Year: 2012

Apple wins injunction against Motorola in Germany over ‘slide to unlock’ patent

When the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) awarded Apple a patent late last year regarding its 'slide to unlock' feature, we didn't think it would be very long before we saw it pop up in Apple's Android war. And it wasn't.

Hot on the heels of Motorola winning an injunction against Apple in Germany, which resulted in a temporary ban of some of its products, the Cupertino company has fired back by winning its own injunction against Motorola in the country...

The Kindle Fire is gaining market share but the iPad remains the king

Some interesting news has been released today regarding the recent success of the Kindle Fire, Amazon's flagship tablet device. According to iSuppli, Amazon managed to grab a 14% share of the tablet market in the last financial quarter, while Apple's market share dropped from 64% in Q3 to 57% in Q4.

Apple released the iPad 2 nearly a year ago so it makes perfect sense that demand will drop as the year goes on, especially when new products like the Fire get released later in the year. I expect market share to significantly increase further in Apple's favor when iPad 3 drops...

Smartr Contacts for iPhone: the iOS address book on steroids

When iOS 5 was released, the folks at Apple HQ brought with it the ability to add social network support within the stock iOS address book application. Smartr Contacts from Xobni manages to push the bar a whole lot further.

The team behind popular Outlook plugin, Smartr Inbox, have released what is essentially an address book on steroids for your iOS device. This nifty free application promises to create rich profiles for all your contacts, including communication history and updates from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Smartr works by creating in-depth profiles by aggregating all of your data from the leading social networking sites and your email accounts, storing the information in the 'Xobni Cloud'. Once a contact's information has been matched you are presented with a slick profile view of every contact you have ever interacted with from the various portals mentioned above...

OS X Mountain Lion borrows heavily from iOS

Today Apple took the wraps off of OS X Mountain Lion (I know, we should have saw that one coming) and continuing with the movement started with its predecessor, OS X Lion, it borrows heavily from iOS.

In fact, you could say that OS X Lion's iOS implants were rather mild compared to what Mountain Lion plans to offer. Apple is obviously serious about completely combining the best elements of iOS directly into its desktop operating system, and no where is this more evident than with Mountain Lion.

Like times past, Apple has released a video teaser outlining various components of their upcoming OS X update. You're already aware of one of them — iMessage — but what are the others?

Why we’ll finally see LTE technology in the iPhone and iPad this year

Yesterday morning, my friend and colleague Oliver Haslam laid out an interesting case for why he believes, despite overwhelming evidence, that Apple won't implement LTE technology into any of its mobile products this year.

Oliver thinks that because there aren't 4G networks in every corner of the world, and because current LTE devices suffer from issues like poor battery life, we won't be seeing LTE in the next iPad or iPhone. But I happen to think he's wrong...

Apple releases public iMessage beta for OS X

Want to get your hands on the new iMessage beta — the iChat replacement that's coming with OS X Mountain Lion this summer? If so, you can do so now, as Apple has posted a public beta download for all to enjoy.

iMessage was one of the prominent features of iOS 5, and it allows users to chat across multiple devices using the same interface that's used for SMS messages.

The beauty about iMessage is that it's basically just an IM client, which means you incur no SMS fees. Now with this latest update, you can start and/or finish conversations on your desktop or laptop...

Apple’s attention to detail extends to its product photos

Have you ever looked at the product images of the iPod touch or the iPad on Apple's website and wondered how the company was able to produce such a perfect photo? It almost looks like it was rendered in a computer program. But it wasn't.

What you see (most of the time) is actually a real photograph — one that Apple spent more time producing than you could imagine. Yes, the company's infamous attention to detail extends to its product photos as well...

Why the study showing that jailbreak apps leak less private data than App Store apps is flawed

Following the Path debacle which led the world to realize that many apps indeed upload some of your private data to their servers, much ink has been spilled about the subject. To the point that Congress sent Apple a letter to express their concern, but also to ask for more details about the situation. Apple later commented on the matter saying that apps will now need explicit user permission to access contacts.

In the meantime, a year-old study by a group of researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara showing that jailbreak apps leak less data than App Store apps was uncovered. For a site like us, and for many jailbreakers alike, this study was a blessing as we could once again claim that jailbreaking can actually make your device more secure.

The problem is that this study is flawed and proves nothing...

When an iPhone meets a Samsung Note

A couple weeks ago, Samsung spent big bucks to play a commercial during the Super Bowl for their latest device: the Galaxy Note, a 5.3-inch phablet (phone/tablet), powered by a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, and 16GB of built-in memory. Oh yes, and I almost forgot. It also comes with a stylus!

The guys over at Joy of Tech imagined what would happen if an iPhone met a Samsung Note. Quite entertaining, and perfect to start the day on a funny note...

‘WeeRoll’ will add over a dozen animations to Notification Center

WeeRoll is an unreleased jailbreak tweak that lends the ability to add over a dozen animations to iOS 5's Notification Center.

It's very similar to the Flowtation tweak we covered a while back, except that there's a lot more animation options bundled with WeeRoll.

I asked the developer why his tweak had so many animations, and he replied: "That's just how WeeRoll". Okay, I admit that was bad, really bad.

To make up for it, enjoy this special video preview of WeeRoll in action...

WinZip releases new iOS app for viewing .zip files

Chances are pretty good that you've heard about WinZip at some point in your life. The compression utility, which exists on both Windows and Mac OS, has been around since 1991. Wow.

Now it looks like you'll be able to use WinZip's software while on the go, as WinZip Computing has just released an [extremely limited] iOS version of its popular app...