It often seems that many of Apple’s competitors decide to launch products based upon what Cupertino is rumored to do, hoping to get a head start on Apple. It’s funny how often this fails. Remember when all of Apple’s competitors announced their own “slates” ahead of the 2010 debut of the original iPad? Or how Amazon launched a crappy cloud locker service for MP3s ahead of iTunes Match?

With rumors swirling that Apple is planning on launching its own streaming music service, it seems curious that Microsoft is now choosing to relaunch their own answer to iTunes, the Zune Music Store, under the Xbox brand, while simultaneously introducing their own… wait for it… streaming music service. And it’s coming to iOS.

We constantly share our snapshots from our iPhones to Twitter and Facebook, we send them via e-mail and iMessage, print them from our phones, and even share them to group sites like Picasa and Flickr. It’s a veritable frenzy of photo sharing!

It’s all really amazing and fun, of course, but what about those times we just want to share our photos with a select group of friends or family members? Setting up special lists in Facebook or Flickr can be unintuitive and tricky, so chances are good that it doesn’t happen that often.

Luckily, Apple’s got shared Photo Streams in the new iOS 6, and it’s fairly straightforward to set up. Here’s how.

Users of OS X Mountain Lion have been able to share reminders with other users since the new OS was released, but now Apple is giving iCloud.com users the ability to share their reminders even when they’re not on a Mac.

An update to iCloud’s Reminders app has added the Shared Reminders ability for users, making iOS 6 the only Reminders portal that can’t share reminders with other users.

In some fields, the iPad just isn’t suited to take over from a PC. And that’s cool, because it can still help out. Take pro-level Photoshopping, for example: without actions, multiple windows and keyboard shortcuts, no iPad app is going to be better than PS on OS X. But you can put your tablet net to your Mac and let them work together.

Today’s example: Colorotate, a color editing app for your iPad.

The new fifth-generation iPod touch is the thinnest, most advanced iPod touch yet, boasting a 4-inch display, an A5 chip and an incredibly small form factor, but it’s not an upgrade in every way from the models that preceded it.

In fact, in one key way, it’s a serious downgrade from previous iPod touches: the new iPo touch no longer has an ambient light sensor, meaning that it can’t adjust screen brightness depending upon the brightness in the room around you. That could mean you’ll spend a lot more time manually juggling brightness in the new iPod touch.

Felix Baumgartner is a total bad ass. Like, the dude has got the testicular fortitude of Hercules. Not only did he jump out of a capsule from the edge of space, but he also broke the sound barrier without any propulsion assistance, and he uses a Mac.

To celebrate Felix’s amazing accomplishment you can decorate your iPhone 5 with this breathtaking wallpaper that was captured moments before Baumgartner jumped. Download it here.

Source: Reddit

Say what you want about the stupid, impossible-to-control previous generation iPod Nano, but don’t say its clip wasn’t useful.

If you wanted to clip your tie to your shirt whilst making both of them sag thanks to the extra weight, or if you wanted to go jogging and have the heavy little block of aluminum and glass pull at and eventually drop off your t-shirt sleeve, then the old Nano was ideal.

The new one gets handy buttons and no longer looks like a Shuffle-with-a-screen, but it lacks the clip. Luckily, for $20 you can put it right back.

Another day, another todo app. There’s a bewildering variety of choice in this category, and newer phones all come with Apple’s own Reminders app, which is capable although not to everyone’s taste.

This one, oddly named DOOO, is nicer than most. For two bucks, it combines a thoughtful approach to feature design with stylish looks and a minimal, simple layout.

For all you lucky sots who have an iPhone 5 already, I bet you’re still looking for a great case (or maybe alternate cases). Here’s a great looking case, but with a little twist—Style Up Your iPhone 5 With The #CLEANSLATE Case (Black): Keep Your iPhone 5 Safe With This Sleek Case.

This case doesn’t just protect your iPhone, it helps kids in Kenya have better schools.

The first time you purchase your first LTE-capable smartphone, the biggest shocker of the device isn’t how wicked fast LTE download speeds are, it’s how sinisterly expensive it is to pay for all that super-fast LTE data. Just like 3G data plans, LTE is expensive. In fact, according to to the GSM Association, Americans are being charged too much for LTE data.

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iTrack Solo is a little box which lets you record two inputs directly into your iPad or your Mac. The aluminium unibody box has inputs for a microphone and a guitar, and outputs not only for the iPad but also for your headphones or anything that you can connect to stereo line-out plugs.

Could Amazon be making a go at Apple and Samsung in the smartphone sector? According to Israeli financial newspaper Calcalist, it sure looks that way. According to the report, Amazon is in advanced talks with TI, looking to scoop up their chip business at a cost of billions of dollars. Texas Instruments has been quite vocal about wanting to get out of the smartphone market and has scaled back its support after losing most of its market share to Qualcomm and predicting an unattractive long-term opportunity for them in the smartphone market.

Apple’s iPad Mini event that is rumored to be taking place on October 23rd is going to be jam packed with goodies. The iPad Mini is coming. Some redesigned iMacs might be revealed too. And now we’ve gotten some solid info that Apple will also unveil a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display at the event.

Last year, Apple announced that a “small number” of 1TB Seagate hard drives used in 2011 iMacs could fail under certain conditions, and were eligible for a free replacement. Now Apple’s extended that program to all iMacs sold between October 2009 and July 2011.

According to the new support page, if you have a 21.5 or 27-inch iMac with a 1TB Seagate hard drive, Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider will replace the hard drive free of charge. They’ve even included a handy little form to figure out if your iMac is affected. (My 2009 27-inch iMac luckily isn’t).

One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t necessarily have to bring your iMac back to the Apple Store: in some areas, if you contact an AppleCare representative, you can take advantage of an in-office or home repair option, so if you are going to get your hard drive replaced and don’t want to lug forty pounds of aluminum and silicon to your local Apple Store, ask about this option.

Source: Apple

Dropbox photo-sharing just got a little more handy. Now, if you head over to Dropbox.com in Mobile Safari, you get a fantastic new mobile view which lets you swipe and tap your way through your photos.

The iPad mini is getting all the hype this month, but we haven’t heard much about the line of new iMacs that should be coming out some month soon. Apple hasn’t updated the iMac lineup in over 531 days, but according to a new rumor, a redesigned iMac might be unveiled at the iPad mini event on October 23rd.

Yesterday, sky adventurer Felix Baumgartner hurled himself out of a 30 million cubic foot helium balloon hovering at the edge of outer space and fell 24 miles down to the earth, making him the first human outside of a vehicle to break the sound barrier. What else is there to say except the man has balls of steel?

Well, maybe this: Felix Baumgartner uses a MacBook. And like everything else he does, he does it like a boss.

You mess with the bull, you’re going to get the horns. Google discovered this when they launched Android, their own competitor to iOS, a move which ultimately resulted in Apple jettisoning the search giant’s products almost entirely from iOS 6. Now Samsung is finding out the same thing: not only has it been found guilty of infringing Apple’s intellectual property and been told to pony up a $1 billion fine, but now Apple is now taking away their portion of Samsung’s multi-billion dollar manufacturing business.

Scapple — a cross between scabs and Snapple? Thankfully not: Scapple is in fact a brand new (as in beta) mind-map app for writers. What’s that, you say? There are already a ton of mind-map apps out there? That’s true. But none of them comes from the developer of the awesome Scrivener.

Director Rian Johnson has released a director’s commentary for his sci-fi thriller Looper. The gimmick here is that this isn’t a DVD extra, nor do you have to pay for it. The track is available as a free MP3, and you are supposed to load it up onto your iPod and listen along in the movie theater.

After much speculation, the last piece of the iPad mini puzzle has fallen into place, as a complete list of European prices of the iPad mini have leaked to the Internet, confirming that the iPad mini will come in multiple variations and ship with LTE capability.

Safari does a great job at making your time on the web easy and simple. It will fill in frequently occurring form information, like your name, address, and email address, so that you don’t have to for every site you visit with a form requesting this information. Fill it out once, then let Safari auto-fill the info the rest of the time. It will also save website user names and passwords. Which, when you think about it, is a great idea for your own personal computer at home, but not so great for a work or shared computer.

Here’s how to disable that.

The iPhone-Dev Team has updated its popular Redsn0w tool to offer full iOS 6 compatibility, including an official Cydia app. Until now, the iOS 6 jailbreak was strictly for developers, and so Cydia was not installed automatically when jailbreaking an iOS 6 device. Now it’s ready for the public.

Geekbench benchmarks for the new iPod touch prove Apple has made lots of improvements to the fifth-generation device, with its dual-core A5 chip making it significantly faster than its predecessor. When compared with iPhone performance, however, the iPod touch is lagging far behind.

Despite the same 800MHz processor, the new iPod touch is still slightly slower then the iPhone 4S, and not even half as fast as the iPhone 5.

SoftBank, Japan’s third-largest carrier, has this morning announced that it will acquire Sprint in a deal worth $20.1 billion. The company will purchase $8 billion in newly-issues shares from Sprint, in addition to $12.1 billion in existing shares — giving it a 70% stake overall.