Apple devices are already wiping the floor with the competition in Japan — but things look to be getting even better on the iOS front, thanks to news that the iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display are set to launch on the DoCoMo network in two week’s time.

With more than 63 million mobile subscribers, NTT DoCoMo is the largest mobile service provider in Japan.

“With the addition of iPad alongside iPhone, we now offer the complete lineup of Japan’s most popular mobile devices on the nation’s most reliable LTE network,” says NTT DoCoMo CEO Kaoru Kato.

Apple says that iCloud was not hacked, following on from the news that a number of iOS and Mac users in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the U.S. report have had their devices remotely locked in exchange for ransom.

It’s been speculated that the hacking in question was done using login credentials gained from users as a result of recent data breaches and then used as Apple ID logins to lock users out via iCloud. While this may be the case, Apple says that it is not the result of the iCloud being compromised in any way.

So far, we at Cult of Mac have not been big fans of Amazon’s acquisition of ComiXology. Although we’ve previously praised them as the iTunes of comic books, the first thing the e-shopping giant did upon purchasing Comixology was stop allowing you to purchase comics directly within the app on iOS, presumably to get around paying Apple its 30% cut.

It was an anti-consumer move that made the app infinitely less appealing for digital comic readers, but Amazon has now announced something that might take some of the sting out: they’re releasing a free comic a day for the next three weeks. That means 19 free comics, which should be enough to tempt anyone who lovers comics to at least download the app.

Ever since the iPhone 4s was released, it hasn’t been hard to predict when Apple will release the next iPhone. In the second week of September on a Tuesday, Apple holds its annual iPhone event; ten days later, the newest iPhone is released in the United States, Canada, France, Germany, the UK, and a handful of other countries.

Following this logic, it’s pretty easy to guess that the iPhone 6 will be released on September 19th this year, after being announced on September 9th. And, in fact, that’s just what a German telecom is now predicting.

Universal translators are a common trope in science fiction. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, they come in the form of the babelfish, a tiny crustacean you jam in your ear. In Farscape, they are bacteria injected into your body. In Star Trek, they take a less squishy form as a wand or tiny computer pinned to your lapel.

In all incarnations, though, a universal communicator is seen as alien and futuristic. But Microsoft wants to change all that. The Washington-based company has just revealed a new real-time speech translation tool that is set to be built right into Skype, and which can translate any foreign language into English in the blink of an eye.

After Beats co-founder Dr. Dre made an exuberant video post on Vine boasting about becoming the first rap billionaire, many worried that Apple’s deal with the audio and streaming music service — once rumored to be worth as much as $3.2 billion — was scuttled. But a new report suggests it’s still on track for being announced this week, although Dre’s boastfulness may have cost him two hundred million dollars.

Ubisoft’s highly-anticipated console and PC game, Watch Dogs, came out today. One of the cooler features of the release, though, at least from a mobile gaming standpoint, is an app for both iOS and Android that purports to be more than just a tie-in game, letting mobile players “hack into” the console version of the game to play a bit of cat-and-mouse via the mobile app.

As I grabbed the free Watch_Dogs Companion: ctOS Mobile app for my iPhone today (it’s also on the Google Play store), I was excited to drop into the futuristic setting and actually impact someone’s game.

Unfortunately, the excitement didn’t last long. When I tried to connect via the game’s Quick Match option, which connects mobile players to random console players for some head-to-head action, the app hung on the connection screen.

For those with access to its mobile app, Uber is quickly becoming the preferred method of transportation over traditional taxis.

It’s a lot easier to summon a ride with a tap on your iPhone screen than hailing down a cab on the side of the street. For drivers, Uber is proving to be not only easier, but incredibly lucrative.

Our iPhone’s have the ability to do so many things but the core of its purpose is to help us communicate through talk and even text. While it can be easy to simply type a message and send it off, the messaging app in iOS 7 is capable of doing so much more. In today’s how-to find out how you can take full control of the iOS messaging app and take your messaging to the next level.

Take a look at the video to see what to do.

Apple wants to keep a tight grip on its supply chain, but it’s caught in a bidding war over a key component supplier for the iPhone.

Renesas Electronics has been in talks with Apple about Cupertino taking over a unit of the Japanese company that makes all the iPhone’s display chips. Apple has been interested in the purchase, but it’s now set to lose to a higher bid from Synaptics, a screenmaker that already works with Apple and its competitors.

Apple’s first keynote of the year is scheduled to take place this coming Monday at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. And like clockwork, banners and signage for the event have started going up at the conference’s venue, Moscone West.

We’re less than a week away from WWDC and while Apple’s official app is slim on clues for the event, the company just revealed it will stream its entire keynote to Macs and iPhones so you can learn about all the new goodies, even if you didn’t get a golden ticket.

Wil Wheaton gets his own show starting Tuesday, May 27, in which the uber-nerd best known for his portrayal of Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Gordie in Stand By Me gets to wax rhapsodic about his favorite subject: geek culture.

Wheaton is no stranger to celebrity nor the science fiction genre, calling himself one of the Star Wars generation. “Science Fiction had the ability to be meaningful and socially relevant,” he says in a video interview on SyFy, “but in a way that flew under the radar of people not looking for that sort of commentary.”

His new show will have Wheaton in his fully nerd-hero persona, talking about what fantasy, science fiction, and horror genre movies, TV shows, and culture gets right (and ranting about what it gets wrong).

Here’s a teaser trailer to whet your appetite, below.

If you’ve ever thought about iOS game development as a career, then Cult of Mac Deals has a great offer that will help you turn those thoughts into action.

iOS game development is an area with huge upside potential and high demand for new entrants, and The Complete iOS Dev Course is your way in. You’ll go from complete beginner to junior game developer in three months, and the apps you create in this course can be used on your portfolio. And Cult of Mac Deals has this course for 88% off the regular price — just $59 — for a limited time.

If I had to whittle down what I love about the LEGO Batman games (and really LEGO games in general) it’s that they can go places with their licensed characters that more serious game franchises can’t.

That’s the case with the just-announced Batman 3, which will be making its way to major consoles, handhelds, PC (and hopefully Mac) this fall.

The game will continue on from the events of DC Superheroes. Subtitled “Beyond Gotham” it follows Batman as he goes on a sci-fi-inspired intergalactic adventure, attempting to thwart the villainous plans of Brainiac who aims to destroy Earth by… miniaturizing cities from around the cosmos with the aid of the Lantern Rings.

It’s that time of year when Apple finalizes its supply chain plans for the next generation iPhone, and if you believe new reports coming out of Taiwan Foxconn is getting the biggest piece of the pie.

While this isn’t exactly earth shattering news, it’s still a bit surprising (and, for at least one company, disappointing) given that Apple has been shifting more and more manufacturing work to rival company Pegatron in recent times. Pegatron has been consistently stealing work by undercutting Foxconn’s prices — although these latest rumors state that Apple may have elected to remain with its long-time manufacturing partner for the bulk of work on the iPhone 6.

Having a day out or a night in with friends who all want to DJ a song or two? The magnificent new Nyne Bass pairs with mobile devices faster than you can say NFC-Bluetooth and lets everyone share their songs instantly — and clear. And loud.

The Bass is aptly named, with tons of low end balanced by rich overall sound. And you don’t need to have company, of course — the Nyne Bass makes an excellent home audio system to have in the kitchen, bedroom or living room. Or garden. Paired to your device using Bluetooth and with an impressive 10-hour battery, you can pick it up by its clever carrying handle and port it around anywhere.

This post is brought to you by Darkness Productions, creator of iFile.

Introducing the all-new iFile application, which has recently been updated to version 2.0.

The first version of this app was reviewed on Cult of Mac in 2012.

iFile is a fully featured file manager and simply claims to be a “must have” app on your device.

What’s new in version 2.0? Renewed design. The design became more attractive and standardized for iOS 7. The animation and effects were also improved. See more here.

Thanks to its amazing products, Apple already runs your social life, your work life and your downtime. But what if the Cupertino company designed products for the rest of your world? Over the years, there’s been much speculation about the company branching out – especially the Jetsons-like iWatch that will sync all our data and make sure the burrito is at the perfect temp when we get home.

Here are a few items we wish Sir Jony Ive would turn his hand to — because we’d like to take a dip, drop trou, drink and drive with that sweet Apple logo. Maybe just not in that order.

What would you like to see Apple’s design team dream up? Let us know in the comments below.

Imagine a world in which an Apple portable called Pippin rules the video game industry. Nintendo and Sony are nothing more than petrified corpses after a surprise attack from Cupertino vaporizes their platforms with a portable device so simple, so magical, that Michael Spindler would have let John Sculley waterboard him with Pepsi to make it a reality.

That’s the world imagined by Mike Donovan, a New York City designer who draws faux prototypes of everything from retro iPads to iPhones based on the iMac G3. His retrotastic mockup of the gaming gadget that never was, which he shared exclusively with Cult of Mac, takes the concept of Apple’s failed Pippin video game platform to its logical, period-appropriate extension.

“We’re inundated with new tech choices at almost every turn but there is something so alluring about the fun and simplicity of those early ’80s and ’90s gadgets,” Donovan told Cult of Mac. “Plus, who doesn’t love a good throwback?”

Free public domain audiobooks app Audiobooks (kind of like Audible for the poor-dible) has just received a notable upgrade.

Coinciding with the app’s fifth anniversary, Audiobooks 6.0 features a redesigned interface — improving significantly on the iOS 7 overhaul which arrived last September. The improved interfaces adds book covers for easier searching, along with a better library and file management system.

The upgrade also sees the addition of around 1,600 new audiobooks to the app’s free catalog, along with the addition of podcast support.

I don’t need to tell the readers of a blog called Cult of Mac that Steve Jobs could be brilliant. Nor, if you’ve read much about Jobs’ life, do you likely need to be informed that he could sometimes be a little unhinged — whether that meant berating co-workers, or bursting into tears because the design for a forthcoming product didn’t totally live up to his expectations.

A good case can, in fact, be made for the fact that these two qualities went hand-in-hand: that treating the creation of a personal computer or a smartphone as if life depended on it was what made, and still makes, Apple products great.

Taking this idea into consideration, a new plan by Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications seeks to find the country’s next great technology mogul who is just a bit “hen” — the Japanese word for odd, weird, or crazy.

If you’ve previously felt left out by the lack of Touch ID on non-iPhone 5s devices, have no fear: according to well-resepected KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo the fingerprint sensor will be featured as a standard in all new Apple devices– including the iPhone 6, iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3.

A number of Mac and iOS users from across Australia have had their Macs, iPhones and iPads remotely locked by hackers — and money demanded if they want to be able to continue using the devices.

Affected users have taken to Apple’s support forum, along with social media, to discuss the issue.

Facebook’s Chat Heads first debuted back in April, 2013 as a central UI element in the new Facebook for Android, the Facebook app on iOS, and the laughably ill-received ‘Facebook phone,’ the HTC First. Just like it sounds, a Chat Head is a bubble-like chat indicator that hovers over everything else until you read the message and then dismiss it by dragging it to the trash.

Some people love Chat Heads as a whimsical alternative to the omnipresent UI indicator. Some people despite it as the perfect example of design excess: a disruptive nagging ‘feature’ that forces a user to go through a tedious interaction every time a message is received in order to dismiss it. However you feel about Chat Heads, though, you can now have them on your iPhone’s default Messaging app… if you have a jailbroken device, that is.