Year: 2012

Apple says iPad coming to China on Friday, July 20

Now that its trademark fight with ProView has been settled for a cool $60 million, Apple this morning issued a release announcing the new iPad will finally land on store shelves in China on Friday, July 20. Both cellular and WiFi models of the new iPad will be on offer in the 1.33 billion people market, through both its few retail stores and authorized resellers...

Google to pay $22.5M fine in Safari privacy debacle settlement

Remember when Google was caught with its hands in the jar, overriding privacy settings of both desktop and iOS Safari users' privacy settings in order to better track their web browsing activity? The issue snowballed into a privacy scandal as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said in April it would investigate the practice. The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that the FTC and the search Goliath are now close to finalizing a settlement that will see Google pony up a whopping $22.5 million to settle the privacy issue, FTC's largest ever fine...

Mockups show what apps would look like on 7.85-inch iPad

After a series of reports from Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, the "iPad Mini" has once again become the hotest topic in the tech world. It seems like everyone is getting in on the speculation regarding how, when, and why Apple would release such a device.

Up to this point, one of the most popular arguments against the smaller iPad has been that a 7.85-inch display would render most current apps unusable. So either developers would have to completely redesign their apps, or users would be forced to deal with tiny UI elements.

This theory has already been disproven by a number of pundits, via math and other reasoning. But we've come across some mockups that really drive the point across, demonstrating what apps would look and feel like on the smaller screen...

Electronic Arts teases upcoming FIFA 13 release

Football, known to Americans as soccer, is by far and wide the most popular sport on the planet. So it's no surprise that Electronic Arts' FIFA is one of the world's best-selling video game franchises.

The series' latest iteration, FIFA 13, is expected to hit all major platforms within the next two months. And EA has started to tease the release, by posting beautiful screenshots of the iOS version...

Top 5 customer complaints about the iPhone 4S

FixYa, an online tech support community, released a new report over the weekend regarding the top 5 most commonly reported issues in some of today's most popular smartphones.

The data comes from more than 25 million users, and 650,000 experts. And the report covers top handsets like the iPhone 4S, the Nokia Lumia 900, and the Samsung Galaxy S III...

Apple patches App Store bug that leaked unreleased app updates

Early this morning, we all got a preview of what's in store for the next Twitter for iPhone update. In fact, we know pretty much everything about version 4.3, despite the fact that it hasn't been released yet.

The info came from a leaked change log, found in the 'History' section of the iOS 6 App Store. Apparently a glitch in the Store was allowing users to view release notes from upcoming app updates...

Vancouver hotel replacing guest phones with iPhones

Hotels offer a wide range of amenities for guests-on-the-go. This includes on-site pools, Wi-Fi, bars, and workout rooms. But for one Canadian hotel, this also includes complimentary iPhones.

That's right, the Opus hotel in Vancouver has started replacing the landline telephones in each of its rooms, with iPhones. And even better, guests can carry the handsets throughout their entire stay...

More on iPad mini and why it might not require sandpaper after all

I know the sandpaper joke is getting boring at this point, but bear with me for a second. Though Jobs famously dissed seven inchers as being too small to comfortably operate "unless you include sandpaper so users can sand their fingers down to a quarter of their size", many watchers and journalists have been overanalyzing the repercussions of Apple's rumored inexpensive 7.85-inch iPad, allegedly slated for a September launch.

I'm also guilty for this, having recently explained why I thought Apple must deliver the iPad mini sooner than later (hint: it's the ecosystem, stupid). So let's assume for the argument's sake that the iPad mini is coming soon, rocking a 1024-by-768 pixels packed on a screen between seven and eight inches diagonally.

How would the new form factor affect developers, end-users and usability?

The exodus begins: corporate America abandoning BlackBerry for iOS and Android

As Research In Motion's woes deepen amid lay offs, outrageous losses five times bigger than projected and news that its long-expected BlackBerry 10 software won't arrive until next year, a significant number of high-profile and profitable corporate customers are readying contingency plans, a tell tale sign that, unfortunately, the window of opportunity for the BlackBerry as we know it is closing fast...

AT&T opens up its Watson speech engine via SDK for iOS and Android

Realizing Apple and Google are moving swiftly to mainstream speech recognition on mobile devices, U.S. carrier AT&T today announced that it is opening up its own Watson speech engine to iOS and Android platforms via a software development kit (SDK), now available on the AT&T Developer website.

Much like Apple's Siri or Google Voice Actions in Android (and Google Now), Watson takes input, analyzes it, performs one or more services and returns a result. Input can be audio files, speech, gestures, face recognition and text. Here's a video of Watson in action...

New report reiterates why Apple needs China Mobile deal

A new report is out this morning regarding the current state of the smartphone market in mainland China. With three providers on the world's 20 largest carriers list, and more than a billion cell phone users, the country is quickly become a battleground for smartphone-makers.

The new data comes from Needham & Company's Charlie Wolf. The analyst issued his quarterly report on the smartphone industry today, and it contains both good news and bad news for Apple's handset business...

iWatch concept with Retina display and FaceTime

Ever since Steve Jobs joked about iPod nano wrist straps during the September 2010 presser ("one of our board of director members is gonna clip it on to an armband as a watch"), there has been no shortage of futuristic iWatch concepts, ranging from ADR Studio's James Bond-like thing to Italian designer Federico Ciccarese's Star Trek-like wearable device with curved glass we told you about last week.

If you can't get enough of these, you'll appreciate this one by Swedish designer Anders Kjellberg who earned our respect with a remarkable iWatch vision featuring FaceTime (quite logical, isn't it?), Retina display (why not?) and a whole bunch of other nice-to-haves...