The Google Search app for iOS was updated earlier this week to bring Google Now to your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. but it seems that the service isn’t yet supported in all territories. As is often the case, however, the jailbreaking community has a solution.
GoogleNowEnabler is a new tweak that promises to activate Google Now on your iOS device no matter where you live.
Although it’s been less than a year since it’s debut, and though it was widely criticized at its debut for a beefy $329 price tag and a low-resolution display, the iPad mini has quickly become the one 7-inch tablet to rule them all.
A new supplier report out of Asia puts the iPad mini’s triumph into sharp relief. Not only is the iPad mini pretty much the only 7-inch tablet that isn’t running headfirst down a profitability cliff in a race to crater at the bottom, it’s actually putting iPad sales to the knife.
In Apple’s latest earnings call, CEO Tim Cook was suddenly equivocal about whether or not Apple would do an iPhone with a larger display.
“Our competitors have made some significant tradeoffs in many of these areas to ship a larger display,” Cook said on the earnings call. “We would not ship a larger display iPhone while these tradeoffs exist.”
What that hints is Apple doesn’t have a larger screen iPhone in its pipeline yet, but they’re working on one, without any of the tradeoffs of the competition. (What these tradeoffs actually are in Apple’s mind are anyone’s guess.)
A new analyst report suggests that this larger screen iPhone will be the iPhone 6, and it will land in summer of 2014. This year, we’ll just have to deal with an iPhone 5S in a bevy of peacock fan of different color options.
The patent war between Apple and Samsung has no end in sight. After Apple won a landmark victory against Samsung for patent infringement last summer to the tune of about $1 billion in damages, the court later deducted $450 million from what Samsung owes Apple. The California judge presiding over the case, Lucy Koh, said that the jury miscalculated what the damages should be for the 14 included Samsung devices.
All of the various charges and reexaminations being thrown around mean that Apple and Samsung will be heading to trial in the U.S. again not once, but twice in the coming year.
Apple executives have a long history of appearing at the All Things Digital (or “D”) conference every year. Steve Jobs gave some of his most revealing public interviews at D over the years, and Tim Cook’s first major interview as Apple’s newly-appointed CEO was at D10 last year.
For D11, Tim Cook will be headlining once again with an interview on the conference’s opening night, May 28th.
Path was recently fined $800,000 by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for deceiving its users “by collecting personal information from their mobile device address books without their knowledge and consent.” Last year, the social network was caught storing all of its users’ contacts on its servers under the radar. Now users have started accusing Path of spamming friends to join the service via text message.
Despite having a mountain of cash overseas, Apple has decided it’d be cheaper for the company to go into debt for its stock buyback program, rather than bring the money back to the U.S. to be taxed.
After taking the initial steps yesterday toward offering bonds to investors, Apple opened up its order book today and plans to sell $17 billion worth of bonds. The six-part all dollar offering has already attracted more than $50 billion of orders within the first few hours, in what has become the largest non-bank bond deal in history.
According to a report from Reuters, Apple is offering $17 billion worth of bonds in the following six bond types to investors:
BlackBerry has been going through a bit of a rough patch the last few years. The iPhone and Android stole the smartphone market from beneath their feet, and its recent product launches have been incredibly underwhelming.
Things are looking bad for BlackBerry, but it’s totally not going to let these last few years of mediocrity get to it though. In fact, BlackBerry’s CEO thinks his company just needs to weather the storm while everyone is going through this iPad-fad thing.
In a recent interview, BlackBerry’s CEO, Thorsten Heins said that he sees a limited future for tablet computers, and we’ll probably stop using them in a couple years.
Putting a sweet decal on your MacBook’s lid is cool and all, but if you’re looking to take things to another level with your MacBook decorating skills, maybe you you should try cutting some artwork into it with a laser.
The process of laser cutting artwork into your MacBook’s lid isn’t easy, but the people over at Uncover will do it for you. You can get almost any design cut into your MacBook, but Uncover requires that you send in your MacBook to be beautified, or just buy a new one through them so they can customize it before sending it out to you.
The results are pretty stunning, and it will definitely help you stand out at a college or your next IT conference.
Here’s a peek at some of the cool laser-cut artwork others have had Uncover do for them:
When the VLC iOS app was pulled from the App Store in 2011, a little part of me died inside. I own a large collection of movies in different file formats, and VLC is my go-to media player for files that aren’t supported by QuickTime and iTunes. While there’s hope that VLC will return to the App Store, I’m not holding my breath. And I don’t really care anymore because I’ve found something better.
For several months I’ve been beta testing an iOS app called Infuse. Support for 14+ file formats, an intuitive interface, and some slick details make Infuse the best third-party media player out there.
Ever tried to record a selfie on Vine? Normally, it’s been a pain in the ass ever since the app came out, because you couldn’t use your iPhone’s front-facing camera, but times are a changin’ as the app is now ready to help you record all your vain selfies from the comfort of your front-facing camera.
The days of awkwardly clutching your iPhone infront of you while pressing the record button on the other side are over. A new version of Vine just hit the App Store and it includes the ability to use the front-facing camera on your iPhone. Oh, and you can finally mention people in posts and comments now too.
The free update for Vine 1.1 is available in the App Store now.
Source: iTunes
Jawbone has today launched a new platform for iOS that allows third-party apps to work with your Up wristband. The API is called the Up Platform, and provides access to all of your fitness data, including steps, calories, and distance traveled.
The Up Platform has already been integrated into ten iOS apps, including IFTTT, LoseIt, Maxwell Health, MapMyFitness, MyFitnessPal, Notch, RunKeeper, Sleepio, Wello, and Withings.
Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov has revealed that he recently spent $100 million on Apple shares in anticipation that they will rebound. The 59-year-old believes that Apple is a “very promising” investment, despite the current share price being almost 40% off its peak last September.
Popular jailbreak tweak biteSMS just got a new update that introduces a quick compose widget to your iPhone’s Notification Center. The feature promises to be a simple and convenient way to send text messages in a pinch.
Boost Mobile is to begin prepaid iPhone sales during the third quarter of 2013, according to information leaked on Twitter. Boost would become the third prepaid provider to offer Apple’s popular device, following its introduction to Cricket and Virgin Mobile in 2012.
The latest Lensbaby in the lineup is the Edge 80 optic, a plug-in 80mm blur-tastic chunk of glass for your existing Lensbaby body. It offers the same movable sweet-spot of all other Lensbabies, but in a portrait-friendly length.
What if your local coffee shop offered free phone charging along with free Wi-Fi? What do you mean, it already does? Yeah, sure, you can plug your phone in while you sip your delicious cup of pour-over, but you still have to bring your own charger.
ChargeAll’s answer is to sell multi-point charging stations to store owners, and have them provide the service to their customers.
Spotdox is combo Mac app and iOS-accessible web-service which lets you access any file on your computer via Dropbox. That is, you can even get remote access to files which are in, say, your movies folder as long as your Mac is running. How? Magic.
MirrorCase: Handy tool for meetings and lectures, or creepy accessory to help snap pictures of people without them ever knowing (until they find them on some revenge porn site, I guess)? The answer is a resounding “both!” Find out why…
This cute little iPhone 5 case comes from Poketo, and not only coddles the iPhone within but also packs slots for your cash and cards. The twist here is that the cards sit safely on the inside instead of in a set of rear-cut slots on the back, and the whole thing snaps shut with a clicky clasp.
WordEver is neat new iPad text editor with a big gimmick: the keyboard. Instead of using Apple’s built-in keyboard,it has a custom version which is both good and bad. Good, because it brings some geniunely useful features to the iPad. Bad, because it can be hard to type and lacks auto-correct, which is why the original version of this first paragraph was so bad.
It’s a bit of a challenge to describe Spreecast in a nutshell — hence the clumsy headline.
Watching the service is sort of like eavesdropping on a videochat between a small group of people; only you can also interact with other viewers, and the videochatters (I hereby coin this word) themselves, through live (text) comments. Spreecast has been used by a bunch of big organizations and famous people — a few standout examples include Reese Witherspoon, The Wall Street Journal, VH1 — to broadcast conversations and interviews. Of course, peons like me (or you) can also use Spreecast to broadcast our own chatter.
Spreecast is old news, since it’s been around since late 2011; but now it’s available as an iPhone app.
Previously teased as an untitled Mystery Game, Anomaly 2 is releasing in just a couple of weeks. Coming May 15th for Mac (and PC, Linux), this real time strategy/tower offense game is the sequel to the 11 Bit Studios’ previous efforts, Anomaly: Warzone Earth and Anomaly Korea, both originally made for iOS.
If you pre-order now, you’ll get two copies of the game, one for you and one for a friend, for $13.49, which is 10 percent off the final retail price of $14.99. You can grab this special deal at Steam or the official Anomaly 2 game site. However, before you head off to Steam, the devs promise an extra gift come launch day if you order directly from them. So, there’s that.
Consumer Reports, the popular magazine and website for figuring out what consumers think about all sorts of products and services, just published its annual reader survey on computer tech support.
Apple not only claimed the top spot in the list this year, beating out all other computer manufacturers, it got an even better score than it did in last year’s survey.
JailbreakCon, the only convention dedicated solely to the iOS jailbreak community, took place last summer in San Francisco, California. We brought you on-the-ground reporting from the convention floor, including profiles of people like pod2g, the luckiest jailbreak hacker in the world.
Now JailbreakCon is coming to New York City on August 23rd-24th.