On May 4th 2012, Marvel is scheduled to culminate its last four years of superhero movies with The Avengers, the Joss Whedon helmed ensemble super hero movie starring Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, Chris Evans as Captain America, Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk, Chris Helmsworth as Thor and Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow.
But did you know that parts of The Avengers were shot on an iPhone? Yup. Apple Fans Assemble!
Ever since Apple started them in 2008, Apple’s iPhone Tech Talk World Tours have been wildly popular with developers… little mini-WWDC’s that travel the globe where Apple reaches out to devs, answers questions and facilitates in networking with all the app makers who make iOS great.
Hot on the heels of iOS 5’s release, no surprise, then, that Apple’s launching another one. The iOS 5 Tech Talk World Tour 2011 will be held across Europe, Asia and America starting next month and continue until January in the following cities: Berlin, London, Rome, Beijing, Seoul, Sao Paolo, New York City, Seattle, and Austin, Texas.
That’s a pretty good line up of cities, making it likely a Tech Talk will be within driving distance from most devs. Even better is the price: unlike the $1599 ticket required to attend WWDC, the Tech Talks are free.
The real estate chain Coldwell Banker, the iPad is the perfect tool. Soon after the first iPad was unveiled, the company ordered the tablet for both its company and the many field personnel selling home across the country. Today, there are about 50-75 iPads in use internally with every field office using the iPad, along with a customize app displaying videos of available homes.
Andy Rubin, Google’s senior vice president of mobile, doesn’t particularly care for Siri and the idea that the iPhone 4S could be your personal assistant. Rubin says it’s just a little weird for people to be talking to their phone. Those words he’s going to eat.
Thought the iPhone 4S’s new camera is impressive, to say the least, it does share one issue with any other camera phone or pocket digicam: the tiny sensor means it simply can’t deep focus, making the background artistically blurry while the subject is kept crystal sharp.
If you want shallow depth-of-field like a SLR while using your iPhone, consider giving Big Lens a try. It will allow you to give your iPhone photos a super depth of field, just like those fancy pants pros use.
Siri’s an amazing advancement in the way that we interact with out iPhones, but it doesn’t exactly do everything you want it to do out of the box. In fact, three conspicuous abilities absent from Siri’s feature set include the ability to make a Facebook status update, send a message to Google+ or even tweet… doubly absurd given iOS 5’s native Twitter integration.
Don’t worry, though. It’s easy enough to hack any iPhone 4S to Tweet, Facebook or Google+ through Siri. Here’s how.
Apple once more outsold Nokia as the one-time cell phone giant bleeds more red ink. The Finnish cell phone maker is hoping the launch of its first smartphone based on Microsoft’s Windows Phone software will save it from further financial drubbing.
With yesterdays memorial ceremony to Steve Jobs comes some semblance of closure, and so it is back to business. This morning, Apple removed the Steve Jobs in memoriam from its official home page, with the only mention now made to Apple’s charismatic and iconic co-founder being a link at the bottom of the page to Apple’s now domain, rememberingstevejobs.com, which collates all of the messages Cupertino received from grieving Apple fans around the world after Steve’s death two weeks ago.
Some PC makers may have taken comfort in a few analyst comments following Apple’s fourth-quarter financial report that left some on Wall Street wondering if the laptop was truly dead. However, look a bit closer and it becomes a case of Apple sales being lost to, um, Apple.
Coming up on 15 years ago, I tied my first tie with the help of a tiny little Geocities web page, and if I had to pinpoint one moment when I first realized the true extent of the ocean of digital information at my finger tips, it would be that one.
I wonder if TieSight will prove to be an identical sort of watershed moment for some other pimply teenager headed out on his first ‘fancy’ date… not for the web, but for the App Internet. It’s just that wonderful.
Despite its new dual-core A5 processor, its much-improved 8-megapixel camera, and a wireless chip that allows the device to use both CDMA and GSM networks, Apple’s new iPhone 4S only costs the Cupertino company around $0.49 more than the iPhone 4.
I think Apple fans watching the brawl between Cupertino and Samsung can sometimes just be confounded by what is going on. Why is Samsung taking a risk of alienating its biggest manufacturing customer just to release some crummy iPhone knockoffs? Madness, right?
Wrong. While not exactly ethical, Samsung is playing it smart: the Korean electronics giant knows that the potential margins on selling smartphones dwarf the margins on any parts it sells Apple. But the proof is in the pudding, so check this out: Samsung actually shipped more smartphones last quarter than Apple did.
A research team from the Georgia Institute of Technology claims to have discovered a keyboard keylogger attack that is performed using an iPhone’s accelerometer. However, the situation has to be so precise — and is so unlikely — that if you’re a victim of this attack you really are one of the unluckiest people on the planet.
Ever the purveyors of fuzzy, geeky, and Apple-inspired throw pillows, the craftsmen over at Throwboy.com have just released some spooky new finder pillows.
Handmade in the good ol’ USA, these fun stuffed finders are available now (and for a limited time) for $29 each, or $125 for the whole five piece set. If you want one of these guys before Halloween though, better act fast; Throwboy says these usually takes 2-3 weeks to make and ship.
In another sign consumers were waiting for the new iPhone 4S, AT&T Thursday said iPhone activations dropped in the third quarter. However, since Tuesday, the carrier announced 1M iPhone 4S units were activated, making it the company’s best-selling Apple handset.
Not many of us expected Apple to introduce LTE or 4G capabilities to its fifth-generation iPhone, but according to one Swedish carrier, the Cupertino company would be killing its iPhone 5 if it doesn’t adopt LTE technology by then.
A Samsung executive and Apple CEO Tim Cook used weekend memorial for the late Steve Jobs to talk about extending a supply deal set to end next year through 2014. The South Korean company is also considering whether to continue its legal fight with the tech giant, considering at $7.8 billion, Apple is Samsung’s largest customer.
While sometimes it may seem that Samsung tries its hardest to taunt Apple’s legal department, the company’s mobile president has revealed that its latest Galaxy Nexus smartphone was built to avoid Apple patents, saving the Korean company yet another legal battle.
The BBC has finally issued an update to its free iPlayer app for the iPad that allows users to stream content to their Apple TV for viewing on their television.
If you’ve got a bicycle and an iPhone/iPt, here’s a pretty interesting development: iBike, who earlier this year introduced a $200-plus kit that turned the iPhone into a sensor-linked cycling computer, has just released a $70 iPhone cycling package for riders who aren’t Gu-fueled cycling nuts; and it includes what looks like a stellar — and free — cycling app.
So you’ve got your new iPhone 4S, and now you want to talk to Siri (and maybe friends) and enjoy some tuneage. Step one: Donate those pathetic white buds that came with your iPhone to your favorite charity, if they’ll take ’em. Step two: Get yourself a snazzy pair of microphone-equipped canalphones — earphones that fit snugly in your ear. Why? Because a good set of canalphones are the best accessory ever made for an iPhone; they’ll create a seal that will block out ambient noise while enhancing sound coming from the earphones, especially bass — which means better conversations with friends (or Siri), and better music.
Around $100 seems to be the point at which there’s a big jump in quality; also, most in that range are now equipped with inline volume controls (in addition to the play/pause and track-skip controls like the ones on Apple’s stock buds).
We’ve assembled an Apple Store’s worth of canalphones at that level, and we’ll be reviewing them over the next several days. Up first is Sennheiser’s MM 70 iP earphones ($100).
Apple has posted an official image from today’s celebration of Steve Jobs’ life. This afternoon Apple held a celebration to honor Jobs at its headquarters in Cupertino, California.
Aerial footage of today’s event shows tens of thousands employees gathered to honor Jobs’ legacy. Artists like Nora Jones and Coldplay played music at the event.
The above photo shows Apple CEO Tim Cook addressing Apple employees at the gathering. Retail employees from around the world watched the celebration today from their respective Apple Stores via a live feed.
The latest piece of full-on AirPlay sound hardware is from the sonic wizards over at Los Angeles-based Audyssey.
Yeah, the Lower East Side Audio Dock Air ($399) looks more like a Lego brick than the outfit’s svelte South of Market dock we raved about earlier this year — but the new, six-speaker dock is filled with audio-techno-jargon like “passive bass radiators” and “Smart Speaker technology,” which is probably English for “this will blow you away, dude.” And of course, don’t forget the AirPlay.
Interactive Innovation Solutions has released an iPhone app for Google Music called gMusic. Members of Google’s music locker service can stream up to 20,000 tracks from the iPhone.
gMusic looks and feels almost exactly like the native Music app in iOS 5, and it offers a native experience over the web app that Google offers its customers.
Every new Mac comes with iPhoto, which is getting better all the time. Still, it doesn’t have all of the features that are made for folks who are really into manipulating their photgraphs. Adobe’s Photoshop is often too much for the budding shooter (and cost prohibitive to boot), and image editors like Acorn – while simple to use and well-priced – don’t necessarily have the “feel” of iPhoto that many Mac users are used to.
This is where FX Photo Studio Pro by MacPhun ($40 in the Mac App Store) comes in.