iPhone News

Celebrating our 1,000th video

Late last night I had the privilege of posting our 1,000th YouTube video. I've been creating videos for iDownloadBlog for almost two years now, and it's been an insanely rewarding and invigorating journey.

Oddly enough, doing video walkthroughs started off as just a test, something to spice things up every now and then at most. I never had the intentions of doing this to any great degree, let alone full time. To tell the truth, it was your kind feedback and helpful suggestions that made me want to keep going.

Of course, we started off small in our endeavors. In fact, some of the earliest creations were downright terrible in my opinion, both from a image quality and sound perpective. Despite these early hiccups, you, the viewers, have stuck with us from the beginning until now, and for that we want to thank you.

To celebrate video number 1,000, I've put together a special montage of some of my favorite moments from the last year and a half. Granted, this represents only a smidgen of what I'd like to share, but due to time I had to be realistic and limit the amount of content included.

What's been your favorite video moment thus far? We invite you inside to watch and to share your thoughts...

How to open Home screen shortcuts with Google Chrome

Earlier in the day we covered BrowserChooser, a jailbreak tweak developed by Ryan Petrich, which allows you to assign Google Chrome as your default web browser.

It's a great tweak, and works exactly as expected; it was even recently updated with a few new additions such as the ability to have a dialogue to select your browser of choice when opening a link, and the ability to make the dialogue sheets say "Open with Chrome" instead of "Open with Safari".

One thing BrowserChooser doesn't do, however, (at least for the time being that is) is allow you to open Home screen shortcuts/bookmarks created via Safari with Google Chrome. Browser Changer is a tweak that's been around for a very long time, and it was recently updated to allow you to do just that.

Check out our hands-on walkthrough inside...

Google+ SDK for iOS now available, Google confirms

Google's social thing, Google+, may be lagging behind Facebook (250 million users versus Facebook's nearly one billion globally), but the search Goliath has no intention of sitting on the sidelines.

Earlier this week, it announced that the official Google+ client would hit the iPad very soon and today the company took to the blogs to announce the official software development kit for iOS and Android.

Francis Ma, product manager with Google+, wrote in a blog post that Google+ platform for mobile is available beginning today in early developer preview...

Prepaid iPhone lands on Virgin Mobile, also available via Best Buy and RadioShack

Confirming earlier reports, prepaid iPhones are now available at Virgin Mobile, a Sprint-owned carrier in the United States. The 16GB/32GB iPhone 4S will set you back $649 ($549 for the 8GB iPhone 4) with one of Virgin's no-commit plans priced between $30-$50.

The plans offer unlimited data and messaging and you can also get a $5 discount if you sign up for automatic monthly payments. The devices is available at Virgin's ten brand spanking new retail stores (their first retail outlets in the U.S.), but also over at Best Buy, RadioShack and select local retailers...

Apple caught altering App Store algorithm again

Have you been having trouble finding apps in the App Store lately? Try it now. Word has it that Apple has undone whatever it did to to the Store's search algorithm last weekend.

Last Saturday, search results in the App Store appeared to all of a sudden start favoring download numbers and other factors ahead of app names and keywords. It was bad...

Top 10 Google Chrome features for iOS

As we reported yesterday, Google Chrome was released on iOS and it was met with much fanfare. Although it's not, and probably never will be as fast as Safari (unless Apple decides to even the playing field), it tries to make up for the speed difference with awesome features like cross-platform syncing, the Omnibox, and much more.

With this in mind, we've decided to cover 10 of our favorite things about Google Chrome for iOS. Who knows? Perhaps there will be a few items on the list that you weren't even aware of...

Apple wants to own iPad3.com

With the "new" iPad, Apple stopped applying numerical suffixes to distinguish iPad iterrations, a practice many expect to continue with a sixth-generation iPhone (think "the new iPhone").

The fact doesn't stop the company from fighting to secure ownership of the attractive iPad3.com domain name. Looks like someone's plans to pocket a little profit from serving a bunch of ads on a single homepage just got curbed by Cupertino...

Come again? How much is the iPhone and iPad nation worth?

A bunch of numbers have been tossed around thus far to illustrate how valuable the iOS ecosystem and its users are to Apple, but this tops it all. According to none other than Goldman Sachs, a total combined value of the iPhone and iPad customer base is nearly $295 billion (you read that right).

Talk about the value of loyalty! The figure represents more than half the Apple's value of $543 billion and easily exceeds market capitalization of Microsoft ($256 billion), Google ($188 billion) or IBM ($225 billion)...

Siri’s search accuracy graded as a D, Google text search gets a B+

Curious to figure out which is more accurate for searching, Apple's Siri or Google's traditional search engine, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster pitted Siri's voice-activated search against Google's old-fashioned text-based searching. He and his team set out to ask their iPhones a total of 1,600 questions, 800 on the busy streets of Minneapolis, 800 in a quiet room. His findings will no doubt come as a surprise to even the most vocal Siri proponents out there...

Google’s Chrome is already No. 1 free App Store app

In less than 24 hours following its official introduction, Google's Chrome browser for the iPhone and iPad has risen to become the No. 1 free app on the App Store. That's a remarkable achievement, one clearly highlighting the popularity of Google's excellent web browser. Although it doesn't use the speedy Safari Nitro engine, Chrome for iOS is very zippy (speed test here) and enables seamless synchronization of browsing preferences and open tabs across desktop and mobile installations via your Google Account...