Apple on Tuesday added 18 new banks and credit unions to the growing list of Apple Pay-supporting issuers in the United States. With these additions, Apple Pay is now supported by more than 400 financial institutions nationwide.
Launched in October of last year, Apple Pay is a mobile payment service that allows users to pay for goods and services using iPhone or Apple Watch. It's accepted at hundreds of thousands of retailers and restaurants around the country.
Roughly one in ten iOS users is listening to Apple Music, according to a new research study conducted by MusicWatch. The company, which provides consumer research for the music industry, collected data from the surveys of 5,000 U.S. consumers, aged 13 and older.
According to the research, a little over three quarters (77%) of iOS users in the United States are aware of Apple Music. Only 11%, however, of the group surveyed said they are actually using the service, and 48% of those who have tried it out said they are no longer using it.
Precisely two weeks following the release of OS X El Capitan public beta 4 and about three weeks after it seeded OS X El Capitan beta 5 to its registered developers, Apple today rolled out a fifth beta of the forthcoming Mac operating system update to public beta testers.
People who are on the beta program can download the new release through the Updates tab on the Mac App Store.
KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who is arguably the most reliable Apple analyst on the planet, predicted back in June that Apple's forthcoming 'iPhone 6s' and 'iPhone 6s Plus' refresh would introduce a new color option: rose gold.
No, not the full 18-karat rose gold body like the Apple Watch but rather a coat of paint, but still... A batch of images surfaced Tuesday on Chinese social media are now making the rounds, allegedly depicting an iPhone 6s in rose gold (or pink, depending on your sense of color).
Have a look and tell us what you think in the comments.
Right on cue, makers of the popular SwiftKey software keyboard for iPhones, iPads and iPods today rolled out a new feature designed to provide a valuable insight into which emoji symbols you use the most as your unique writing style and the emoji you use more than other people.
The app will even tell you which US state most reflects your emoji use. Called Emoji Insights, the new typing statistics shows you detailed highlights of your emoji use.
Just like the recently introduced standalone Facebook Messenger web app, Google's Hangouts service now runs in a browser. Taking advantage of modern web technologies, the Hangouts desktop web app can now live inside Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari, Mozilla's Firefox and other modern browsers, no app install required whatsoever.
Try it out at hangouts.google.com and let us know what you think in the comments.
FiftyThree, makers of the popular iPad drawing app Paper which supports a range of styli, on Tuesday teased a forthcoming Paper refresh that will bring full iPhone compatibility.
Paper for iPhone is “coming soon,” wrote developers on a newly published webpage where you can register your interest and sign up to be notified when the app hits the App Store.
Or, just follow iDownloadBlog as we'll be making sure to keep you in the loop.
A claimed logic board that recently leaked strongly indicated that Apple's upcoming 'iPhone 6s' and 'iPhone 6s Plus' smartphone upgrades will use an improved Qualcomm modem chip, part of its ‘Gobi’ modem platform, with 2x faster LTE download speeds at 300Mbps.
But Apple could be looking to diversify its suppliers two years from now by adding Intel to its supply chain for baseband modems, if sources who spoke with DigiTimes are to be trusted.
Spark, my new favorite email app by Readdle (good-bye Mailbox!), launched in the App Store nearly 3 months ago.
In my initial review of Spark, I praised its gorgeous user interface, powerful productivity features and integration with popular services but cautioned mobile pros to wait until a future update brings a few commonly used features that didn't make it into the initial release.
Spark 1.1 is here and with it come some much-needed missing features that make the app more powerful and productivity-focused. These include brand new swipe options, support for HTML signatures, email aliases and more.
Misfit, the maker of wearable activity trackers, and swimwear company Speedo today announced they partnered up to create a new Shine activity tracker designed to count swim laps, because step counting is so 2014.
The all-new 'Speedo Shine' is basically a special version of the company's 'Shine' fitness tracking wearable which caters to swimmers. Waterproofed to 50 meters, the device uses proprietary lap counting algorithms with “industry-leading accuracy” and launches on September 1 exclusively through Apple Stores.
An important breakthrough by Dr. Wang Changan of Tsinghua University and Dr. Li Ju of MIT promises to extend the lifespan of lithium-ion batteries that power today's notebooks, mobile devices and other gadgets by a factor of four.
The unexpected discovery has the potential to allow for an all-week Apple Watch battery life while significantly extending run time between charges when using your iPhone, iPod touch, iPad or Mac notebook.
Remarkably, a team of forgetful researchers have figured out how to quadruple a li-ion battery’s lifespan literally by accident.
The iTunes Music Festival, an annual 30-day event hosted and organized by Apple, is back this year in a bit changed form. Taking advantage of the buzz surrounding Apple Music, the event is now called Apple Music Festival and will run 10 consecutive nights at London’s Roundhouse, starting on September 19.
“Apple hosted the iTunes Festival in London for eight years, and now in honor of the launch of Apple Music, has renamed the event the Apple Music Festival,” explains the iPhone maker.
According to Apple, some of the headline acts include Pharrell Williams, One Direction, Florence + The Machine and Disclosure.