Yesterday, the Verizon iPhone was announced. Not much is different; there is a new CDMA antenna and mobile hotspot feature coined as "Personal Hotspot." This new (currently) Verizon-specific iPhone feature mimics popular jailbreak utilities like MyWi.
Personal Hotspot will be a new, pre-installed software feature for the Verizon brand of iOS. This mobile hotspot feature has been available on most Android phones for quite some time. Some more details have surfaced about Personal Hotspot...
I guess the most exciting thing about the Verizon iPhone's announcement this morning was the fact that you will be able to use your iPhone as a hotspot for up to 5 devices. This means you'll be able to turn your Verizon iPhone into a hotspot and share your Internet connection with up to 5 devices around you.
Sounds great, right? It is great. Not so great is that the pricing information has been left aside and no one at Verizon deemed it necessary to let people know how much this great feature will cost...
The Verizon iPhone has been announced, and if you're one of the millions that is probably planning on buying one, you can now check your contract eligibility. Among other things, the Verizon iPhone has a new antenna. This should make call reliability much better with the iPhone on Verizon's network.
If you are a current Verizon wireless customer, Apple has posted a page where you can check your contract eligibility for an upgrade. Verizon also has an eligibility page for customers to check their contracts as well...
4 days after AT&T slashed the price of the iPhone 3GS, it's now Apple who's discounting the previous iPhone model to the same $49 price tag. I think this move isn't so much related to the Verizon iPhone being announced tomorrow, but rather to getting rid off their old inventory.
If you don't care about owning the latest and bestest, then the iPhone 3GS at $49 is a hell of a deal. If like me you do like to get the latest gadget, you may want to wait until June/July, when the iPhone 5 will be released...
Yes, I made more money than Steve Jobs in 2010. Can you believe that? Chances are, if you worked for a minute or so in 2010, you too made more money than Apple's CEO. That's because Steve-o took a symbolic one-dollar salary for the year that ended.
This being said, don't feel bad for Mr Jobs because the total value of his Apple shares is worth over 1.8 billion dollars. Not bad, huh?
Apple and Android always duke it out in smartphone statistics. The latest Nielsen market share data says no differently.
From a poll conducted in November of 2010, U.S. smartphone market share is dominated by iOS at 28.6%. iOS is followed by Blackberry at 26.1%, and Android at 25.8%. These numbers are U.S. only, but it is interesting to see how iOS and Android are battling for smartphone dominance.
Depending on how you look at things, the iPhone retains the lead in smartphone market share. However, Android is having greater growth with new smartphone adopters. This means that more people are buying an Android for their next smartphone, and not the iPhone...
There are plenty of industry reports and infographics that give us an idea about the state of Apple's App Store. Apps are being sold at an average price of less than $2.50 each, and there is speculation that app sales could be a $34 billion dollar industry by 2014. In 2010, iOS users spent an average of only $4 each month on apps.
I have a feeling that the user statistic of $4 a month is a product of the way that averaging statistics bend numbers. There is still a huge divide between what most would call "power users," and the "average users" of technologies like the smartphone. (If you read iDB, most likely you're a power user.)
There are people that are really into buying and trying different apps, and those people purchase a lot of apps. Then there is the vast sea of average, mom-and-dad iOS users who may download a free app every now and then, but don't make money purchases in the App Store too often. The good news is, you can easily see how much you're spent in the App Store with a nifty utility for Mac OS X...
The App Store has never been a very quiet place. 2010 was no exception; thousands upon thousands of new apps were submitted to the App Store. Most of them aren't worth mentioning, but there have been some exceptional apps that have risen to the forefront of what the App Store has had to offer throughout the year 2010.
We've covered a lot of App Store apps this year on iDB, with the goal of keeping our readers in the know.
Now, we’d like to take some time to reflect on our favorite App Store apps of 2010. Being included on this list doesn’t necessarily mean the app was released in 2010, it just means that it was amongst our most utilized of this year. Drumroll, please…
Foxconn, the Chinese industrial giant, has been under the spotlight recently due to a string of suicides supposedly linked to the factory's awful working conditions. Foxconn is Apple's main supplier for product manufacturing; it's the place where our iPhones get made.
A french journalist and photographer, Jordan Pouille, recently revisited a large Foxconn facorty in Longhua, China. His visit was in tandem with a highly publicized pay raise for the factory's 300,000+ Chinese workers.
While it seems that the living conditions of these young workers (mostly teenagers or young 20-somethings) has improved since Foxconn's dehumanizing treatment of its employees was brought into the light, something still doesn't feel right about the way that our gadgets are being made...
It's that time of year. Christmas music, staff parties, plenty of egg nog, and gifts. As fellow iPhone users, what better gift is there to give each other than what we crave: more apps.
We could all probably name at least a few apps that we would like to have, but haven't bought yet. How nice would it be to wake up on Christmas day and have that new app you've been wanting?
Luckily, Apple allows you to "gift" an app to a friend. If you didn't know about gifting apps, I'm going to walk you through how to gift an app, along with some gift-giving tips...
Apple has never been known as an easy company to get along with. While it has always made some of the greatest products on the market, it is also notorious for being overly censored and stubborn with its decisions.
We recently reported that an unofficial WikiLeaks app had been pulled from the App Store. It was thought that Apple could have justified the pull based on their charitable donation policy. As it turns out, that policy has been plaguing app developers for some time, and they're starting to get frustrated.
The Huffington Post recently published an article on Apple's denial of in-app donations for charity. Many developers run non-profit, or support non-profit, organizations and would like to allow their app's users to make philanthropic donations in the same way that other in-app purchases function. For some reason, Apple has been denying these requests from developers, and it's making Apple look like the bad guy...
Sam's Club is selling AT&T-locked iPhone 4's for $147 with a two-year contract. This offer runs through Christmas day, and is the cheapest retail sale of an iPhone 4 that you will find this holiday season.
The Sam's Club "iPhone Christmas" is part of a growing trend. Retailers everywhere seem to be discounting smartphones around this time of the year, but there hasn't been much discount activity on Apple's coveted iPhone.
While this Sam's Club promotion is short, it's still a killer deal if you're eligible for an iPhone 4 upgrade...