Apple's iPhone trade-in program has just hit the United Kingdom and Germany. First launched prior to the iPhone 5s / 5c's September announcement in the United States, it allows customers to gain some credit back for their current iPhone and trade said handset in for a shiny new one. Unfortunately, though, the return on any iPhone seems to be way below what most would perceive as a respectful amount, and thus, the trade-in program is probably just for those who find the business of private selling just way too intolerable.
It's typical in today's digital industry that we should begin talking about a product before its would-be predecessor has even hit the market, and although we're fairly sure that Apple will be announcing a new iPad 5 at some point this fall, resident Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities already has the scoop on the iPad 6, in a note which was picked up by 9to5Mac. Apparently, it will offer a resolution exceeding the current standard of Apple's so-called Retina iPad panel, with 30-40% more pixels over the 9.7-inch diameter.
Privacy is something that is very much the hot button topic on the Internet of late, and location privacy is possibly one of the biggest things that people are most concerned about. In a world where everything can track us in one way or another, people always feel like they're winning the battle if they can maintain a little bit of privacy.
People may, rightly or wrongly, accuse the smartphone market of being a little on the stale side. Six years in since the market was turned upside down by Apple when the original iPhone was announced, it's arguable that not a great deal has changed since then. Yes, we've got 4G handsets and yes, they're blazingly fast when compared to the original iPhone and the HTC G1, but they essentially look the same and the form factor hasn't changed a great deal either.
With mobile gaming, what was once the market that the likes of Sega, Sony and Nintendo dominated is now wide open for the taking. With its huge collection of games and devices selling like the proverbial hotcakes, it's safe to say that Apple is a real mobile gaming player at this point, if you pardon the rather heavy-handed pun.
The latest big Android release was definitely the Galaxy Note 3. Both big in the attention it drew and the sheer size of the device brought to market, Samsung's new phablet is proving just as popular as the two versions that came before it. No big shocks there, then.
Tutorial on how you can root Samsung Galaxy Note 3 running Android 4.3 the easy way using Chainfire, auto-root of which has served a viable, working solution for a lot of Android devices.
As we work our way through the month of October it's surely only a matter of time until we see an invitation to Google's Nexus 5 event landing in inboxes across the blogging world. With more and more leaks of not just the hardware but also the software that it runs appearing on a seemingly daily basis, it's clear that Google's new smartphone can't be too far away.
Switching between running apps on a smartphone or tablet is something that users just expect to be possible. Computers have no problems running multiple programs within different windows, so why can't mobile devices do it efficiently, right? Well, there is a little more complexity to handling this type of expensive multitasking on a small portable device, but we do live in an age where our mobile phones and tablets can handle this pretty adequately. With that said, sometimes adequate just isn't good enough which is why Switchr for Android is getting so much praise.
The official combination of hardware and software feature sets that ship with most devices is usually enough, but in some cases it just makes sense for developers to push the boundaries a little and extend the published capabilities of a device.
