We’ve been talking a lot about the budget iPhone in recent months, mostly in relation to the emerging market (where the vast majority of the remaining smartphone growth is expected to happen in the next five years), but here’s a question: even if Apple, as they are rumored to do, release their first plastic iPhone since the iPhone 3GS, how are they going to price it low enough to actually penetrate third-world countries where the cost of the phone might be equal to someone’s salary for the month? Especially while maintaining Apple’s customary profit margins?

The truth is, it’s almost impossible to imagine Apple being able — or interested! — in doing any such thing. Current rumor pegs the “budget” iPhone as basically an iPhone 5 with a colorful plastic shell. If those rumors are true, that’s not really a budget phone: it’s a mid-range. It has to be if Apple wants to make money off of it.

Slowly but surely, that’s the realization dawning on some people on Wall Street. The “budget” iPhone isn’t going to be budget at all. And Apple’s going to make buttloads off of it.

Apple just sidestepped a $9.2 billion tax bill by financing part of a $55 billion stock buyback with debt rather than using its offshore cash. The sneaky trick means the U.S. government is unable to bill the Cupertino company for tax on the deal, which is said to be the “the biggest corporate offering on record,” according to Bloomberg.

If you share your songs and movies via iTunes on your home network, you might not want just any old people to access your shared media or playlists, even if you let them onto your Wi-Fi. While iTunes lets you share all the types of media it can serve up, maybe your kids or office mates don’t need to listen to those hardcore rap tunes.

It’s fairly easy to protect your shared items with a password, using the iTunes Preferences. Here’s how to do just that.

The Galaxy S4 has been cleared for government use by the U.S. Department of Defense, with Samsung’s new Knox security software deemed safe for military use. It’s the first Android-powered smartphone to ever win DoD approval, and it gets it ahead of Apple’s iPhone.

In a characteristically terse reports, the ever-spotty DigiTimes is backing up recent reports that Apple is readying a plastic 4-inch iPhone with a colorful casing… but also claiming, bizarrely, that Apple doesn’t have much faith that such an iPhone would sell.

Romanian Apple fan Andrei was a straight-A student and promising C++ programmer whose 21-year life was tragically cut short before he could fulfill his dream of working for Cupertino, and possibly, if he was good enough, becoming Steve Jobs.

His passion for Apple was so much that when he died, his parents erected a tombstone with his honor, featuring the Apple logo on it. The message on the stone from his parents reads: “Our son, our hope, you are with us in every moment, and we are with you every moment. You are the champion!”

Source: Cancan.ro
Thanks: Victor!

Apparently, there is a magnet somewhere inside the back panel of the iPhone 5. How do I know? Because these cool new lenses from Carson use it to stick themselves to the back of the phone. The result is something like a small, less-bulbous Olloclip, only for close-up photography.

You already have a connected scale for tweeting your weight. You might also have a baby scale to do the same, (only for the baby). Now you can get a smart scale for dinner. Not to eat for your dinner–to weigh your dinner. Or breakfast. You know what I mean.

The Smart Food Scale is a Kickstarter project and comes from Chef Sleeve, the folks behind the Chef Sleeve, the ultimate wipe-clean iPad prophylactic.

There’s certainly no lack of great ways to share photos from your iPad: Photo Stream, iPhoto Journals, Dropbox, Everpix, Flickr and on and on. Despite this wealth of options, I’m going to add to your confusion. Fotopedia’s News Reporter for iPad is a new app that lets you turn your photos into gorgeous magazine-style news reports and publish them to Fotopedia’s site. It’s pretty great.

Remember Sparrow? Of course you do – it was the best e-mail app for the iPhone, and the only app for Gmail that didn’t suck. Then Google bought it and killed it before the team could release its iPad version.

Well fret not, dear Gmail-using iPad user – we have good news. Evomail is a new thing which exists, and it’s kind of like Sparrow for the iPad.

Google brought its intelligent Google Now service to iOS earlier this week with an update to the Google Search app, and for many, the feature works very well. For a lot of others, however, Google Now appears to be causing a significantly negative impact on battery life — as we reported on Wednesday.

Google has since responded to these reports, calling them “incorrect” and insisting that Google Now does not have a battery drain issue.

OpenStreetMap is a project that makes and distributes free map data for the world, letting anyone use the data for free, without any legal or technical restrictions.

Startup skobbler uses this global mapping data to create its own set of location-aware mobile apps, like ForeverMap 2, an app that has been on Android for a while now, and which is now available on the App Store for your iOS device.

Apple has started a new contest to promote the supremacy of the App Store. Apple is giving away a $10,000 iTunes giftcard to whomever downloads the 50 billionth app from the App Store.

Apple had a similar contest last year  for the 25th billion app downloaded from the App Store. Apple’s also going to give out 50 iTunes giftcards worth $500 each to the next 50 people would download apps right after the 50 billionth. 

Google Glass has been getting a lot of attention recently for it’s futuristic take on wearable computing. Apple’s iWatch has got people intrigued, but it turns out that Google has been working on a watch of its own, just incase Google Glass is a little bit too weird for people.

Patents filed by Google in 2011 show that the company has been working on a wearable wrist computer. The Google Watch concept describes two touchpads on a wristband that work intandem to undertand gestures like Google has on the Google Glass pad.

We’ve talked before about all of the Braun products that have inspired Apple’s designs. Perhaps the best known is the Braun ET66 pocket calculator, first released in 1987 replacing the earlier ET22 model which inspired iOS’s own calculator app and has become a Dieter Rams design classic.

Outside of inside your iPhone, it’s hard to find a working ET66 these days, which is why it’s so great that Braun intends on re-releasing the original model later this year as an official replica. No word on price or exact availibility yet, but I know I’ll be getting one. Won’t you?

Source: Acquire

Mobile Safari has a great sharing feature, letting you send a web page to anyone via iMessage, Twitter, Facebook, or email. The bummer thing is, though, that if you hit Mail, your iPhone will wrest control from you and make you send via the built-in iOS Mail App.

But you don’t want to use Mail. You prefer the Gmail app, right? Of course you do. How the heck, then, can you send that adorable picture of a cute pug puppy via email using the Gmail app? With a secret bookmark, of course.

Here’s how.

There would be but one way to make the mŌna iPad stand seem more like an adult toy, and that’d to make it in pink. As it is. The suggestive-looking stand comes in black, white and red. I have been using one on and off for a few months (strictly for iPad support purposes) and found it to be excellent in some aspects and silly in others. Would you like to know more?

Foxconn is notorious for its tough working conditions and labor practices, but the company has started relaxing on some of its strict factory rules after two recent suicides occurred at its Zhengzhou factory last month.

Starting now, Foxconn has decided it will stop forcing workers from fraternizing with one another during work hours. Foxconn’s factories have used a “mute mode” policy with workers that prohibits any conversation that is not relevant to their jobs while in the workshop, but the iPhone-maker has decided it’s probably good for workers’ health to be able to talk to each other.

There are so many pictures of clouds, coffee, sunsets and trees on Instagram, that sometimes it can be hard as hell to find pictures of things you actually care about, like family and friends. Instagram is rolling out a new photo tagging feature today that will help make finding people way easier – which might be a good or bad thing.

The new feature, called Photos of You, allows users to tag friends who are in the photo. A new Photos of You section now graces the your profile, where you can find all the Instagram photo’s you’ve been tagged in. Just like on Facebook, if you don’t want to be tagged in a certain picture, you can decided to remove it.

Here’s a video Instagram released to promote Photos of You:

Blockbuster has been teetering on the edge of oblivion ever since its bankruptcy filing in 2010, but after being bought by Dish Network in 2011, the company has begun a push to get back into the movie businesses.

Blockbuster relaunched its streaming video service, Blockbuster On Demand, last year, and the company is finally bringing it to iOS today. Users of the new app can stream movies to their iPhone or iPad. Unlike Netflix’s all-you-can-stream model, Blockbuster charges a rental fee per video watched, that runs between $2.99 and $4.99 per movie. Blockbuster’s movie catalogue offers thousands of hit movies and the app now supports HD.

Here’s the full description:

Apple has just released a surprise iOS 6.1.4 update! What’s new? What incredible new features and bug fixes can we portend?

Nothing, pretty much. The sole change in the log is “updated audio profile for speakerphone” with no other enhancesments or bug fixes listed.

A month ago or so, it was said that the iOS 6.1.4 patch would be pretty much dictated by the lawyers, but it looks like Apple has somehow avoided the change to the “Always On” VPN setting that was requred in the aftermath of its patent lawsuit with VirnetX.

The iOS 6.1.4 release seems to only be for the CDMA and GSM versions of the iPhone 5, at least right now. Let us know if you see anything new.

Sometimes Cult of Mac Deals is able to offer you a deal on something that you might not need to use all the time, but could come in handy when you want to stretch your creativity on a project – or simply do something fun for family and friends. This is one of those offers.

CrazyTalk7 Pro for Mac is the most popular facial animation tool that uses sound and text to vividly animate facial images. With this groundbreaking Auto Motion technology, you just need to import images, specify the facial feature points and record your own voice to automatically generate lip-syncs to create 3D life-like, talking videos. And we’ve got CrazyTalk7 Pro for Mac for 33% off the regular price – just $99.99 – for a limited time!

When you buy a 16GB iPhone, iOS 6 takes up roughly 1GB of space on the device, leaving about 15GB or so to spare. Buy a 16GB Samsung Galaxy S4, on the other hand, and you get just 8.49GB!

Why? Samsung says all the bloat is because of the nonsense, half-baked “software features” they keep on baking in.

Evernote’s Penultimate app for iPad has today been updated with a number of new notebook features and new sync options. It also adds the ability to sign out of your Evernote account, and two new features for Evernote Premium subscribers.

Just over a month after acquiring Summly for $30 million, Yahoo! has gobbled up another smartphone app. This time it’s Astrid, a pretty task management client for Android and iOS, which has a strong focus on sharing. Astrid announced the news on its blog today.