If there is one thing that owners of Android phones laud over their iPhone owning friends, it's the ability to use their handsets as external storage for their computers. Plug an Android phone into a computer, flick a switch and the device appears just as if it was a thumb drive.
There's been much talk of late regarding Apple's expansive bank balance. As opposed to making a large acquisition like Google or Microsoft with its $100 billion kitty, the fruit company decided a share repurchase program would be a forward-thinking way to utilize some of that eye-watering wealth.
If you ever decided to take the time to sit and sift through the hundreds and thousands of packages that live within the default repositories in Cydia, I would imagine you would need to set aside a fair portion of your week in order to get through them all. With that said, even if you managed to sort through the packages, you only come out with a handful of tweaks or extensions that would be classed as essential installations for your jailbroken iOS device.
Of all the essential everyday uses our smartphones give us, the simplest - and perhaps, the most vital - is the alarm clock.
Part of the joy of owning an Android device is its open source-ness - allowing customization of almost any aspect. As such, a plethora of different launchers, ROMS and features are ported and shared on a daily basis.
Like most mobile device features, the idea of having a camera as a standard feature wasn't one that occurred overnight. Many years of quite terrible cameras passed, amid cries of "it will never stick", "who needs a camera all the time?", and, the ironically overused "it's just a novelty feature".
iOS-powered devices such as the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad are hugely popular around the world, with Apple's mobile OS considered to be one of the most complete offerings in the mobile world. Like all major operating systems that are updated periodically, iOS has seen organic growth over its life and has benefitted from multiple feature additions as well as numerous bug fixes. Apple have steadily introduced enhancements to their mobile OS over time which has significantly improved the software and ensured that it clings onto the top spot.
There can be no denying that Apple puts a lot of effort into the native apps that it ships pre-installed with their iOS and Mac OS X operating systems. Some of the installed apps that make up the individual OSes are extremely in-depth and functional pieces of software which are often a lot more advanced that any competing offering that may be available from third-party development studios. With that said, there is always going to be a part of any app, regardless of whether it is part of the operating system or not, that doesn't appeal to users.
The production of the AssistantExtensions tweak for Cydia has made it a lot easier for developers to produce Siri based modifications for download from the Cydia store. Rather than have to do their own groundwork and lay the foundations for hooking into the intelligent assistant, developers can simply build their modification as a plug-in to the already created AssistantExtensions framework making things a lot easier and a lot less time consuming.
Sometimes technology can be used for good, and other times it can be used for evil. The development and inclusion of the Siri intelligent voice assistant on the iPhone 4S is an example of how technological advancements can be a good thing and no matter what a user’s personal opinion of Siri is, we must all agree that is represents an exciting future for human mobile interaction. With that in mind, developers involved in the jailbreak community also have the ability to modify Siri behavior, making her dance to the beat of their drum, which isn't always a good thing.
