followers to a wealth of knowledge that you can curate on your very own mobile app.

Seriously, if you want to make a mobile app and have no clue about C++ or Xcode compilers or other such fooferaw, adsy.me is your best bet.

The iWatch may be set to mark Apple’s debut into health and fitness tracking, but one company is taking the concept of wearables a step further.

The forthcoming $199 OMsignal shirt promises to be the gym wear of the future — featuring a ton of health sensors sewn into its fabric, which constantly monitor the condition of the wearer. Sensors are capable of tracking heart rate, breathing rate, breathing volume, movement (including steps and cadence), movement intensity, heart rate variability, and calories burned.

“The data is sent via Bluetooth to a specially developed iPhone app, which lets you see all of it in real time,” says Dr. Jesse Slade Shantz, the firm’s Chief Medical Officer. “Your iPhone beams the data up to the cloud, and algorithms we’ve developed then push back various metrics — showing you information about your breathing during workouts, and information like that.”

Apple’s biggest acquisition ever is all the tech world can talk about, and Apple hasn’t even confirmed the news yet.

Last week it was reported that Apple has plans to acquire Beats Electronics for $3.2 billion. Shortly after the news broke, Beats co-founder and legendary producer Dr. Dre called himself the “first billionaire in hip-hop.”

Now Dre and music industry tycoon Jimmy Iovine are rumored to appear onstage at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference next month. What exactly the future holds for Apple and Beats remains unclear, but here are five things to know about the monumental deal:

The icon-tiled interface of iOS could use more than just a flat facelift from Jony Ive to feel more modern and even though jailbreakers have enjoyed widgets for years, maybe it’s time Apple added them in Control Center.

This iOS 8 concept from Ryan Gilsdorf envisions widgets coming to iOS 8 through Control Center where users can swipe between music, calendar, weather and third-party widgets to control apps from the homescreen.

Take a look at the full concept video below:

If silence is golden then Twitter’s new mute feature is like King Midas, turning every annoying miscreant and troll in your feed into an unseeable nothing.

The new mute feature is rolling out today for people who use Twitter on iPhone, Android, and Twitter.com. Mute let’s you take more control of the content in your feed by completely banning some users from showing up in your timeline.

Apple is planning to rollout a new 8GB iPhone 5c in India starting this June in hopes to turn the country into it’s next booming market.

India was one of the few places you could still buy an iPhone 4 until last week when Apple pulled phone from the country. A cheaper iPhone 5c will aim to boost Apple’s marketshare in a smartphone market dominated by Sony and Samsung.

Square has been at the forefront of mobile payments for years now, thanks largely to the popularity of its white card reader that’s used by merchants everywhere.

Now the company is debuting a brand new app called Square Order, and it does away with the need for a cash register completely. The introduction of Square Order also means the death of Square Wallet, a failed experiment that Order hopes to correct.

Instapaper v5.2 adds familiar yellow-marker highlights to your saved articles. This doesn’t sound like much, but it will change how you use the read-later service. Instapaper is the O.G read-it-later app, letting you save those longer articles you find on the web, in Twitter, in your RSS reader or anywhere else. You send these articles off to Instapaper via a bookmarklet (or using the third-party integration from many apps), whereupon they are cleaned of clutter and saved for you to read off line.

This seemingly small update changes the game. Before, Instapaper was a transient place for long-form articles — you’d read them and then archive them. Now it’s a place to organize and revisit articles, turning your collection of clippings into a library of annotated notes. And for the makers, it represents a way to make more money for the app, by finally adding a killer reasons for us to buy the $1-per-month subscription.

Apple is making it quicker than ever to return unwanted iPhones and other gadgets purchased online with a new policy that gives customers refunds twice as fast.

In an effort to boost direct sales from its website, Apple has decided to take a big upfront cost on returns, according to Reuters, but the small move could give it the boost it needs to compete with Amazon and Best Buy online.

HYPER by Sanho – the company behind the Hyperjuice batteries for Macbooks and iPads have just launched their latest creation to the world through Kickstarter.

The iStick is essentially a USB stick with the dual use of connecting it to your iPhone 5, 5s, iPod Touch and iPads with it’s Apple certified lightning connector, which is great if you have a internet connection that is too slow in the office for cloud based storage, or if you’re on the road and want to watch a couple of movies without eating into your data plan.

To me, the 1976 Gibson Explorer means lust at first sight, love at first feel and that rarest of man-machine crushes: an enduring passion that persists long after I plunked down my hard-earned cash.

Gibson’s luthiers prototyped the Explorer (alongside pointy siblings the Flying V and the apocryphal Moderne) in the ’50s. The space race was on, rock ‘n’ roll was coming into its own and cars boasted bold curves and sci-fi fins. The Explorer and Flying V were released in 1958, a year after the Soviets launched Sputnik 1. (The Moderne didn’t makes its official debut until 1982.)

Like the beautiful but doomed Power Mac G4 Cube, the radically shaped guitars were clearly ahead of their time: These pointy instruments, which years later would become staples of heavy metal and hard-rock style, flopped hard. Gibson discontinued both lines within a few years.

In 1976, spurred by the success of competitors’ Explorer clones, Gibson came to its senses and reissued the Explorer. The natural mahogany finish on the best of these, much like the lighter Korina of the original models, gave the strangely shaped guitars a retro-futuristic look. That marriage of old and new is coming back into fashion now as designers tumble to the innate beauty of natural materials.

Bouncing, huffing and puffing through a beautifully-rendered cartoon world, avoiding jagged rolling wheels and collecting coins, Leo’s Fortune may just be the year’s most lovable iPhone game. But which games did its creators fall in love with?

Following our exclusive look inside behind the scenes of Apple’s iPhone “game of the month,” we asked Leo’s Fortune designer Anders Hejdenberg to name his current top five iOS games. He said he’s most impressed by titles that pair intriguing artwork with novel gameplay mechanics.

The highly imaginative Monument Valley, for instance, won him over quickly. “It didn’t take long to finish,” says Hejdenberg of his experience playing the game, “but during that time I experienced quite a few moments where I thought to myself, ‘Wow, this is really cool!’ That rarely happens when I play games, so it was definitely worth the price of admission.”

Here are the other iOS games currently taking his breath away. (You’ll find download links available below the gallery.)

A New York street artist claims Apple stole his trademark slogan for its latest ad campaign. The line “You’re more powerful than you think” is used in conjunction with shots of people using their iPhone in various different lines of work.

46-year-old James De La Vega says that he’s been using the trademarked line for almost a decade as part of his “Become Your Dream” series. The line has been used in various murals and designs, and was even (by permission) incorporated into a graffiti motif used for a recent line of handbags and accessories.

Think Apple is free from Samsung after defeating it yet again in court for flat out copying the iPhone infringing on several Apple patents? Think again!

In fact, when it comes to the iPad Apple is more reliant on Samsung than ever, according to a new report which suggests that the South Korean tech giant became the largest supplier of iPad displays in the first quarter of 2014.