Apple

Apple and IBM roll out eight new apps, bringing MobileFirst for iOS portfolio to 22 apps

Apple and IBM have once again expanded upon their portfolio of MobileFirst for iOS native apps specifically targeted at businesses and enterprise, as born out of their exclusive enterprise mobility partnership established in the summer of 2014.

A total of eight new apps have been unveiled, as revealed on Apple's MobileFirst webpage, covering the healthcare and industrial products segments with new software like Ancillary Sale, Hospital Lead and Hospital Tech.

iPhone and iPad trade-in launches in China

Following an expanded trade-in program in the United States which offers store credits to Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone users looking to jump ship, Apple has now rolled out its iPhone and iPad trade-in initiative in Greater China, South China Morning Post reported Wednesday.

Available in all of Apple's eighteen retail stores across the country, customers can now trade in their old devices for an Apple Store Gift Card, which can be used toward a new device purchase.

Pandora CFO talks support for CarPlay, relationship with Apple

Pandora revealed on Tuesday it has plans to launch its online music radio on Apple's CarPlay, the in-car infotainment software set to be found in several vehicles on the market.

While Pandora is a little late to the party, as CarPlay launched in 2014, it's a seemingly perfect app to fit the car software. Many users already utilize the Pandora app on their iPhone to play music through their car's speakers.

Review: Todoist 10 brings themes, gestures and plenty of new features

Todoist, a mobile app and a web service aimed at cloud-based task and project management for both personal and professional productivity, has received a thorough refresh on Tuesday.

Available free in the App Store, the new Todoist 10 for the iPhone and iPad brings dozens of new features, including support for user interface themes, several new gestures to speed up common tasks, way more powerful natural language processing, new date options and many more enhancements.

78 percent of devices are now using iOS 8

Having been tracking iOS 8 adoption rates on a regular basis, it's clear now that the pace of user adoption of the latests and greatest iOS version has been slowing down since its peak in the holiday quarter of 2014.

According to the most recent numbers provided by Apple itself on the App Store Distribution webpage, iOS 8 is now installed on 78 percent of iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices in the wild, a marginal increase over the 77 percent adoption rate from two weeks ago.

Google brings custom snooze times and other perks to Inbox by Gmail

Inbox, a gesture-heavy, sleek looking email client for the iPhone by the Gmail team born out of Google's acquisition of the Sparrow app, is getting new features later today.

Among them: custom snooze times for your messages. Normally, Inbox lets you snooze messages you don't necessarily need to act right now using its built-in snooze options: Evening, Tomorrow, Next Week and Someday.

But sometimes a message wants to be snoozed until a specific date and time. This is now possible thanks to new features letting you customize your morning, afternoon and evening Snooze times in Inbox, Google said Tuesday. This new feature, along with other enhancements listed further below, is rolling out to Inbox later today.

Kids under 13 can now have Facebook presence with new Scrapbooks feature

Facebook on Tuesday announced a better way for parents to organize photographs of their toddlers and kids under 13 on the service, the Scrapbook.

Rolling out in the United States across Facebook's mobile apps for iOS and Android, in addition to the desktop interface, this optional new feature actually allows children under 13 who are not normally permitted to create a Facebook profile to have an official presence on the service, sans the actual profile.

Facebook's internal survey has found that 65 percent of the parents who share pictures of their children on the service tag their partner in these photos to share them with their partner’s friends.

NYT launches one-sentence stories on Apple Watch

If you ever wondered how the Apple Watch's tiny screen might lend itself to news consumption, one possible answer came Tuesday as The New York Times newspaper announced one-sentence stories designed specifically for the Apple Watch.

It's like the ultimate news summarization technology, only curated fully by human editors and copywriters. This new form of storytelling should help readers “catch up in seconds” on Apple's wearable device.

Microsoft announces low-cost $499 Surface 3

Microsoft on Tuesday upped the ante in the tablet race by announcing a new version of its Surface tablet/laptop hybrid, the Surface 3. Matching the iPad Air's starting price, the $499 device is being advertised as Microsoft's lightest, thinnest and least expensive tablet yet.

This non-Pro, low-cost version of the Surface runs Intel's new 1.6GHz quad-core Atom x7 chip (the highest performing Atom processor on the market) rather than an ARM-based processor, putting another nail in the Windows RT coffin.

The hybrid device has two gigabytes of RAM and sixty-four gigabytes of flash storage, runs full Windows 8.1, is upgradable to Windows 10 and offers an optional colorful keyboard at $129 for a $628 total before taxes.

Google+ Photos now appear in Drive, Auto Backup for images and videos available in iOS app

The search giant Google announced yesterday it is adding support for Google+ Photos to the Drive app on iOS, Android and the web. “Starting today, the photos and videos you keep in Google+ Photos will also be available in Google Drive,” said the company.

In addition to storing your photos and files together in Drive, the refreshed Google Drive for iOS app has introduced a new Auto Backup feature to ensure that your Camera Roll photos and videos are safely backed up in the Google cloud.