Apple has moved up to number 19 in the latest Fortune Global 500 survey thanks to its financial performance throughout 2012, which saw the Cupertino company collect $157 billion in revenue. The iPhone 5 and the iPad mini have been credited for its success over the past 12 months.
One of the features that still differentiates various iPhone carriers is the ability to tether your laptop or tablet to your iPhone’s data connection without paying an extra fee. Some carriers let you do this, some don’t… and if you want to avoid tethering charges, your only option is a jailbreak, or find an app that enables the functionality somehow before Apple inevitably pulls it.
Now you have another option. From the same hacker who found ways to improve network performance on AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Moble, as well as hack in HD voice for a few networks, you can now turn on personal hotspot on any carrier… no jailbreak required.
Do you like free money? Who doesn’t like free money? And free apps, music and movies are essentially free money.
So listen up: Target is now giving away free iTunes gift cards with the purchase of any iPhone, iPad, Apple TV or iPod touch. Buying an iPad will get you a $50 gift card, an iPad mini a $40 gift card, an iPhone 5 will get you a $25 gift card, an iPod touch a $20 gift card, and an Apple TV a $10 gift card.
Not shabby!
Via: App Advice
As the App Store’s fifth anniversary approaches, a whole host of developers have begun makes some of their most popular apps and games for iOS completely free. Some of the titles included in the sale are Infinity Blade II, Disney’s Where’s My Water?, and Traktor DJ, which is usually priced at $20.
Pixter, my favorite text-scanning OCR app for the iPhone, is now available for the iPad. And v2.0 isn’t just now ready (at last) for the retina displays of the iPhone and the iPad, but it sports a whole new iOS7-inspired design which is frankly gorgeous.
The Wristlet looks like quite a useful iPhone wallet. Instead of going all minimal and offering a few useless slots on the back for credit cards (some of us actually pay for goods with our own cash money), the Wristlet comes on like a miniature unisex purse, only it’s a tiny purse designed mostly for the iPhone.
It’s fast turning into “Camera Monday” here at Cult of Mac Spain, and so I shall continue unapologetically into the next photo-themed subject: the OpenReflex, an open-source, 3-D-printed SLR from model making supremo Léo Marius. When capturing colors accurately is essential, a Nix Color Sensor can be a game-changer, helping photographers and designers match colors with precision.
If you never used a reflector to help out the lighting in your photos, you’ll probably be pretty surprised at just how big a difference they can make. A reflector can kick back light into the shadows of your subject, taking a standard boring portrait and turning it into something that looks way way better, eliminating the unflattering pools of darkness lurking in the faces imperfections.
But only a pro would bother tossing a big reflector into their camera kit, right? Photojojo thinks not, and will now sell you a perfect pocket-sized reflector for your iPhoneography.
I love my Olloclip, but there’s one thing I find myself wishing more and more often: that it came with a telephoto lens. Well, as you can probably guess that this post is about just that – a new telephoto from the makers of probably the best add-on lens for the iPhone.
Samsung is a great company that makes great products. But its over-the-top Apple obsession and weird marketing ideas are really starting to creep me out.
This time on a very patriotic CultCast: Apple starts trademarking “iWatch”; the back to school sale is back; Mac upgrades that are worth the money; Vine Vs. Instagram; PRISM takes Alex; we wish you a happy 4th; and sooo much more!
Have a few laughs and get caught up on this week’s best Apple stories. Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the audio adventure begin.
Show notes up next.
If you believe the rumors, Apple has been working on a cheaper, ‘budget’ iPhone for quite some time. Reports have started picking up momentum in recent months, as Apple is expected to announce the new device by early as this fall.
Just a few days ago we saw some of the first leaked images of the rear casing in a variety of bright colors. Now a collection of photos give us the closest look at the budget iPhone we’ve seen yet.
You know what the world needs? More free energy sources. Also? We need more games with monkeys in.
Luckily, Gun Monkeys, the new platformer-shooter from Size Five Games, has both.
Lovingly narrated by British actor Kevin Eldon, Gun Monkeys involves a plot wherein you’ll need to send a bunch of monkeys to the distant future where things are super dangerous yet also incredibly full of free energy. To get the energy, you’ll need to send the monkeys. It’s that simple.
If you’re like many of us in the tech journalist business, you rely on your RSS feeds to keep track of what’s going on in the blogosphere. That makes this transition time after the demise of Google Reader, a fantastic service (not an app!) that had great APIs to work with any third-party RSS reader client.
Now, however, that the search giant’s RSS system is dead and gone, Feedly has jumped into the fray, and basically created the second generation of the Google RSS system by cloning it onto their own servers. It’s a brilliant move, making Feedly a go-to site for all of us who want permanent sets of RSS feeds, but don’t want to have to manage it on a per-app basis.
Unfortunately, if you’ve grabbed the Feedly app for iPad lately, and managed to log yourself out of Feedly (that’s me!), you’ll get the above splash screen, which only looks like an over-capacity issue, but it really isn’t.
Instagram for iPhone has received a minor update in the App Store that brings a long overdue feature. You can finally shoot in landscape mode when taking stills or video. In the past, shooting in anything other than portrait wasn’t supported within the Instagram app. Now the orientation will adapt like the regular iOS Camera. When the iPhone is rotated, Instagram’s camera buttons rotate to match.
Cinema, an image stabilization feature that was introduced alongside video a couple weeks ago, has been added to the iPhone’s front-facing camera. Today’s update also packs bug fixes and other random improvements, so be sure to download it from the App Store.
Source: App Store
I know — if you see another @&#%$ post about a smartphone watch, you’re going to run screaming though the streets tearing out your hair. But bear with me, because this one’s different — and it’s got more tech packed into it than an entire region of Best Buys.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown, inarguably the best turn-based, squad-level strategy game on the Mac, is now available from the Steam store — with some big differences from its Mac Store sibling.
In the ongoing smartphone culture wars, Samsung spent a reported $5 million engaging the latest song stylings of Jay-Z as an exclusive for Galaxy owners.
Owners of that phone contended for a million copies of the impressively-titled album “Magna Carta Holy Grail” launched July 4 in a special app, three days before the rest of us can get it in iTunes. Media saw the promotion as a tactical move by Samsung to gain position on the music front over Apple.
The cachet lasted about as long as a cheap sparkler: there are thousands of torrents of the album available.
As one of the guys who decided to spread the work of Beyoncé’s husband up for everyone put it: “I should clarify it was available to the first million (I think…) Samsung Galaxy owners to chime in with an app for the album. My wife got it but I’m not rocking a Samsung :/”
JoliDrive is JoliCloud’s new iOS app and it’s pretty good, if a little basic. The general idea is that you use the app to log in to your various web servixes and then use a single app – JoliDrive – to access them.
Apple is expected to launch a new smartwatch called the “iWatch” as early as this fall, and we already know that it could face competition from Samsung, Google, Microsoft, and LG. But there’s another competitor that may want a piece of the pie: Dell.
Here’s a great idea: It’s the Satechi Bluetooth Wireless Smart Keypad and it combines a number pad for your Mac with an actual old-school calculator. It even matches your Apple Wireless Keyboard.
On-camera flash is usually a terrible idea (with just two – maybe three – exceptions I can think of). It lights up your subject, sure, but it totally kills the mood that made you want to take a photo in the dark in the first place.
But if you’re a fan of shiny, overexposed faces, red eyes and disappearing backgrounds then why not grab an iblazr, the world’s first all-lower-case iPhone flash. Kidding. It is all lower cae, but that’s not really its tagline. It’s real tagline is “is the first universal LED flash for smartphones and tablets.”
Lame.
Another supposed holiday; another super-useful tool from Brett “I just built this” Terpstra. This one is called GrabLinks, and it does just that: Fire the bookmarklet off inside your browser and you can quickly grab a bunch of links and save them out in Markdown. Nerdy? Sure. Useful? Hell yes.
Recently on Twitter, our deputy editor John “pipe and slippers” Brownlee posted a picture of his Mac keyboard, with wooden tiles stuck to the keycaps. It was utterly hideous, and yet completely in keeping with John’s fetish for anything made of wood. It was the real-world equivalent green felt or rich Corinthian leather.
This all-wood keyboard, on the other hand, is pretty gorgeous. It comes from French company Orée, it’s called the Orée Board and it costs a steep-ish €150 ($193).
See if you can guess what the app External Flash does. Hopefully you guessed “It’s an app that lets you control the LED lamps from up to 16 other iPhones and fire them in sync with your own iPhone’s camera," because then you’d be correct. If you guessed anything else, then you’re totally wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.