News tagged ‘iPod’

Apple today announced that users have now downloaded over 3 billion iPhone and iPod touch applications from AppStore. "Three billion applications downloaded in less than 18 months—this is like nothing we’ve ever seen before," said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.

Apple has sold 1 billion apps since the two billion milestone in September, reaching 2 billion in 98 days. That's 30,612,244 apps per day, 1,275,510 per hour, 121,043 per minute, 350 every second.

Our colleagues from Engadget.com released their own iPhone / iPod touch app to bring different tech news directly to our famous devices. The app features a whole bunch of useful features such as offline viewing, built in streaming and different customization options.

Engadget app is free and can be downloaded here.

iTablet rumors continue today, with the New York Times blogging that, according to an some Apple employee:

“I can’t really say anything, but, let’s just say Steve [Jobs] is extremely happy with the new tablet.”

Apple has had a tablet in the labs for years, but Steve Jobs and others didn’t see a mainstream market for the device or were not "extremely happy". It looks like now the situation is different.

Moreover, the NYT post adds that former Apple employee has told them:

“You will be very surprised how you interact with the new tablet.”

Anyway we have to wait for another month. Remember? Rumors say iTablet will be announced on January 26th.

The Financial Times reports that it has received information that Apple has scheduled a special media event for Tuesday, January 26th in San Francisco. A stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco was rented for several days in late January. Apple is expected to make a major product announcement. The topic is unknown. However, everyone is sure that it will be an iTablet!

Want more proof? Recently Apple asked app developers to prepare for a demo scheduled for next month. Notably, Apple has requested that the developers prepare their applications to run in "full screen" mode rather than limiting display to the iPhone and iPod touch's 320 x 480 pixels.

Exact specs of the tablet remain unknown. There are long-standing rumors of a 10" display and recent claims of a 7" display. Apple might make multiple models of the new device.

The Unreal Engine 3 is a modern 3D gaming engine which powers games such as Bioshock, Gears of War and Unreal Tournament 3.

Anandtech spent some time with Mark Rein (Epic Games) last week and was shown a demo of the Unreal Engine 3 running on a 3rd Generation iPod Touch. The demo included a flythrough as well as a playable level from Unreal Tournament.

The game engine requires OpenGL 2.0 so this will restrict the game to 3rd generation iPod Touches and iPhone 3GSs only. Epic is planning on making the engine available to licensees at some point, opening the door eventually to Unreal-powered iPhone games. Epic tells Anand we're going to see Unreal running on another mobile platform at CES.

Let's watch the video demo:

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According to research conducted by Chitika, nearly 45% of users still have the old iPod Touch firmware 2.0 installed and have not upgraded to the 3.0.

The reasons are numerous and starts from the need to pay for the upgrade - $10 could be an issue. However the main reason is the lack of motivation for upgrading. Unless you want to play with copy/paste, the 3.0 update doesn’t bring much to the iPod Touch - Push notifications are useless on Wi-Fi and many games still run on 2.0.

Who knows, maybe Apple will decide to make the next update to version 4.0 free just to encourage upgrades. Updates are free for iPhone users nad wee see that almost 95% of users have updated to 3.x.

This wonderful accessory plugs into the docking port on an iPhone (or iPod Touch), and turns Apple mobile platform into the holy grail of living room devices — a full programmable, multitouch universal RI remote. Included features are: an extensive library of IR codes, customizable buttons, and RF learning from other remotes. The accessorywill be used along with an app.

There is not much information about this gadget yet, but it will be officially announced at CES in just a few weeks.

SBSettings is a great application to quickly turn on and off different services. Recently two developers have released tethering toggles to easily enable and disable iPhone tethering from SBSettings.

The first called, "Tethering" by Filipe Pina makes changes to the files that the preferences framework makes, then restarts the service. The second called, "Tether" by Ryan Petrich uses the preferences frameworks and calls the functions that the settings app calls.

According to BigBoss, both toggles work well. You can download togles and SBSettings via Cydia (for jailbreaked iPhones only).

via iclarified and bigboss

The iPhone game F.A.S.T. (Fleet Air Superiority Training) is an air combat simulation game with online multiplayer functionality. Yesterday it was updated and today it became free. The regular price was $0.99. The discount is probably due to the addition of some new paid content that is avaliable through the in-app purchase.

Why not try it for free? Go ahead and download via AppStore (link).

Watch the video:

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It seems Apple is continuing to invest in advancing web-based technologies to provide a more full feature experienced on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Daring Fireball describes in detail an impressive new web framework called PastryKit. This kit is for making HTML, CSS, and JavaScript-based WebApps.
It is already deployed in Apple's iPhone User Guide web page (when viewed from an iPhone). You can watch the video at hte end of this post.

Apple has implemented a few key interface features in Javascript that could make web-apps feel much more like native iPhone apps. These include:

• Completely hiding the address bar
• Allowing for fixed-position toolbars that don't move when you scroll
• Allows for scrolling with momentum so you can quickly scroll long lists

Since these features have been implemented by Apple in Javascript, they could be available to any web developer.

Let's watch the video:

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MacWorld has listed their 20 favorite apps of the year for the iPhone and iPod touch. With over 100,000 apps in the App Store, MacWorld focused on 20 categories and narrowed it down to the best performer in each category.

Here is the list:

Best Messaging App: BeeJive IM
Best Photo App: Best Camera
Best Notification App: Boxcar
Best News App: CNN Mobile
Best Book App: Eucalyptus
Best Social Networking App: Facebook 3
Best Casual Game: Flight Control
Best Search Tool: Google Mobile App
Best Reference App: iBird Explorer Plus
Best Reader: Instapaper Pro 2
Best Multimedia App: MLB.com At Bat 2009
Best Education App: Pocket Universe
Best E-Mail App: Postage
Best Designed Game: Ramp Champ
Best Sports Game: Real Soccer 2010
Best Shopping Tool: RedLaser
Best Platform Game: Rolando 2
Best Strategy Game: Strategery
Best Twitter Client: Tweetie 2

You can read a bit more about these apps MacWorld's site.

On Tuesday, December 8, the official Playboy iPhone app hopped into the App Storу. Everybody can buy it for just $1.99.

The app is a scaled-down iPhone version of the largest selling men’s magazine, Playboy, and includes portions of the text from the following well known features … Playboy Interview, Playboy Advisor, 20 Questions, Party Jokes, Fashion and more.

However do not expect to see everything you can find in the magazine. Apple does NOT allow nudity in the App Store. So the application includes the Playmate’s intro, data sheet, preview pictures and exclusive behind the scenes preview video. Theresa Hennessey explained: “The pictures are all non-nude or cropped, either from the magazine pictorial or from the Playmate’s Playboy.com pictorial.”

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If you are a developer, make sure you do not make fake reviews for your applications. Apple in fact, has taken serious steps, blocking the accounts of a developer and removing 1011 applications because of fake reviews.

The developer "Molinker" had many apps. Each of them had about 50 reviews. The developer was using his promocodes (every developer gets 50 of them for every app) to write reviews for his own apps. One of the users, who bought several apps, investigated this issue and wrote to Phil Schiller. The apps and all the reviews were removed very very quickly from AppStore.

What’s incredible is that the developer had 1011 apps, which is almost 1% of the entire App Store. Well that’s 1% of the App Store that no longer exists.

The developers shouldn’t be surprised, but they are:

We got email from Apple yesterday [Sunday 6th] which told us our contract is changed to pending status.
Actually, we do not know what’s wrong so far. We had contacted Apple for such sudden changes, hope we can get quick response and actions from Apple.

Nice, isn't it?

Dragon Naturally Speaking is a popular speech recognition software application for PC/Mac. Soon it will be released for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The program for the iPhone will capture a clip of about 20-30 seconds and turn into text everything that was said. Then you can send your dictation via email or SMS.

Here is a video demonstration:

Fring has added video calling support to the iPhone and iPod touch via Skype. This is a huge step further. iPhone became a videophone!

It works on Fring to Fring, and Skype to Fring. Unfortunately, it's not bi-directional. You would be able to see whoever is calling you from a desktop, but you won't be able to transmit your image. The reason is because the iPhone doesn't have a front camera, so you can't do face to face. The application will support two-way video calling if the iPhone and iPod touch gain front-facing cameras in the future. The company already supports two-way video calling on several Nokia phones with such cameras.

A promotional video highlighting the new video functionality has also been released:

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