One of the primary uses of smartphones today - besides taking photos/videos, receiving/sending texts and calls, consuming content from social networks and RSS feeds - is as an organizational tool; we use it to wake us up in the morning, to keep track of meetings, events and other appointments and, of course, to keep to-do lists.
Most of you following the news here at Redmond Pie will own a smartphone. In fact, I'd guess that all of you own a device boasting features qualifying your cell for the "smart" moniker.
Perhaps not the most exciting, but one of the most useful aspects of an iPhone or iPod touch in my opinion is the built-in functionality to display weather conditions for you local city using the default stock Weather app. iOS has always had a default Weather app from day one, which has remained relatively untouched with every new version of iOS which Apple releases.
I would imagine that being the CEO of Apple would be one of the most challenging but also most rewarding job in the technology industry at the moment. The company is enjoying such a tremendous run of success with their mobile and Mac products and have seen their stock price soar in recent weeks, but that doesn't mean that the position of CEO doesn't come with its fair share of stress. After being in the position full-time for the last seven months, it seems that Tim Cook is settling in rather nicely if the latest employee opinion polls are anything to go by.
Facebook has long been trying to become our personal address and telephone book. Replacing the need to keep track of all our friends and their contact details, Mark Zuckerberg's creation has largely succeeded in its quest to run our lives, especially if you happen to be of the right age. We're looking at you, young kiddly-winks!
One of the pitfalls of being a huge company is that you become less agile and more prone to slip-ups that perhaps wouldn't happen if there was more focus, or if it had a better understanding of a the market or territory it is operating in.
Apple makes a number of premium products, but it is mainly the iPhone and iPad that have stolen the limelight in recent years. Their smartphone and tablet range are clearly their most successful products in recent years, but one of their other media devices is starting to gain some traction now, thanks to recent hardware and software updates.
The ongoing patent disputes between Apple and Samsung are constantly subject to media attention, and at present, U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh has the unenviable task of listening to the argument regarding Apple's U.S. Design Patents D558, D757, D618 and D678, related to the look and feel of its iDevice range.
Phil Schiller made sure to mention the A5X processor found in the new iPad performed 4x better than NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 chip. With a quad-core GPU, the new chip was also said to boast twice the graphics output compared with the iPad 2.
FireCore, the guys behind the Seas0nPass jailbreak tool have pushed out an update that provides a tethered jailbreak on the latest iOS 5.0 (iOS 5.1 - 9B179b) firmware. The update to the popular jailbreak tool currently only supports the second-generation Apple TV unit and therefore will not provide any jailbreak on the 1080p capable third-gen Apple TV. The tethered nature of this jailbreak obviously means that every time the unit needs to be rebooted, it will have to be connected to your PC or Mac to be put into a jailbroken state.
