iPhone News

Gameloft talks Modern Combat 5: Blackout classes and unified progression system

As my colleague Cody informed you, French games maker Gameloft recently shed more light on its highly anticipated Modern Combat sequel, titled Modern Combat 5: Blackout.

Coming to mobile later this year, Modern Combat 5: Blackout takes place in such locations as Venice, Italy and Tokyo and involves the main character Phoenix securing a transport of weapons of mass destruction from a particularly well-armed terrorist group.

This is a nice excuse for action-packed combat sequences and a bunch of nicely rendered orange explosions. Before you jump straight for comments, there's much more to this game than meets the eye. A new Gameloft blog post published Thursday offers new details on the game's unified progression system and its four soldier classes...

iPhone 5s/5c is half price at Best Buy until Sunday

Best Buy, the nation's popular consumer electronics retailer, is offering latest iPhones with a notable 50 percent discount until this coming Sunday, May 11. The entry-level iPhone 5s model with sixteen gigabytes of storage is now available for $99 after a two-year wireless contract with Verizon or Sprint.

The 16GB iPhone 5c - which normally costs $99 after a two-year contract over at the Online Apple Store (and through many other carriers/retailers) - will now set you back $49.95 in upfront payment. Higher-capacity iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c models are half price, too...

Apple litigation won’t cripple Android, Samsung lawyer insists

The Great Apple-Samsung Legal War has been raging on for years now, and on a scale almost unprecedented in business history. The latest in the saga involves a California court awarding Apple $119.6 million in damages over Samsung patent infringement, a far cry from the $2 billion the iPhone maker was shooting for.

The ruling has prompted many watchers to question the wisdom of Apple's thermonuclear war on Android. Adding the latest damages award on top of the $900+ million awarded to Apple from the first patent megatrial barely results in $1 billion. I'm certain this is the price Samsung is happy to pay for profiting from willfully lifting Apple's patented iPhone technology.

But no amount of litigation will ever stop Android dead in its tracks, argues an attorney for Samsung who represents the South Korean conglomerate in the courtroom...

San Francisco museum to honor Jony Ive with lifetime achievement award

According to a new report by MediaBistro, Jony Ive will be presented with this year's Bay Area Treasure Award on October 30. The award is granted annually by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in recognition of artists and creative leaders who have redefined visual art.

Ive will be the 15th recipient of the award, joining the likes of Star Wars filmmaker George Lucas and famed landscape architect Lawrence Halprin. And he's being honored for his long history of designing innovative products for Apple, which include the iMac, iPhone and iPad...

Stampede Run is Apple’s new Free App of the Week

Like any given Thursday, another iOS app has gone free today as part of Apple's ongoing App Store promotion that's been running under the 'Free App of the Week' tagline for months now.

Awarded the App Store Best of 2013 for Great Multiplayer and named Apple Editor's Choice, Zynga's Stampede Run is now available free of charge.

In case you haven't heard about Stampede Run, it's a hilarious game where you run away from mad bulls in the streets of Spain. So, what are you waiting for? Pick Stampede Run for the iPhone and iPad in the App Store, free of charge through next Thursday. Go, go, go!

Apple exploring ‘super-resolution’ iPhone imaging

If Apple's patent filing with the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) is anything to go by, future iOS devices could appeal further to iPhoneography fans by allowing them to take very detailed snaps using a fancily named 'super-resolution' imaging.

According to the filing, this could be achieved by using optical image stabilization - a feature that must be implemented in the camera hardware itself - to capture multiple images in a burst, each at a slightly offset angle.

The software would take it from there and stitch individual image data together to form a single super-resolution image, bypassing the need for more megapixels...

Instapaper introduces Highlights, revamps web UI

The popular read-later iOS app Instapaper (I prefer the free Pocket app, formerly Read It Later) has received an interesting update this morning bringing out a new Highlights feature which lets you create and save passages of text from any article, useful to keep those quotes and important notes handy. The biggest threat to Instapaper's further adoption is its pricing structure: unlike the free Pocket, Instapaper is a $3.99 value...

Hipstamatic takes aim at Instagram and Vine with new Cinamatic video app

Our youngest audience may be totally oblivious to this, but back when hipsters were not cool yet and way before Facebook-owned Instagram and Twitter-owned Vine made mobile photo and video sharing popular, there was Hipstamatic.

And just when you thought that Hipstamatic has given up on mobile photography, the photo editing pioneer is back with a new video sharing app called Cinamatic.

It's available now for $1.99 in the App Store, here's what it brings to the table...

Yahoo News Digest has gone global

Yahoo's News Digest iOS app isn't just gorgeous, it's a great time saver, too. For those unfamiliar with Digest, it uses Yahoo-owned Summly technology and algorithmic and human editorial curation to aggregate and summarize the day's most important topics from a variety of trusted sources and premium media outlets.

With your news delivered twice a day, it's a great way to start your day in the morning and wind down in the evening, without spending too much time catching up on the most important news.

The catch? The news it serves focuses on U.S. and UK markets. But not anymore: as of today, the new version of the app serves news globally, with both international and Canadian editions of the Digest now available...

Adobe debuts ‘Voice’ story creation app for iPad

Photoshop maker Adobe on Thurday released a brand new iPad application on the App Store. Named Voice and available for free, the iPad-only software makes it easy to pair your spoken words to any of the 25,000 included “beautiful iconic images” (or your own graphics) in order to “create stunning animated videos in minutes.”

Targeted at both consumers and business users who want to create compelling presentations that tell a story, Adobe Voice includes features to effortlessly create cinema-quality transitions and animations, add an inspiring soundtrack and render your presentations for easy viewing on any platform or device...

iSpaceship ground imprint now clearly visible in new aerial photos

Apple's upcoming Campus 2 structure, dubbed by the press the iSpaceship, is starting to take shape. As evidenced by a bunch of aerial photos taken last month, a large portion of the site has been demolished, with the rubble cleared out.

A new batch of photos taken from the air and published Thursday depict a spaceship-like imprint of the main building on the ground.

The dirt in the circle is especially interesting as it offers a hint of the perfect Euclidean geometry, in line with Apple's maniacal attention to detail. Check out the images included after the jump and dare telling me this won't be the office of the future...