News - page 1704

Google has just made its “biggest ever update” to Street View, adding over a quarter of a million miles worth of roads around the globe.

How do we know the new iPod touch began shipping yesterday? Because iFixit’s gone and torn it apart already. That’s right, the fifth-generation device has received its customary teardown, revealing its whopping new battery, and all of its new components. iFixit have awarded the iPod touch a repairability score of 3 out of 10, meaning it’s not at all easy to fix.

While the purple lens flare that sometimes (rarely?) spoils your iPhone 5 photos is completely normal, it can still be somewhat frustrating — especially if you don’t notice it until you upload your photos to iPhoto, by which time it’s too late to take the shot again. But a new iPhone 5 case called the camHoodie promises to “greatly reduce” that purple lens flare and leave your photos looking flawless.

Apple’s efforts to be greener mean it boasts some of the most environmentally friendly gadgets on the planet. The new iPhone 5, for example, is one of the greenest smartphones money can buy. Apple also tries to make its packaging green. In fact, the packing for its new EarPods is so environmentally friendly that it turns to mush when you submerge it in water.

In remarks about Microsoft Office across a variety of platforms, a Czech executive told a local website that Microsoft Office for iOS and Android was coming in the first quarter of 2013. Quickly thereafter, A US Microsoft representative, Frank Shaw, denied the dates in a tweet, saying, “the information shared by our Czech Republic subsidiary is not accurate. We have nothing further to share.”

Just retooled for the iPhone 5, Vlock is a free app that displays a bold Android-ish clock, with date, on your iPhone. It’ll also let you play videos through the clock in a kind of video version of the iPad’s Picture Frame mode, complete with loop and transitions. Combine this with the app’s lockscreen feature, and you’ve got a faux animated Android-y lockscreen. All without a jailbreak.

The fourth installment of the five episode game series, The Walking Dead, is available now for your Mac on Steam. The group of survivors head into Savannah to find a boat to escape from the horror around them. Not only must they avoid the undead, but the human threat as well. The survivors are getting more and more skittish, even paranoid, and Lee must figure out a way to deal with them while protecting his young friend, Clementine.

Apple’s new Maps app in iOS 6 has been the subject of intense criticism in the press for weeks. Tim Cook had to issue a public apology for the widespread inaccuracy of Maps, and Apple is now recommending other third-party mapping solutions in the App Store. Not exactly a great product launch.

Google’s Eric Schmidt commented on Apple ditching Google Maps in an interview tonight. “Apple should have kept our maps,” said Schmidt. Why? Simply put, “They’re better maps.” Touche.

T-Mobile launched a new marketing campaign around the same time as the iPhone 5 launch. Called “Bring Your Own Device,” T-Mobile used Apple’s latest smartphone to demonstrate how customers can bring their unlocked devices from other carriers and use them on T-Mobile’s unlimited everything plan. Because Apple still hasn’t partnered with T-Mobile officially, the smaller carrier’s best bet is tempting unlockers with its attractive data pricing.

It’s only been a month into the campaign, but T-Mobile is already removing the iPhone brand from all marketing materials. Did Apple force T-Mobile’s hand? Not exactly.

When Steve Jobs said that the iPad was ushering in the “post-PC’ era, he was right. Gartner has released its PC shipment results for the third quarter of 2012, and things aren’t looking good for traditional computer makers like HP and Acer. The rise of smartphones and tablets has caused PC shipments to decline drastically in the last year, and it doesn’t look like the downwards spiral will be ending anytime soon.

There’s no denying that Apple’s success with iOS has influenced every aspect of their business, but it goes even further than you might think: Apple’s now even modeling its packaging after iOS app icons!

You see more and more of them every day: iPads, doubling as cash registers in businesses small and large, thanks to forward-thinking mobile payment companies like Square. Now Groupon, the deals-and-couponing social network, is getting in on the game with Breadcrumb, an incredible point-of-sale system which makes integrating an iPad into your business as simple as if Apple made the product themselves.

The Speck PixelSkin HD is a thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) case that’s designed to give you “slim and smooth” protection for your iPhone 5, while offering “grippyness [sic] with high-contrast matte pixels.”

Its raised bezel aims to keep your iPhone’s display free from scuffs and scratches should you drop it on its face, while the rubberized covers for the volume keys and sleep/wake button prevent fluff and grime from gathering within nooks and crannies.

The PixelSkin HD comes in a variety of colors — including red, purple, blue, black, and grey, and it’s priced at just under $30. The PixelSkin HD was one of my favorite “simple” cases for iPhone 4S, so will it retain that status for the iPhone 5?

EA announced back in June that Need For Speed Most Wanted would be coming to Android and iOS by the end of October. Well, that day is slowly approaching, and EA is reminding us by flaunting more in-game footage of this action-packed open world racer.

At first glance, it looks as if someone’s raided a high street Apple Store, stolen all the iPhones and iPads and MacBooks Air, and dumped a load of retro computers in their place.

Look closer, and you’ll begin to understand what a remarkable achievement this place is.

Welcome to the Moscow Apple Museum, owned and operated by 46-year-old computer engineer Andrey Antonov. If ever you felt the need to explain to your kids how Apple got where it is today, this is the place to take them.

IPEVO’s USB document cameras are a weird kind of hybrid product. Or anti-hybrid, maybe? To scan documents and digitize them, you’d usually use either a sheet-feed scanner, or the camera in your iPhone/iPad.

The Point 2 View and Ziggi cameras sit on your desk — like dedicated scanners — but snap the documents using cameras, like your iPhone.

One of the things I miss most about the design of the iPhone 4S is the ability to easily change the back of my iPhone to something different, like a non-standard color, or even teak.

You simply can’t do that with the iPhone 5, but Gizmodo just pointed out an even better idea: you can laser engrave the back of your iPhone 5 with your own custom design.

This is awesome, and there’s a laser engraving place right around the corner. I might just have to give it a try. The only questions are, which design should I get, and is this going to void my AppleCare+? After all, technically, it’s just a bunch of scratches.

There’s more laser-engraved iPhones at the link below, so check them out.

Source: Gizmodo

The Washington Post’s WP Politics app for the iPad is an excellent resource for anyone interested in United States politics. I spent a few days with this free app and found it to be an excellent tool for tracking and understanding the 2012 election season. While not without its flaws, this app does two critical things exceedingly well. First, it aggregates media and information from a broad range of sources into one tool. Whether you’re looking for the latest news about a particular candidate or economic data from years ago, it’s all here. Second, it organizes and contextualizes the information in a way that helps the casual user to understand it. It classifies news articles by genre, organizes Twitter feeds by source, and breaks candidates down by their stances on the issues.  If you’re looking for an app to help you follow the upcoming election, or politics in general, look no further.

iOS 6 Maps. An unmitigated disaster, right? That’s what I’d say as I struggle to get Maps to even give me correct directions from work to my house, but apparently, I’m in the minority: a recent poll suggests that most people don’t think Maps has degraded at all in iOS 6.

According to the sensor-studying pixel peepers at DxOMark, cellphone cameras have already surpassed the compact cameras of five years ago in terms of image quality. Amazing.

Like the iPhone 5, most of today’s competitive smartphones sport a camera with a sensor of at least 8megapixels. This is a far cry from one of the world’s first mass-produced camera cellphones, the Sharp-made J-SH04, which had a sensor resolution of 110,000 pixels, or just 0.1-Mpix.

Go a GoPro HD Hero2? And an iPhone, iPad or (ahem) Android device? Then head over to the App Store right now, because — with a new free app — you can use one to control the other.

When Steve Jobs passed away a little over year ago, he left Apple — the company he started in his parents’ garage back in 1976 — in the hands of Tim Cook, its former Chief Operating Officer.

The question on everyone’s lips at the time was how well Apple would fare without its co-founder at the helm. Jobs was unique. He was an innovator and a visionary, and he had this incredible ability to see into the future.

Jobs knew what we wanted — and what we didn’t — long before we did. He devised exciting new products that have changed our lives and sold in their millions, and he left rival companies playing catch-up. He revolutionized not just one, but a number of different industries.

He really did make a dent in the universe.

So naturally, when Jobs passed away, it was hard to imagine Apple without him. He had spent time away from Apple in the mid-eighties when John Sculley was CEO, and when he returned in 1996, his company was on the brink of bankruptcy.

Some feared that the same thing would happen again — that Apple would lose its way and struggle to maintain its edge without Jobs steering the ship in the right direction. But 12 months on, the company’s in a better position now than it’s ever been in.

So, was Steve Jobs really irreplaceable?

There can’t be much I hate more than a bad ringtone. I have one (because my phone is a Samsung and all of its tones are awful); my neighbor has one, which he takes forever to answer when his family call from overseas at like two in the morning every day; idiots on the bus and metro have them (usually some tinny-sounding “music” snippet of a record I never want to hear in full); and even my parents have them — not that anyone ever calls their cellphones, thank god.

In fact, there are only two things in the world of ringtones that make me optimistic. The first is that — with the slow death of Nokia — the horrible default Gran Vals tone (and its cheesily remixed derivatives) is also dying.

The second is Cleartones Organic, a set of 50 ringtones and 50 notifications which will calm you like a cool forest breeze.

It’s been nearly three years since Rovio’s first Angry Birds game made its debut on iOS devices, and you might have thought that interest in the series may have died down a little in that time. But you’d be very wrong indeed. According to the Finnish firm, Angry Birds games still see more than 200 million active users every single month.

Lacie’s new Thunderbolt Little Big Disk claims to be the fastest portable Thunderbolt drive around, running at up to 635MB/s – “a 33 percent increase from the previous model.”