Before the iPhone came along, the US smartphone market was dominated by a couple of major players. RIM, Palm, and the few third-party manufacturers that made Windows Mobile handsets ran the show.
But everything has changed over the last few years. Not only has Apple entered the market and overtaken the aforementioned companies, but so have handset-makers sporting Google's popular Android OS. So, who's the top dog in the US now?
This is a summary of the most popular news stories published on iDB this past week.
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This documentary was recently aired on BBC. It features several insiders, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who tell extraordinary stories of the rise, fall, and rise again of Apple with Steve Jobs at its helm.
Our friends at Just Mobile have partnered with us to give away 3 brand new Xtand Go White car mounts for the iPhone. You may recall that we told you about the Xtand Go several weeks ago, and now we're ready to give 3 of them away to lucky iDB readers.
This flexible, versatile car mount for the iPhone sells for about $40 normally, and the new white version is not yet officially available in the US. The winners of this giveaway will be some of the first people in the US to get an Xtand Go White!
Are you growing tired of waiting for an iOS 5 jailbreak? Do you wish you could go back to the good old days of iOS 4.3.3, when jailbreaking was simple? If you answered yes to either one of those questions, you might be interested in TinyCFW.
TinyCFW is a new downgrading tool by TinyUmbrella-creator NotCom. Using your saved SHSH blobs, you can use TinyCFW to downgrade your iPhone 4 or iPad 2 to iOS 4.3.3 so you can go back to having an untethered jailbreak.
One of the benefits of iCloud is Find My iPhone, a service that lets you locate and remote wipe a handset if it is stolen or misplaced. While remote wiping an iPhone on iOS 5 cleans the device of your personal information, a bug in iMessage has been discovered that lets a thief continue to send messages from someone's iMessage account.
Ars Technica has uncovered the bug, and the scariest part is that permanently deleting your Apple ID is the only way to circumvent the issue until it is addressed by Apple.
Apple released a number of updates for its iOS products this week. It seeded the second beta for iOS 5.1 to developers, Apple TV 4.4.4, and a small iPhone 4S update.
The latter release was strange because it wasn't available to everyone (just those on iOS 5.0 or lower), and the version number didn't change. So, what was it for?
What's better than 30 million? How about 190 million. Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty has predicted that Apple is set to shatter its previous sales records in 2012, with 200 million iPhones expected to fly off the shelves.
Oddly, more consumers are expected to buy iPhones in the first quarter of next year rather than this holiday 2011 quarter. Demand for the iPad isn't weakening, either.
After giving away free copies of the popular game Where's My Water, Apple is feeling generous again as it is offering promo codes for the puzzle game Bejeweled to its loyal Facebook fans.
In order to redeem your free copy of Bejeweled, head over to Apple's Facebook page, "Like" it if you haven't yet, and click on "Get Your App Free."
While we haven't seen too many app sales yet this month, we have seen quite a few apps go free for short periods of time. There was Where's My Water, High Caliber Hunting, and EA's Flight Control to name a few.
Now we can add another one to the list. Gameloft has just made its popular iOS racing title, Asphalt 6: Adrenaline, free for a limited time.
We've seen Siri do everything from turn on a fireplace to control a TV set, so there's not much that Apple's digital assistant can do at this point that would surprise us. But all of these tricks require use of the Siri Proxy.
What about the average user that probably hasn't installed the proxy? Well, there's still Wolfram Alpha. The database allows you to do a number of things with Apple's new handset, and it just added another cool feature.
Chinese manufacturer K.O. Gadget has just revealed a cool new hack that will make the Apple logo on the back of your iPhone 4S glow, much like the logo on MacBooks. For $42, the company will send you the kit to perform the mod and claims that it can be done at home in less than five minutes.
The mod is actually pretty simple since you are only replacing the back panel of your iPhone. The back panel has a transparent Apple logo which lets light pass through it, but the trick is the "light strip" that you add to it...