Yesterday we showed you the ZTE Open, the first entry-level smartphone running Mozilla’s new Firefox OS. Other companies, like Sony, are planning to release Firefox OS phones as well. Mozilla has been trying to get the word out at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
During a recent talk at MWC, Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs touted Firefox OS as a new platform to disrupt Android and Apple’s hold on the industry.
Keeping a cable on you at all times to charge your iPhone is a pain in the ass, mostly because the wires get all tangled and they take up too much space.
Last summer we saw the nifty Kickstarter project called ChargeCard that aimed to put an iPhone charging cable in your wallet. Well the project got funded and is now ready to make its way to your wallet.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – It’s not all announcements of exciting new Android handsets with fractionally faster processors here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Oh no. You’ll also find rose-tinted spectacles. Yes, Elecom – maker of some of the most accessorial iAccessories ever – now makes some specs that will stop your eyes from being ruined – ruined! – by blue light.
Last week a Staples Exec gloated that the office supply chain superstore had struck a deal to sell Apple products very soon. At the time, we didn’t know which Apple products Staples would sell, but for now it looks like they’re just selling accessories.
If you want to buy an Apple TV, Magic Mouse, Smart Cover, EarPods, or any other Apple accessories, you can now purchase them from Staples’ online store for the U.S.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – Excito is an AppleTV-a-like puck which hooks up to your home network and lets you stream TV, music and movies to any stereo or screen in the house.
So what, right? The Apple TV already does that? The difference is that the Excito only uses your phone as a remote, and streams the content either direct from the internet, or from your own local media server. Oh, and it costs around half the price if the already-cheap Apple TV.
Be careful what you request on Apple’s website. While you might think you’re passing on the opportunity to get something beautiful engraved on your iPod, you might actually be requesting it.
That’s what happened to one unfortunate redditor who swears he totally didn’t want Apple to engrave anything on his iPod. This joke has been around for years, but it’s still funny, right?
Source: Reddit
Via: Gizmodo
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – You’re stuck in the dessert. You are thirsty, hot, and – worst of all – your cellphone is dead. You discover that you have a teaspoonful of water that you had previously overlooked. Do you a) Drink it? or b) use it to recharge your phone.
What?
Ken Segall has a long history with Apple. He worked with Steve Jobs for over 14-years as the creative director at TBWA/Chiat/Day. Segall is the guy who came up with the ‘Think Different’ campaign, literally put the ‘i’ in iMac, and he’s even got his own book about Steve Jobs.
When it comes to Apple, Ken knows what he’s talking about, and right now, he’s not happy at all with how Apple’s been approaching their ads. In Ken’s opinion, Apple is getting beat up by Samsung because Samsung is producing great ads, and Apple isn’t.
You ever do that thing where you have to move your mouse around, jiggling the little thing just to find the dang cursor? I do it all the time these days, with my smaller screen Macbook Air and the Mac Mini that’s connected to the HDTV across the room from me, since there’s so much going on onscreen that I often lose track of it.
There’s an easy way to fix this problem, and it involves the Accessibility options that come built right in to your Mac OS X system.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – Here’s something I wish would come to a future iPhone, or — even better — an iPad: e-ink. Imagine being able to switch to an e-ink version of the tablet and read in bright sunlight. Or turn off the various radios and enjoy a battery life measured in months, not hours.
That’s what the e-ink phone can do.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS –
RadBlocker might sound like some lame anti-skateboarding device from the 1980s, but it is in fact an Israeli company dedicated to keeping your brains unscrambled. And nestled amongst its RF-denying belt holsters (for Dad!) and laptop trays is this amazing pair of headphones: Echo Tubez.
Well, it may be past the officially announced February 22 date, but Canadian game developer Beamdog just sent us an email announcing the availability of Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition for OS X. You can buy it now via the Beamdog site, or wait for the Mac App Store version, which the devs promise is coming soon.
Going paperless is a goal of mine. I’d love to be able to keep all my important documents, like banking paperwork and medical records, all safely and cleanly tucked away into the digital ether. And, while productivity apps are fairly common in the Mac App store, when Apple made document-organizing app, doo, an Editor’s Choice app this week, well, it certainly piqued my interest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3H2hF0dmEE
Yep, note the date at the end of that trailer above? It’s February 25 right now. And, as such, you can grab yourself a copy of Awesome Games Studio’s latest indie game release, Yet Another Zombie Defense, on the App Store today for a mere $0.99, half off the regular $1.99 price. Don’t wait too long, though, as this remake of the popular XBox Live Indie Game will only be on sale for a week.
Apple has finally settled a 2011 lawsuit with parents whose kids spent insane amounts of money on in-app purchases. A group of parents originally sued Apple after their kids raked up enormous iTunes bills on apps that were downloaded for free from the App Store.
One of the world’s most outspoken telecom CEOs recently talked about how he has seen Apple change under the guidance of Tim Cook. Stephane Richard runs Orange, a leading French carrier and longtime Apple partner. During Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Richard spoke to reporters about how he has seen Apple become “more flexible” and “less arrogant than they used to be.”
Apple has been historically fickle about how it lets marketers and developers track iOS users through apps downloaded from the App Store. After all of the privacy concerns were raised about the UDID device identifier back in 2011, a better solution never presented itself.
Apple eventually introduced its own Advertising Identifier for iOS device tracking purposes, but marketers still favored the unique, permanent nature of the UDID. The UDID worked so well because it was a device-specific identifier that could never be changed. Athough developers were technically banned from using the UDID to track iOS devices more than a year ago, many, many apps still use the deprecated method today.
Apple is reportedly starting to reject apps that use web cookies to track user activity in iOS. Could this mean a reinvigorated push towards the Advertising Identifier again?
The popular method for listening to music online has shifted from $0.99 paid downloads to subscription services like Spotify and Rdio. Bigger tech companies like Samsung have tried to claim their piece of the music subscription pie, and Apple is rumored to be entering the space with some sort of ‘iRadio’ product.
That’s why it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Google is working on its own music streaming service too.
Otterbox is known for making really durable iPhone cases that are designed to survive all kinds of calamities. Now Otterbox is taking the next logical step: screen protectors for the iPhone and iPad.
The company has unveiled four different screen protectors, and each one has its own distinct appeal.
I’ve been driving a lot lately, and have been wanting to listen to ebooks on my iPHone as I do so. It’s fairly simple to turn on VoiceOver and have what sounds like Siri read my books to me, but honestly? She’s a terrible narrator. The VoiceOver voice is heavily robotic, and it’s difficult to understand what’s being read to me most of the time, so I end up giving up or contemplating purchasing an audiobook from iTunes.
But I’d really like to just continue the ebooks I already have on my iPhone while I’m driving. That way I can listen to them while in the car, but actually read them when I’m not. NaturalReader just might be part of the solution I’ve been looking for, so I figured I’d share it here with you.
It’s only been a few weeks since the first lockscreen hack was discovered on iOS 6.1, but some researchers have already discovered a new way to bypass the iPhone’s lockscreen without entering the security PIN.
The bug was found in iOS 6.1 by Benjamin Kunx Mejri, and it follows some of the steps as the last exploit but has some variation in the steps, and it allows an attacker to access all your data by plugging your device into a computer’s USB port.
If you haven’t heard of App.net yet, it’s a cloud platform that’s kind of like Twitter, except it’s ad-free, so you have to pay a monthly fee to use the social network.
Starting today you can setup your own App.net account for free. It comes with some limitations on what you can do, and the only way to get the free account is via an invite from a paid member, but if you’re curious about the platform, the free account might be a hell of a deal.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS — As I was walking around the show floor at MWC today, I noticed a number of smartphones that looked very familiar — yet they were being paraded by Chinese companies I’d never heard of. I saw what looked like a large iPhone 5, an entire range of Samsung Galaxy devices, and a number of high-end HTC handsets.
Except they weren’t really Apple, Samsung, or HTC devices at all; they were actually cheap clones that were trying their best to look like the real thing. They even had fake accessories that were identical to the originals.
Apple doesn’t like jailbreaks. Never has, never will… which is why it’s odd that the evasi0n jailbreak, first unleashed to the world with iOS 6.1, has seen two small bug fix releases of iOS come and go — iOS 6.1.1 and iOS 6.1.2 — that don’t fix the exploit.
Better get your jailbreak in while you can, though, because word is that Apple is now beta testing a new version of iOS 6.1.3 that closes the exploit for good.
The success of the iPhone and iPad was supposed to do great things for Sharp. As Apple’s profits have gone up, Sharp has seen an increased amount of orders from Cupertino as Apple tries to distance itself from buying supplies from Samsung.
Even though Sharp supplies Apple with displays for the iPad and iPhone, their stock price has been falling lately, and its investment deal with Foxconn might be in jeopardy.
