Buying an iPhone without getting AppleCare+ or your provider’s insurance plan is a bad move. You’re going to break that screen eventually trust us.
If you don’t live near an Apple Store, then you might want to go with your carrier’s own insurance protection plan on your iPhone. AT&T & Verizon already offer insurance for iPhone customers, and Sprint is finally joining the mix too.
Rolling Stone magazine finally makes its debut in Newsstand on the iPad today, two years after the publication’s founder criticized rivals’ premature rush to Apple’s tablet. The digital version of the magazine comes filled with iTunes links that will allow readers to quickly purchase content from featured artists.
The iPad may be the king of tablets in some markets, but Apple’s device cannot compete with the Nexus 7 in Japan. Its premium price tag is causing tablet buyers to opt for Google’s 7-inch slate instead, despite its smaller display and lack of a rear-facing camera. One survey of Japanese electronics stores has found that the Nexus 7 has claimed 44.4% of the tablet market.
The popular Dolphin Browser for Android and iOS has been updated today to introduce a number of handy new features. In addition to one-tap sharing to Facebook and Twitter, users can enjoy Evernote clipping, and the ability to sync bookmarks and tabs between Dolphin and their desktop browser.
USA Today published a couple of new stills from the upcoming movie, Jobs,which has actor Ashton Kutcher playing Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs and Josh Gad playing co-founder Steve Wozniak.
The movie will premier January 26 at the Sundance Film Festival and hits theaters in April.
Amazon has today launched a new web app for the iPhone and iPod touch that allows users to purchase more than 22 million tracks directly from the retail giant’s MP3 store. Amazon says the HTML5 app has been optimized to work seamlessly inside Apple’s mobile Safari browser, and any music you purchase will be transferred instantly to your Cloud Player library.
AT&T could acquire a European carrier as it looks to expand its business overseas, The Wall Street Journal reports. The company is reportedly looking at way in which it can escape the growth constraints in the United States by entering a new wireless market where it can “upgrade technology and rollout more lucrative pricing strategies.”
Although AT&T is only identifying targets at this point, it’s though the company could announce a deal before the end of the year.
Here’s a fun little extra for those of you that use the Reminders app on OS X.
Sometimes you just like to feel a bit more accomplished, a bit more successful at your day. One of the cool things about keeping a list of things you need to remember to do is actually checking them off as you do so. Heck, on a particularly frustrating day, you might want to know how many things you’ve actually completed, right?
Using the Reminders app, this is fairly simple to do.
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As we reported a couple of days ago, the iOS game from the National Rifle Association (NRA), NRA: Practice Range, has been coming under fire from various media outlets and political organizations for being a shooting game that is rated for anyone four years of age and up.
Apparently, Apple heard some of the outcry, and revised the rating in the App Store, which now says the shooting game is “Rated 12+ for the following: Frequent/Intense Realistic Violence.”
So, here’s an interesting new idea. Take a little bit of Instagram, with it’s ability to snap quick pictures and apply fun visual filters, and combine that with a push-to-record feature that lets you add audio commentary, music, whatever you like, to the picture itself. Digisocial aims to be the next big social thing, obviously, with a well-designed, free app that’s easy and fun to use.
The problem is, of course, a matter of scale.
CNN Money polled 67 separate analysts, 39 pros and 28 indies, on their thoughts about Apple’s upcoming financial report, due on January 23rd. The consensus among them all is that Apple is most likely going to report the best quarter it has ever had. Ever.
Apple products are expensive, and they’re especially expensive in China, a country where Foxconn workers can’t afford the iPhones they make. To help make its devices more affordable for Chinese customers, Apple has started offering payment plans that range from 6-24 months. The plans are available for purchases between 300 yuan to 30,000 yuan, or about $48 to $4,825.
The 6-12 month installments are offered with 0% interest, while a 2-year payment plan comes with a 8% interest charge. Customers must be using China Merchants Bank to participate.
We know that Apple’s product roadmap for 2013 will consist of new iPads, iPhones and Macs. That’s nothing new. Apple is always working on new stuff, and if 2012 is anything to go by, we’re about to see an onslaught of new products.
Martin Hajek is a successful designer, and his work has been featured multiple times here on Cult of Mac. His iPad mini and iPhone 5 concepts from last year were spot on, and Hajek has published renderings for the less-expensive ‘iPhone mini’ that Apple reportedly has planned for later in 2013. Some think the seventh-gen iPhone (‘iPhone 5S’) could come in multiple colors, and it will probably look a lot like the 5.
Hajek also has some great renderings of what the iPad 5 may look like should Apple tweak the design to look more like the iPad mini.
Facebook promised that their updated Facebook Messenger app would allow iPhone users to call one another for free thanks to the magic of VOIP calls. The feature has been rolled out to other countries, but Facebook just rolled it out to the U.S. today.
The Free Call feature allows you to call any of your Facebook friends who are also using the Facebook Messenger app. Rather than using the minutes on your cellular plan, the calls are made using your data connection so you’re not using up any minutes.
Write is yet another Dropbox-friendly text editor for the iPhone, but even in its present state as a teaser video and landing site, it looks amazing. In fact, it looks like it could become my favorite iPhone editor.
Not convinced? Read on…
Apple has issued a new developer beta of OS X 10.8.3. The update comes after a long line of betas for the next version of Mountain Lion, and today marks Apple’s seventh release to devs.
Another beta build was seeded last Tuesday with no major changes, and today’s update looks relatively minor as well. Apple always asks dev to focus on testing with certain aspects of OS X, and today’s beta is mainly focused on WiFi issues. (Apple is rumored to incorporate faster 802.11ac wireless into future Macs, coincidentally.)
The newest version of Mountain Lion should be available to the public any day now. We’ll be staying on the lookout for 10.8.3 to drop.
Source: Apple
This post is for entertainment purposes only. Sure, there are people out there that will need a case with which they can transport up to twenty iPad minis, and which can charge all of them simultaneously, but they are probably few.
No, the real reason for this post is that the PowerSync Roller 20 is both amazing looking, and ridiculously over the top.
Oddly enough, I bought the case for my iPad mini years ago, before even the full-sized iPad was a real thing that existed. It’s the back pocket of my jeans, and unless I’m sitting down or riding a bike, it’s just about perfect. And it’s even Smart Cover compatible.
But there are those who maybe like to protect their investment a little more, or who just really, really hate the sound of exquisitely hewn aluminum scraping against a rough-topped table. For you, there’s the CoverBuddy.
I was a big fan of the original BookBook case for iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S, but it did have a number of drawbacks that its creators, Twelve South, needed to address — such as the lack of a camera cutout on the back of the case. With the iPhone 5 version, however, drawbacks have been eliminated.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the BookBook, is a luxury, handmade leather wallet case that’s designed to look like a pocket-sized, vintage book. In addition to carrying and protection your iPhone 5, it carries up to four credit cards and has space for cash.
BookBook for iPhone 5 comes in vintage brown and classic black, and it’s priced at $59.99.
There are a whole bunch of ways a guitarist can hook his axe up to his iPhone, from fancy to totally ghetto (a cable from the guitar’s jack to the iPhone’s headphone socket). IK’s new iRig HD is at the fancy end, and it even works with your brand-new iPhone’s Lightning socket.
I frequently “shop” for books using my iPhone, snapping pictures of books I want to read as I move through the store, and keeping them in my Camera Roll. This is a quick an easy way to keep track of stuff I want to check out later, but there’s really no organization to it. What would be cool is an app that I can keep track of the books, movies, and music I want to read, watch, and listen to that keeps track of stuff while organizing it.
Enter Done Not Done, a sweet little wishlist app that does just that, and more, adding recommendations from Facebook and Twitter friends to boot.
The one big advantage of traveling in the U.S is that I get to use your crappy, cheap-ass two-pin power plugs. I love that these small pieces of junk can fold up even smaller. Compare this to taking a vacation to the UK, where the adapters are the size of 1980s-era cellphones and young citizens have to be trained in the use of their safety features.
All of which is a roundabout (and culturally insulting) way to say I love Quirky’s new Pivot Power Mini, a tiny lightbulb-sized adapter which converts a single socket into two USB ports and a pair of power-points.
AT&T has been dancing around its FaceTime restrictions for several months now. Before iOS 6 even went public, it was discovered that the carrier would block FaceTime calls over a cellular connection at its own discretion. AT&T later confirmed that users would have to be on one of its new shared data plans.
Public outcry caused AT&T to then backtrack and extend the feature to anyone with a tiered, traditional data plan and a LTE device. That still didn’t cut it. Now AT&T has updated its policy again, and subscribers with grandfathered unlimited data plans are the only ones still left out in the cold.
Cars are a fairly boring topic for me, but I just sat through this 15-minute documentary by Audi completely enthralled by the amount of dedication the Slots Mods team poured into making an iPad-controlled slot car race track utopia for Audi.
Basically, Audi asked Slot Mods to make an iPad-controlled slot car race track that would give people the experience of driving an Audi from their iPad. You can control the speed of the car from the iPad and a little video camera behind the windshield shows you what it’s like to be the driver. The concept is cool on its own, but the amount of details and obsession poured into the project make it truly enthralling.