Skype for iPhone gains emergency call redirection, automatic call recovery

Following a Skype for iPad update earlier this week that has enabled automatic dropped call recovery, in-app purchase of Skype credits and a minor UI tweak, the Microsoft-owned VoIP provider has pushed out an update to its iPhone and iPod touch client this morning. Borrowing from the latest iPad build, the iPhone version will now automatically reconnect any dropped call.

More importantly emergency calls now get routed through the native dialer, which is interesting knowing most other VoIP apps don't support this feature. A few more tidbits and the full changelog follow after the jump...

FreedomPop confirms LTE iPad clip, launches in H2 2013

Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom-backed FreedomPop startup made waves with its Freedom Hub Burst no-contract wireless appliance that serves one gigabyte of free 4G data each month to up to 10 wireless or wired devices simultaneously.

Monday, Forbes reported that FreedomPop could unveil an iPad sleeve with 4G data via Sprint’s LTE network. A new report out today sheds more light on the matter: a FreedomPop LTE clip compatible with iPads is indeed due in the second half of this year. We've got more tidbits right after the break...

Sprint sold record 2.2M iPhones during the holiday quarter

U.S. carrier Sprint, the latest wireless provider to offer the Apple iPhone, announced Thursday it sold a record 2.2 million during the holiday fourth-quarter. A total of 6.6 million iPhones were sold for all of 2012, according to the company. Despite complaints of losses due to high subsidies, the iPhone has improved Sprint's ability to attract new customers.

The company said 38 percent of iPhone buyers during the fourth quarter were new subscribers. That's just slightly below the 40 percent of iPhones purchased by new customers throughout the entire year, according to the firm... 

Canalys: iPad accounted for 1 in 6 PCs in Q4 2012

Apple's iPad mini is doing the job exactly as the company planned: slowing a slipping market share. The 7.9-inch device is working so well one analyst credited it for preventing Apple's fourth-quarter share of the tablet market falling below 49 percent.

Another, even more striking tidbit: the iPad accounted for one-in-six PCs shipped in the fourth quarter of 2012, per research firm Canalys. And if you counted tablets instead of PCs, demand during the fourth quarter would be up twelve percent to 134 million units. Instead, PC shipments fell by five percent in 2012, emphasizing how tablets such as the iPad could recharge a flagging industry...

Apple, Samsung took 103% of 2012 handset profits

We have often written how the handset market is essentially a duopoly of operating systems - iOS and Android - as well as brands: Apple and Samsung. Yesterday came even another way the two are dominating the mobile world - profits. Apple and Samsung accounted for 103 percent of handset profits in 2013, a figure made possible by the zero or negative growth by six of the eight leading handset makers. Apple held 69 percent of handset profits earned in all of 2012, more than double that of the South Korean Samsung, which hauled in 34 percent of phone profits last year, according to Canaccord Genuity...

Evasi0n 1.1 released with fixes for Weather and long reboot bugs

Earlier today, the evad3rs uploaded two new packages to Cydia that were built to fix a few bugs found in the latest jailbreak: one that caused the Weather app to crash, and another that caused longer reboot times.

This afternoon, the team has released an update to evasi0n, bringing the utility to version 1.1. And as expected, it includes these bug fixes, so users should no longer encounter them when jailbreaking their devices...

Apple seeds iOS 6.1.1 beta to developers

It's only been a week since Apple released iOS 6.1 to the public, and it's already hard at work on the software's next update. The iPhone-maker has seeded the first beta of iOS 6.1.1 to developers this morning, bringing the build to version 10B311.

It's also worth noting that today's beta arrives just 48 hours after the iOS 6.x evasi0n jailbreak was released. So obviously, those of you who are jailbroken that have access to today's software update will want to avoid it until it's investigated...

iOS discovered to be saving deleted iMessage attachments

This is kind of odd. It's recently been discovered that iOS has been holding on to deleted SMS and iMessage attachments. The software stores all attachments in the Library/SMS/Attachments directory, and when they're erased from Messages, they're supposed to be erased there too.

But as many folks have pointed out, that doesn't seem to be the case. One user in particular, on a quest to determine what the 'Other' category listed in his device storage consisted of, found that the directory contained thousands of sub-folders with images he was sure he had deleted...

FullForce for iPhone stretches older apps to fit on your iPhone 5 screen

We recently published a post about ScreenExtender, a free tweak available in Cydia that forces legacy apps to stretch to the iPhone 5’s taller screen. As we published the post, Ryan Petrich came up with his own solution to stretch older apps to take advantage of the taller iPhone 5 screen.

Similar to his iPad tweak called FullForce, FullForce for iPhone forces applications to show in full screen mode on the taller device...

Pod2g shares more evasi0n stats: 40 million page views, 20% from China

We've been keeping close tabs on the popularity of the evasi0n jailbreak since it was released on Monday. Within the first 10 minutes, it saw over 100,000 downloads. And yesterday morning, Saurik said that it had crossed the 1.7 million mark.

Today, pod2g shares even more interesting stats on the jailbreak, noting that the evasi0n website has seen more than 5 million unique visitors, and 40 million page views in the last few days. Here's a breakdown of all of that traffic by country...

Twitter refreshes its terrible iPhone app with revamped search, tweaks

The popular micro-blogging platform Twitter today announced a freshly redesigned search experience for its iOS/Android apps and the Twitter.com web interface. This helps you find relevant tweets, trends and people to follow in a single stream. Plus, the reorganized search is now available anywhere in the mobile apps via a new icon.

You can see your five most recent searches, tap them to redo the search and clear your recent search history. Twitter says the updated iOS client launches faster, especially on older iDevices. It's a nice, albeit way overdue refresh. If you're using Twitter's official client, you can update your devices now. I'm sticking with Tweetbot...