Apple Pay goes live for U.S. Bank, Navy Federal, PNC, Barclaycard and M&T customers

Apple's press release announcing Apple Pay said the mobile payments service would later come to Barclaycard, Navy Federal Credit Union, PNC Bank, USAA and U.S. Bank. Monday, U.S. Bank confirmed in a media release that customers can now start using Apple Pay, followed by a similar press release from Navy Federal and multiple reports from readers confirming Apple Pay working for PNC, Barclaycard and M&T customers.

The iPhone maker's support document outlining supported Apple Pay cards and banks had not been updated at post time with new information.

Southwest Airlines brings free Beats Music streaming to in-flight entertainment service

Southwest Airlines on Monday announced an interesting partnership with Apple bringing Beats Music streaming music app to its in-flight entertainment service.

The subscription on-demand streaming music service, which Apple acquired as part of its $3 billion Beats buy in May of this year, is offered for free.

Beginning today, Beats Music is available onboard select Southwest Airlines WiFi-enabled aircraft featuring a library of hundreds of human-curated playlists.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Companion app hits iOS ahead of tomorrow’s console release

The official mobile companion app of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare has been released in the App Store on Monday ahead of the game's global release on consoles tomorrow, November 4.

Featuring Clan Wars, emblem editor and more, the companion app makes it easy to create and manage your clan, produce in-game player and clan emblems on mobile for the first time ever that sync with the console game and even participate in Clan Wars on your iPhone and iPad.

The app is available free of charge in the App Store.

iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus hitting new countries on November 14

Although Apple has not yet formally announced the third wave of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus roll-out, 9to5Mac spotted that local carriers in Brazil, Colombia, Philippines and a few other countries are now advertising November 16 availability of the new handsets.

Specifically, the publication was able to verify that local carriers in Brazil, Philippines, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Guatemala, Lebanon, Kenya and Nigeria have so far announced the November 14 availability of the new handsets.

New Microsoft ad pits Lenovo’s Yoga 3 Pro convertible to MacBook Air

Microsoft's Windows channel on YouTube yesterday released a new commercial painting Lenovo's Yoga Pro 3 convertible laptop as a better portable computer overall than Apple's ultra-thin MacBook Air.

Titled 'Let's Dance', the 30-second commercial is critical of the Apple machine's lack of a touchscreen while praising multi-mode flexibility of the Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro, concluding that once you add the touchscreen to the mix, “it’s game over” because the Yoga 3 Pro proves there’s “more than one way to do what you want”.

CroppingScreen: take screenshots of specific areas of your iPhone’s screen

Normally, when you press the Home and the Power button simultaneously on your iOS device, a screenshot of your whole screen is taken right away. Unfortunately, there's no way that you can take a screenshot of a particular portion area of your screen other than cropping it manually. This is why a new jailbreak tweak known as CroppingScreen debuted on Cydia recently to make your work a whole lot easier.

Respring your device from the Settings menu with PullToRespring

Respring with a pull to refresh gesture.

If you're a long time jailbreak user, you'll know that a lot of tweaks require you to respring your device after installing them from Cydia or when you configure their settings. There is a lot of tweaks on Cydia that mimic the Respring functionality, but PullToRespring is a brand new jailbreak tweak that takes advantage of the Settings menu in order to perform the same job.

The Pangu team says a 0.4 Untether update is coming soon

It's hard to believe, but it's almost been two weeks since Pangu surprised us all, providing a jailbreak for iOS 8. Since that day, we've seen numerous updates and releases to fix bugs and address other lingering issues.

Many of you, though, are still waiting for an OS X version of the iOS 8 jailbreak. From the looks of things, the OS X jailbreak is still a little ways off. Pangu is currently working on a 0.4 release of its Windows tool, which will drop shortly after the 0.3 update was released to fix overheating issues in 32-bit devices.

Apple retail chief tells employees Apple Watch launching in ‘spring’

Apple's Angela Ahrendts has told staffers that the highly anticipated Apple Watch will be launching in the spring, according to a new report from 9to5Mac. The site says the company's Senior Vice President of Retail and Online Stores recently sent out a video message to employees, where she noted the new timeframe.

More specifically, Ahrendts tells her employees that they are "sprinting a marathon," hinting at the busy times the retail channel has ahead of them. From a transcript of her comments, she says "we’re going into the holidays, we’ll go into Chinese New Year, and then we’ve got a new watch launch coming in the spring."

Sam’s Club will discount iPhone 6 to $99 on November 15

Retailer Sam's Club will offer the iPhone 6 starting at $99 for the 16GB version on November 15th, according to a leaked flier obtained by GottaDeals. Black Friday doesn't begin until November 28th, but apparently Sam's Club is wanting to kick things off early, to presumably capitalize off the demand. 

MyWi updated for iOS 8 with public beta release

Intelliborn's MyWi, the landmark tethering tool for jailbroken iOS devices, has been updated for iOS 8 in the form of a public beta. The update, which is now available on Cydia, brings enhanced tethering capability to iOS devices.

Some may argue against using a tool like MyWi since iOS 8 makes it even easier to connect to hotspot-enabled iPhones and iPads. But MyWi has a definite one-up on stock tethering due to the amount of options and stats that it presents to the user. Have a look inside for the full change log and a rundown of some of the tweak's more compelling features.

Vivo Xplay conversions wallpapers

Sunday is wallpaper day on iDownloadBlog. The section is quite popular and is a running compilation back more than a year. Despite posting more than 75 individual wallpaper posts with more than one image per post, I have yet to feature a specific genre of images.

In an effort to completely "fanboy" our wallpaper section, the curated posts never blatantly featured wallpapers from another device. It felt like featuring wallpapers from other devices somehow would shine a jealous light on iPhone. If we love our iPhones, why do we need wallpapers from other devices? Well, it doesn't really matter where the wallpapers are from as long as they are esthetically pleasing.