Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site. (Click on the image to see a bigger version.)
A self-described iPhone freak, designer Norma Kamali spends each morning reading the day’s headlines on her gadget’s current-events application. To unwind, she plays Scrabble on a game app. When her miniature dachshund Zeke acts up, Ms. Kamali looks up her iPhone’s encyclopedia on canine ailments.
For students of the Chinese language, there is one electronic dictionary application that seems to stand in a class of its own, made by a small New York-based software company called Pleco.
Certain language learners (myself included) have been known to carry otherwise useless (and outdated) Palm Pilots for the sole purpose of using the Pleco dictionary.
One of the frequently heard complaints about iPhone applications is that with more than 85,000 options, finding good ones can be tricky and time-consuming. Could the answer be yet another app?
Envio Networks on Tuesday is launching Chorus, a free app that shows users the ones their friends are trying out and suggests ones that might interest them. The Andover, Mass.-based company, which has received funding from Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners, specializes in social-networking technology and saw the Apple device as a good showcase for what it can do.
At its media event in early September, Apple threw down the gauntlet to Nintendo Co. and Sony Corp. Dedicated gaming gadgets like the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable “seemed so cool,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing, but “they don’t stack up against the iPod touch.”
The easy single-handed operation of the iPhone1 is not one of its obvious selling points but is one of those little features that grows on you and becomes nearly indispensable.
China Unicom may have gotten a bad rap for its lackluster iPhone announcement this week, but its launch upstaged the event at the Apple store.
The iPhone did, in fact, draw a crowd today, despite a rare rainstorm that had streets jammed in Beijing. At China Unicom’s outdoor event, several hundred people lined up to be first to buy the phone.
Apple Inc. is a master at creating buzz around its product launches. But as the popular iPhone approaches its official debut in China–the world’s largest mobile-phone market–consumers here seem anything but excited.
The creators of “iDon’t Care,” a video spoofing Motorola and Verizon Wireless’s “iDon’t” ad, said some of their detractors are missing the point.
Three Boston-area ad-agency staffers developed “iDon’t Care.” They said they aren’t affiliated with Apple or any of the other companies involved in the original campaigns–they are, however, iPhone and Mac loyalists, said Jon, one of the video’s editors.
The smart-phone wars are heating up. Handset makers are releasing a wave of new devices backed by a flood of advertisements, as some fight for survival in the fast-growing but increasingly crowded market.
Companies such as Motorola Inc., Palm Inc. and HTC Corp. are hoping new phones will help them reclaim market share from the reigning iPhone and BlackBerry.
With Apple posting record profits last week, thanks in large part to brisk sales of its iPhone, it may seem downright crazy to mount a smartphone challenge at all, let alone one that takes direct aim at the iPhone.
Nokia Corp. unveiled its first cell phone developed with China’s homegrown third-generation mobile technology Tuesday, saying it would aim to “democratize” the smart phone market by aiming to sell lower-priced handsets at higher volumes.
You’d think selling subscriptions within iPhone applications would appeal to media companies: It’s a model that promises recurring revenue streams, and it matches up nicely with the way they’ve always done business in print.
It’s been just over a month since news broke that Intuit, makers of Quicken budgeting software and Turbo Tax, would buy Mint.com for $170 million.
Some of Mint’s 1.5 million customers took to blogs and Twitter to complain about the deal and threaten to close their accounts.
About 1,500 to 2,000 customers did jump ship, said Aaron Patzer, Mint’s CEO, most within two days of the acquisition announcement.
Apple Inc. said Thursday it will let iPhone application developers offer their users the option to buy additional content or features within a free app on its App Store.
App developers said they received an e-mail notice from Apple informing them that the in-app purchase feature was now available for free apps and that it would “simplify your development by creating a single version of your app that uses in App Purchase to unlock additional functionality, eliminating the need to create Lite versions of your app.”
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