When Apple CEO Tim Cook stepped onto the stage at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, we already had a pretty good idea of what he and his merry men were planning on announcing. The run up to WWDC was filled with the usual speculation and Internet chit chat, with the world wide web correctly predicting that OS X Mountain Lion and iOS 6 would feature heavily on the agenda.
When Apple announced iOS 6 - the next installment to its famous mobile operating system - at WWDC earlier this month, the centerpiece feature turned out to be the hotly-rumored Maps app, which, in displacing Google's omni-present Maps offering, will include 3D aesthetics and turn-by-turn navigation.
You only need to have a quick look through the photography and video section of the official App Store to realize just how popular these types of applications are for the iPhone and iPod touch. The fantastic quality of the Retina display and the powerful abilities of the embedded camera units on Apple's latest generation iOS devices literally cry out for a functional application that takes advantage of that hardware.
If you are a smartphone user and aren't concerned about privacy and the security of your information then it could possibly be the time that you started to give it a little thought. Most iPhone and iOS device owners have a large number of apps installed, a number of which have some kind of personal information stored within them.
I’m a big fan of music discovery services but, unfortunately, the most popular ones like Pandora, Spotify, last.FM don’t work outside a handful of supported countries where streaming music from big music labels is allowed. Outside these countries, you have services like GrooveShark which, really, is the poor man’s Spotify. There is, however, one not-so-famous service that not only works outside the USA and Europe but also offers excellent music discovery features for free.
The iPhone 4S takes photos that one would generally expect from a (low-end) dedicated point-and-shoot camera. In smartphone speak, that is class-leading image quality.
Remember Apple’s suing spree of 2011? The company filed lawsuits against multiple popular Android manufacturers like Samsung, HTC and Motorola in regions across the globe from USA all the way to Japan. A few weeks ago, Apple sued Samsung again on basis of their Galaxy S III; while that and many other cases are ongoing, one very major case in one very major country has been dismissed – that of Apple vs. Motorola Mobility. Details after the jump!
Thanks to a marked increase in cloud-computing options, the days of connecting a physical cable in order to transfer files to and from a mobile device look to be behind us. Dropbox has been the omni-present offering, although with Apple, Google, and Microsoft all joining the fray with their respective services, competition for supremacy is certainly driving up the standards.
The excitement and adrenaline that surrounds the release of any new or upgraded Apple product is something that manages to take hold of the technology loving world every time the company decides to push out a new or updated piece of kit. We may feel frustrated for allowing ourselves to get so excited about a gadget or a smartphone release, but for reasons known only to themselves, a lot of people have a strong emotional attachment to Apple's kit.
I don't imagine that I am the only person in the world who spends most of his day buried face first into an iPhone, iPad or MacBook. And in that respect, said devices become something I depend on and can't honestly get my day's social and professional work done without them. It sounds pretty weird to say out loud, but the three Apple products I use daily have almost become an extension of who I am and I therefore like them set up just right.
