Top stories - page 776

Almost from the start, iPad users have begged and pleaded with Apple to add a missing feature: split-screen multitasking.

Split-screen multitasking is the ability to run two or more apps simultaneously, side by side, just like you can on a desktop computer. But iOS, of course, is the antithesis of traditional multitasking. You can have only one app on the screen at a time.

That may be about to change. Apple is rumored to be adding multitasking to the iPad in iOS 8, which is expected to be shown to developers at next month’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference.

With split screen multitasking, you could write a paper in Pages on the left while researching in Safari on the right. You may even be able to drag and drop items between the two apps, like photos or chunks of text.

For some, this would be nirvana. Better multitasking would turbocharge the iPad, especially for work, right?.

Microsoft loves to crow about the Surface 2 tablet’s ability to multitask, which in Redmond’s eyes makes the tablet appear more suited for work than watching cat videos. Some iPad users have been lobbying for it for years. The feature has been the subject of plenty UI mockups, design videos, and jailbreak tweaks.

My iPad Air is jailbroken, and for the last week I’ve been using a new jailbreak tweak called OS Experience, which allows me to have split-screen multitasking.

I’ve tried using it as part of my daily workflow. And what I found was surprising.

Bullish billionaire activist-investor Carl Icahn recently ramped up his stake in Apple to the tune of 2.8 million shares — bringing his total stake in the company to a little over $4.4 billion.

Icahn’s position was revealed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Thursday, showing how Icahn now owns more than 7.5 million AAPL shares. The buy took place during the March period, which preceded Apple’s announcement of the 7-to-1 stock split and share repurchase program.

iOS devices have made tools like video editing more accessible for the general public, but they’re increasingly being used by the pros too.

Car maker Bentley’s latest ad, called “Intelligent Details,” was shot and edited using only an iPhone 5s (for filming), iPad Air (for stitching it all together) and handheld of accessories — including iPhones lenses and mounts.

The use of the iMovie iOS software meant that filmmakers were able to carry out the majority of the editing work from the back seat of their car.

Hey bike thieves – if you see a Skylock on my bike, then go ahead and cut through my frame and leave the lock behind. Why? Because my shitty beater cost like €50 and the Skylock is $250, that’s why.

$250? Yup, although you get a lot of tech for that money.

Just yesterday I had the experience of sending a text message to the wrong person. Okay, luckily it wasn’t a compromising message in any sense, but it goes to show what happens when you’re carrying out too many text conversations at the same time.

Clearly someone at Apple has had a similar experience, because a patent published Thursday reveals how future iOS devices might incorporate background images of the people you’re messaging, to ensure you don’t send out misdirected messages.

They’re big, they’re unwieldy, and they represent one-third of all handsets presently available worldwide.

According to new research undertaken by Canalys, around 34% of smartphones shipped worldwide have screens measuring upwards of five inches diagnoally. The rise in popularity of the so-called “phablet” (describing a smartphone with a screen between 5.0 and 6.9 inches) bodes very well for Apple, ahead of its eagerly anticipated 5.5-inch iPhone 6, which we fully expect to see arrive this September.

Apple’s much-discussed acquisition of Beats Electronics might not be finalised until next week, according to “people familiar with the transaction.”

Whether you’re listening to music or watching a video on your iPhone, sometimes you just want to have the volume loud. While your iPhone may have decent sound on it’s own, Speck’s new CandyShell AMPED case claims to have a fix to boost your volume even more. Advertised to have up to 2X louder sound and clarity, all while maintaining quality protection, will this become your new go-to iPhone case?

Take a look at the video to see what you think.

The most addicting game to ever hit the App Store will make its triumphant return in August. Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen tells CNBC that he has a new version in the works, but this time it won’t be as addictive.

iPhone 6 case leaks have been sprouting up like spring flowers this May, and while we still have a long wait until Apple reveals the date of its iPhone 6 event, its retail stores might already be prepping for a Fall launch.

Apple retail stores have started blacking out vacation dates for employees in September, pointing to a probable September launch for Apple’s bigger screened iPhone.

I have at least three apps set to auto-upload my iPhone photos whenever I reach a Wi-Fi connection. That’s three apps running in the background and using bandwidth to send my pictures up to the cloud, and they all run in addition to Apple’s own Photo Stream.

There’s nothing really wrong with this system: After all, bandwidth over Wi-Fi isn’t limited, and redundancy is good. But what if you could somehow consolidate all these services, and at the same save all your iPhone photos to a folder on your Mac? That’s what we’ll do today, with PhotoStream2Folder and a few other apps. We’ll take your Photo Stream, grab all the photos and save them to a folder on your Mac, then auto-upload them to Flickr, Dropbox and anywhere else you want.

Nintendo won’t bring its popular game franchises to iOS, and Apple won’t allow emulators in the App Store. In order to play titles like Super Mario and Zelda on your iPhone, then, you have to look at unofficial alternatives. GBA4iOS was one of the most popular — but after its creators received a DMCA notice from Nintendo this week, it is no more.

Your iPhone’s speakers suck. No amount of magical design from Jony Ive can change the laws of physics to give those itsy-bitsy tweeters earth-shattering bass, but plenty of acoustic iPhone docks are willing to try.

We’ve seen a menagerie of speaker docks over the years, and while most stick to being practical, we love the weird creations that make you do a double-take. We’ve gathered 14 of the most incredible iPhone docks you’ll ever see in the gallery above.

Got your own favorite bizarre dock for your iDevice? Let us know in the comments below.

The iPhone has hit a new all-time high when it comes to market share in Japan: representing a massive 36.6% of all Japanese smartphones in the first quarter of 2014.

This increase, which is up from last year’s 25.5%, was driven by Apple’s deal with NTT DoCoMo, a.k.a. Japan’s largest carrier. Apple launched the iPhone 5s and 5c with NTT DoCoMo back in September, and sales have been rocketing upwards ever since. Sales have proven so good, in fact, that Apple recently moved Doug Beck, chief of sales for Japan and Korea, over to handle the North American beat — where it is hoped he can apply some of the same sales mojo to increasing U.S. market share.

Weather apps are a dime a dozen, but what do you use when you want to know the exact temperature where you are right now? That’s the question that drove app company Robocat to make Thermodo, a small thermometer that plugs directly into a smartphone’s headphone jack.

What makes Thermodo incredibly unique is the overwhelming amount of support it received on Kickstarter last year. The project raised over 10 times its original goal of $35,000. People clearly loved the idea of a portable thermometer for the iPhone, as over $336,000 has been pledged by backers.

Now that Thermodo is shipping and out in the wild, does it live up to the all the hype?

Kris Van de Sande’s distorted pictures of Dadipark, an abandoned Belgian amusement park, weren’t made under ideal circumstance, but they capture the distressed carnival atmosphere of the decaying attraction perfectly.

The look comes from a stroke of bad luck: While on a 2011 photographic pilgrimage to the modern ruins, Van de Sande’s gear crapped out and he was forced to make due with a loaner.

“I was limited very much with the equipment so I borrowed a fisheye lens,” he says over FaceTime from his home in Hasselt, Belgium. “I’m not a big fan of the fisheye thing but I tried to shoot as if it was just a wide-angle.”

A new survey, reportedly taken from a sample of 50,000 smartphone users around the world, reveals the reasons consumers made the phone purchasing decisions they did.

According to IDC’s findings, battery life is the number one most important factor when it comes to choosing a smartphone — coming above ease of use, screen size, camera resolution, and touch screen. When asked, almost half of all iPhone owners quizzed named battery life as the main reason for their selecting the device.

As if the reported $3.2 billion Beats deal isn’t enough evidence, Apple seems to be quite big on this “music” thing.

According to new reports, Apple will introduce high definition audio playback in iOS 8, alongside new versions of its In-Ear Headphones. The iOS rumor corresponds with earlier reports that Apple will announce high-fidelity iTunes music downloads at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). As it currently stands, iOS 7’s standard Music app can’t play high quality 24-bit audio files which contain a sampling frequency beyond 48 kHz.

Microsoft Office for iPad only landed six weeks ago, but Microsoft claims it’s already been downloaded a whopping 27 million times.

The figure was thrown out by Julia White, the general manager of Microsoft’s Office division, who mentioned it during a keynote speech on Monday at Microsoft’s TechEd customer conference in Houston.

The iWatch may be set to mark Apple’s debut into health and fitness tracking, but one company is taking the concept of wearables a step further.

The forthcoming $199 OMsignal shirt promises to be the gym wear of the future — featuring a ton of health sensors sewn into its fabric, which constantly monitor the condition of the wearer. Sensors are capable of tracking heart rate, breathing rate, breathing volume, movement (including steps and cadence), movement intensity, heart rate variability, and calories burned.

“The data is sent via Bluetooth to a specially developed iPhone app, which lets you see all of it in real time,” says Dr. Jesse Slade Shantz, the firm’s Chief Medical Officer. “Your iPhone beams the data up to the cloud, and algorithms we’ve developed then push back various metrics — showing you information about your breathing during workouts, and information like that.”

Apple’s biggest acquisition ever is all the tech world can talk about, and Apple hasn’t even confirmed the news yet.

Last week it was reported that Apple has plans to acquire Beats Electronics for $3.2 billion. Shortly after the news broke, Beats co-founder and legendary producer Dr. Dre called himself the “first billionaire in hip-hop.”

Now Dre and music industry tycoon Jimmy Iovine are rumored to appear onstage at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference next month. What exactly the future holds for Apple and Beats remains unclear, but here are five things to know about the monumental deal:

Square has been at the forefront of mobile payments for years now, thanks largely to the popularity of its white card reader that’s used by merchants everywhere.

Now the company is debuting a brand new app called Square Order, and it does away with the need for a cash register completely. The introduction of Square Order also means the death of Square Wallet, a failed experiment that Order hopes to correct.

HYPER by Sanho – the company behind the Hyperjuice batteries for Macbooks and iPads have just launched their latest creation to the world through Kickstarter.

The iStick is essentially a USB stick with the dual use of connecting it to your iPhone 5, 5s, iPod Touch and iPads with it’s Apple certified lightning connector, which is great if you have a internet connection that is too slow in the office for cloud based storage, or if you’re on the road and want to watch a couple of movies without eating into your data plan.

To me, the 1976 Gibson Explorer means lust at first sight, love at first feel and that rarest of man-machine crushes: an enduring passion that persists long after I plunked down my hard-earned cash.

Gibson’s luthiers prototyped the Explorer (alongside pointy siblings the Flying V and the apocryphal Moderne) in the ’50s. The space race was on, rock ‘n’ roll was coming into its own and cars boasted bold curves and sci-fi fins. The Explorer and Flying V were released in 1958, a year after the Soviets launched Sputnik 1. (The Moderne didn’t makes its official debut until 1982.)

Like the beautiful but doomed Power Mac G4 Cube, the radically shaped guitars were clearly ahead of their time: These pointy instruments, which years later would become staples of heavy metal and hard-rock style, flopped hard. Gibson discontinued both lines within a few years.

In 1976, spurred by the success of competitors’ Explorer clones, Gibson came to its senses and reissued the Explorer. The natural mahogany finish on the best of these, much like the lighter Korina of the original models, gave the strangely shaped guitars a retro-futuristic look. That marriage of old and new is coming back into fashion now as designers tumble to the innate beauty of natural materials.

Bouncing, huffing and puffing through a beautifully-rendered cartoon world, avoiding jagged rolling wheels and collecting coins, Leo’s Fortune may just be the year’s most lovable iPhone game. But which games did its creators fall in love with?

Following our exclusive look inside behind the scenes of Apple’s iPhone “game of the month,” we asked Leo’s Fortune designer Anders Hejdenberg to name his current top five iOS games. He said he’s most impressed by titles that pair intriguing artwork with novel gameplay mechanics.

The highly imaginative Monument Valley, for instance, won him over quickly. “It didn’t take long to finish,” says Hejdenberg of his experience playing the game, “but during that time I experienced quite a few moments where I thought to myself, ‘Wow, this is really cool!’ That rarely happens when I play games, so it was definitely worth the price of admission.”

Here are the other iOS games currently taking his breath away. (You’ll find download links available below the gallery.)