I wouldn't like to think how many presses, taps and clicks the 'track shipment' option on Apple's website and official app have notched up in the last few days from users who are desperate to find out where their new iPad is. The fact that Apple decided to allow customers to put through pre-orders for this new product launch means that email inboxes lit up all over the world at the beginning of the week with order progress updates advising that the order has been shipped by the company. Unfortunately for excited consumers, it seems that Apple had advised the delivery companies to hold onto the shipments and try their very hardest to make sure they were delivered on the official launch date this Friday.
While the minor, incremental Windows Phone Tango/Refresh update is right around the corner - which, primarily, will allow Windows Phone to penetrate the lower-end emerging markets with diminished hardware requirements and functionality - a far more major update is on the horizon.
As well as the obvious introduction of the new iPad, Apple also made what many deemed as a statement of intent towards eventual connected TV by introducing an updated Apple TV device.
Although not everybody is taken by the MIUI aftermarket ROM for Android, some of its more favorable features have been plucked and ported through to those running other software, leaving MIUI looking much like a garden picked of its most treasured fruit.
Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, and anyone else who may happen to be using an Android-powered HTC smartphone, good times are coming, well, for some of you that is, as HTC have begun rolling out their Ice Cream Sandwich update to a very select few devices, with a larger device set to be included in the near future. The latest major release of the mobile operating system, Android 4.0, has been knocking around the smartphone scene since October 2011, but has so far only managed to make its way onto a very select number of devices due to various and unnecessarily complicated reasons.
Unless you've been living under a rock for the past week, you'll certainly have heard that Apple has showcased the latest addition to its iPad family - set to release at 8AM this Friday.
IntelliScreenX has been described by a lot of people as a good enough reason alone to jailbreak the iPhone, with some believing that Apple should adopt the ideas shown by Intelliborn and build them into future revisions of iOS. The commercial modification, which sits at home on the device’s lockscreen and integrates seamlessly into iOS provides a huge array of functionality which justifies the $9.99 price tag attached to it.
For established or up and coming iOS developers who are considering releasing something for download on the Cydia store, my advice would be to make sure that it is either entirely unique and innovative, or if it does offer similar functionality compared to an already available package, then make sure it dramatically improves upon it. With new packages being sent to repositories on an almost hourly basis, it stands to reason that we are ultimately going to see a slow down in unique creations and begin to see ideas regurgitated.
With our mobile devices' cameras improving year in, year out, and supplementary apps making editing and manipulating easy for essentially anyone to master, social networks from Facebook to Flickr see billions of images uploaded to servers each year.
Despite being an altogether solid mobile OS, Ice Cream Sandwich seems to be taking an age to reach many Android devices. Although the Samsung Galaxy S II has finally been blessed with the official ICS update, it will still only be the second device after the heavily-delayed Galaxy Nexus.
