I can’t believe it’s been two years since Verizon rolled out its 4G LTE network. That’s insane considering carriers such as T-Mobile have yet to even launch a 4G LTE network. To celebrate two years of providing consumers with the fastest, most reliable 4G LTE available, Verizon has a few amazing statistics to remind some of us why we continue to put up with their ridiculous prices and constant BS.
Got an Android phone with NFC and ticked off you can’t use it anywhere for mobile payments? Blame Apple. According to one industry watcher, the Cupertino-based tech company is responsible for setting back the emerging NFC market by two years in the United States.
One of the better Yuletide traditions is the venerable holiday Advent Calendar, in which each day of December leading up to Christmas is marked off on a special calendar by opening its corresponding door to find a small gift, toy or chocolate squirreled away inside.
This year, we here at Cult of Mac decided we wanted to give our readers their very own Apple-themed advent calendar, filled with the year’s best apps, gadgets, stories and other curios. So each day in December, we’re going to lovingly peel back the door on the Cult of Mac 2012 Advent Calendar to reveal another delicious morsel, something really special that came out this year that we think every one of you should enjoy.
What’s hiding behind the door for Day 5? It’s a handy service called Pocket, formerly known as Read It Later.
If you’ve spent some time with last week’s app tip, Glympse, you’ll know it’s pretty handy to send your location info along to friends, family, or co-workers. One feature that is missing from Glympse, however, is an automatic message about when you’ll be there.
Twist, another iOS app that helps you keep folks you’re meeting up with aware of where you are, has just that — an automatic ETA message.
Apple is racing to hire former Texas Instruments employees in Israel in an effort to staff a planned R&D center. Not wanting to be outdone, Intel has decided to ramp up their efforts to hire the same former Texas Instruments employees before Apple can grab them first.
A new report claims that Intel is offering the employees “healthy compensation packages” above the standard salary rates in an effort to keep the employees from slipping into Apple’s hands.
Microsoft’s new tablet, the Surface, is supposed to make the iPad and MacBook Air irrelevant. It’s supposed to be the best of both worlds by being a tablet/laptop hybrid. Reviews of the Surface have been mixed, and initial sales reports are indicating that Surface RT might be in trouble, because no one is buying it.
According to new research by the Boston-based brokerage firm Detwiler Fenton, Microsoft is likely to sell fewer than 1 million Surface RT units in the December quarter. To put that number in perspective, Apple sold 300,000 original iPad units on its first day of availability.
Apple released iTunes 11 last week, and it’s a step in the right direction. Its interface is cleaner and easier to use than previous versions, but what Apple fans have really been wanting for the past couple years is an unlimited music streaming service akin to Rdio, Spotify, or Pandora.
Rumors surfaced earlier this year that Apple is working on a Pandora-like radio service backed by iTunes’ huge music catalog. Some hoped Apple would introduce the service before the end of the year, but a new report claims that the new streaming service is nowhere near to being complete.
Apple’s iPads, including the new iPad mini, have become the most successful tablets every built. Almost three years after Steve Jobs introduced the original iPad, the device continues to be the king of slates, with more than half of the tablet market share. That hasn’t changed much in 2012, but Android tablets have slowly been eating away at its market share, and it may not be long before they dominate.
Although a bag fancier, there have not been many backpacks in my life that I have cared for. There was a plastic Optimus Prime knapsack when I was six that was pretty boss, and I traveled through over three dozen countries in my early 20s lugging around an 80 pound rucksack, but otherwise, backpacks are the accomplice of unpleasant memories: of inexplicable and unpublished high school rules of coolness dictating the correct number of straps to use in order to silently advertise your relative merit on the cosmic scale of “phat”-ness; of bags torn from my shoulders by laughing cromagnons and tossed into open sewers.
Worse? I think backpacks look dumb on adult men. I know there’s a vocal brotherhood who thinks that any bag on a man looks dumb, but at least I know that a messenger bag or satchel is as much a conscious fashion decision as it is a utilitarian method of hauling around your stuff. A backpack, though, makes even the most slender-of-hip, effortlessly dressed and stubbled metrosexual look as if he were a be-moobed 13 year old gasping and wheezing his way home after school with a backpack overstuffed with text books and X-Men comics. And I should know, because I was that 13 year old.
But backpacks have their purpose, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become a little more enamored with their practicality. They are easier on the back, and easier to lug around while biking. If only they didn’t look so ridiculous.
Enter the HEX Drake Origin, a fashionable backpack with a slim form factor that is none the less big enough to fit a 15-inch MacBook, and even has a dedicated pocket for a 10-inch iPad. This is a backpack I not only like; I’m not embarassed to wear it.
Keen internet users might already be familiar with speedtest.net, the website that lets you check exactly how fast your internet connection is. Now it’s available as an app too.
After Instagram was acquired by Facebook earlier this year, Instagrammers have worried that some changes are coming to the popular photo sharing app. On Wednesday, a big change was made to Instagram that disabled the ability for Twitter to properly display photos on the Twitter website.
Instagram images viewed through Twitter this morning now appear cropped and off-center. The change comes from Instagram disabling its integration with Twitter cards, which is used to display images and content within Twitter messages.
It wasn’t until I’d written the name at least five times that I realized the Amplifiear isn’t called the “Amplifear” after all. That’s not to say I’m disappointed: I’d much rather have an acoustic amplifier for my iPad than a small, buzzing metal box that amplifies the terror in my heart until my emotions are torn into rags and my life becomes a fearful shuffle from corner to dark corner.
If you’re an AT&T iPhone customer living in Pennsylvania, you may have woken up this morning to discover your handset had been inhabited by a mysterious being known only as “Dan.” He lives inside your iPhone and comes out when you’re asleep. While he’s awake, the AT&T name in your status bar changes to “Dan” — but it usually changes back before you get a chance to catch him.
Scary, isn’t it? Fortunately, that’s not true. Your iPhone isn’t inhabited by an unknown being that forgot to disappear before you woke up; it’s just a glitch on AT&T’s network that’s affecting users in Pennsylvania.
When you combine all the titles in Apple’s App Store with those in Google Play, you have a catalog of more than 1.4 million apps from hundreds of thousands of developers. But incredibly, more than 50% of the revenue made by these stores in the United States goes to just 25 app developers.
This is intriguing: leaked images purporting to be the rear housing of the forthcoming iPhone 5S have just appeared online, and if previous reports about when the iPhone 5S is supposed to enter production are correct, they could be the real thing.
The Boombot REX is a ruggedized, wearable JamBox for outdoorsy types. It looks amazing – and even more so because it was invented by Bill and Ted.
Props to the indefatigable Onion News Network for breaking this important story: Apple is promising an update by Christmas that will fix iOS 6 Maps’ unreliable mapping results by physically altering the shape and geography of the Earth’s crust. That’s a solution that Steve “you’re holding it wrong” Jobs could be proud of.
Source: The Onion
On the evening of Apple’s latest earnings call, David Miller, a 40 year old trader at Rochdale Securities LLC, had a great idea. Apple stock price always goes up after an earnings call, right? So what he would do is buy 1.6 million shares of Apple stock worth over $1 billion, then “flip” them the next morning when the stocks rose, pocketing a personal profit of millions of dollars.
A fine plan, don’t you think? There was only one problem: Apple stock actually went down the morning after the latest earnings call. Now Miller is facing 20 years in federal prison for wire fraud, and his trading company might be going under.
Apple released iTunes 11 last week, which introduced a new look and a number of new features. It also took a couple of features away, including Cover Flow and duplicate song detection. While the former appears to be dead and buried now, it looks like the latter is one its way back in a future update.
Da-duh-duh-da-duh-duh-da-DUH-duh. So goes the familiar tune of the iPhone’s default Marimba ringtone, as recognizable (and yet not nearly as annoying) as Nokia’s Gran Vals.
And yet what if you want to mix things up a little, but not too much? Greg Pierce, the wonder-developer at Agile Tortoise – responsible for Drafts, Terminology and others – has done the hard work for you, re-rendering iOS’ alert sounds on acoustic guitar.
Finding an iPad mini right now is like trying to find oil; they’re out of stock almost everywhere — at least where I live in the United Kingdom. Apple retail stores are getting them in, but they sell out in no time at all. The only option for most customers, then, is to order online and endure the lengthy wait for delivery.
That’s what Reddit user ‘vinlays’ did. And after a painful five-week wait, FedEx delivered the iPad mini to his door. That’s a picture of it above.
Reader James H. contacted me today, asking, “Now perhaps you can you tell me how to make the Genius work the way it used to? I don’t even know how to make a new Genius playlist build now.”
As you may have noticed, iTunes 11 has switched a few things around. One of them is how the Genius playlists work. Previously, once you started a Genius playlist, you could save it as a stand-alone playlist, or you could replace it with the next Genius list you created. That’s a bit different now in iTunes 11.
Casio has announced its new G-Shock GB6900AA wristwatch which syncs with your iPhone over Bluetooth to bring notifications to your wrist. It will notify you of incoming calls, text messages, and emails, and it’ll alert you when your iPhone goes out of range to prevent it from being misplaced. And if you do lose your device, the G-Shock will help you find it.
Productions rates for the iPhone 5 are improving, supply sources claim, just in time for the handset to make its debut in more than 50 additional markets throughout December. Now that Apple has caught up with demand, the handset’s shipping delay has been reduced from four weeks to just 2-4 business days. Suppliers now expect the Cupertino company to sell 45 million iPhone 5 units during the fourth quarter alone.
One thing that nobody sees to have noticed with yesterday’s iOS iWork update is that Pages now tracks changes. And not just changes from other Pages documents, either – it’ll import and export tracked changes from Microsoft Word documents.
This could be huge. Or maybe it just won’t work at all.