For the last four years, T-Mobile has been just battered by the iPhone. Unable to ink the same deals with Apple as AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon to get the Jesus Phone on their networks at a subsidized price, T-Mobile tried to sell itself to AT&T, only to have the deal killed by the FCC.

In desperation, T-Mobile tried a new approach: they decided to call themselves an “Un-carrier” and start offering untraditional no-contract, upgrade-anytime-you-want plans. And you know what? It’s really paying off for them.

YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have today unveiled MixBit, the new video sharing service that they’ve been teasing us with for several months. It hopes to rival Instagram and Vine with a focus on mixing and editing video. Users can record 16-second clips at a time, and then stitch up to 256 of them together to create an hourlong video. 

Grid is a pretty cool new app which brings a new approach to note taking. It uses a flat grid metaphor and some very easy-to-use gestures to add contacts, photos, notes and places.

Ever used your iPhone to take a photo through the viewfinder of your camera? Or tried to line up the iPhone’s lens with one half of a pair of binoculars? Then you’ll know how hard it is to get a good result. But if you’re willing to sacrifice an old iPhone case and pony up a few dollars for an SLR eyepiece, then you can make an adapter that’ll get you great Instagrammatical pictures every time.

The eTeleporter is a brand new box that will teleport humans from one physical location to another, instantaneously. Wait, no. Let’s start again. The eTeleporter is a kind of a phone booth for your iPad.

There’s a new option emerging for mobile apps that want to sync to the desktop: Evernote. No, Evernote isn’t new, but it’s fast becoming the service of choice for app developers who don’t want to develop a companion Mac app.

And the latest of these is Adventures for iPhone, an app which lets you save the places you’ve visited into a location-based journal.

Komoot (like commute, only not) is a gem of an app for German bikers and hikers. Or rather, it was: with today’s v5.2 update, the navigation app now comes in English, and adds support for a slew of new countries.

The short form: If you ever take to two wheels, then you need this app.

Live histograms, saving layered images as PSD files, clone stamping, geotagging, layer masking… I’m talking about a desktop class app like Acorn, right? Nope. I’m listing features from Leonardo, an absurdly powerful universal iOS image-editing app.

It should be apparent by now that wires are an endangered species, what with the recent explosive popularity of Bluetooth for transmission of sound and data, and the growing ability to keep everything constantly synced with the cloud.

The lone holdout restraining the iPhone from breaking free is the charging cable—but even that’s on its way out. Case in point, Buqu Tech’s Magnetyze wireless charging case for the iPhone 5 is now available.

The British Isles aren’t generally known for exporting headphones; mega boy bands and cycling superstars, yes, and perhaps Marmite. But headphones? All that’s changing though, with the impact RHA has made over the past year or so. The outfit has thus far produced a series of home run hits (or batted sixes, if you’re a cricket fan) with inexpensive headphones with sound way above their price.

If their past successes are anything to go by, these new ‘phones from RHA should sound amazing—because they’re the company’s most expensive yet.

When we first took a look at Anchor back in June after it had just launched, the social platform for coworkers was a decidedly walled-off environment; just like Hotel California, you could check out any time you like—but you could never leave. At least, your ideas couldn’t.

But that’s changed today, as the app sees its first big update and adds integration with Evernote, and the ability to email outside of the platform.

For those whose income is based on billable time or on a per-project basis, some kind of time/project tracker app is a basic necessity. OfficeTime combines meat-and-potatoes time and project management with greatly customizable billing and reporting features, and is one of the few apps in this category available on all Apple devices—iPhone, iPad and Mac.

Not too surprisingly, the five major publishers originally named in the U.S. Department of Justice’s e-book case regarding their collusion with Apple on pricing have now themselves filed a complaint regarding the Justice Department’s proposal to eliminate the use of the agency model in any Apple agreements with publishers for a period of five years.

Publishers like the agency model as it allows them to set prices for e-books, instead of the distributor, as Amazon did before Apple’s own iBooks system launched on the iPad.

The cloud storage wars continue with a new tweet from Microsoft’s SkyDrive Twitter account. The service, typically offering seven gigabytes of online storage for free, just made an offer Apple’s jilted MobileMe members might not be able to refuse.

In a tweet today, @SkyDrive offered anyone who could forward the Apple downgrade email to a special SkyDrive email address would receive an extra 15GB of Microsoft’s own cloud storage system for one year for free.

XMBC is a cross-platform, open source media player that specializes in tons of options and ways of accessing content via local storage and the internet. The latest pre-release version of the Android client has support for Zeroconf, which in turn means the ability to use Apple’s AirPlay protocol on compatible devices. Your Android device becomes an AirPlay receiver for audio and/or video, which is the kind of thing that usually requires a tricky workaround.

You know the little Location Services triangle in the top right of your iPhone’s status bar well. It floats there faithfully every day, representing modern technology’s obsession with location data. Knowing where you are and what you do on a daily basis is incredibly valuable to advertisers and merchants looking to sell the next “x because you where at x.” Knowing your location also makes apps and iOS smarter, which ultimately makes the experience of using your iPhone more seamless.

If you’ve had Location Services turned on, then you’ve already been giving Apple permission to silently track your every move. A new setting in iOS 7 called “Frequent Locations” makes how and to what level you are tracked more transparent, right down to the minute you left your house yesterday.

Apple has released OS X Mavericks Developer Preview 5 today following the release of the fourth preview two weeks ago. The update is available via the Mac App Store for registered developers already on the Mavericks beta, and a direct download is available in the Mac Dev Center. Apple’s iBooks for Mac app has been included for the first time in this particular beta release. General stability and performance issues have also been addressed.

The eighth beta of OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.5 was also seeded today. 10.8.5 will likely be the last Mountain Lion update to come out before Mavericks is released to the public this fall.

Apple has been generally sticking to a two-week release cycle for Mavericks and iOS 7 betas this summer, despite the Dev Center outage. Mavericks is continuing to get more stable with each preview release, and the finishing touches are being put on 10.8.5.

Source: Apple

Microsoft’s recent barrage of anti–iPad ads have nearly all featured third-party tablets rather than boasting about Microsoft’s own iPad-killer, the Surface RT. Now that it’s desperately slashed prices on RT units, Microsoft is feeling inexplicably cocky in its latest ad, which pits the hardware and software specs of the iPad against that of the Surface RT.

Basically, Microsoft is praying the iPad’s lack of a keyboard (that you have to purchase separately), Microsoft Office, and a USB port will be enough to entice some unlucky nerds to buy a Surface RT instead of an iPad now that it’s cheaper than ever but still deprived of quality apps.

Here’s the ad:

My iPhone 5 camera has gotten some grime inside it, and my pictures are all yucky because of it. I’ve procrastinated taking it to the Apple Store to get cleaned out because, hey, I’m busy lazy.

Luckily, there’s a guy on YouTube whose buddy had the same problem, and he put up a video showing how to clean out the iPhone 5 with a tiny screwdriver, suction cup, can of air, and a plastic non-marring tool.

A quick disclaimer: if you choose to try this fairly simple iPhone 5 surgery, you’re responsible for any damage that might occur. Please don’t email us asking for a replacement iPhone.

Mobile app, Twine, is trying to do something new in the dating app space. Unlike other dating or random chatting apps like ChatRoulette, Tinder, or OK Cupid, Twine connects you with new people around you and lets you chat and flirt with them without revealing your identity until you decide to.

That’s kind of a big deal, especially for those who find themselves overwhelmed with overly assertive individuals on many online and app-based dating services. Twine also tries to keep things gender balanced, saying that it only allows in equal numbers of each gender (it only recognizes two), so that’s why some folks may be put on a waiting list when they join.

Instagram just pushed out a big update for its iOS and Android apps which gives users the ability to import video from their smartphone libraries into Instagram.

Now you can film video at any time and then splice it together later into a 15-second video to import into Instagram. The update also brings video support to Android 4.0 devices and has a new trim and crop feature so your vids can be molded into perfect squares.

iOS users also pick up a new Automatic Straightening feature that set your photos level with the tap of a button. The new Instagram 4.1 update is available now in the App Store and Google Play.

Source: Instagram

When I opened the mailing box to find three pairs of EarSkinz, I wasn’t super impressed. Especially as this model, the ES2, so closely matched the shape of the EarPods it’s designed for use with, I figured it was just another throwaway product.

My apologies for even writing the above, but imagine my surprise when EarSkinz turned out to be an essential accessory for my set of EarPods. I’m even thinking about buying a pair of ES1s for my older Apple earbuds.

The EarSkinz marketing material claims that the little ES2 silicone earbud coverings will improve the comfort, fit, and sound of a pair of EarPods. I found that they indeed improved the comfort and fit, but I’m not so sure about improving the sound, though of course your mileage may vary.

Spike Jonze is coming out with a new movie and this time, rather than dissecting the mind of a famous movie star, Jonze’s new film, Her, takes a look at what it would be like to fall in love with an operating system like Siri.

The movie stars Joaquin Phoenix as a lonely dude with a non-ironic mustache who becomes intrigued with a new, Siri-like, advanced operating system named Samantha that’s powered by Scarlett Johansonn’s sexy vocal chords.

We’ll have to wait until November 20th to see what happens when you give Siri a soul and place her in the hands of anti-social men across the world, but here’s the first trailer to hold you over:

Are you unable to download content from the App Store and iTunes this morning? Don’t worry—you’re not the only one. Lots of people are experiencing the same thing, and Apple has acknowledged a problem affecting “some users” on its system status page.

Now that the iPad has a full-blown camera built in, more and more people are taking pictures with it. Even my old, original iPad has photos I’ve synced to it so that I can display photos in a larger format when I feel the need. But I rarely use the iPad’s Picture Frame mode because, well, considering the way I store the iPad it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

But when I saw The Koala Wall Mount from Dockem–the latest deal at Cult of Mac Deals–I saw a whole new way to make use of the iPad’s Picture Frame mode that makes a whole lot of sense. And looks good in the process.