Although preceded by Windows Phone 7.x, the perception is that Windows Phone 8 is Microsoft's first real stab at today's mobile market. The experimental phase has now passed, and the Redmond company is all set to launch its assault on Android and iOS with its new improved ecosystem and to begin with, the Surface. Naturally, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has stepped out and criticized his two main rivals, and while he calls the Android ecosystem "wild" and "uncontrolled," he also states Apple's iOS is is as highly-priced as it is controlled.
We've known for quite some time that Ryan Petrich is probably one of the hardest working and most productive developers in the jailbreak community, but if we need further proof regarding that notion; a wave of tweaks were released in Cydia bearing his name. Although a lot of the developer’s packages often land on his own private repository for testing purposes, a number of them were pushed out to the main repo for everyone to take advantage of. One of the simplest releases, but one that a lot of users may find useful is the UpsideDown package that pretty does exactly what the name suggests.
If someone thinks smartphones are merely devices for telephonic communication, chances are that they’ve either never used a smartphone, or they’ve actually been living under a rock. Today’s smartphones are nothing short of an electronic Swiss knife – they offer portable multimedia players, news readers, internet communication, handheld gaming, digital cameras, all packaged into one. With powerful quad-core microprocessors, adequate RAM chips and more than sufficient storage capacities, these devices are actually computers that you carry around in your pocket all day long.
olloclip, the company behind the self-named 3-in-1 photo lens attachment for the iPhone recently named an honoree at the CES Innovations Awards, has now readied a version for the iPhone 5 and it's ready to preorder. The iPhone is utilized by many as the only means of photography, and with innovative peripherals like the olloclip at large, it's not too difficult to see why.
The release of the iPhone 5 has, by and large, gone without major incident. The Antennagate scandal of two years ago with the iPhone 4 was regarded as the biggest tech fail of that particular year, and while the battery issue plagued a few iPhone 4S handsets back in October 2011, the software-related Maps app has been the only real issue this time around. With that said, not everybody has had such a great first two months with their shiny new device, and while a couple of complaints have arisen with regards to scratching of the anodized aluminum, some have had to contend with the altogether more pressing issue of poor Wi-Fi performance.
Apple and Samsung may require the help of a courtroom, judge and jury settle many of their differences, but when you consider what is at stake, perhaps the number of court cases and lawsuits isn't so disproportionately high after all. The two titans of the smartphone market now account for a whopping 46.5 percent of global smartphone sales according to a quarterly report by analytics firm Gartner, and in bad news for rivals, it doesn't look as though the dominance is about to plateau any time soon.
Steve Wozniak, known to most simply as "Woz" was part of the original Apple team alongside Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne, and although the Cupertino co-founder prefers to spend his days enjoying all forms of technology, giving seminars and following philanthropic ventures, it was always written that he'd return to the Apple fold in one way or another. While he won't, of course, be chipping in on how to move forward with iOS, or mulling over the hardware implementations of the next MacBook, he will be gracing the App Store next week as a character in a shoot-'em-up title for the iPhone. Sound interesting? More after the jump!
Everybody likes free stuff, and if that particular item of "stuff" happens to relate to something you've been enjoying for a decade, well, even better. To commemorate ten years of Xbox LIVE, Microsoft has been really generous to some ardent users of its online gaming service, and has, it would appear, begun sending off free, limited edition versions of the Xbox 360 console to some of those who've been playing all along.
Apple has led the way in removing optical drives from notebooks - a pattern followed by Windows OEMs with the ultrabook - and with the latest iMac refresh also eradicating the optical media slot, it's fair to say its days are numbered. With improved connections, most music, movies, and software can be downloaded and shared in a much more convenient fashion via the Web, but it's fair to say optical media isn't the only piece of once-essential hardware leaving our computers and notebooks in an apparent hurry. Improved online services have seen native storage space become less and less relevant, and with many consumers now relying heavily on Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud and SkyDrive, are we going to see an increase in Chromebook-esque devices which all-but omit the hard drive / flash storage?
Now Halo 4 and Call Of Duty: Black Ops II are done and dusted, perhaps the next most anticipated title will be Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto V. Up until recently, the developer has been dropping bundles of screenshots and images intermittently, but with pre-orders having officially begun and a Spring release date now confirmed, the level of excitement for the next version of GTA is reaching fever pitch.
