News - page 1593

Earlier today, we reported that the Wall Street consensus was that Apple’s profit in this last quarter probably shrank for the first time in a decade, and that results will be even more dire next quarter, with iPhone sales units being extremely low.

But Wall Street’s pessimism in regards to Apple is, as usual, nuts. For Apple to perform as low as Wall Street thinks it will next quarter, Apple would have to show zero growth in the iPhone market compared to the same spring quarter a year ago. This would rank it as one of the smartphone industry’s worst disasters ever. Which is crazy, because Apple’s selling more iPhones than ever.

Over the last few weeks, T-Mobile has stolen a lot of the prepaid carriers’ thunder with its new “Uncarrier” plans. But Cricket Wireless is eager to make sure no one forgets about it.

Starting today, Cricket Wireless is cutting the price of its iPhone plans to help it compete against the likes of T-Mobile and AT&T. The new family bundle plan offered by Cricket includes two smartphone plans for $40 each a month. If you just want an iPhone on your own plan, individual plans now start at $50 a month.

Supposedly, these nanoSIM trays are for the iPhone 5S. They look exactly like nanoSIM trays for the iPhone 5, except for one thing: they are in gold and gray. This is notable because in the iPhone 5 the nanoSIM trays were silver and black, and the iPhone 5S is rumored to come in different colors.

Except… gold seems like a pretty gaudy color to release a new iPhone in, don’t you think? And gray is sort of an anti-color, not the kind of thing you get excited about buying a new iPhone for. “Check out my cool gray iPhone!”

So I’m a little skeptical. What do you think?

Source: Moumantai.biz
Via: iDownloadBlog

iPhone and iPad owners who love watching video will appreciate a new update coming from Netflix to iOS. The video giant just released Netflix 4.0 for iOS that makes navigating to your favorite episodes even easier.

The update includes UI changes that make it easier to find new episodes for shows, as well as better navigation for changing the audio and subtitles for a video. There are also some little bug fixes in the update as well.

Here are the full release notes:

My girlfriend and I aren’t so much collectors of books and records as we are black hole like vortexes to which books and records are inescapably drawn, gravitational wells from which any media that passes our event horizons can not escape.

As such, we’re constantly trying to keep track of the books and records we already have. One of our favorite apps to do so is Delicious Library, a fantastic media cataloging application that lets you keep track of your stuff by using a webcam as a barcode scanner (as well as manual entry), but it hasn’t really seen a serious update in years.

Thankfully, that’s about to change. Delicious Library 3 is coming soon, and it apparently will have some pretty rad new functionality: a recommendation engine, and a corresponding iOS app.

Apple’s quarterly profit probably fell for the first time in over a decade, thanks to new products with lower profit margins and a slowing demand for the iPhone, Bloomberg reports. Fourteen analysts have reduced their estimates for Apple in recent weeks, and on Friday, the Cupertino company’s share price fell below $400 for the first time since December 2011.

A Chinese paper is reporting that Apple and Foxconn may have had a staggering setback in the production of the iPhone, with up to eight million iPhones returned to Foxconn because they didn’t meet Apple’s standards.

I have to admit, I hadn’t heard of case maker Tactus until last week, but in the space of just a few days it has published an unveiling date and specifications for the fifth-generation iPad, the plastic casing for Apple’s rumored low-cost iPhone, and now the fifth-generation iPad’s new aluminum shell.

Apple’s hard-to-meet high standards and its low price expectations have earned it the nickname “Poison Apple” with Asian suppliers, who say they are feeling the affects of decreasing demand of the iPhone. Several have told Reuters that they are trying to reduce their reliance on Apple amid increasing competition from companies like Samsung.

Apple has donated ¥50 million ($8 million) to those affected by the recent earthquake in China’s Sichuan province. The Cupertino company made an announcement on its Chinese website, which was accompanied by a message of condolence that pledges support for locals and schools.

Hooooo! That, apparently, is the sound of an iPhone whistling. At least, that’s the sound of an iPhone whistling when its inside the WhistleCase, a combo tweeter and phone protector that actually looks cool enough to buy and use.

Remember when we used to switch resolutions on our computers? No, probably not. That’s because only old people experienced the pain of doing such a thing manually – these days our monitors are built in to our computers, and the pixel-mapping is done by the OS.

Unless you have a new Retina MacBook Pro that is. Now there might actually be a reason to switch resolutions. But who wants to dig around in System Preferences? Instead, you can use Pupil.

Cult of Mac reader Derek Stein put me on to this hot hot leather case for the iPhone 5. It’s similar in intent to the TwelveSouth SurfacePad I re-reviewed on Friday in that it’s a simple wraparound leather cover. The differences are that it looks less functional and much longer lasting.

Yeah, you could buy reams and reams of bound notebooks all pre-printed with iPhone-shaped templates for your UI-designing needs. But what will that get you? Boxes of crappy notebooks all filled with quad-printed paper and covered with little iPhone outlines.

Worse, you’ll have to carry these with you along with your proper Moleskine notebook if you want to do any real sketching or note taking.

But what if you could add an iPhone page to any book, any time you like? With this stamp, you totally can.

It’s funny: Back in high school I had a project called "Mount Julie" (which Julie never knew about), and now here in 2013 we see a new project called "Mount July." Coincidence? Probably…

Anyhow. Mount July will be a set of camera filters for film, stills and video which will add Instagram-like effects, using old-fashioned analog glass filters.

I almost never (except when shooting video) wish that I had a wider angle lens – it would just mean that I have to poke my camera even closer into the face of my subject. But I do often reach for the telephoto lens that isn’t there. After all, apart from a long lens’s ability to squish elements together in a picture, sometimes you just can’t walk any closer to your subject.

At those times, you can now reach for the iPad Telephoto lens for Photojojo.

Jailbreaking is great for fine tuning the iOS experience. Abstergo is a new and excellent jailbreak tweak that does just that, and it’s available in Cydia now for $2. Developed by Joshua Tucker and Andrew Richardson, Abstergo improves Notification Center by adding some subtle features. It won’t blow you away, but it will make interacting with notifications less annoying—and sometimes that’s all it takes for a tweak to be great.

We get ca-rayyy-zee on this week’s CultCast, takin’ ’bout iPhone 5S’ rumored new camera; why megapixels don’t matter; Facebook Home coming to iOS; why teens really love Snapchat; and we review the new iSteve mockumentary—it’s either way better or way worse than you heard. Plus more!

Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing now on iTunes, or hit play below and let the good times roll.

Be excellent to each other, and party on through for the show notes.

Fans of hit vertical jumper The Incident will be pleased to learn that the game’s makers are about to release a new creation in the App Store called Space Age. Based on early screenshots and demo videos, it has the same delightfully retro charm as its predecessor.

The App Store has a chokehold on mobile gaming, but Apple has yet to set foot into the world of living room consoles. And Apple doesn’t need to worry about competing with the likes of Xbox—the App Store has already created an incredibly vibrant and profitable gaming ecosystem.

You can mirror a game running on your iPhone to the big screen with an Apple TV. It works, but there’s more that could be done. That’s why a gaming startup based in India is bringing Wii-like motion gaming to the Apple TV. Instead of playing on the iPhone, you play with the iPhone.

Perpetual PC chipmaking underdog AMD is having a rough time of it in the mobile age. The stock is in the tank, and they lost $146 million last quarter on $1.09 billion in revenue. AMD needs to figure out a way to make a splash in mobile quick if it intends on surviving.

Over the past year, there’s been some sign that AMD has been taking this threat seriously. Last August, Jim Keller — previously director of Apple’s mobile platform architecture group — was enticed over to AMD, reporting to former Apple hardware chief Mark Papermaster. Reportedly, Keller was focusing on developing high-performance, low-power processor cores at AMD.

Now it looks like AMD is looking to beef up its mobile division even further. It is now being reported that AMD has poached Raja Koduri, Apple’s director of graphics architecture.

Fitbug is a company that makes exercise accessories that work with iPhone apps. Fitbit is also a company that makes exercise accessories that work with iPhone apps. Their names are similar, and so are their products. It’s kind of like they’re the same company, except they’re totally not, and that’s the problem.

The confusion between the names of the two companies has really started to get under Fitbug’s skin, so it’s decided to sue Fitbit for trademark infringement to decided who gets to be the fittest company in the U.S.

Ah, the iCar. We’ve been waiting for Apple to make a real one for years, ever since they transformed a Porsche into one way back in 1980. And we know Steve Jobs was game.

So the promise that Volkswagen is preparing an iBeetle might, at first, seem of interest to Apple fans and auto enthusiasts. But don’t get too excited, because the iBeetle is lame.

Earlier this week, we wrote about Grabby, a rad little Cydia tweak that let you extend the lockscreen camera launcher into a quickbar for up to five favorite apps.

Here’s a similar idea. Atom is an upcoming Cydia tweak that is set to be released this weekend which allows you to unlock your iPhone directly to up to six different apps, just by dragging the on-screen ‘locked’ icon to one of six positions.

We’re pretty confident the iPhone 5S will look almost identical to the iPhone 5, but its insides are likely to be a little different. Recent rumors have claimed Apple could add a faster processor to the device, along with fingerprint technology and improved cameras. And one of those cameras may have been leaked.

The picture above shows what is believed to be a front-facing camera for the iPhone 5S.