News - page 2033

Four years ago today, after having announced the pregnancy six months before, Apple finally gave the first iPhone to the world… and changed the mobile landscape forever. There’s much serious beard stroking to be done about the ramifications of that epochal birth on the smartphone industry as a whole, and we’ll do some of that later today, but right now we’d rather throw the iPhone a birthday bash… and what better way to do that than to serve up a nice slice of birthday cake?

As you know, making and frosting cakes in the shape of the iPhone has become quite a movement in the baking world since the iPhone’s debut. It’s probably a little creepy to serve up an iPhone-shaped cake at the iPhone’s own party —how would you like to eat a big, frosted slice out of yourself on your birthday? — but let’s not think it through too much. Here’s four years of the best iPhone birthday cakes we could find. Dig in!

We’ve seen people do some pretty impressive things with iOS devices, such as producing short films and recording complete albums. However, this is the first time we’ve seen an iPhone capture one couple’s special day.

As we prepare to welcome iOS 5 to our devices, a look back finds iOS 4 is used by nearly all iPhones just a year after its release. Unveiled a year ago for the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G, iOS 4 is on 95.59 percent of Apple handsets, an advertising firm announced Wednesday.

To mark the fourth anniversary of the original iPhone, Mashable has put together an incredible infographic covering the four years of iPhone. You can see it below, and it really puts into perspective what a momentous event the release of the first iPhone was.

In many ways, it’s hard for me to remember my first iPhone without wincing a bit — no apps? Only 4GB of storage? —but Mashable has it dead right when they say “when we look at the mobile industry, there is a very clear line between what happened before June 29, 2007, and what happened after.”

Although it seems antiquated now in a lot of ways, the original iPhone is easily the singly most important cell phone of the last twenty years.

Happy Birthday, iPhone, and thanks.

Will Apple offer two handsets later this year, the iPhone 5 and an unknown option? So far, the answer to the question is yes, no, and both — and its only Wednesday.

Apple teased the latest features in the upcoming OS X Lion operating system at WWDC early this month, but when it comes to a release date, the company has left us hanging. Now a new report claims that Lion will launch on July 19th… and will drag new MacBook Airs out to customers immeditely in its wake.

Apple has just added three new pages to its website which highlight why its Macs and iOS devices are the perfect companions for those heading off to college. Well, actually, the Mac gets a bit of a soft sell… but Apple’s really banging the drum when it comes to their iOS devices, and as usual, it all comes down to apps.

Google launched its latest attempt at social networking yesterday dubbed Google+, a service which is said to focus on sharing content with groups of people that you place into “circles.” At the moment the service is available by invitation only, but by the time it goes public, there may be an official iPhone app for you to run it on.

Here’s a nifty feature that’s just been discovered in Lion: the ability to send text to iTunes as a spoken track for those who would prefer to listen rather than read.

In an attempt to appease those unhappy with their new Final Cut Pro X purchase and reduce the number of disgruntled reviews, Apple has published a new FAQ page on its website that aims to answer some of the questions many users have about the latest Final Cut Pro. But will this be enough?

It seems that not a week goes by when Gameloft doesn’t have another awesome App Store release up its sleeve. If you’re wandering what we can expect for the rest of 2011, we have the full list of release for you right here!

Hot on the heels of other recent updates Apple has released updates for Java on Mac OS X Leopard 10.5  and Snow Leopard 10.6.  The updates improve compatibility, security, and reliability.

If you really had reason to encrypt your phone calls — or were on the payroll of the MI6 —  perhaps a $1,600 yearly subscription to a cell phone call encryption app service would make sense.

Most of the time, police are in the news for recovering stolen iPads. Now an officer has made headlines for suspicion of stealing the must-have gadget.

A police officer was put on paid administrative leave on suspicion of swiping an iPad at the airport. She says she “found it” after going through a TSA security checkpoint.

By punching a big, conspicuous button on an iPad, Pope Benedict XVI has just launched the new official Vatican news site. Then he sent a tweet from the official Twitter app and afterwards a bunch of old men kissed his knuckles. Between this and Google+, it was a big day for technology.

[via Rome Reports]

By most accounts, Google’s new social network Google+ at least looks pretty good.

As it turns out, there’s a reason for that: it was designed by the guy who designed the original Macintosh.

Google’s just helped put another nail in Adobe Flash’s coffin. Their new tool is called Swiffy, and it allows you to easily convert simple SWF Flash animations and games into HTML5 compliant code, viewable and interactable on any iPhone or iPad.

Remember that Lulzsec hack the other day that showed that AT&T was already testing iPads on their next generation 4G network?

Well, there’s even more interesting information in the leak than that. Complete details about AT&T’s proposed LTE data plans make it clear that when Apple does release an iPhone or iPad 4G, prohibitive data caps, massive overage charges and automatically throttled bandwidth will be the rule of the day.

Google’s just launched their biggest attack against Facebook yet with Google+, a new social networking service that emphasizes the sharing of content and updates to groups of people instead of Facebook’s universal wall spooge approach. But is Google+ destined to be just another wanna-be failure like Buzz and Orkut, or could it instead finally lead to Apple and Facebook to put their differences aside and strike a deal for iOS 6?

The first non-Apple laptop supporting the new Thunderbolt standard has now officially been announced in the Sony Vaio Z, and it’s an impressive machine… for a Windows PC. Unfortunately, though, Sony’s implementation of Thunderbolt is hobbled by a hubristic decision to use a different connector than Apple, , along with a petulant refusal to adopt Apple’s Thunderbolt brand name.

Undoubtedly the most simple jailbreak solution to ever be available for the iPhone is the JailbreakMe online exploit from Comex. Apple quickly patched this hack shortly after its release, but Comex has updated the JailbreakMe page with a teaser its upcoming relaunch… reminding people that this was a jailbreak a LONG time in the making.

Even as Apple starts issuing refunds to developers angry that Final Cut Pro X leaves out some of the features upon which they depend most, new evidence suggests that those must-have features are already in Final Cut Pro X’s source code, just waiting to be turned on.

Wow. Apple’s latest version of their professional video editing software Final Cut Pro X has proven to be such a PR mess for them that according to reports they are now backing down from their strict “all sales are final” policy for the App Store and issuing refunds.

Contrary to yesterday’s rumors, a new analyst report suggests that the iPhone 3GS will remain the low-end iPhone even after the iPhone 5 drops in September… making it the first iPhone to spend over three years on the market.

Short of Sprint’s WiMax, Verizon LTE has no actual competition to speak of in the 4G market. AT&T and T-Mobile’s “4G” is really just supercharged HSPA+ 3G technology, after all. So the results of PC Mag’s nationwide mobile bandwidth test shouldn’t be much of a surprise: Verizon LTE just mops the floor with the competition.

That’s not going to last though. Here’s why.