Xiaomi has quickly become the world’s third largest smartphone supplier, thanks to its cheap Apple-esques devices, and all that copying is about to pay off big time. CNBC reports that the Chinese startup is raising $1.5 billion in capitol, the largest private financing deal of since Facebook in 2011.
Negotiations haven’t been finalized, but investors include Russian Internet company DST – which backed Facebook, Airbnb, and Alibaba – with a valuation expected to top $40 billion.
It’s easy to point a finger at Xiaomi, the Chinese phone maker that clearly draws a lot of… inspiration from Apple. And there’s Samsung, of course. But there’s another copycat offender out there that’s almost just as bad, if not worse: Lenovo.
The Chinese manufacturer has a new phone coming out called the Sisley S90. Excuse the fact that the device looks just like an iPhone 6; its website is basically a carbon clone of Apple’s.
Sometimes all a penguin needs is love, says the new Christmas ad from British department store John Lewis.
There’s a young boy with a real penguin. The penguin, named Monty, loves playing with the boy: swimming, sledding, building with Legos. but there’s one thing the boy cannot provide for poor Monty, and that’s a life mate.
Watch the full ad below and be sure to stick around for a delightful Calvin & Hobbesian moment at the end.
Monument Valley is my pick for iOS game of the year; a twisting, gorgeous, MC Escher-style puzzler that’s spellbinding from start to finish. And given that it has received upwards of 1 million downloads, I’m far from alone in thinking that way.
Which is why it’s great to hear that the game is set to receive its first expansion on November 13. Titled “Forgotten Shores,” the expansion will plunge players back into the world of Princess Ida, as she travels through eight entirely new levels, with a slew of fresh puzzles to solve on her journey.
In a much-requested feature, paying Spotify users can now use their iPhone or iPad to control the songs playing on their desktop computer.
Thanks to the update, you can now easily switch between desktop and mobile — perhaps using your iPad to skip and change tracks at a party, or shutting down your laptop, and then picking up listening on your iPhone from exactly where you left off on your phone.
We get slammed 24/7 with new Apple rumors. Some are accurate, most are not. To give you a clue about what’s really coming out of Cupertino in the future, we’re busting out our rumor debunker each week to blow up the nonsense.
After staying quiet the past few weeks, the Apple rumor mill is erupting like Mt Kilauea with hot rumors about the Apple Watch’s possible launch date, gossip of the iPad mini getting discontinued, and our first iPhone 7 rumors of the year. Step up to the crystal ball and see which of these rumors are the real deal, and which are just pretenders.
Walter Isaacson’s new book might not be quite the monster hit that his 2011 Steve Jobs biography was, but The Innovators is definitely the 2014 tech book you’re most likely to spot someone reading on the bus. Having focused on one of tech's most singular visionaries, The Innovators turns its attention to teams of inventors and computer scientists, offering a look at just how far technology have come over the past century.
If The Innovators has a downside, it’s that it can be cursory in its discussions of specific people. Jobs got 500 pages of his own, but Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee, Larry Page and others have to share less than that between them.
Still, if you’re looking for a tech book people will have read this winter, The Innovators should be high on your list.
Photo: Simon & Schuster
According a rumor in BusinessKorea, Apple is set to switch from using the problematic TLC (triple-level cell) NAND flash to MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. MLC NAND was used in the 16GB version of the new iPhone 6 devices, as well as some of the 64GB models, while the 64GB and 128GB models use TLC NAND.
A few days ago we detailed reports that a small percentage of users were having issues with their new iPhones crashing and becoming stuck in a boot loop, supposedly due to the controller IC of the TLC NAND.
Although the suggestion that Apple was looking at a full-on product recall were largely debunked, the company is supposedly looking to fix the problem going forward.
iPad users generated a massive 79.9% of North American tablet-based Web traffic over the month of September, according to a new report by Chitika Insights.
This number is down slightly from the 81% figure the iPad represented one year ago, although the iPad actually gained 1.9% points since July 2014 — the largest quarter-over-quarter usage share increase of any tablet brand out there.
Slo-mo videos have become my favorite new thing to shoot with the iPhone 6 Plus now that Apple added the ability to spit out gorgeous vids at 240 FPS, but my slo-mo addiction comes at a heavy cost: storage space.
The best smartphone camera in the world doesn’t mean jack if your 16GB iPhone can’t hold another 30 second video, so the guys at Leef have come up with a brilliant solution to ensure you never run out of room for all your video. It’s called the iBridge, and while it might look an ordinary USB-stick, it has the extraordinary ability to add storage to both your iPhone and Mac.
From answering trolls online to busting out near-fluent Mandarin in front of a surprised audience, Mark Zuckerberg’s all about defying expectations these days. That trend continued yesterday, as he gave a reasonable (and even Steve Jobsian) answer about why Facebook moved messaging out of its main app and into a standalone Messenger one.
Telling the audience at his first public Q&A that, “I’m grateful for hard questions” and “it keeps us honest,” Zuck noted how:
My math-averse daughter wanted to cheat on her algebra homework. So we downloaded PhotoMath, a free app that lets you take a picture of your mathematical and algebraic equations, solving them for you and showing the steps to the solution.
PhotoMath has been at the top of the App Store charts for a couple of weeks, hitting number one on the Education, Kids Games and Top Apps lists. Small wonder, as it seems like a great way to get out of doing homework.
However, despite the concerns of some parents and teachers, apps like PhotoMath just won’t help when it comes to cheating — they’re far too limited. Still, it’s a promising technology that, once it matures, might actually turn into the type of wonder tool for education we’ve long been promised, turning our iOS devices into useful educational tools that will help kids actually learn math, rather than simply giving them a shortcut to homework answers.
The online reality of the internet is a lot like real life. There’s a great deal of good out there, but hiding in the shadows is a criminal element that wishes to do you harm.
Get the tools to protect yourself from online thugs with The Cyber Security Developer Bundle, 88% off for a limited time at Cult of Mac Deals.
Today Apple quietly added a new feature to the developer beta version of iCloud.com. Photos can now be uploaded directly from the browser to a user’s iCloud Photo Library, which was introduced with iOS 8.1.
Since Apple isn’t releasing its new Photos app for OS X until next year, this could very well be the only way to upload photos to iCloud from a desktop for months.
Today’s good news: a new Toy Story movie.
Pixar just announced that it’s releasing the fourth installment of Toy Story in June 2017. The movie will be directed by John Lasseter, the legend who directed the first two movies and currently serves as Chief Creative Officer of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios.
Toy Story 3 came out in 2010 and earned nearly $1.1 billion worldwide at the box office. No plot or character details about Toy Story 4 have been revealed yet.
Via: Variety
iOS 8 has been technically jailbroken since October 22, but it’s taken weeks to get it polished enough for Cydia, the jailbreak alternative to the App Store.
Now that things are “stable enough,” Cydia creator Jay Freeman has flipped the switch to start allowing the sale of iOS 8 tweaks and themes.
Today CBS News added a new channel to the Apple TV. The network’s CBSN channel is the first of its kind to offer live, anchored coverage without a cable subscription.
CBS is now seriously competing with Fox, ABC, CNBC and other competitors on the Apple TV with a mix of streaming news and on-demand content.
In this new, three-minute-long trailer, Warner Bros. teases us with the epic conclusion to Peter Jackson’s Hobbit film trilogy.
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies will complete the story of Bilbo Baggins’ journey with Thorin Oakenshield and his company of dwarves as they reclaim the wealth of their homeland. But the heroes also must deal with Smaug (that pesky dragon they unleashed in the last movie) and take care of that badass orc that’s been following them from the get-go.
Check out the full trailer below.
Principal photography has wrapped for the much-anticipated Star Wars Episode VII, and to celebrate the crew has revealed the movie’s official title: Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Aaron Sorkin was tapped by Sony to write the ultimate Steve Jobs movie, but the Oscar winning screenwriter says despite tons of other movies and books written about Jobs, Hollywood could make 10 more Steve Jobs movies and they’d all be worth watching.
In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Sorkin discussed his relationship with the Apple co-founder, revealing that Steve actually tried to recruit Sorkin to help write a Pixar movie, and another time Steve hooked him up with an pre-released MacBook Pro because Sorkin told the media he’s written everything on a Mac.
Sorkin says he and Steve only talked three times, one of which was to help him fix a couple typos in his famous Stanford commencement speech from 2005, but Sorkin says the message and the words were 100% Steve.
Watch the full interview below:
Microsoft announced new versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint are coming to the iPhone today, giving users more tools to create and edit documents, so you can finally get some ‘real work’ done on that giant iPhone 6 Plus screen.
The new Office apps for iPhone are pretty much exactly like the iPad versions which were released in March, only they’ve been optimized for portrait mode, and unlike the old Microsoft Office Mobile app for iPhone, users will finally be able to do a whole lot more than just edit text.
In an interesting Wall Street Journal profile of Beats founders Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, the two music industry vets and current Apple employees describe their new $70m undergraduate academy at the University of Southern California as a training ground for future Apple and Beats employees.
“We wanted to build a school that we feel is what the entertainment industry needs right now,” Iovine is quoted as saying. “There’s a new kid in town, and he’s brought up on an iPad from one and a half years old. But the problem with some of the companies up north [in Silicon Valley] is that they really are culturally inept.”
“I’ve been shocked at the different species in Northern and Southern California—we don’t even speak the same language. The kid who’s going to have an advantage in the entertainment industry today is the kid who speaks both languages: technology and liberal arts. That’s what this school is about.”
From Klingon to GIF-based keyboards, we’re seeing some really interesting examples of new third-party keyboards with iOS 8.
Here’s a particularly exciting one, though: a keyboard which translates messages into other languages as you type. It does the opposite, too, which means that if you receive a text message in say, French, it can instantly translate it into English, or your choice of language. Neat, right?
Like many movie fans out there I couldn’t be more excited about the release of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, a spectacular-looking space epic from one of the greatest filmmakers working today. While I’m not going to get to see it until this weekend, its release gave me reason to revisit some of the best movie space epics in history — and dwell on a few of the worst, too.
Are you ready for a guide to both the best and worst the galaxy has to offer? Check out our picks after the hyper jump:
WhatsApp, one of the most popular messaging platforms on the planet, finally offers one of the most basic messaging features — the ability to tell you when your messages have been read. The app will now display blue checks instead of green ones next to messages that recipients have seen.