Apple has been granted yet another patent for a fingerprint reader embedded underneath the display itself, a feature widely expected to debut on iPhone 8.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) this morning awarded the iPhone maker a patent for an “electronic device including finger biometric sensor carried by a touch display and related methods”. The company first applied for this patent on January 27, 2015.
Mozilla, the non-profit organization behind the Firefox browser, has acquired the read-later service Pocket for an undisclosed sum. The deal files as Mozilla's first acquisition and was confirmed by both Mozilla and Pocket.
I've been a longtime Pocket user because their elegantly designed cross-platform apps let me easily save stripped down versions of articles from online publications for reading later, even without an Internet connection.
Pocket will continue on as a wholly-owned, independent subsidiary of Mozilla. Pocket has native apps on App Store and Mac App Store, plus a browser extension.
Amazon's Echo will soon get some real competition as Google gears up to launch its Home smart connected speaker in the United Kingdom this spring. According to Rick Osterloh, Google's Vice President of Hardware, Home's “artificial intelligence skills and vast data” will give it the edge over Amazon's voice-activated wireless speaker.
Google's mobile YouTube app takes advantage of iOS's deep linking capability to automatically launch itself when a user taps a video URL in their browser. That useful feature doesn't always work as intended, however, prompting Google to push an update to YouTube for iPhone and iPad to rectify this. If clicking a YouTube link in Safari or Chrome doesn't launch the app and iOS doesn't display the “Open this page in YouTube?” pop-up, be sure to update your copy of YouTube for iOS to version 12.07.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that iPhone will feature a flexible screen based on organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display technology and supplant Lightning with USB-C.
The story corroborates KGI Securities analyst Ming Chi-Kuo's claims that Apple will release three new phones this year in the form of the brand new OLED-based iPhone 8 model with refreshed industrial design and the more iterative LCD-based iPhone 7s and iPhone 7s Plus updates.
Anyone looking for a quicker way of dismissing unwanted notification badges from their app icons without having to open the app in question might want to turn their attention to a new free jailbreak tweak release called ClearBadges3DTouch10 by HiDaN.
As the self-explanatory name implies, this tweak is intended to give you a way to remove notification badges from your apps with a 3D Touch gesture.
Anyone with a 3D Touch-enabled device is likely familiar with the bevy of menu options that can be revealed by imposing a simple 3D Touch gesture on apps from the Home screen.
Whenever one of these 3D Touch menus is revealed, iOS blurs the background to draw your focus to the menu, but a new free jailbreak tweak called BlurTouchClean by CydiaGeek can remove the blur effect so you can continue to see everything residing behind the menu.
We're back on schedule to talk about Apple Watch Series 3 rumors, Apple Park, a bunch of iPhone 8 rumors, Samsung's next iPhone killer (?), and the realization that Apple may not be working on an Amazon Echo-like device.
Subscribe on iTunes
Support Let’s Talk iOS: Please take a couple minutes of your time to take our survey, and enter to win a $100 Amazon gift card.
Apple today seeded fourth betas of iOS 10.3, macOS Sierra 10.12.4 and watchOS 3.2 to members of the Apple Developer Program. iOS 10.3 beta 4 (build number 14E5260b), macOS Sierra 10.12.4 beta 4 (build number 16E175b) and watchOS 3.2 are now all available as over-the-air downloads through the Software Update mechanism on devices with an appropriate configuration profile. We'll update the article if we find new features or important under-the-hood changes in the new betas.
The very first enterprise app born out of Apple's partnership with German business software solutions maker SAP will arrive by the end of March, or about a full year after the Apple-SAP deal was announced. SAP said at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain this morning that the official Cloud Platform software development kit for iOS will hit March 30 to help developers write business apps based on SAP's Cloud Platform and Swift, Apple’s modern programming language.
Rhoda Alexander, IHS Markit's director in charge of tablets and PCs, shared some interesting observations with Forbes over the weekend regarding Apple's rumored new bezel-less iPad Pro model which, according to other analysts, would house a display measuring 10.5 inches inside a body the same size as 9.7-inch iPads.
According to Rhoda, the new iPad Pro model should have a 2,224-by-1,668 display with the same pixel density as 9.7-inch iPads. For context, Apple's 12.9-inch iPad Pro has a 2,732-by-2,048 Retina display at 264 pixels per inch and its 9.7-inch counterpart has a 2,048-by-1,536 screen, also at 264 pixels per inch.
Chinese electronics manufacturer Oppo today announced a brand new camera system at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Developed in collaboration with an Israeli startup named Corephotonics, it's based on a periscope-style lens design which makes possible 5x lossless zoom, earning it a rather unexciting but apt 5x Dual Camera Zoom moniker.
What's more, Oppo's new technology kills the need for an unsightly camera bump at the back. The company did not say when the new camera technology can be expected to debut on its smartphones.