In Norwegian, Siri means "beautiful woman who leads you to victory."
Most people seem roughly pretty happy with Siri, but you’ve got to admit: the name is a little bit un-Apple-like. Modern Apple product names tend to be strongly evocative of what the product actually does, or what it looks like. The iPod, for example, looks like something out of Kubrick’s 2001. iCloud stores your documents in the cloud. The iPad is a digital pad of paper. And so on. Compared to Apple’s usual flair for product names, Siri’s name isn’t self-explanatory.
Looks like Steve Jobs agreed. He reportedly wasn’t happy with the name Siri, but couldn’t ever figure out a better name before the iPhone 4S launched.
Apple’s next-gen smartphone is widely expected to feature 4G LTE networking like the newly-released iPad. Rumors peg the product release for later this year, but no real evidence for the device has surfaced quite yet, including carrier partnerships. AT&T and Verizon are expected to be onboard as usual, but what about Sprint? The iPhone 4S debuted on all three carriers last October, but Sprint is relatively new to its Apple partnership.
According to comments from Sprint CFO Joe Euteneuer today, Sprint will be able to sell the 4G iPhone when it’s debuted by Apple.
Siri is still popular among many iPhone 4S owners, but not everyone uses it to its full potential.
For some iPhone 4S users, Siri is a novelty that quickly wears off within a week or two of unwrapping the handset. But believe it or not, 87% of iPhone 4S users are still using the intelligent assistant at least once a month, according to a new study. Not many of them are using it to its full potential, however.
Dictation has been one of my favorite features of the new iPad. It’s a great way to type quick notes or search queries out without having to use the keyboard. Underneath the surface though, dictation is much more than just a simple feature for jotting notes down. In this video, I’ll show you some of the hidden features of voice dictation on the new iPad and iPhone 4S.
Jailbreakers enjoy all kinds of cool Siri add-ons, and a tweak called BatteryLevelAE lets you use Apple’s digital assistant to give you helpful information about your iPhone’s battery life. In a world where we’re always on the go, keeping track of your iPhone’s battery can sometimes be the last thing on our minds. That’s why BatterLevelAE makes it easy for you — just ask Siri.
Way back in September, we told you about a “forthcoming” mod by U.K. based iPatch that would turn the Apple logo on the back of your iPhone into a glowing cutout illuminated by the back of the display, just like on a MacBook. iPatch promised the mod would cost around $160 and be available in about a month.
Well, six months later, and we still don’t have glowing iPhones, but the guys at iPatch are still apparently tinkering with their perpetually imminent mod, and have now shown off how it will allow them to make a miniature torch out of the headphone jack. The iPatch guys talk about how you could then use transparent earbuds to make glow-in-the-dark headphones, but I think they’re missing the true potential here. Can anyone say “laser pointer”?
When we saw Nokia’s 808 PureView at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, we were grudgingly — but decidedly — impressed. Nokia’s 41MP+ camera phone seemed like a joke at first blush, but using satellite imaging technology and pixel oversampling, Nokia has managed to get SLR-quality shots out of a cameraphone. It simply blows the iPhone 4S’s camera out of the water.
But is the 808 PureView just a great camera strapped to a mediocre phone? Not entirely. Sure, as an actual device, the iPhone 4S is leaps and bounds above the Symbian (!) based 808 PureView, but if you want a great multimedia recording device in your pocket that’s also a phone, the 808 PureView comes out ahead.
Best Buy's reach across the U.S. means it's selling almost as many iPhones as Apple.
Apple’s decision to make Best Buy an official partner for the iPhone is certainly paying off. With 1,100 outlets across the U.S. and an online store, the retailer is now selling almost as many iPhones as Apple itself, according to a survey of customers who purchased the device between December 2011 and February 2012.
The Boostcase Hybrid is a battery case that's only bulky when it's charging your iPhone.
The iPhone gets great battery life, but we no longer live in the era of simple cell phones with week long battery life. That smartphone in your pocket isn’t just a way to make calls, but a real humming along inside your pocket, checking email, playing music, keeping an eye on your location, accepting text messages, sucking up push notifications, running Skype and a million other uses beside. That all takes up precious charge, and the more you pull that iPhone out of your pocket, the more quickly you use your battery up.
Given the realities of smartphone power management, battery cases like the Mophie Juice Pack are a necessary evil. Sure, they double and sometimes triple your battery life, but they also double and sometimes triple the size of your iPhone in your pocket. Worse, they are all-or-nothing affairs: if you want to use one, you need to take your existing case off your phone and put the juice pack on instead.
Boostcase’s new Hybrid Case does away with all that. It’s really two cases in one: a lightweight plastic protective case that can snap onto a beefy battery upgrade pack as needed that can juice your iPhone back up. And it’s a pretty great choice for anyone who doesn’t want to juggle cases on the go.
FreedomPop's plans include a 4G iPhone case hotspot
Earlier this week, NetZero launched a new freemium mobile broadband service using Clearwire’s WiMax 4G network. Although NetZero is the first U.S. company to launch a “free” 4G service, it isn’t going to be the last. Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom has begun work on a similar service called FreedomPop that will launch this summer.
FreedomPop plans to offer more monthly data for free than NetZero’s paltry 200MB. It will also target iPhone owners as a major part of its user base.
Apple believes that even the micro-SIM is too big for the iPhone.
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.
Enabling dictation on the iPad means sending your voice and personal data to Apple
One of the feature on the new iPad is its dictation capabilities, a feature also available on the iPhone 4S (which also boasts Apple’s Siri virtual assistant feature). There are quite a few ways that high quality dictation and other speech to text capabilities could useful to professionals in many fields.
The problem is that in order to get that high quality dictation functionality, the new iPad and the iPhone 4S rely on Apple’s servers to do much of the work in turning your speech into text. More importantly, it isn’t just snippets of voice recordings that get sent to Apple. Personal data from your iPad or iPhone 4S gets uploaded as well and much of it remains associated with you and your device. That’s a general concern for most of us, but for professionals in regulated industries like healthcare or fields that require confidentiality like finance and legal professions, it becomes a critical privacy concern and may even break the law.
Despite the performance of LTE, Apple still makes FaceTime Wi-Fi-only
When Apple introduced FaceTime on the iPhone 4 nearly two years ago, many users were disappointed to find out that they could only place video calls while connected to Wi-Fi. That was a disappointing fact, but not entirely surprising given the bandwidth that it takes to pull off a high quality video call and Apple’s penchant for making the user experience perfect at all costs.
Guaranteeing a solid experience might have made a good deal of sense when it comes to the iPhone 4, iPad 2, and iPhone 4S – all of them are 3G devices and 3G data performance often falls short of terrestrial broadband and Wi-Fi. But the Wi-Fi only restriction remains in place on the new iPad models with LTE even though LTE performance can approach that of many home broadband options – begging the question: Why is Apple limiting FaceTime on its new LTE devices?
JuiceTank eliminates wires by allowing your to plug your iPhone right into the wall.
No one enjoys frantically searching for their iPhone charger when they get that dreaded low battery warning. But with the JuiceTank case, you needn’t worry about ever losing your charger, because you can plug your iPhone directly into the mains socket.
Even under iOS 5.1 the iPhone 4S struggles to stay awake.
On Monday, we asked iPhone 4S readers how Apple’s latest iOS 5.1 software has impacted their battery life. The new handset is notoriously poor at staying alive for a whole day, but those pesky bugs affecting its battery life were, according to Apple, quashed in the recent software update.
Nearly 6,000 readers voted in our poll, and here are the results.
Detailed close-up taken with an iPhone. Courtesy of OS X Daily.
Your iPhone’s camera might be good enough to replace your old point-and-shoot — especially if you have the iPhone 4S — but it does have some flaws. For instance, it’s not great at taking those really close-up shots for catching the smallest details; it just doesn’t focus.
But with just a droplet of water, you can add a macro lens to your iPhone that allows you to capture crystal clear high-resolution close-ups. Here’s how!
Customers in Hong Kong must reserve Apple's new iPad online before they attempt to collect it from store.
iOS devices are big business in China, and not just for Apple. Gangs of scalpers queue up to get their hands on the latest devices on launch day so that they can later be sold on through the grey market for a sizable profit.
Back in October, when the iPhone 4S launched in Hong Kong, police were called to break up the riots that occurred outside of Apple retail stores as scalpers attempted to force their way into the lines ahead of genuine customers. To ensure it doesn’t happen again, Apple has warned scalpers not to queue up for its new iPad on Friday.
One of Camera+'s great new features is much-improved sharing.
Camera+, one of the most popular photography apps for the iPhone, has been updated to version 3 today. In addition to a fancy new icon, the update brings a ton of new features including improved photo sharing, focus and exposure locks, workflows, and more. The release also quashes several bugs.
You have to hand it to the people that file lawsuits these days; they sure can be creative. A New Yorker by the name of Frank M. Fazio has sued Apple because Siri on his iPhone 4S is, “at best, a work-in-progress.” Fazio has accused Apple of false advertising in the Siri TV commercials it airs demonstrating making calls, finding directions, sending texts, etc. with the digital assistant.
The commercials convey a “misleading and deceptive message,” according to Fazio. He thinks Siri sucks in real life.
During its iPad event last week, Apple released its latest iOS 5.1 firmware. In addition to several new features, like Japanese support for Siri and a new camera slider for the home screen, the update promises to “address bugs affecting battery life.” But does it work?
iPhone 4S users have been suffering from poor battery life most on Apple’s latest handset, so if you’re an iPhone 4S owner, tell us how iOS 5.1 has affected your battery life by casting your vote in our poll.
The Apple TV isn’t positioned as a business or enterprise product, but its small size, easy setup, and AirPlay make it a very solid presentation tool – and the low cost doesn’t hurt, either.
While the Apple TV has the obvious advantage of being wireless and integrated with other Apple products, specific business advantages beyond its small form factor and the ubiquity of HDTVs and other HDMI-enabled display devices like projectors aren’t always immediately obvious (though those are pretty big advantages in their own right) – but at least one company is designing its business solutions around Apple’s so-called hobby device.
Business Intelligence developer MicroStrategy has taken the Apple TV/iOS combination to a new level by building its mobile apps around AirPlay and the Apple TV.
Apple’s new iPad is the first of its iOS devices to offer super speedy 4G LTE connectivity, but it’s currently only available on AT&T and Verizon in the United States. According to Best Buy’s internal database, however, it could soon be available on Sprint, too.
Before Apple unveiled the new iPad on Wednesday, no one was quite positive what Apple would announce. It seemed pretty sure that the iPad 3 (as it was being called then) would have a Retina Display, but would it have an A5X processor or an A6 processor? 3G or LTE? 512MB of RAM or 1GB of RAM. Would it be thinner or thicker? And what would it be called: the iPad 3 or iPad HD? (Everyone got the name wrong: it’s just called the “new iPad” now.)
One thing few people had any doubt about was that Siri would be making her way to iPad this year… which is why Siri’s absence on the new iPad counted as probably the biggest disappointment of the entire event.
The iPhone 4S launched on China Telecom back in March.
China Telecom has become the second Chinese carrier to offer the iPhone 4S today, ending the exclusivity enjoyed by China Unicom for the last 18 months. The company announced back in February that it would begin selling Apple’s popular smartphone from March 9, and it has taken over 200,000 pre-orders in just the last week.
When Apple unveiled its new iPad yesterday, the Cupertino company labeled its 5-megapixel rear-facing camera an “iSight camera.” The iSight name has been used for years to label the cameras built into the Mac, but the new iPad is the first time we’d heard it used for an iOS device.
Apple has now extended that name to the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S, updating its website to advertise iSight cameras for both.
