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News - page 1413

Latest Update From Fitbit Turns iPhone 5s Into Fitness Tracker Without Extra Hardware

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The Fitbit is one of the most popular fitness trackers out there, and today its companion iOS app was updated with an interesting new feature for iPhone 5s owners. By taking advantage of the new phone’s M7 co-processor (a chip also found in the latest iPads), Fitbit has turned the 5s into a health monitor without the need of an additional wrist strap.

MobileTrack uses the M7 to track the user’s activity throughout the day and distill it into helpful data, like miles traveled and calories burned.

No One Giving An iPhone For Christmas Has Ever Been More Awesome Than This Guy [Humor]

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Many of us got or received iPhones for Christmas, and I’m guessing you thought you were pretty smart, putting it in a gift bag to disguise the telltale shape. But you’ve got nothing on this guy, who fooled someone into thinking that the iPhone they were actually unwrapping was just a crappy old chair. Check out how they did it, after the jump.

NSA Spyware Allegedly Gives Backdoor Access to iPhones

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The U.S. National Security Agency has spyware designed to grant backdoor access to the iPhone specifically, according to leaked documents shared by high-profile security researcher Jacob Appelbaum and German publication Der Spiegel.

While speaking at the Chaos Communication Congress in Germany, Appelbaum shared his knowledge of “DROPOUTJEEP,” a top-secret NSA program that can intercept an iPhone’s SMS messages, contacts, location, camera, and microphone.

Original iPhone Prototype Sells On eBay For A Hefty $1,499

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Occasionally a rare piece of Apple gear will appear on eBay and be suddenly pulled. Why? Apple doesn’t like it when its internal hardware gets exposed out in the wild. But sometimes a prototype slips through Cupertino’s watchful eye and gets sold.

An eBay seller in Australia has sold what appears to be an original iPhone engineering prototype for a nice sum of $1,499.

Streets Of Rage Is Rubbish — Though The Soundtrack Still Kicks Ass [Review]

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Streets of Rage by Sega
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch
Price: $0.99

 

So let’s get the obvious out of the way at the start: Streets of Rage isn’t exactly new. The original game came out in 1991 — meaning that it would now be of legal drinking age were it a person. The iOS port is newer (obviously), but coming out in 2009 that puts it in roughly the same timeframe as iOS 3. Ancient.

So why are we reviewing it?

MMXIII – The Year in Vintage Apple Tech

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In addition to all the new products of 2013, the past year was a whir of activity in the vintage Apple space. Apple may be content to only move forward and deny existence of any products older than seven years – what do you mean my first generation MacBook Pro is vintage??? – but the public has not forgotten them.

The biggest retro news of the year was probably the ascendancy of the Apple 1 on the auction block. In May, an Apple 1 fetched a record price of $671,000 at an auction in Germany – until just recently the highest price ever paid for a personal computer. Other Apple 1s sold this year in the $300,000 range, so if you are lucky enough to have one of these oldies-but-goodies in your attic, dig it out now!

Our Favorite News Stories Of 2013 Video [Year In Review]

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Remember the 25 billion iTunes downloads? How about when Vine came out, or Flipboard? What about that Ashton Kutcher movie?

There was a lot of Apple-related news in 2013, so we decided to pop it all into a video for your viewing pleasure. If you’re like us, you’ll dig this trip down memory lane.

So, let’s take a look back at the long year behind us as we gear up to head into the new year.

BBC’s New Streaming Video Service Takes Page Out Of iTunes Playbook

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Given its tremendous success over the past 12 years, it’s easy to forget that the whole iTunes concept was once a risky proposition people weren’t sure would succeed.

Well, leap forward to the present day, and even the U.K.’s much-lauded BBC is taking its plays from Apple’s playbook — by announcing that it is rethinking (or at least augmenting) its classic flat license fee by borrowing from the iTunes/Netflix model and charging users £5 ($8.25) to download their favorite shows.

PhoneSoap Cleanses Your Filthy iPhone With Pristine UV Light

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Christmas is a filthy time of year. First, it’s in the middle of the winter, when coughs, sneezes and dirty old diseases are most common. And second, extra germs, bacteria and viruses hitch a ride on us meatbag humans as we jet around the globe to see our families, swirling the air into a slurry of septicity.

It’s no wonder Santa spends the rest of the year in bed.

What you need to counteract this insurgence of influenza is the PhoneSoap charger, a kind of Howard Hughes-style tissue box for your iPhone, only with a UV lamp inside.

Scorsese’s Hugo Free With Apple’s 12 Days of Gifts App

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Here’s a reason to download Apple’s 12 Days of Gifts app if you haven’t already: the latest gift — freely downloadable using the app — is Martin Scorsese’s critically-acclaimed 2011 film Hugo.

The movie, based on Brian Selznick’s New York Times best-seller, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, tells the story of a 12-year-old boy living in the walls of a Parisian train station, who meets a down-on-his-luck toymaker, who turns out to be silent movie special effects maestro Georges Méliès (the guy that famously made this iconic short, entitled A Trip to the Moon).

The goDock, An $85 Cable-Wrap

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The goDock is nothing if not ambitious. It’s a cleverly-fashioned block of aluminum which works as both a cable-wrapping spindle and portable dock for the iPhones 4 and 5/S. But it’ll cost you a ker-azy $85 ($58 for Kickstarter supporters), and needs a whopping $75,000 in pledges to get it started.

What?

StorySkeleton, An Index-Card Story Mapping App That Works With Scrivener

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StorySkeleton is an amazing app that’s been around for a little while, but a recent update to add iPad support has made it even better. At heart, it’s a kind of index-card-based note and outlining app for writers (screen, fiction and non-fiction) to help structure and plan stories. But the design is fantastic, making it easier to use than most other alternatives.

Oh, and it exports directly to native Scrivener files.

Hate iOS 7’s Dock? This New Jailbreak Tweak Has You Covered

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In iOS 6, the dock was a glass shelf. In iOS 7, it’s far more abstract: a blurry transparent layer over your wallpaper.

Some people love it, some people hate it. If you’re one of the latter, and you have already jailbroken your iOS 7 device, you’re in for a treat: a new jailbreak tweak lets you adjust the transparency and blurriness of the iOS 7 dock to your heart’s content.

Automatically Upload All Your Mac’s Photos & Video To Google+ Thanks To Auto Backup

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Google+ was not the immediate Facebook-killer that Google wanted it to be, perhaps, but slowly and surely the search giant has been making its social networking service more and more useful to average folk.

That trend continues with the release of Google+ Auto Backup, a new app that will automatically upload images from your computer to Google+, thus storing them in the cloud.