2011 was a year made up of mixed fortunes for Cupertino-based Apple. From a trading and financial aspect; they went from strength to strength with success of the iPad 2 and the iPhone 4S becoming their most successful product launch in the companies history with 4 million units being sold in the first three days. Let us not forget that the share price also breached the $400 mark in 2011 for the first time.
After going through a relatively quiet patch during the latter months of 2011, the last three weeks have been a hive of jailbreaking activity. They say; you can have never have too much information, but there has been so many updates posted to blogs, and various Twitter accounts that in some circumstances it has been difficult to keep up. Let's try and bring some sanity to the situation and see where we are at.
Well it's that time again, when an analyst tells us everything we either already know or suspect about an upcoming product, and this time it's the next iPhone’s turn to get the crystal ball treatment.
Rumors of Apple working on a new 3D interface for the iPhone and iPad just will not go away. It has been a regular rumor ever since the original iPhone was introduced, and has been supported by more than a few patent applications ever since.
If you were one of the many people who were eagerly awaiting the iOS 5.0.1 untethered jailbreak, then I am pretty sure that on December 27th you took the plunge and liberated your device as soon as the tools were released by the development teams. Although everything may have seemed perfectly functional at first, chances are that if you attempted to launch iBooks, or various other applications then you would have experienced a crash.
The release of iOS 5 in October 2011 was one of the biggest iOS revisions and brought over two hundred new user features. A lot of these features have been well reported on and have been classified as substantial additions such as the new Notification Centre and the new iMessaging system.
The smartphone market is fiercely contested, with various carriers, manufacturers and software makers tripping over each other to draw the attention of consumers.
For those of you who have been involved in the jailbreaking community for quite some time, you will no doubt be familiar with the legendary hacker known as PlanetBeing. His real name is Yiduo David Wang, and at one point he was one of the core members of the iPhone Dev Team alongside the likes of MuscleNerd. Obviously we all know the former as one of the biggest names involved in providing baseband hacks and device unlocks, whereas Wang was more focused on the actual jailbreaks.
We brought you the information at the beginning of the new year that Apple were planning on holding a small scale event in New York, stepping away from their usual event home within San Francisco. At the time of writing there wasn't a great deal of information available about the specifics of the event, other than it was rumored that Eddy Cue, the companies Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services would likely be in attendance.
I think pretty much every owner of a smartphone device who has the slightest interest in music will have heard of the Shazam service. For those that haven't then let me introduce you to what I would consider the pioneering music identification service. Shazam launched in 1999 as a company who provided users with the ability to identify music via their mobile telephone. I remember the early days of the service when you had to dial '2580' on your phone then hold the microphone up to the music to allow the service to gather a sample. It then connected to the company using your devices data connection and sent an SMS back to you with the name of the song and artist.
