Thinking about the late Steve Jobs generally conjures up images of him parading around the stage of Moscone Center wearing his blue trademark jeans and black turtle neck jumper ensemble while showing off the latest Apple creation with his infectious enthusiasm. While a large portion of his professional life was entirely dedicated to finding Apple and then ultimately spearheading the company's resurgence from Silicon Valley obscurity, Pixar is attempting to ensure that his other career successes aren't forgotten by renaming their main building in honor of him.
Microsoft has renamed the official Xbox LIVE app for iOS, and released it again with Xbox SmartGlass functionality for both iPhone and iPad. The original Xbox LIVE app for iOS was released back in December last year.
BlackBerry has, for the past seven or eight years, been one of the foremost mobile brands utilized by businesses thanks to its reputation as offering a secure experience, but with Research In Motion - the company behind BlackBerry, struggling to come to terms with the changing face of the mobile industry, many small companies will be looking elsewhere for their primary mode of communication.
What's better than Windows 8 running on a touch-enabled computer? Well, Windows 8 running on a touch-enabled computer that's big enough to sleep on, of course!
Regardless of whether you are a fan of Apple's Siri or prefer to use Google's Voice Search on your device, it looks like giving audible commands to a smartphone or tablet is definitely here to stay and will play an increasingly important role in how we interact with our devices. We have recently seen a video comparison showing Siri and Google Voice Search going head-to-head and now we are seeing the release of the NowNow jailbreak tweak that is designed specifically for those who want to quickly invoke Google's Voice Search on their iOS device.
Some people may choose to forget or overlook it, but one of the main functionality of the iPhone is the ability to make and receive calls. Sure, the iPhone may have advanced media and web browsing features but it is still essentially a smartphone which is going to be used primarily for incoming and outgoing voice calls. The FakeHistory tweak that has landed on Cydia store doesn't directly influence phone calls, but does allow users to modify the call history that shows up within the Phone app.
In the mobile market, it's fair to say Microsoft has a little catching up to do, but having already released a very promising mobile platform and, lest we forget, the Surface, the Redmond company is now setting its sights on the increasingly-popular 7-inch tablet market. Taking a slightly different angle to the manner in which the Nexus 7 and iPad mini have been marketed, rumor has it the software maker's effort will be pushed as a "gaming tablet," and work on the purported "Xbox Surface" is already said to be underway.
Google's Android is by far the most widely-used mobile platform on the planet. Not only is it open-source, but recent improvements have seen its performance levels exceed all expectation, yet while Android's presence in the smartphone and tablet continues to rise, so does its reputation as being susceptible to malicious attacks. A recent report by Kaspersky Labs has just revealed that while Gingerbread 2.3 is now fairly dated, it remains the foremost target to malware, with 28% of all blocked malware attempts in the third quarter of 2012 originating from version 2.3.6.
It should be common news by now that Apple has taken the decision to have an executive shake-up in Cupertino, with a number of notable faces set to leave the company in 2013. One of the most well-known casualties of the internal restructure is Scott Forstall who has held the role of Senior Vice President of iOS over the last few years. Forstall has been in charge of developing and handling the direction of iOS and has reportedly been shown the door due to his inability to play nice with other executives, as well as the publicly perceived shortcomings in the new Apple mapping system and the Siri digital assistant.
Apple has obviously designed iOS to run perfectly on their iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices. Google build and engineer Android with smartphones and tablet devices in mind and Microsoft has built Windows 8 to work on an array of different devices, but it's unlikely that Google, Apple or Microsoft envisaged their software running on a DSLR camera when crafting the operating systems.
