Continue reading Brief Bits: Apple Retail Employee Steals 25 iPhones
Who’s feeling the hump day blues? Sure, the weekend is just two full work days away and some of us might have even had a day off on Monday for President’s Day (not us!), but this last full week of February sure feels like it’s taking its sweet ol’ time. Why not perk up the day with some Beatles ringtones, which are now available from iTunes? Or if you happen to live in Amsterdam, it might be time to start lining up at Apple’s new retail store there. For everyone else, here’s the rest of the tech news for this sleepy Wednesday, February 22, 2012.
Amazing how rumors sometimes quickly become reality, even within the same week! MacRumors is reporting that Apple will be opening its first Dutch retail store in Amsterdam on Saturday, March 3. The 10am grand opening has been confirmed both on Apple’s website as well as emails to local customers. To celebrate the unveiling, press will get an advance look at the new digs with a preview event two days earlier. The Amsterdam location marks 12 countries worldwide that have at least one Apple Store.
FireCore, LLC has announced Seas0nPass 0.8.2, a new version of the jailbreaking tool for the second-generation black Apple TV. Since there’s no newer firmware than 4.4.4, the update introduces a new feature called “stitching” which “allows Seas0nPass to utilize previously saved firmware signatures to jailbreak and restore an Apple TV version that Apple may no longer be signing.” As you may recall from iOS jailbreaking on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, Apple typically only allows users to restore from the most current firmware, which means tinkerers have no way to go backwards. The free TinyUmbrella software can be used to save these SHSH signatures from any iOS device (including the black Apple TV), which can then be used by Seas0nPass 0.8.2 or higher to restore an older firmware. As always, the Seas0nPass software can be downloaded free of charge from FireCore’s website.
It may have taken forever and a few days for The Beatles to land in digital format on iTunes, but it isn’t taking quite as long for The Fab Four to accessorize your iPhone with ringtones. The Beatles’ official website broke the news today about an exclusive deal with the iTunes Store to offer The Beatle’s 27 U.K. and U.S. number one hits for just $1.29 each. “Beginning today, fans around the world can, for the first time, purchase ringtones for the Beatles’ 27 UK and US #1 hits, exclusively on iTunes,” the website announced. “You can even assign your favourite tracks to your favourite people. The ringtones can be downloaded for iPhone, iPad and iTouch.” Of course, you could save yourself the $34.83 and just use GarageBand to make them yourself from the DRM-free iTunes tracks… but where’s the fun in that?
Apple just can’t seem to catch a break in China lately, with investigations of its partner factories and a trademark battle over the iPad name. Now, BGR is reporting that two workers claiming to have been poised by toxins “while assembling touchscreens for Apple’s iPhone” in a Suzhou, China factory have written an open letter aimed at those who are buying these products and asking them to push Cupertino for reforms. The letter was issued to the media on Wednesday afternoon from SumOfUs, an organization pushing an initiative known as the Ethical iPhone Campaign, which was penned by Guo Rui-qiang and Jia Jing-chuan, the two former factory workers in question. “In early 2010, it was independently confirmed that 137 workers, including us, were poisoned by a chemical called n-hexane which was used to clean iPhone screens,” the letter reads. “N-hexane is known to cause eye, skin and respiratory tract irritation, and leads to persistent nerve damage. Apple admitted to gross labour rights violations more than a year later.” The timing of the letter is also no coincidence: It comes a day before Apple’s annual shareholder meeting, and SumOfUs aims to get 100,000 signatures on their petition in an effort so they can deliver it to Apple CEO Tim Cook on Thursday. If you’d like to make your voice heard on the subject, head to the online petition and get signing.
Beatles ringtones aren’t the only iTunes news for this fine hump day -- 9to5Mac is reporting that Apple has introduced a new section of the iTunes Store called “Mastered for iTunes,” which promises users they can “experience music as the artist and sound engineer intended.” Universal Music Group has released a number of offerings for the high-fidelity section including Madonna’s MDNA, U2’s Achtung Baby and hey, there’s the cute Beatle himself, Paul McCartney, with his latest effort, Kisses from the Bottom. The “Mastered for iTunes” section also comes with a new white paper PDF from Apple which details the company’s audio mastering tools, outlining the “best practices for mastering and preparing music for distribution on iTunes.” A “Mastered for iTunes droplet” automates the task of creating iTunes Plus format masters from WAV and AIFF files, so indie musicians don’t have to over-think the process.
Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter
This week, I'm reviewing the Cygnett Icon Art Series case for the iPhone 4S. These fashionable cases are aesthetically pleasing and smooth to the touch, and they do so without adding any bulk to your iPhone. Read on to find out more.
Continue reading ‘OpenIPSW’ Now Online, Provides Info About iOS Updates
Caring for your first baby is a lot like caring for your first car: You never want to leave its side, can’t wait to show it off to your friends (but won’t leave them alone with it), delicately wash it, and take notice of every new sound. And like new car owners, first-time parents can be a bit neurotic about every fluid leak and fill-up.
Since you'll want to keep your baby as finely tuned as possible, you’ll need to keep track of everything that happens. Pencil and paper may work fine for gearheads, but parents need a bit more horsepower. For bumper to bumper coverage, Total Baby is miles ahead of the competition. And with that, we're done with the car references -- let's talk about the app!
The ultimate resource for everything about your little bundle of joy, Total Baby might just remember more about your little one than you do. Dirty diapers, feedings, sleep cycles, baths, vaccines, and even allergies are all stored in Total Baby’s boundless logs. Every bit of data -- such as length of breast feedings and poop frequency -- are effortlessly recorded and easily accessible at your weekly doctor visit.
There’s a built-in sleep timer so you’ll know exactly how much (or little) shut-eye you’re getting, and its easy interface is especially useful for on-the-go changings and cat naps. Extrapolated graphs can pinpoint trends in baby’s feeding and sleeping frequency, and handy CDC and WHO growth charts will let you see exactly how your baby stacks up against other kids.
But the best feature of Total Baby has to be its Wi-Fi sync, which lets parents (or grandparents) share data between devices. So when baby spends the day with dad, mom can get all of the vital statistics beamed right to her phone. Total Baby for iPhone is priced at $4.99, with no native iPad version available at present.
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The Best is a weekly column in which we spotlight the most helpful or impressive iOS app to fit a certain need, whether it's a part of your day-to-day life or just something cool that might come in handy down the line.
Continue reading iTunes Now Offering Beatles Approved Ringtones
The original Holga is a 120mm film format plastic toy camera with a lo-fi “lomo” aesthetic and a remarkable cult following. Photos taken by Holga artists often feature bright colors, vignettes, and spur-of-the-moment framing. Thanks to the Holga iPhone Lens Kit, those effects are now available to those of us who don’t want all of our photos to look like hipster art projects. And, considering the price you’d pay for rolls and rolls of film, processing, filters, and an actual Holga camera to get the real deal, the lens filter kit is a steal.
While die-hard toy camera enthusiasts probably won’t consider the filter kit a replacement for an actual Holga, it does have an array of fun effects that any novice iPhone photographer can appreciate. Effects include dual, triple, and quadruple split lens filters that produce a variety of kaleidoscopic effects; a 60mm macro lens; a red filter with a clear heart-shaped center; and red, green, yellow, and blue filters that drench your photos either solidly in color, or color the edges for warm, cool, and dreamy looks. Though almost every effect can be replicated with an iOS app, it’s so much more fun doing it on the fly with Holga’s circular lens adapter. It allows you to simply rotate each filter right into place and shoot away with the iPhone’s normal camera mode.
We “heart” the various effects we can achieve with the Holga iPhone Lens Kit.
At first glance the filters themselves don’t look crystal clear, but this actually contributes to the dreamy, Holga-like effect the kit aims to achieve. They also add a small amount of vignette to each photo, including photos taken in no-filter mode. And, the included 60mm macro effectively captures the world up-close, from flowers to raindrops. The case itself is slim, lightweight, and well constructed, but we didn’t love that the filter ring added some bulk to our phone—we weren’t even able to fit it in our back pocket. The case also blocks the iPhone’s built-in flash, which could be a problem if you’re hoping to take photos in low light.
The bottom line. We might not opt to keep the Holga Lens Filter Kit on our iPhone all of the time, but we like having the option. For all the simple photo fun that it provides, we’d say the kit is money well spent.
There’ve been several instances where my iMessages are delayed by a few minutes and then sent out as a regular text message. Sometimes this happens regardless of whether or not I’ve got full bars and my iPhone is connected to Wi-Fi. What gives?
Turning off Send As SMS will ensure you aren’t charged if iMessage can’t make a connection.
By default, your iPhone is set to automatically send the iMessage through SMS if the servers are down or you can’t find a Wi-Fi connection. You can change this setting under Settings > Messages. Make sure that Send As SMS is turned off so that you aren’t charged if iMessage can’t make the connection. Instead, it just simply won’t send.
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Last night ABC’s news program Nightline aired its tour of the Foxconn facilities for the iPad and iPhone are built. Apparently, the competition for positions at the factory is fierce and iPhone takes 141 construction steps.
One Safari user has filed suit against Google over alleged privacy violations. The suit stems from recent report that Google was bypassing Safari privacy settings and tracking users.
Facebook has announced improvements to make it easier for iOS app integration. The change allows native iPhone and iPad applications to get traffic from Facebook.
As we reported on Monday, ABC News’ Nightline aired a 30-minute special report Tuesday night that put the spotlight on factory conditions at Foxconn, where many of Apple’s products are manufactured. Missed it? Read on for the highlights.
The Verge has assembled a list of key points from Tuesday night’s Nightline special report on Foxconn. ABC News anchor Bill Weir is the first journalist to be granted access to the factories where Apple’s popular devices are manufactured and assembled, which comes at a time when the spotlight is already shining on these Chinese facilities rather intently.
As it turns out, the report didn’t reveal anything truly shocking -- or as The Verge editor Joshua Topolsky puts its, “there wasn’t much meat on the bones of the 30-minute report.” But that doesn’t mean the Nightline broadcast didn’t glean a few factoids about Foxconn and Apple’s relationship with the company.
For example, there are 141 different steps involved in making an iPhone, almost all of which is done by hand. Meanwhile, it takes five days and 325 hands to produce a single iPad, even though Foxconn manages to produce 300,000 iPad camera modules each day.
On the subject of the Foxconn workers, they receive $1.78 per hour for their work and sleep six to eight in a Foxconn-provided dorm room, which costs each worker $17.50 per month (yes, paid out of their salary). Foxconn workers also pay for their own food (70 cents per meal) and work in 12-hour shifts. Ready to sign up? New hires must survive three days of training and “team building exercises” first.
Last but not least, Apple’s voluntary inspections by the Fair Labor Association are costing the iPhone maker $250,000. And did you know that Foxconn executive Louis Woo would actually prefer it if Apple forced the manufacturer to pay its workers double the pay? Sounds like somebody’s making too much bank.
ABC News has posted the entire Nightline special report, which is available in all its Adobe Flash-plagued glory embedded below as well as through the ABC News app.
Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter
(Image courtesy of The Verge; video courtesy ABC News)
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