When Google eventually took the plunge and pushed out the Chrome browser to the iOS App Store during the second day of their I/O conference in San Francisco, it answered the prayers of thousands of iPhone and iPad users who had been longing for a worthy competitor to the native Mobile Safari browser which Apple ships with the operating system. Chrome for iOS immediately jumped to the top of the App Store download charts and has remained there ever since with users loving the simple and elegant design with great features such as the Chrome Omnibar and gesture integration.
As powerful as Apple's iOS is, some users will always disagree with the way certain things are implemented throughout the system, meaning there will always be a place for jailbreaking in the iDevice ownership world. One of the much discussed areas of concern in iOS is the way in which users can see what is running in the background and invoke apps from the multitasking part of the OS, something that Apple added as one of the major new features of iOS 4.
Although Cydia is rammed to the rafters with packages, apps and extensions, the majority of us still have our favorite tweaks that we always go for every time we jailbreak our devices. Personally speaking I am a long time jailbreaker and over the years have tried out more packages than I care to remember. In fact, I dread to think how much money I have spent on the Cydia store in the pursuit of find those perfect tweaks that perfectly compliment my iOS experience.
Staying permanently connected to the people around us is one of the main benefits which comes associated with owning devices like smartphones and tablets. Being able to store all of our contacts and information about friends and family in once place is an amazingly powerful thing that shouldn't be overlooked, but what if we could head on over to the App Store and download an application which took that functionality to the next level? Maybe we can, thanks to the introduction of the deets iOS app.
Being able to have a plethora of powerful features while also having quick and efficient access to music playback is one of the great benefits of smartphone ownership. Once upon a time, mobile phones would have only come with certain limited features meaning you would be lucky if you got the ability to playback MP3s, never mind listening to those songs on the fly while using other apps. Having said that, listening to music can sometimes be intrusive and can detract from the main usage of the phone.
Apart from letting you take total control of the device, jailbreaking is becoming increasingly successful due to the fact that it allows great customization and enhancement of what is already an extremely powerful mobile operating system from the engineers over at Apple. No one is denying the fact that iOS is a phenomenal creation and certainly ticks most of the boxes which most users would need in an OS, but it never hurts if you get the chance to extend that functionality.
When mobile devices were first introduced with touch capable displays, it was quite an interesting shift in the way we went about completing certain on-device tasks such as creating text messages and composing emails. We had all previously been used to banging on physical keypads and getting that familiar and comforting mechanical feedback that reassured us that everything is working as intended, but now that we are a few years down the line, it's difficult to imagine using anything other than the touch sensitive virtual keyboards that we have seen on most new smartphones.
One of the great things about Apple's mobile operating system is the almost seamless and perfectly crafted animations that take place when users invoke a certain task, like switching between home screens, opening up a folder containing a number of apps icons or when pressing and holding on an icon to put the device into edit mode. The biggest compliment I can pay to the iOS engineers is that everything just works, exactly as it should, pretty much all of the time.
Instagram has managed to make itself one of the most popular and well-known apps on the App Store and Google Play Store, notching up over 80 million registered members on its extremely eventful journey. The Instagram story hasn't been without its set backs, as you might expect from a team of developers venturing into the unknown on a relatively new platform, but with the membership-base growing everyday and the relatively recent acquisition by Facebook, Kevin Systrom and his twelve man team are now able to relax a little as they continue to build the app and grow the Instagram name.
Although Cydia is packed full of great tweaks and packages, developers are still managing to find ways to innovate and produce tweaks which offer small but extremely useful functionality to jailbroken iOS users. With so many areas of iOS already having been amended and certain functionality already introduced through existing packages, the window for change is becoming smaller. But the Turn 2 Hangup package is bringing a very handy and useful little feature set to jailbroken iPhone users.
