EA Sports, formerly a marketing gimmick of Electronic Arts but now a brand that creates and develops sports video games, on Tuesday released FIFA 15 Ultimate Team as a freemium download in the App Store.
Coming in at a massive 1.06 gigabytes, this iPhone and iPad game features authentic football action backed by Electronic Arts' massive marketing budget and whiz-bang campaign, with licensed player and team names, motion-captured animations and other goodies.
Software giant Microsoft, which owns and runs the Skype service, will unleash an update next month that will optimize the popular VoIP platform for the bigger 4.7-inch screen on the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus's 5.5-inch display, according to a Skype spokesperson Tuesday.
“We’re currently working on an update to Skype for iPhone that scales for iPhone 6 and 6 Plus screen sizes, which we plan to release in the next month,” said Skype.
The company wouldn't reveal if the new version will take full advantage of the larger canvas or simply blow up the user interface on 4.7 and 5.5-inch iPhone 6 devices.
Apple has provided carrier partners with a pre-release version of iOS 8.0.1, reports MacRumors. This means that, barring any major issues, the public release shouldn't be far behind, and it sounds like it's going to include a number of bug fixes.
According to the site, iOS 8.0.1 will address the bug in mobile Safari that causes some videos not to play, and one that prevents Passbook passes from being shared over AirDrop. It will also address an issue with installing VPN profiles, and more.
Less than a week following its September 17 release, Apple's new iOS 8 mobile software is installed on 46 percent of all active iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices in the wild that have accessed the App Store recently, reveals a dashboard on the Apple Developers website.
At the same time, the number of devices running the iOS 7 software has dropped to 49 percent as of September 21, with older iOS versions grabbing a meager five percent share.
Apple has posted two new iPhone 6 ads to its YouTube channel. The commercials are titled "Cameras" and "Huge," and they highlight some of the benefits of the updated cameras and larger displays found on the recently-launched handsets.
The two videos are very much inline with the spots we saw during the iPhone 6 event, in that they feature voice overs done by celebrities Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon running down various new features of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.
Apple is planning to unveil a new iPad Air next month, according to a new report from the Commercial Times. The Taiwanese news outlet says that the refreshed tablet is entering mass production this month, and will be ready to ship by mid-October.
Interestingly enough, the site claims that the next iPad mini may not launch alongside the new Air. Instead, it says the second-gen Retina iPad mini could be delayed until early 2015, meaning it could land around the same time as the rumored iPad Pro.
Apple and GT are continuing their work to strengthen sapphire, according to a new report from Wall Street Forensics. The site says the pair are hoping to reduce the material's "fundamental flaw of cracking," as well as improve its reflective properties.
On September 18th, the US Patent and Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that covers new processes to both aid in the strengthening of sapphire, and cut manufacturing costs—a major point of contention with sapphire critics.
From the same team that brought you the iPhone 5s stock-tracker app last year in the form of the Stock5S.com website comes a new web app which allows prospective iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus buyers to check availability information across 21 countries where the handsets are officially available for order or pre-order.
Found at iStockNow.com, the website covers as many as thirty-five retail spots, mostly in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and France. The information is refreshed daily and additional shops and countries are coming soon.
Tim Cook turned up in Manhattan today, to help kickoff the Climate Week NYC 2014 conference. The CEO was invited to speak as part of the 'enterprise-focused global solutions' portion of the event, and he participated in a short on-stage interview regarding Apple's carbon footprint.
More specifically, Cook talked about the various things Apple is doing to reduce its carbon footprint. Not only is it working to ensure that many of its facilities are run on renewable energy, but it's also working to make impactful changes through its supply chain and at the product level.
It's official: the iPhone 6 Plus has raised the bar for LCD display performance up by a notch and earned itself the title of the Best Performing Smartphone LCD display “that we have ever tested”, as per a detailed display shootout conducted by DisplayMate Technologies, a professional video calibration equipment producer.
Note that the benchmark did not take into account OLED screens from Samsung, which use a different display technology from the Retina HD screen on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.
In terms of the best overall smartphone display, which includes both LCD and OLED technologies, Samsung's Galaxy Note 4 with its Super AMOLED display still comes on top, leaving the iPhone 6 Plus with the “Best Performing Smartphone LCD display” designation.
The iPhone 6 also has “a very good display” which is somewhat held back by its lower resolution and pixel count compared to the iPhone 6 Plus.
Apple is looking to shut down its Beats Music streaming service, according to a new report from TechCrunch. Citing "several prominent employees" at both companies, the outlet says that many Beats engineers have already been pulled off the product, and moved on to other projects.
If true, such a move would be interesting considering the public praise Apple and its execs—namely Tim Cook and Eddy Cue—have given the service. It also recently added Beats Music to the 'Apps by Apple' section in the App Store, and launched a new Beats Music channel on Apple TV.
The new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus powered by the Apple-designed A8 processor leave the vast majority of Android competition in the dust in terms of CPU performance and battery life, according to a series of performance benchmarks conducted by the reputable hardware review website AnandTech.
The website's founder Anand Lal Shimpi recently joined Apple for an undisclosed role.
Speaking of the handsets' graphics performance, the site has found the iPhone 6 Plus performing a hair slower versus the iPhone 5s due to the increased screen resolution. It's also approximately fifteen percent slower in GPU performance than the Nvidia Shield-based tablets. Despite this minor setback, performance gains across the board translate into “a pretty solid lead over the competition for the iPhone 6/A8,” wrote the site.
According to Apple, the A8 processor has two billion transistors, twice as much as the previous A7 chip. The piece of silicon incorporates twenty percent faster CPU and a cool fifty percent faster graphics while enabling up to 50 percent more energy efficiency than its A7 counterpart, as per Apple's official numbers.