Apple is continuing its “famous person uses Siri” commercials by bringing in famous person John Malkovich to add a soupçon of Old World weltschmerz and philosophizing to what is, in short, a way to schedule a wake-up call without unlocking your phone. The commercials feature Malkovich in what appears to be the house above the nasty places in Hostel where he muses on fine meats and the meaning of life.
I don’t quite get these celebrity appearances but, in the end, I suppose they’re good for brand awareness. Siri isn’t for the geeks – it’s for the folks who may have once been in love with BlackBerries. Siri suggests a certain ease, a certain subsumed technicality that would draw in the C-level exec and, in parallel, well-known superstars. It is, in short, a little assistant that will never talk back to you, never ask for a raise, and never request that you stop cursing. → Read More
Google today launched version 2.0 of its search app for iPhone. Google completely overhauled the design of the app, which now looks and feels more like the app’s iPad version the company launched last November. The new version feels significantly faster than the last one and the new design works especially well for image searches. Surprisingly, Google hasn’t officially announced the update yet, but it’s already live in Apple’s App Store. → Read More
As evidenced by the success of Chatroulette, people get a kick out of seeing each other (anonymously) on video. Taking that to heart, WhosHere – an app that has allowed countless people to meet and greet each other in meatspace – has launched a video chat service that lets folks connect when and where they want.
The update embeds video chat into the standard text and voice chat already available through the app. Rather than allowing random video and photo encounters immediately, however, the system turns off most media sharing by default. → Read More
These Fraunhofer microprojectors are still quite a ways off from being implemented into real phones, but the technology is certainly interesting. Based on an insect’s compound eye, the projector is a wafer of tiny LEDs that can twist and turn depending on position. This means there is no “keystoning” and the beams striking the surface will always be “crisp and clear.”
“Our projector consists of hundreds of tiny microprojectors in an array, each of which generates a complete image,” said Marcel Sieler, a researcher. “This technology, known as ‘array projection,’ is modeled on nature – on the compound eye found in some insects – and with it for the first time we can create very thin and bright LED projection systems with tremendous imaging properties.” → Read More
Back in July of last year, we wrote about a New York City-based startup, called Consmr, which was attempting to build the Yelp, or Rotten Tomatoes of consumer goods. There’s now more web research on consumer goods than ever before, but few resources that use crowdsourced data and social integration to recommend the right product. There are cool sites like Fixya, but opportunity for a service that provides ratings and reviews of consumer packaged goods.
At the time, Consmr was just starting out and to really up its value proposition, it was focused on becoming a data-vore and growing its user base to increase the quality of its recs before adding a component. Of course, for a service like Consmr, it’s all about the aisle experience — being able to whip out your phone at the point of (in)decision. So, today Consmr added a big piece to the puzzle, launching its iPhone app, which is now powered by over 100K user ratings. → Read More
A post on CNN Money found that during a quick assessment of 10 Verizon stores and reps in New York – arguably a small sample size – the representatives would pitch Verizon’s Android’s 4G phones over the “old fashioned” 3G iPhone. Said one rep: “The iPhone is a great phone, but it’s on 3G. I’m not going to recommend a phone that’s outdated.”
Now I don’t doubt David Goldman’s story that Verizon reps are pushing Android inventory in New York if only to clear out the back room. However, I had to test it myself. I chatted briefly with a Verizon rep online and found that she (I assume it was a she as her name was Chiquita) just wanted to close the sale rather than steer me towards anything else:
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In September 2010, I wrote a post that ignited an absolute shitstorm around these parts. “Shitstorm” in this case meaning a post with a thousand comments, the majority of which were spewed up by rabid Android fanatics. The title of that post:
Is Android Surging Only Because Apple Is Letting It?
At the time, we were in the midst of a massive Android surge to the top of the smartphone ecosystem food chain. This was happening all around the world, but the focus of this particular post was the U.S. market. Based on some comments made by developer David Beach at the time, I wondered if, as the title suggested, Android was only doing so well in the U.S. because the iPhone was still only available on one carrier, AT&T?
It’s time to revisit that thought because there’s now absolutely no question that this was the case. There’s now data to back it up. What’s more, despite what some surveys suggest, this trend may have fully reversed itself. → Read More
iPhone unlocks are usually a tetchy experience – you have to have the right firmware on the right model iPhone at the right time. Now, however, thanks to a method that spoofs the activation server, you can unlock almost any iPhone semi-permanently.
The system, called Subscriber Artificial Module or SAM, requires a jailbroken iPhone and Cydia. To run it, you de-activate your phone, insert a new SIM, and then activate SAM. SAM spoofs the activation process, convincing the phone that it has been unlocked properly and without issues.
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I try my best to stay away from writing about speaker docks and phone cases. In my experience, they’re all the same, save for a few minor tweaks here and there. But today I stumbled upon a pretty novel little iPhone speaker dock that just so happens to be 100 percent green and uses no electricity whatsoever.
You’re intrigued. I can feel it. → Read More
Well, here’s an app that’s actually practical. Cloud Photos (for iOS) is a newly launched mobile camera replacement app which automatically uploads photos to Dropbox, as soon as you snap the picture. The idea here is that you can use the app to save space on your iPhone’s disk drive, as it allows you to save photos directly to the cloud instead of the iPhone’s Camera Roll.
Within Cloud Photos, you can browse the photos stored in your Dropbox folders, which displays them as thumbnails that take up 1/40th of the space of the original, the app’s developers claim. → Read More
Topps, the company best known for its Bazooka bubble gum and for essentially inventing and popularizing trading cards in the 1950s, is today releasing its first-ever mobile apps in conjunction with the start of the 2012 Major League Baseball season. That’s right. People of all ages may remember collecting and trading their favorite players’ cards as youngsters, and though trading cards don’t quite enjoy the same level of ubiquity as they did in decades past, Topps’ cards remain iconic for most sports fans. → Read More
There are a fair amount of third-party iPhone email clients out there, but few ever received the kind of reception that Sparrow for iPhone got a few weeks ago. Sadly, though, unless you have a jailbroken iPhone or use a third-party service like Boxcar, you won’t be able to get push notifications for new emails from Sparrow – but this could soon change. → Read More
The other day, Matt made a desperate plea: “Please don’t buy cheap Android phones.” To do so is a mistake, and the more you buy, the more cheap phones flood the market, and thus more people are walking around with crap up against their faces.
And after hearing that Samsung has sold 5 million Galaxy Notes, I think it may be time to make my own plea: Please stop buying giant phones.
Now, obviously I don’t take this request as seriously as the whole cheap Android phone thing. But I was actually musing to myself just last night that if people continue to buy phones with 4.5-inch + screen sizes, phone makers will think that’s OK. It’s not. It’s just as dumb as Motorola’s advertising, directed squarely at men with robots and cyborgs. → Read More
Alright. So you have your new iPad. You’re breathing easy knowing that the hectic, crazy part is over and you can simply relax and browse the interwebs on that stunning Retina display.
But not so fast. The iPhone rumor mill started picking up the pace before the iPad was even announced, and now that big brother tablet is out and about, speculation is revving up. Today, the rumors include a 4.6-inch Retina display on the next-gen iPhone, as well as 4G LTE connectivity. → Read More
Privacy and security issues have been at the forefront of tech news this week, with recently exposed loopholes in Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android indicating that apps can access much more content on our smartphones than most users realize. Superstar security researcherAshkan Soltani came by the TCTV studio to dig a bit deeper into how safe smartphones are today and whether things are getting better. → Read More
Vocre was one of the more popular battlefield companies at Disrupt SF 2011; the automagical quality of the app and their excellent on-stage presentation made them one of the frontrunners. They haven’t been idle since then, though, and they’ve taken the advice of some critics who suggested their pay-per-use model was going to turn off users.
They’re releasing a new version of the app today with a few significant improvements, most notably that the app is now free. → Read More
Apple may have seen $13 billion in sales in China last year, but apparently those numbers could have been higher if they’d had a bit more faith. The iPhone sold in huge quantities in the markets served by China Unicom, which since October of 2009 has been the only carrier over there to offer it.
Adding a second major carrier to the mix should expand the market and the sales, as it has here in the US, and China Telecom has stepped up to bat. It’s the third-largest carrier after China Mobile and China Unicom, though the situation over there is rather different owing to fact that much of the industry is state-owned. Regardless, it represents a major opportunity for everyone involved. → Read More
Apple has an undeniably huge opportunity in China, but it is still facing some big challenges. As the iPhone maker claimed the top spot as the world’s biggest smartphone vendor in the last quarter (October-December), it actually slipped in the rankings in China and is now in fifth position after ZTE.
But with Apple only kicking off sales of the iPhone 4S in China this January, it’s arguable whether we will see a delayed reaction from the launch of the new device, or whether longer term this is simply a market that will ultimately gravitate to local brands and cheaper devices in the longer term. → Read More
Whenever you see those photos and stories of the crazy crowds at Apple stores in China, they seem to always be about the launch of a new iPhone. But if Apple has its way, soon those masses will be clamoring for something else as well: Mac computers.
Apple CEO Tim Cook, speaking earlier this week at the Goldman Sachs conference, noted that China accounted for $13 billion in sales last year for his company, and in that time, sales of Mac computers in China went up by 100 percent.
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We’ve seen handset makers like HTC, LG and Nokia all warning of declines in smartphone sales. But if there is a slowdown affecting some, it’s not because people are not buying smartphones; it’s because they’re all buying iPhones.
Figures out from Gartner today say that smartphone sales totalled 149 million units in Q4 2011 — 47.3 percent higher than the same quarter a year ago, led by none other than Apple’s iPhone, which its analysts noted “saved” the smartphone market after two quarters of declining sales. → Read More
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