Forget the slight increase in temperature issue-that-shouldn’t-even-be-an-issue affecting the new iPad. According to some early adopters, the third-generation tablet has its own antennagate. Many users are taking to Apple’s Support Communities forum to complain that the Wi-Fi signal on their device is a lot weaker than that of their iPad 2, and even their iPhones and MacBooks.
If you’re not using the RSS screensaver on your Mac, we’ll forgive you. This time. With a little terminal code and your favorite RSS feed, however, you can get this bad boy to display behind all your apps and desktop icons, as your desktop wallpaper. Cool, huh?
Before Apple released its iOS 5.1 update to the public earlier this month, clicking on a Yelp link after performing a search with Siri did absolutely nothing. Now, however, it’ll take you straight to Yelp’s iOS app — or the App Store if you don’t already have it installed.
Telltale Games, the studio behind popular iOS games like Back to the Future and Monkey Island, is developing a new series based on the hit TV show The Walking Dead. If that news alone doesn’t get you excited, then check out this incredible teaser trailer.
To make its iPhone 4 smaller and thinner than previous iPhones, one of the steps Apple took was making the SIM card smaller. This saw the birth of the micro-SIM, which is slowly making its way into other smartphones, such as the Nokia Lumia 800.
But Apple is still unhappy with the size of existing SIM cards, and it is pushing to make them even smaller for future iPhones. But other smartphone makers are against the idea.
We now know that the new iPad uses retina images when blowing up iPhone apps to fill its big screen, but what does that mean exactly? It’s one thing to know that Spotify doesn’t look horrible anymore, but it’s another thing entirely to see the differences side-by-side. That’s why the fine folks at Touch Arcade grabbed screenshots of various versions of Real Racing running on the new iPad and the iPad 2. The results are astonishing.
If you didn’t catch The CultCast Special Edition episode we released this last Saturday, you can download it here.
What’s so special about it? Well, besides giving you our honest hands-on review of the new iPad, we decided to include an impromptu pre-show discussion on the Agony and Ecstasy Of Steve Jobs, the powerful monologue by Mike Daisy that’s been getting press lately for being partly fabricated.
Our frank discussion revolved around this notion: Mr. Daisey’s monologue focussed consumers’ attention on labor conditions in China, and in that light it has done a world of good. Should it matter that it’s not 100% true?
We’re only two days away from experiencing the new gravity defying, interstellar slingshotting Angry Birds Space game and Rovio wants to make sure we don’t forget. Today they released the official game trailer and while we’ve already been exposed to in-game footage, the trailer gives us a bird’s eye view of the latest avian egg abduction. So grab your freeze-dried astronaut food, pack yourself a month’s supply of adult diapers and start counting down to this year’s out of this world blockbuster.
A year or two ago, IT departments were focused on mobile device management (MDM) as a way to secure smartphones and other mobile devices. It was a natural extension of how IT had always handled technology in the workplace. While there are times that strict device management is the best approach (such as K-12 schools), IT departments are beginning to realize that MDM isn’t always the course of action.
In fact, the rush to lock down every device feature was little more than stale and rather old thinking on the parts of IT leaders who are now looking for better options.
We absolutely adore beautiful wallpapers here at Cult of Mac, and we’re always on the hunt to find beautiful images to share. We already pointed you towards a plethora of wallpapers that have been optimized for the iPad’s Retina display, and we’ve found another collection to check out.
Something you may have noticed while playing with your new iPad is that many iPhone apps now look much better when expanded to fill the iPad’s 9.7-inch screen. You’ve always been able to run iPhone apps on the iPad in their shruken, non-Retina resolution. Tapping the little ‘2x’ button would instantly make the app expand to fill the display. An unfortunate side effect was that enlarged iPhone apps on the iPad looked pretty awful.
Thanks to the new iPad’s stunning 2048×1536 Retina display, iPhone apps now look much better when zoomed in on the tablet’s shiny screen.
We’ve known about Verizon’s plan to introduce family shared data plans for quite some time now and have been patiently awaiting their release. It now appears we may see them soon as new images have popped up suggesting Verizon is in the end stages of development. PhoneArena managed to get their hands on a screenshot showing what appears to be Verizon’s future Family Data Usage Calculator. If it looks familiar to you it’s because it follows closely with Verizon’s current Data Usage Calculator which helps customers figure out which plan would best fit their data usage needs.
In most regards, Consumer Reports do great work, but when it comes to Apple’s mobile devices, they’ve historically tended to act like bozos. Quickly jumping upon the Antennagate bandwagon when the iPhone 4 came out, Consumer Reports refused to recommend Apple’s latest handset for over a year. When the iPhone 4S came out, Consumer Reports grudgingly said it was worth buying, but not as good as Android phones. Are you for real?
Anyway, yesterday, in response to reports that the new iPad ran hotter than its predecessor, Consumer Reports eagerly promised to investigate, sniffing another scandal. They’ve now published some preliminary results, though, and surprise! They’re surprisingly sensible.
According to a new report, Microsoft will launch Windows 8 this October. That tracks with the company’s announced plan to launch the latest version of Windows before the end of the. The launch will include traditional PCs like desktops and notebook as well as tablets. How successful Microsoft and its partners will be in taking business and consumer tablet marketshare away from the iPad remains an open question, however.
With all the recent protests outside Apple stores, you might think this placard-carrying duo was taking the Cupertino company to task about labor in China.
Nope: it’s a publicity stunt for a play called Robot the Rock Opera. Members of the merry troupe of the Planet X Players descended on the Cherry Creek Mall store in Denver to promote the upcoming play.
Despite the fact that it was the day of the new iPad launch, they were allowed in and given the boot (albeit cordially) by Apple employees after handing out a few flyers about liberating Apple’s robot voice assistant Siri from “slavery.”
Cult of Mac talked to writer/director Seth Iniguez Bertoni about how services like Siri are leading to “digital servitude,” whether Siri considers the work fair labor and how the actors got that mesmerizing silver sheen.
Doozy is a todo app for iOS with a difference. It’s not about lists, it’s about organizing your stuff visually. Although it’s more complicated than many of its rivals, it’s also somewhat more powerful, and offers some task tracking and monitoring features we’ve never seen anywhere else.
Yesterday, we showed you how to fix apps that get stuck “waiting” as you downloaded everything to your newly-restored iPad. That’s fine and all, but what if you really, really need to check your RSS reader of choice to read the latest Cult of Mac stories? With this incredibly simple tip, you can just tell the iPad to download that app right away.
Over the past two years, the Internet has been flooded with stories about the next iPad-killer. The iPad-killing hype has been applied to the Cisco Cius, Motorola Xoom, BlackBerry PlayBook, HP Touch Pad, and Galaxy Tab just to name a few. Several of these products were specifically hyped at being business tablets – alternatives to the iPad in the workplace.
At the end of the day, however, the iPad still rules the tablet space in general and the business tablet in particular. Despite being a “consumer” device, the business tablet market is really the business iPad market. The latest statistic to drive this point home is that, during the new iPad launch, Apple sold more iPads in one weekend during than one quarter of Android tablets ever sold.
Sales figures like that pose a question for IT departments – Is there a point to developing support models for Android tablets?
iOS is the best mobile OS in the world but it certainly isn’t without its flaws. There are a few areas that need improvement. Is the iPhone Lockscreen one of them? We’ve seen conceptual designs that change the information displayed on the lockscreen and this new idea proposes to change the way the camera is accessed on the lockscreen, but does it make any sense?
Since I got the Changers solar charger to test, I haven’t plugged a USB-chargeable device into anything else (with the exception of my iPad). Changers comes as a kit containing a solar panel and a battery pack, along with a a bag of tips that fit most cellphones and gadgets. But this description doesn’t do justice to what is a rather excellent and useful device.
Dealing with customer service representatives can be one of the world’s most torturous experiences. Apple isn’t perfect, but they usually give customers the best experience possible, no matter. Proving that point, earlier today a story surfaced of Tim Cook stepping in and forcing AT&T to make a special exception to a request the deny to most customers.
When third-place carrier Sprint first got the iPhone 4S, it quickly became clear that they had literally bet the company on the notion that Apple’s popular handset could save them from being steamrolled by AT&T and Verizon. In fact, Sprint agreed to pay Apple $20 billion over the next four years just to secure rights to the iPhone, whether they can sell them or no. The whole company is riding on the iPhone.
That could have turned out to be a big mistake suggests a new report today, which says that the nation’s third largest carrier is on the verge of going bankrupt. And what bankrupted them? The iPhone.
In a response to reports that the new iPad can get pretty toasty when compared with the iPad 2’s heat output, Apple has responded with an official comment telling everyone to take a chill pill. According to Apple, the new iPad operates “well within our thermal specification” and there shouldn’t be a cause for concern.
Full response from Apple:
Carriers are constantly talking about the limited spectrum available for mobile devices. That’s the reason that give for instituting data caps and throttling heavy users. It’s reasonable to assume that carriers exaggerate the real issues somewhat when the trot this argument out as a case for data caps and tiered data pricing (they make a lot of money that way), but it is true that radio spectrum is a finite resource. With Cisco predicting an 39-fold increase mobile traffic use will over the next four years, carriers will need to find creative ways to manage the slices of spectrum that they have.
One option is to offload service to Wi-Fi networks. All iPhone (or other smartphone) users do this already to some extent when we connect our iPhones to our home networks. They deliver better performance and let use as much data as we want without having to worry about it impacting our next bill. Two mobile trade groups are looking to turn this same offloading model into a large scale option for carriers to deliver better mobile broadband while taking the load off their 3G or 4G networks.
httpvh://youtu.be/o3zHpzYWnGQ
iPad-owning guitarists are going to love the Digitech iPB-10 Programable Pedalboard. It’s a stompbox with ten stud switches and a wah pedal on the side, all of which work with your iPad to give a range of music effects that you’d normally need a whole case of pedals to create.