News - page 1828

What you’re seeing above are Steve Jobs’s speech notes that he brought with him on January 9, 2007 when he announced the original iPhone, and they are in many ways a telling encapsulation of the man himself. Jobs was a natural showman who needed only the barest outline to announce the changing of the world, and his notes here are so simple that they could have been scrawled on the back of a napkin, but Jobs was also a perfectionist: he had them expertly type set, printed out and bound.

Amazing. Also, if you’re wondering what those three devices are below the notes on Steve’s podium, they’re actually iPhones with special attachments so they can do video on the big screen behind him. Steve would only use one; the others were probably backups.

Source: Wahaha
Via: Reddit
Image: Flickr

My kids fell in love with Toothless, the lovable fire-breathing dragon, after watching DreamWorks’s hit 2010 animation How To Train Your Dragon. Today he makes his debut on iOS in DreamWorks Dragons: TapDragonTap, a colorful physics-based puzzle game from development studio PikPok.

An iTunes customer who was billed twice for the same song has filed a class action lawsuit against Apple after the Cupertino company refused to refund his money. Robert Herskowitz $2.58 for Adam Lambert’s pain-inducing pop song “Whataya Want From Me,” but he should have paid just $1.29.

He’s now taking Apple to court in an effort to make refunds easier for iTunes customers.

When Apple introduced the new iPad earlier this year, it didn’t just discontinue the iPad 2; it dropped its price and sent it out to do battle with cheaper, Android-powered tablets from the likes of Amazon. But that’s not the only change the Cupertino company made to the device.

Although there’s no mention of it, if you buy a brand new iPad today, it will pack a new A5 processor under the hood that’s a little different to earlier A5 chips, and delivers much better battery life.

Update: In an official statement today to Cult of Mac, Walmart U.S. confirmed that these new price listings were a mistake that have been corrected at certain stores throughout the country. “Yesterday, we experienced a pricing error in limited stores,” said Walmart. “This has been addressed and the normal prices are in effect (iPhone 4S – $188, iPhone 4 – $88, iPhone 3GS – $0.97).”

We’ve gotten word that Walmart has dropped its prices on the AT&T iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S in its retail stores. Without any notice, the price of the 8GB iPhone 4 on AT&T has dropped from $88 to $34. Also, the white and black 16GB flavor of the iPhone 4S on AT&T is now being offered for $114, down from the original $188 listing.

Good news for hopeful iOS 5.1 jailbreakers, infamous iOS hacker and Chronic Dev Team member ‘pod2g’ just tweeted that he has his iPhone 4 running an untethered jailbreak on iOS 5.1. For those who don’t know, the difference between a tethered and untethered jailbreak is huge; the former means you have to re-jailbreak every time the device reboots while the latter means you’re jailbroken until you update to a new version of iOS.

There’s still a lot of work to be done on the untethered iOS 5.1 jailbreak for iPhone 4S owners, but an untether for iPhone 4 and iPad 2 users looks to be on the distant horizon. The iPhone 4S runs on a faster A5 processor, making it a totally different nut to crack for jailbreak hackers.

First Temple Run, then Instagram, and now Flipboard.

Continuing the trend of high-profile iPhone apps making their way to the Android platform, popular reading app Flipboard has unveiled its exclusive partnership window with Samsung for the just-announced Galaxy S III. This is the first time Flipboard has ventured away from iOS, and its Android app will be available exclusively for the Galaxy S III for an undisclosed amount of time. The app will then be available for all Android handsets in Google’s Play store.

One of the problems with modern glass displays on smartphones, tablets, and computers is screen glare. If you’ve ever tried to use your iPad out in the sun or check your iPhone on the beach during a bright, sunny day, you know what it’s like — any kind of light creates a glare that can be almost unbearable. Amazon has touted the Kindle’s E-ink display for its anti-glare technology, while all of Apple’s products with glass screens, including the non-matte MacBooks, are notorious for their tendency to collect smudges and reflect ambient light.

MIT researches have developed a water-repellent, self-cleaning glass that “virtually eliminates” reflections of any kind. The new glass will hopefully start making its way into the technologies we use on a daily basis, especially our beloved Apple devices.

Text editing on iOS isn’t bad, but it’s definitely fiddly. Make an error or want to delete some words and unless you’re using a Bluetooth keyboard, you have to take your hands off the keyboard, tap the words you want to select or where you want to insert your cursor, adjust the boxes manually and more. A pain.

YouTube user Daniel Chase Hooper had a better ideas, as illustrated in this video concept below. What if to edit text, your hands never had to leave the keyboard area on the iPad? To move the cursor, you swipe in the keyboard area left, right, up or down. To select a bunch of text at once, you swipe in the keyboard area while holding down shift.

This morning Samsung announced their newest high-end Android phone, the Samsung Galaxy S III. With a release date of May 29th, the new phone comes with a lot of crazy new features, like Smart Stay, that uses facial recognition to determine if you’re looking at it, and if not, it’ll turn the screen off. But topping the list of awesome new features is the “innovative” voice recognition feature. It’s innovative because you can say things like, “Hi Mr. Galaxy phone, what’s the weather gonna be like today?” and S Voice will pop-up a screen that looks exactly like Apple’s Siri feature does on the iPhone 4S.

Keep it up Samsung.

Source: Sebastiaan de With

Via: Rene Ritchie

May is Mobile Management Month at Cult of Mac, where we will be profiling a different mobile management company every weekday. You can find all previous entries here  and read our Mobile Management manifesto here.

Boxtone offers a range of mobile management capabilities for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. The company has strategic partnerships with multiple carriers as a device and expense management solution. Boxtone also has partnerships with companies like Good and Accellion for secure on-device data storage as well as a range of other enterprise technology vendors. These relationships can help integrate services that Boxtone doesn’t provide one its own. The company also offers a support and operation management capabilities that go beyond traditional mobile management.

While Apple saw strong sales for all its iOS devices during its post-holiday quarter, Android tablet sales slumped, giving up any gains that Android had seen as a tablet platform during the holiday shopping season.

According to IDC, overall tablet shipments were down more than the analyst firm had expected. The decline to 17.4 million units represented a 38.4% drop off from the holiday quarter shipments of 28.2 million units – a notably steeper decline than IDC’s predicted 34% decline.

While overall tablet shipments were down, Android tablets slumped significantly more than Apple’s iPad, which gained an additional 13.3% of the tablet market.

Incase’s Box Case for the iPhone is just that: a boxy, sharp-cornered rubber case with a brutalist minimalism that wouldn’t look out of place on London’s South Bank. And not only does the thing look awesome, it also offers quite a bit of protection thanks to all the extra rubber at the corners. It’s probably not a good idea to start tossing your iPhone on the floor, but if it does accidentally drop, then it might at least bounce to a safe end.

In addition to promoting its unfinished BlackBerry 10 mobile OS at BlackBerry World in Florida, RIM also made an effort to hype the success of its current BlackBerry 7 OS in developing markets, including Nigeria and Indonesia.

It isn’t surprising to see RIM trying to prove that it’s still a competitor in the global marketplace by highlighting the platforms use in developing countries. During RIM’s latest financials call, the first one for its new CEO Thorsten Heins, the company acknowledged that markets in the developing world accounted for much of the company’s revenue.

Practically every mobile phone carrier in the U.S. has relied on the iPhone to boost their sales numbers and increase customer satisfaction in recent years (sorry, T-Mobile). It turns out that betting on the iPhone isn’t just great because it gives customers the pretty device they want, but converting users into iPhone owners might mean that they will be more likely to stay with your carrier in the long run even when your service sucks. On the other hand, BlackBerry and Android owners are quicker to jump ship when the service has problems.

As a bunch of professional underpants bloggers, the editorial bullpen at Cult of Mac drinks a lot of beer. Seriously. When you’re taking your first sip of coffee in the morning and pouring your cornflakes, we’re already a six pack up on you, and by the time at the end of the day when the last words come trembling off our fingers, that’s about the same time the DTs are setting in. In fact, Cult of Mac’s San Francisco headquarters isn’t even a proper office, but rather a skunky, wobbling skyscraper made up entirely of our empties. You might have seen it towering on the horizon off of the local garbage dump.

The point is, basically, we’re all just sheets to the wind all the time, and can open a beer with anything. Pen. Knife. Our teeth. Another bottle. The curb. Anything. So why the heck didn’t we ever figure out you can use an iPhone, iPad or MacBook power brick to bust a beer open? How did OS X Daily of all people outscoop us?

Source: OS X Daily

Whether or not Foxconn’s running sweatshops is some matter of debate. The China Labor Watch says Foxconn’s iPhone assembly lines are sweatshops, while the Fair Labor Association says that factory worker conditions are much, much better than at actual sweatshops.

Now Foxconn CEO Terry Gou is trying to settle the debate. Yes, Gou says, Foxconn may well be running a sweatshop… but what’s wrong with sweatshops anyway?

At last, here’s the Apple TV everyone is waiting for. Well, kinda. Bang & Olufsen’s new V1 is a 32 or 40-inch 1080p TV with a hole in the back where you can hide your little puck-sized Apple TV. This, combined with a remote that can be used to control Apple’s set-top box, means that the V1 is the closest you’ll get to an actual HDTV from Apple.

Can the iPad help finance, wealth management, and corporate banking companies rebuild a sense of trust with their customers after the global financial crisis? According to the analysts at Ovum, the answer is yes.

Analysts at the research firm released a note this week noting that the iPad (and tablets in general) is a perfect tool for the industries, which are often dominated by in-person “face-time” meetings.

Transferring files from your Mac to your iPhone is supposed to be an easy process thanks to iCloud, but sometimes the lack of a physical connection between your devices can make the process feel daunting. Or that’s what Ishac Bertran thinks, anyway. He’s come up with a neat concept idea that is simple and clever for tranferring photos, webpages, music, etc., to your iPhone or iPad, even if it’s not what users really need anymore. Ishac claims,

Our devices are well connected virtually, through services like DropBox or iCloud. Those offer wireless synchronization for data, but the devices that contain this data still miss a tangible connection. I thought that a representation of a physical connection would facilitate a more intuitive interaction based on traditional mental models from the physical world.

Here’s a video of Bertran’s concept in action:

According to reports from Twitter, the music subscription service Rdio, appears to have secretly launched in the U.K. and France. While Rdio has yet to chime in on the subject, users in those locations are now able to sign up for a free 7-day trial of unlimited listening. Everything seems to work, although I’m hearing quite a few people in the U.K. are unable to stream or download a significant number of albums (probably why we haven’t heard an official announcement from Rdio).

When analysts and companies compare mobile devices, the big number everyone focuses on is how much market share each platform or product has in relation to its competitors. While this makes for a good overall view of the playing field, it doesn’t always give a clear or accurate picture of which companies are doing well on a single metric as a model for success and ignores others, like whether a platform or manufacturer managed to turn a significant profit.

This is, of course, a very big point when discussing Apple’s iOS succes compared to Android as a whole or to individual manufacturers – and something that Asymco’s latest review of the mobile phone market in which Apple accounts for a small 8.8% of handsets but reaps a whopping 73% of the industry’s profits.

The world’s first iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, is no longer an iPad-only newspaper after making its debut on the iPhone today. Launched back in February 2011, the publication is optimized for the digital age, and provides the latest breaking news for a whole host of topics, including business, the arts, technology, and sports.

iLounge has had decent luck predicting new iOS devices recently, managing earlier this year to correctly prophesize most of the details about the new iPad (although consensus had pretty much agreed upon them already).

Now iLounge is doing the same for the iPhone 4S, and while they echo a lot of the current speculation about a thinner iPhone 5 with a longer 4-inch display, the professional renders iLounge has put together are absolutely top-notch. This would be an incredibly attractive iPhone.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jNJOd3muQg

Although several rather bizarre rumors have claimed Apple will integrate a projector into a future iPhone, it seems a little unlikely — at least for many years. But thanks to PoP Video, you can add your own projector that displays 960 x 540 video for just $99.