The native calendar app on your iPhone or iPad is pretty great, and since it’s built right into iOS and the info is on your iPhone, not the internet, you have access to all your calendar events even when you’re offline or can’t find a network signal.

Now, many of us use Google Calendar to schedule our stuff. Personally, I like that I can sync my calendars across the web and my iOS devices, and share events with other Google Calendar users. But I’ve always wanted to have my events on my iPhone’s Calendar app, too, for the whole “can’t find a network” reason above.

It’s pretty easy, really, to get it all to sync together.

If you’re looking to upgrade your Mac with a high-capacity solid-state drive (SSD), this 1-Terabyte Samsung EVO-Series SSD on Amazon is a great deal. Normally $849.99, it’s just $514.99 and free shipping.

The best iPad case I ever had was the red leather Smart Cover for the iPad 2 (and iPads 3 and 4). It looked and felt great, and only ever got better with age. It’s sturdy (the Lady is still using it on her iPad 3), and while the metal hinge has worn a shiny pattern into the iPad’s edge, it grips way better than the plastic-hinged covers for the Air and Mini.

In short, I loved the leather. To get an Apple-made leather cover for the iPad mini, though, you need to buy the Smart Case, which is a case, and regular readers will know I’m not so hot on cases thanks to their usual bulk and weight.

So how does the crazily overpriced Smart Case shape up? Pretty damn well.

There are a bunch of apps out on iOS for kids, from educational apps to sports apps and more. Sure, you can get reviews of these games by adults, sometimes even from parents of kids who use them.

We thought it’d be fun, though, to ask the kids themselves.

Welcome to Kid APProved, a series of videos in which we ask our own children what they think of apps on the App Store that they’re using.

This week, it’s a game about an acrobatic hedgehog, Wide Sky from Marcus Eckert. Here’s what our Kid APProved reporter Nadine thinks.

Cake Ideas — Food & Drink — Free

Sometimes the name of an app is a woeful understatement.

Cake Ideas doesn’t contain “ideas” so much as the most complicated baking projects I’ve ever seen. Some of the recipes contained within include lists of things you must pick up at a hardware store because the cakes in question are so badass that they have freaking skeletons. It won’t show you how to make all of them — instructions for the one shaped like a wedding gown would probably melt your phone — but if you’re planning a wedding or just like looking at fancy cakes, prepare to be impressed.

Cake Ideas

The universe has a problem: It has all these planets lying around with no life on them. So obviously, the solution is some kind of forced cosmic osmosis to spread vitality throughout the void.

That’s the premise of Abductor Pro, anyway. It’s a new iOS title that puts players in the space boots of Antaris, a green alien tasked with grabbing humans from Earth for transplantation to other, less human-y planets. But the planets are picky, and possibly racist*, and they’re very particular about who gets to live on them.

Your job as Antaris is to make sure the right people get to the right place.

Upgraded to the iPhone 5S or 5C but still have a speaker dock with a 30-pin connector? The folks at Auris feel your pain. That’s why they’ve designed a way for you to enjoy your music without ever worrying about dock compatibility again.

The Auris freeDa is a small Bluetooth® receiver that connects to any speaker system via 30-pin connection (old-gen Apple devices) or auxiliary input – providing an elegant, compact way to wirelessly play and control your music from any Bluetooth-enabled device. And Cult of Mac Deals has it for only $44.99 during this limited time offer.

When you launch Safari these days, you’ll get the Top Sites page, showing all the sites you visit most frequently in Safari. If you’ve disabled this default view, you can get to it with a quick Option-Command-1 in Safari.

Did you know, however, that you can rearrange these Top Sites more to your liking? You can even delete sites you don’t want appearing there, as well.

Yesterday, AT&T announced new Mobile Share Value plans that were pitched as making subscriber’s monthly rates cheaper if you already own a smartphone.

It seemed like a pretty honest move. Most carriers bill you a set monthly that includes a fee designed to pay off your smartphone’s full prive over a two year period, which is common knowledge. What isn’t common knowledge is that on most carriers, even if you bring your own smartphone to your contract or fully pay off your device, the carrier will continue to bill you for that smartphone subsidy in perpetuity. It’s super sleazy, so AT&T’s move seemed like a refreshing dose of honesty.

That’s not how T-Mobile sees it, though.

Apple has filed a patent for a “smart dock” which greatly extends the range and capabilities of Siri to give it a far bigger role in your home life.

Entitled “Smart Dock for Activating a Voice Recognition Mode of a Portable Electronic Device” the patent was filed in May last year, but only published now.

Right now, Apple has over $156 billion in its war chest, prompting investors like Carl Icahn to pretty much riot to try to get at some or all of it.

Compared to $156 billion, $16 million is a drop in the ocean of Apple’s money, an amount so small that Tim Cook wouldn’t think twice to even sign the check. But when it comes to Samsung, Apple’s intellectual property arch rival, Cupertino wants to wring out every drop of money it can.

Many of the stats we have about iOS marketshare and demographics come from third-party companies, most of whom are tracking ad impressions within their network. As such, their stats have the potential of being inaccurate, and need to be taken with at least a little bit of salt.

Looks like online ad network Chitika can be trusted though. Earlier this week, we reported that Chitika was now tracking 74.1% of all devices as running iOS 7. Now, Apple is backing those numbers up, and it makes Google look pathetic.

Good news, my friends! If you want to get someone in your life an iPhone 5s in time for Christmas, or just splurge on a new iPhone yourself, good news: in the United States, Canada, and several other countries, you can now get an iPhone 5s shipped to you in just 1-3 business days. Even in gold!

Ah, to be ten years old again — and arrested for stealing £400,000 ($654,000) worth of Apple products.

That is the news coming out of Coventry, in the UK, where a dawn raid saw police arrest a boy and a 37-year-old man for their part in a series of commercial and domestic burglaries.

A new report from analysts Park Associates has placed Apple at the top of the list for most desirable brand in the desktop computer category.

Apple has previously topped the survey for most desired brand in tablets, smartphones, MP3 players, and streaming devices — but this adds one more platform to the list.

For a company that people are either making fun of, or else talking about overtaking — Apple sure is doing well these days, isn’t it?

While Spotify can be used without a paid subscription on your desktop, you need to sign up to Spotify Premium at $9.99 a month to enjoy it on mobile. But that could be about to change, with The Wall Street Journal reporting that Spotify is planning a new ad-supported version of its music streaming service for mobile devices.

Apple will begin using iBeacon technology in 254 of its U.S. stores from Friday.

Apple demonstrated the tech this week at its 24-hour Fifth Avenue store in New York City, where the company has installed around 20 iBeacon transmitters.

As ever with many of Quirky’s excellent crowd-sourced designs, the Prop Power Pro inspires me to make my own. I’m pretty sure a regular extension cable plus a bendy wire coat-hanger plus a length of flexible tubing would do the trick. The thing is, by the time I’d bought all the parts (plus a roll of gaffer tape), I’d be in the hole for way more than the $25 Quirky want for its version.

In the market for a new Lightning cable for on-the-go charging purposes? Then consider the awkwardly-named “8-pin Lightning Data Sync (iTune) Blocker” from USB Fever. Not only is is like about a third of the price of Apple’s own cable, but it comes with a switch on the wire that’ll let you plug your iDevice into any charging hole without worrying that it’s going to suck out your data of pump it full of filthy malware.

The Mesh Card is a wallet so small and slim that it’ll fit inside a single card pocket in your own fat wallet. And it’s not just a place to keep cards and cash: it doubles as a neat iPhone stand, and even as a bottle opener.

Mr. Reader, the best RSS news reader app for the iPad, is now fully iOS 7-ready, letting me (finally!) get the last non iOS 7 app out of my dock. As you’d expect, it now looks great, and adds a few neat new features.

Apparently, Americans like to pull up stakes and move to greener pastures more often than almost anyone else — which would explain the swirl of activity at the umpteen websites that help renters find an apartment. As one of the umpteen, RadPad is a relative newcomer to the group that stands out because of its user-friendliness.

RadPad is sort of the graphic novel of the apartment-hunting site breed: It emphasizes big, pretty pictures over a dull jumble of text. RadPad says their staff tries to ensure all listings have at least three up-to-date images by actually calling the author of each listing as they’re posted to verify.

There are really only two obvious solutions for backpackers to keep electronics charged out in the boonies.

There’s the more conventional route of using a solar-powered battery, like the Joos Orange, or Solio’s line of chargers. Or there’s the less common alternative of using one of an increasing number of stoves that can charge gadgets while heating dinner or water for coffee.

The upcoming newest member of the latter group, the PowerPot X (that “X” is a 10, btw), can even charge an iPad.