News - page 1721

If you’ve ever dropped your iPhone or taken it for a dip in the swimming pool, then you know the pains of having your favorite electronic device murdered in front of your eyes. You also know the pains of the repair bill in your attempts to bring your iPhone back to life.

SquareTrade released a new study today that shows damaged iPhones have cost Americans about $5.9 billion in repair bills since their introduction in 2007. The study also found that in the last 12 months alone, 30% of iPhone owners damaged their device.

Madame Tussauds Wax Mueseums are renowned for their life-like representations of famous celebrities. To mark the first anniversary of Steve Jobs’s death, Madame Tussauds Hong Kong will unveil a new wax figure of the legendary Apple co-founder that will go on display September 27th.

Satechi’s USB Surge Protector might just be the cutest little surge protector ever seen, with its look of surprised dismay, and its colorful two-tone shell. It even hads a little LED which tells you that it’s still alive, and which will eventually fade to nothing when the unit finally dies. And die it will:

Remember that iPad mini that surfaced on Tuesday? Rather naively, I suggested it could have been the real thing, but as it turns out, it was nothing more than a dummy unit — as you can see from the video above. Admittedly, it is a rather impressive dummy unit, and it’s likely to be almost identical to the real iPad mini.

https://youtu.be/40mHk8lTmPE

Street Fighter and Tekken are ready to go head-to-head on iOS in this “never-before-dreamed-of-crossover battle,” Street Fighter X Tekken. Now available to download from the App Store, the game brings online multiplayer brawling to iOS with 3D visuals optimized for your Retina display.

Click-clack-CLUNK! That’s the sound a Transformer makes when it, uh, transforms. And that’s the sound I imagine the Jorno makes when it transforms from stout, ugly black box into miniature-but-not-too-tiny Bluetooth keyboard.

Evernote has updated Skitch, its wonderful image editing tool, to make it a universal app, and to introduce a stack of new features. The app was previously exclusive to the iPad, but now you can use it to annotate pictures of your cat on your iPhone, too. What’s more, the update also brings full Evernote integration, cross-platform syncing, and more.

With iOS 6 making its public debut today, I’m sure some of you are sitting in front of iTunes with your iOS device plugged into your computer, mashing that ‘Update’ button as much as humanly possible in the hope that any time now, Apple will open the gate. Well, you may want to give your fingers a rest, because it could be a few hours yet before iOS 6 drops.

We first told you about Rayman Jungle Run a couple weeks ago, when Ubisoft unveiled its first trailer, and we’ve been looking forward to it since. The title was scheduled to hit the App Store tomorrow, but fortunately for you, it just turned up a day early.

After Apple was awarded two prestigious D&AD (British Design & Art Direction) awards, Jony Ive and the rest of the Cupertino company’s design team flew to London this week to pick them up. There were 16 Apple employees in attendance, and Ive, who is responsible for Apple’s most iconic designs, received a standing ovation when he took to the stage.

I can’t remember the last time I really used Spotlight on iOS. I guess it’s cool. It brings up some pertinent stuff that you search for, but it’s not really a precise tool you can use with pinpoint accuracy, so most of the time it just gets neglected on most iPhones.

My fingers haven’t really been aching for a iOS Spotlight overhaul, but after watching this concept video by Cody Sanfilippo, I’m starting to believe there are a lot of great possibilities Apple needs to explore by heavily integrating apps into Spotlight. Just watch the concept video below to see all the cool things Apple could do to make Spotlight in iOS 7 truly amazing.

On Tuesday, the first Geekbench benchmarks surfaced for the iPhone 5. Those have been followed by SunSpider Javascript benchmarks which show Apple’s latest iPhone 5 beats everything when it comes to Javascript performance. It’s twice as fast as the iPhone 4S, and significantly snappier than high-end Android handsets like the Samsung Galaxy S III, the HTC One X, and the new LG Optimus G.

After a few days of trickling releases, the flood of iOS-compatible updates has begun. Among them is Instapaper, our favorite read-later app here at Cult ofCult of Mac. Amongst the usual bug fixes and iOS6 compatibility comes a new font, optimized for dyslexic readers.

The Humble Indie Bundle has always been a fantastic source of solid Mac games for a very reasonable price. How much, you might ask? Well, the five initial offerings in this year’s bundle would run you almost $90 retail, but the price you’ll pay for them here is totally up to you.

Yes, you could pay no money at all for games like Rochard or Torchlight, both solidly great games that have been released on other platforms. But you wouldn’t do that, would you? The Humble Indie Bundle gives the money you decide to pay to the developers, to EFF, and to Child’s Play, a charity that raises money for games and consoles for sick kids in hospitals. See? I told you that you wouldn’t pay nothing.

It’s been less than a week since the iPhone 5 was made available for pre-order, and shipping estimates from the Apple Store have now slipped to 3-4 weeks. It took a couple hours for shipping estimates to slip to 1-2 weeks last Friday morning, and then they slipped even father to 2-3 weeks shortly after.

Considering the fact that the iPhone 5 sold 2 million pre-orders in 24 hours, it looks like demand for Apple’s newest handset won’t be slowing down anytime soon.

At this point, your best bet for getting your hands on the iPhone 5 before October is waiting in line Friday morning.

Source: Apple

Thanks: Matthew

Check out the image above, and then marvel that Samsung put this together for the court case it lost to Apple a couple weeks back in US District Court. Judge Lucy Koh understandably excluded the slide from Samsung’s final argument documents – these comparisons have nothing to do with the actual merits of the case, but rather show that Apple was asking for a lot of money in damages.

Regardless of the facts, though, this image is pretty hilarious. It does show what a crazy amount of money companies are taking in and/or losing in our current “touch economic times,” rendering the phrase meaningless when set next to these kinds of figures.

Everyone published their iPhone 5 reviews moments ago, and unsurprisingly, the initial batch of reviews are mostly glowing. The iPhone 5 is lighter, faster and slimmer than the iPhone 4S, and there seems to be very few qualms with Apple’s latest handset.

We’ve collected most of the early iPhone 5 reviews from around the internet to give you a general sense of what reviewers are saying.

BGR got its hands on an early iPhone 5 unit, and now the first shots of the device’s unboxing are out for everyone to gawk at. Apple is sticking to the classic black outer design for the box itself, and the internal packaging reveals the new EarPods, wall charger, and Lightning cable.

Our own Charlie Sorrel gave Apple’s EarPods a glowing review, and now the fine folks at iFixit have dug deep into the internals of Apple’s latest earbuds to see what they’re made of. It took Apple three years of R&D to design the EarPods, so we’re all hoping they mark a huge improvement over their predecessor.

According to iFixit’s teardown, Apple uses a single-driver setup to power the EarPods, although the Cupertino company claims that the EarPods will perform at the level of higher quality, multi-driver earphones. With a completely redesigned shape that’s been molded to fit the average human ear, iFixit is saying that the EarPods boast “significant improvements in durability.”

There's one camera accessory which you probably never, ever use — unless you're a professional who carries several cameras: the body cap. This protective plastic disk is most likely in the back of a closet somewhere, waiting inside the camera's box for the day you sell it and the cap is needed once again.

But Olympus thinks that it can tempt you with a fancy body cap. What's more, it thinks that you'll pay £70 for it (around $114). Behold: The 15mm ƒ8 "body cap."

Jeff Benjamin at the iDownload Blog thinks it is. Comparing it to the tiny box shot on the official Apple iPhone 5 ordering page, it looks legit, and also looks as if white iPhone 5s and black iPhone 5s will be shipping in vastly different boxes: all black for the black model, mostly white and light-toned for the white model:

Looks gorgeous. Can’t wait to rip open mine.

Source: iDownload Blog

When the new iPhone 5 is officially released on Friday, it will be powered by Apple’s custom-designed A6 chip, a 1.2GHz, dual-core chip that is the first Cortex-A15 class CPU to market.

How did Apple get to this point? Just four years ago, they made their first step into custom chip design: now they are releasing cutting edge chips that are months ahead of the competition.

Over the weekend, Linley Gwennap, who heads the Linley Group chip consultacy, posted up a brief history of Apple’s chip development. It’s not just illuminating because of how we got here — from Apple buying up P.A. Semi in 2008 to signing secret deals with ARM — but in that it predicts when and what the next-gen A7 chip will look like.

Question: How many iPhone owners does it take to change a lightbulb(‘s color)?

Answer: One. As long as he has installed the LIFX app, and bought the LIFX remote-controlled lightbulb.

No other news agency consistently fails as much as Fox. Take for instance this Fox 5 reporter in NY who decided to head down to the 5th Avenue Apple Store to interview a few of the crazies already lining up for the “most amazing, best Apple product ever.” I was shaking my head until the reporter started listing off some of the new features of the iPhone 5 and let me tell you… I’m packing my sleeping bag as soon as I finish this post!

When Apple releases iOS 6 tomorrow, it will finally allow users to make FaceTime calls over 3G and 4G data connections. But AT&T has decided — unlike most other carriers — that it’s going to charge its customers extra to take advantage of the feature. Understandably, this has annoyed a lot of people.

So much so that the Free Press, Public Knowledge, and the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute have warned AT&T that they will be filing a complaint with the FCC against the carrier for violating network neutrality rules.