News - page 1646

Apple products are expensive, and they’re especially expensive in China, a country where Foxconn workers can’t afford the iPhones they make. To help make its devices more affordable for Chinese customers, Apple has started offering payment plans that range from 6-24 months. The plans are available for purchases between 300 yuan to 30,000 yuan, or about $48 to $4,825.

The 6-12 month installments are offered with 0% interest, while a 2-year payment plan comes with a 8% interest charge. Customers must be using China Merchants Bank to participate.

We know that Apple’s product roadmap for 2013 will consist of new iPads, iPhones and Macs. That’s nothing new. Apple is always working on new stuff, and if 2012 is anything to go by, we’re about to see an onslaught of new products.

Martin Hajek is a successful designer, and his work has been featured multiple times here on Cult of Mac. His iPad mini and iPhone 5 concepts from last year were spot on, and Hajek has published renderings for the less-expensive ‘iPhone mini’ that Apple reportedly has planned for later in 2013. Some think the seventh-gen iPhone (‘iPhone 5S’) could come in multiple colors, and it will probably look a lot like the 5.

Hajek also has some great renderings of what the iPad 5 may look like should Apple tweak the design to look more like the iPad mini.

Facebook promised that their updated Facebook Messenger app would allow iPhone users to call one another for free thanks to the magic of VOIP calls. The feature has been rolled out to other countries, but Facebook just rolled it out to the U.S. today.

The Free Call feature allows you to call any of your Facebook friends who are also using the Facebook Messenger app. Rather than using the minutes on your cellular plan, the calls are made using your data connection so you’re not using up any minutes.

Write is yet another Dropbox-friendly text editor for the iPhone, but even in its present state as a teaser video and landing site, it looks amazing. In fact, it looks like it could become my favorite iPhone editor.

Not convinced? Read on…

Apple has issued a new developer beta of OS X 10.8.3. The update comes after a long line of betas for the next version of Mountain Lion, and today marks Apple’s seventh release to devs.

Another beta build was seeded last Tuesday with no major changes, and today’s update looks relatively minor as well. Apple always asks dev to focus on testing with certain aspects of OS X, and today’s beta is mainly focused on WiFi issues. (Apple is rumored to incorporate faster 802.11ac wireless into future Macs, coincidentally.)

The newest version of Mountain Lion should be available to the public any day now. We’ll be staying on the lookout for 10.8.3 to drop.

Source: Apple

This post is for entertainment purposes only. Sure, there are people out there that will need a case with which they can transport up to twenty iPad minis, and which can charge all of them simultaneously, but they are probably few.

No, the real reason for this post is that the PowerSync Roller 20 is both amazing looking, and ridiculously over the top.

Oddly enough, I bought the case for my iPad mini years ago, before even the full-sized iPad was a real thing that existed. It’s the back pocket of my jeans, and unless I’m sitting down or riding a bike, it’s just about perfect. And it’s even Smart Cover compatible.

But there are those who maybe like to protect their investment a little more, or who just really, really hate the sound of exquisitely hewn aluminum scraping against a rough-topped table. For you, there’s the CoverBuddy.

There are a whole bunch of ways a guitarist can hook his axe up to his iPhone, from fancy to totally ghetto (a cable from the guitar’s jack to the iPhone’s headphone socket). IK’s new iRig HD is at the fancy end, and it even works with your brand-new iPhone’s Lightning socket.

The one big advantage of traveling in the U.S is that I get to use your crappy, cheap-ass two-pin power plugs. I love that these small pieces of junk can fold up even smaller. Compare this to taking a vacation to the UK, where the adapters are the size of 1980s-era cellphones and young citizens have to be trained in the use of their safety features.

All of which is a roundabout (and culturally insulting) way to say I love Quirky’s new Pivot Power Mini, a tiny lightbulb-sized adapter which converts a single socket into two USB ports and a pair of power-points.

AT&T has been dancing around its FaceTime restrictions for several months now. Before iOS 6 even went public, it was discovered that the carrier would block FaceTime calls over a cellular connection at its own discretion. AT&T later confirmed that users would have to be on one of its new shared data plans.

Public outcry caused AT&T to then backtrack and extend the feature to anyone with a tiered, traditional data plan and a LTE device. That still didn’t cut it. Now AT&T has updated its policy again, and subscribers with grandfathered unlimited data plans are the only ones still left out in the cold.

Cars are a fairly boring topic for me, but I just sat through this 15-minute documentary by Audi completely enthralled by the amount of dedication the Slots Mods team poured into making an iPad-controlled slot car race track utopia for Audi.

Basically, Audi asked Slot Mods to make an iPad-controlled slot car race track that would give people the experience of driving an Audi from their iPad. You can control the speed of the car from the iPad and a little video camera behind the windshield shows you what it’s like to be the driver. The concept is cool on its own, but the amount of details and obsession poured into the project make it truly enthralling.

The idea of a secret public transportation system that only a small, technocratic elite knows about has something of the Knight Bus about it, but it’s a reality here in San Francisco, where thousands of commuters go to their jobs thirty to fifty miles south in Silicon Valley on ultra-secret bus lines. And yes, Apple — of course! — runs one.

There have been all sorts of crazy rumors about the iPhone 5S. Some have said it might launch in June. It could have NFC built-in with a ‘Super HD’ camera. There might even be multiple iPhone colors for you to choose from.

If you want high-tech security in your iPhone, then maybe this new rumor will get you excited. According to one analyst, the next iPhone will be rocking a built-in fingerprint sensor, and it’s going to debut alongside a cheaper iPhone model.

If you haven’t already got more Final Fantasy than you can handle on iOS, then prepare yourself for Final Fantasy All The Bravest, a new Square Enix title that’s hitting the App Store tomorrow. Already available to those in New Zealand, this is a “touch-action RPG in which you continuously battle enemies to advance through the game’s many stages.” If you’re a Final Fantasy fan, it’s likely to be another worthwhile purchase.

Earlier this week we heard reports that Apple is cutting back on the number of iPhone 5 parts they’ve ordered. Some felt that it was a sure sign that Apple is slipping and that the iPhone isn’t as popular anymore, while others have said everything’s just fine.

A new report claims that the iPhone 5 orders aren’t getting cutback because it’s not popular anymore, but that it was initially too popular for Apple to sustain.

A Dutch court has today ruled that a number of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab tablets do not infringe Apple designs. The court cited a previous decision made by a High Court in the United Kingdom back in October 2012, which ruled Samsung’s devices are “not as cool” because they lacked the “extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design.”

HTC is set to announce a new flagship smartphone at Mobile World Congress next month, and recent rumors have revealed it’s set to be called the HTC M7. We already know a lot about its internal specifications, thank to previous leaks, but we had no idea what the handset would look like — until today.

Now we’re led to believe the device is going to look almost identical to the iPhone 5.

Apple and Amazon are set to enter settlement talks over Amazon’s use of the term “Appstore,” Bloomberg reports. Apple has filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against the retail giant, claiming that its Android software store could be confused with its own App Store for iOS. A U.S. Magistrate Judge has now ordered the pair to enter talks and try to settle the case ahead of the trial.

Temple Run from Imangi Studios is one of the most successful games on iOS, racking up more than 75 million downloads during 2012 alone. If you’re one of the many players who are still addicted to it after all this time, you’ll be delighted to know that Temple Run 2 is hitting the App Store tonight.

Readdle is well-known for its awesome productivity apps for the iPhone and iPad, so it’s always exciting when the company launches something new. Today sees the release of Documents, a terrific file manager, document editor, and media player for the iPad that promises to be unlike any other app you’ve download.

“You will use it constantly, at home, office, university or on the road, every single day,” Readdle says. And what’s more, Documents is completely free.

If you lose a smartphone and you use a service that can track its location via GPS, ignore it when it tells you that your handset is a Wayne Dobson’s house. For the past two years, this 59-year-old retiree has had cellphone owners showing up at his Las Vegas home demanding their devices back. They turn up at all hours of the day, yelling and threatening to call the police.

But Dobson is no thief, and he doesn’t have their phones. It’s a strange glitch that appears to be affecting devices on Sprint, and its making this man’s life a misery.

LAS VEGAS — The wine list at Gordon Ramsay’s Steak restaurant changes so frequently, the servers need iPads to keep up.

The wait staff at the Englishman’s massively popular restaurant are armed with 20 iPads to take wine orders.

Not only does it save paper, it’s the only way to make sure the ever-changing wine list is accurate.

Not only do the sommeliers love it, the customers do too.

Verizon Wireless has helped a critical infrastructure company based in the United States catch one of its developers paying Chinese workers to do his job so that he could browse the Internet all day. “Bob” outsourced all of his work to China and paid the workers just a fraction of his six-figure salary so that he could spend his time on sites like Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, and eBay.

Verizon has revealed the fascinating story in a new case study.

You may not know Spicy Horse, but you’re sure to have heard of American McGee, its CEO, from his long association with critically acclaimed video games stretching back to Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, and (of course) American McGee’s Alice. He subsequently built a game studio in Shanghai called Spicy Horse, which has just been given the greenlight on Steam for its new game, Akaneiro: Demon Hunters.

Amidst rumors of a mysterious smartphone and new iPad apps, Facebook held a big press event today at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The topic was search, or more specifically, social search. It’s a new feature Facebook is calling “Graph Search,” and the beta has started rolling out already. It will be available for all of Facebook’s one billion users soon.

Think of Graph Search as Google with a more personal touch. Facebook is leveraging everything it knows about you to help you connect with people who like what you like. Instead of leaving Facebook.com to get your results, all of your social data and timeline history is mined and collated inside Facebook’s walls. That’s good news for Facebook, and bad news for Google.