News - page 33

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.

You probably don’t need the 10,000-watt iNuke Boom speaker for your iPhone, but you might just find a place in your home for the iNuke Boom Junior, a 1:23 scale model of Behringer’s basbehemoth.

SnapSeed, probably our favorite photo editor here at Cult of Mac, has been updated to (finally!) work with iOS6 and the iPhone 5

Cork: soft, sustainable, impact-absorbing, grippy and nice to look at and touch. Who wouldn’t want to use it as an iPad case? The answer, in the case of the iCork from Pomm design, is anyone who like their iPad storage to be thin.

Google has just made its “biggest ever update” to Street View, adding over a quarter of a million miles worth of roads around the globe.

Just retooled for the iPhone 5, Vlock is a free app that displays a bold Android-ish clock, with date, on your iPhone. It’ll also let you play videos through the clock in a kind of video version of the iPad’s Picture Frame mode, complete with loop and transitions. Combine this with the app’s lockscreen feature, and you’ve got a faux animated Android-y lockscreen. All without a jailbreak.

IPEVO’s USB document cameras are a weird kind of hybrid product. Or anti-hybrid, maybe? To scan documents and digitize them, you’d usually use either a sheet-feed scanner, or the camera in your iPhone/iPad.

The Point 2 View and Ziggi cameras sit on your desk — like dedicated scanners — but snap the documents using cameras, like your iPhone.

According to the sensor-studying pixel peepers at DxOMark, cellphone cameras have already surpassed the compact cameras of five years ago in terms of image quality. Amazing.

Like the iPhone 5, most of today’s competitive smartphones sport a camera with a sensor of at least 8megapixels. This is a far cry from one of the world’s first mass-produced camera cellphones, the Sharp-made J-SH04, which had a sensor resolution of 110,000 pixels, or just 0.1-Mpix.

Go a GoPro HD Hero2? And an iPhone, iPad or (ahem) Android device? Then head over to the App Store right now, because — with a new free app — you can use one to control the other.

There can’t be much I hate more than a bad ringtone. I have one (because my phone is a Samsung and all of its tones are awful); my neighbor has one, which he takes forever to answer when his family call from overseas at like two in the morning every day; idiots on the bus and metro have them (usually some tinny-sounding “music” snippet of a record I never want to hear in full); and even my parents have them — not that anyone ever calls their cellphones, thank god.

In fact, there are only two things in the world of ringtones that make me optimistic. The first is that — with the slow death of Nokia — the horrible default Gran Vals tone (and its cheesily remixed derivatives) is also dying.

The second is Cleartones Organic, a set of 50 ringtones and 50 notifications which will calm you like a cool forest breeze.

Lacie’s new Thunderbolt Little Big Disk claims to be the fastest portable Thunderbolt drive around, running at up to 635MB/s – “a 33 percent increase from the previous model.”

The Nomad Brush Flex is the latest in Nomad’s line of capacitive touchscreen brushes. That’s right — brushes. When you’re painting into an app like Brushes or Procreate on the iPad, then you really do want to use a stylus os some kind. And if you’re going to go to the trouble of using a stylus, why not make it a brush?

The SlingPlayer app for both Android and iOS has been discounted to $14.99 (50% off) after receiving a long-overdue update. SlingPlayer is one of the more expensive apps so grabbing it while it’s half-off is a must for anyone considering the purchase of a Slingbox. The SlingPlayer works in conjunction with a compatible Slingbox and smartphone or tablet, allowing users to watch live or recorded TV while on-the-go.

Lytro’s Light Field cameras — the ones which let you refocus an image after you have taken it, are now on general sale. BEtter yet, they come in a range of Nano-tastic colors, and get a whole lot of new controls.

Journalists and PR folk, or hacks and flacks, are supposed to fight like cats and, uh, laser pointers shone onto walls. But like Jedis and ninjas, there are good ones and bad ones. And today, I got the best product tagline from one of the good ones, regarding the ECOXBT Bluetooth speaker:

Think Jambox…if Jambox wasn’t scared of the water and a wimp.

Who can argue with that?

Sure, Rovio just announced its new Star Wars Angry Bird iteration, but they certainly haven’t forgotten about the OG Angry Birds that started it all. Today, Rovio has updated the original Angry Birds with a ton of new content. Chock full of new power-ups, this update includes 15 new Surf & Turf levels as well as 15 pig themed levels.

LifeProof has definitely made an impact with the digital outdoors; seems I run into their sleek, modular, waterproof iPhone cases everywhere (we love them, btw). Now, the company is focusing on their new Nüüd iPad case, and the second available accessory for the case is the LifeJacket, a flotation device that fits around the waterproof Nüüd case and keeps the iPad from sinking into the murky depths after you’ve, say, calculated your dive profile.

I hope you haven’t grown tired of dismembering the undead because Gameloft plans on unleashing another horde of zombies onto Android an iOS this Halloween. You’ll soon have the opportunity to play the part of Stuntman/Movie Star extraordinaire, aimed with ridding the entertainment capital of the world of walking corpses (and I’m not talking Joan Rivers). Arm yourself with weapons sporting wacky names like “Widow Maker” and the “Cyclops,” then annihilate anything without a pulse (pretty much all of Hollywood).

Greg Pierce, the genius behind Drafts for the iPhone and iPad, has posted a teaser screenshot for a new feature in an upcoming version of the app. To save you puzzling it out from the picture, it gives you the chance to send pre-defined emails to pre-set addresses, with one click.

You know how it is with iOS-enabled fitness trackers: they’re like busses. You wait around for ages, and then three (or more) all turn up at once.

And the sweetest, cleanest-looking of those busses looks to be the Lark, a clever, wrist-mounted sensor which tracks your whole day, from daily exercise to nightly sleep.

If you live in the UK, or if you know how to make your iPhone think that it’s in the UK, then you can now listen to BBC radio from a new dedicated app. It’s called iPlayer Radio, and it turns your high-tech, $700 pocket computer into a 1980s clock radio.

This, if you were wondering, is awesome.

Another week, another clever way to hold your lens cap.

One of the very best things about the iPhone’s camera, aside from its portability, its speed, its quality, its connectivity and its ability to share pictures instantly. And to edit them. And its tough, sapphire crystal protective cap. And… Wait. Where was I?

Ah, yes. One of the best things about the iPhone camera is that there’s no lens cap to lose. That’s not the case for your supposedly superior SLR. Which is why you’re going to have to spend another $14 or so just to fix the problem.

I-Mego’s Throne headphones will bring a big dose of retro styling to the sides of your head. While they pack almost every modern piece of tech you need, they look more like those old-style mics used by radio-announcers (radio announcers in movies at least) and blues crooners.

Talk from around the internet says that the new iPod Touch is starting to ship to those who pre-ordered it. Several Apple customers are reporting that their orders are now en-route from China.

Some gadgets pick one thing, and do only that thing. And they do it very, very well. Other gadgets try to pack in everything possible, and they usually end up doing everything badly. This is called the Swiss Army Knife Approach (SAKA), and if you ever wondered why the Swiss are neutral in all wars, now you know.

The ReadyCase takes the latter approach, and like any good SAKA device, it’s way more fun to marvel at the amount of widgets the makers packed in than it would ever be to use.