The iWatch

Good news for those of us waiting for a brand spanking ( ooh) new Apple product!

Yesterday, Apple’s application to trademark the term ‘iWatch’ in Japan was made public.

iWatch is, of course, the rumored name for the first wearable Apple device and the potentially out of this world Smart Watch. The trademark was applied for on June 3rd this year and is actually the second time that Apple has applied to trademark the name, the first being in Russia in February.

Momentum (and the rumor mill) for this product is building rapidly. Yesterday’s reports come after Bloomberg posted in March this year that according to their sources there were 100 engineers working on the planned smart watch, and after Tim Cook said in May that the wearable device market is one just waiting for innovation. And who better to do it than Apple?

Unlike other Smart Watches currently available (see the wonderful Pebble Watch), the much speculated iWatch will most likely be a stand alone device, with biometric potential that could turn the way we use technology on it’s head.
Suckily, experts agree that we probably won’t see the iWatch until the 3rd or 4th quarter of 2014.

C’mon Tim Cook! We want wearable device innovation, and we want it now! Or soon! Please?

Image courtesy of  Forbes.

Microsoft Games coming to iPhone

This is one to be filed under F for Fun! Erm… yeh, so anyway, who likes playing games?

Everyone? Cool. Later this year, according to reports via Reuters, Microsoft will be bringing a bunch of their X-Box and Windows games to the iPhone.

Helping bring their gamey goodness over into the smartphone world is Japanese gaming firm KLab Inc.

The first game is said to be Age of Empires, and is also said to be F for Free!

P.s We do apologize, some of the team here at iPhone Antidote appear to have been taken over by Sesame Street.

Images courtesy of isource.com and blogs.sfweekly.jpeg

WWDC lowdown!

Alright guys, so yesterday was THE BIG DAY!

The four day annual world wide developers conference for Apple began yesterday morning, kicking off at the Mascone Centre in San Francisco at 10am.

As per usual, WWDC began with a perfectly orchestrated keynote speech given by Tim Cook, featuring a few other key Apple guys AND more importantly, featuring some new Apple software and hardware announcements and previews.

DOUBLE RAINBOW EXCITING!

For the first time, the keynote was broadcast live from the Apple website and on Apple TV.

The two hour address was, as expected, super stylishly presented, with multiple media presentations, some jokes, and a few fantastic and even surprising new Apple products and updates.

The top things you should know about that were announced today are:

– The new Mac Pro. Stellar, revolutionary and round.

– iOS 7, the biggest change to iOS since the iPhone came out.

– OS  X Mavericks – the new operating system named after a California beach break.

– New Macbook airs with super extended battery life.

– iTunes Radio – the much talked about radio product that actually sounds better than we expected!

Super double rainbow exciting, right!?

We’ll have even more from WWDC coming up this week!!

iOS 7

Yesterday we were given a preview of iOS 7, and apart from the fact that we only saw a teensy snippet of one of our personal favs and the man mainly responsible for iOS 7, Jony Ive, the new iOS announcement exceeded even our expectations. And we had high hopes!

Now, this system update will not change your life drastically, it will not do your job for you or make you a more beautiful person, but what it does is promise to enhance your life, with it’s combination of a pared down and simplified beauty and increased functionality.

This seventh system update is the biggest change to iOS since the iPhone came out with the user interface changing pretty drastically as well as the addition of a number of new features.

As was predicted ( or leaked in a timely manner by Apple), the new iOS has none of the skeumorphic, life like graphics or icons as seen in the previous versions.There is a whole new color palette, completely new icons and the overall impression is a much cleaner, flatter, brighter and simpler user interface.

There is a translucent feel to the screen, which gives depth to the phone, even down to the wallpaper, which you can now see behind app icons, and that moves intuitively in relation to the motion in your hands.The typography, also, has been redesigned to be bigger, spacier and cleaner.

Apple has said that this is the future of iOS, that as well as being the biggest change to iOS since the original iPhone, it is a new beginning.And, well, we haven’t tested it out yet, but we like the way it looks. We like the new features, and we like the direction Apple is going with it.

Here are some new features that make iOS 7 super, double rainbow exciting.

Control center
Swiping up from the bottom of the device, you can find the all-new control center. This innovation provides quick access to preferences and settings. You will find switches for wifi, Airplay, a flashlight, do not disturb, brightness, airplane mode, and quick music buttons.

Weather, Messages, Calendar

Messages and the Calendar app have both been cleaned up and simplified. The updated weather app has animation representing live weather, (the lightening looked particularly cool) with the ability to see more details such as humidity, and scrunch all your favorite places together to see not only the weather in each, but the time in world clock format.

Multitasking

Pressing the power button twice will now give previews of apps that are open, rather than the small app icons that we see right now on iOS 6.

The phone will intuitively learn which apps you use most often and at what time. Background processing will then provide updated content, ready and waiting for the time that you use them.

This also applies with apps that send push notifications- when that happens, the phone will start processing updates because it knows that you will more than likely be opening that app soon.

The phone will recognize and take advantage of power efficient times, such as when it is connected to Wi-Fi, to update apps.

Airdrop
This is a new function, sadly only available on the most recent devices ( iPhone 5, iPad etc).

Airdrop makes it super easy to share photos, videos, contacts and other stuff between friends with iPhones. Connecting via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, you can simply click the share button and choose the recipient from those around you.

You can send whatever you want ( from apps that support Airdrop) and the person receiving can choose to save the item- it will then be located in the appropriate app. Photos in iPhoto, etc.

Safari

Safari is updated with a new full screen look and smart search tab, one tap access to favorites and better parental controls.

You also have the ability to see and browse your tabs from other devices.

Also… and this is kind of a biggie… no more eight tab limit! Oh my god apple, why did that take so long, but thank you, thank you.

Tabs are also now organized differently- vertically in 3D instead of horizontally, with the ability to reorder the tabs. To get rid of one tab you just swipe it to the left.

Photos and camera

The camera app now includes 4 camera options- Normal, square cropped, video and panoramic. You also have the option of a number of live filters to apply to photos.

The photos app has a brilliant way of organizing your photos using time and location to bundle your photos into ‘moments’, which are photos from the same time and/or place. These ‘moments’ can then be organized into ‘collections’, which are groupings of moments using that same organizational information.

You can also view your whole collection via year, see what locations you were in for each year, and scrub to find a specific photo.

Siri

Siri now has not one but two new voices, a more human like female and male voice!

A new interface, with sound waves to represent Siri when he/she’s processing, French and German capabilities and a whole whack load of higher intelligence makes Siri exciting again.

The results can now include photos within the app and has the ability to answer more questions more intelligently, with Twitter, Wikipedia and web search results from Bing integrated into the app. Interesting choice with Bing, but we’ll ride with it for a while…

Siri itself has also become more integrated into your device, and can perform functions such as turning the brightness down, turning Bluetooth on etc.

New app store
For starters, the new app store looks way better. Secondly, all of your apps will now update automatically, (down with those little red numbers!) and thirdly, we now have some new search options.

You will be able to search for apps based on your location, or or an event or festival you’re at. You can also now search for and find apps using age range, which is designed with kids in mind.

Itunes Radio
We have a whole other section on iTunes Radio, go here to read it ☺

Ios in the car
iOS will soon be integrated into your car by having your device display through the in-car monitors. A bunch of cars will begin to be integrated with Siri, Maps, messages and more in 2014.

The introduction to this was pretty broad, however there will be more details to come. The car manufactuors who will be including iOS in at least one of their models include Honda, Mercedes- Benz, Nissan, Volvo, Kia, Acura, Ferrari, Hyundai, Infiniti, Jaguar, Opel, and Chevrolet.

OK, so those are the big features. There are also a ton of different, smaller features in iOS 7, like the updated notification centre that can now be accessed from the lock screen, and synced across all of your devices, and the activation lock to try to prevent theft ( no-one can use your iphone unless they know your iCloud username & password.)

We think that iOS 7 is really pretty cool, especially considering that we’ll be getting at least a few more cool features in the hardware component around the same time (Fall this year). What do you guys think?

iOS 7 will be available to the public in the Fall. Demos for iOS 7 are available on Apple’s site- here.

First image courtesy of techradar.com, all others courtesy of Apple.com

Friday Afternoon App Review: Vine

So, Vine. It is no longer only wine in a Transylvanian accent; it is now also a mobile app. One of those fast up and coming social media apps that are going to take over the world. We feel like we should be running right now, that kind of thing.

The general gist of Vine is that it with it, you can create and post video clips. These video clips have a maximum length of 6 seconds and are posted in an unending loop.

The video clips that are posted have the ability to be shared on both Facebook, and Twitter, who since Oct 2012 actually own the app. So, cool. But what exactly am I using this for?

Well, companies have started using it in branching out further into social media advertising; some people are using it in journalism, it’s become big in film and there have already been Vine film festivals, and there are even those who believe that soon, video will take over the internet, and it all starts here. Bye, words.

You also get to see cool things like a person making a dog look like they are eating cereal. AND you get to play with stop motion, which, call us geeks but… it’s rad.

Three reasons you might have heard of Vine recently:

1. The head of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, climbed the Bay Bridge in San Francisco on June 3rd to celebrate the release of Vine for Android. He also put it on Vine.

2. Those people we all know who are always one step ahead of everyone else when it comes to cool new things are talking about it. Usually exclusively on social media.

3. Vine was also made famous for a reaction from one of the actresses of Game Of Thrones, regarding the so called ‘red wedding’ episode. And by that I mean I refuse to say anything more about it because the amount of people already talking about it is unbelieveable. Ever heard of spoilers people??

Anyway.

The app is pleasantly simple to use. You can browse through the editor’s picks of video’s, the popular section, or search for specific video’s by using people’s names or hashtags. To make your own video, simply press the video camera button, and Vine will take you through a tutorial.

Vine is free from the app store, however due to Twitter not forbidding pornography explicitly ( Ha!), upon Apple’s request, you now have to be 17 to download the app.

Image courtesy of agbeat.com

Friday Afternoon App review: Tinder…

The two newest dating/meetup Apps that everyone is talking about are ‘Tinder’, and ‘Bang With Friends’.

Yes, you read that right.

We at iPhone Antidote take app reviewing seriously so we have tested both of these (…not to the full extent…) and, if you’re interested in meeting up, dating, or, umm… banging people, whether it be Facebook friends or strangers/potential friends, here’s the low down.

Tinder first.

The rather more subtly named Tinder has gained extraordinary popularity spread mainly by college students (those horny buggers). You sign in using your Facebook logon information, although what happens in the app, stays in the app- the (necessary) promise is that nothing will ever be shared on Facebook or posted on any walls!

The app does however use your Facebook profile picture, (cue reminder to make sure your profile picture is you, not you and your boyfriend/girlfriend, a group of people/a cat.)

The app scans the area using preferences set by you in the settings tab. Preferences include- the scannable distance from a 5-mile to a 50-mile radius, and the gender of people that you’re interested in.

Then, it scans. It’s pretty exciting.

And this is the crux of the app. A photo appears on your screen, and you say if you like them or not.

Tinder is mainly based on looks, but you can also see if you have similar interests from Facebook, like the 49’ers or Coachella and you can also see if you have friends in common, which is good to know for many reasons, from ‘oh that’s neat’ to ‘oh god, don’t click like, don’t click like, avoid that awkwardness’.

You have two choices to like or dislike someone. You can click the cross or the heart, or you can swipe left for not interested, right for interested. Warning- this has the potential to become too automatic!

The first time you like or dislike someone, you get a warning asking you if you’re sure – and after that, you’re on your own. Not the end of the world, though.

Once you like someone, if they’ve already liked you, then you get a match! Yay! You now have the ability to message them through the app. You can also get notified if someone you like, liked you back after the fact. That’s a lot of liking.

If you dislike someone, well, no-one will never know. Kind of.

The people who had the most likelihood of being liked, in our humble opinion, was not only good looking people, but people who had good pictures- pictures of famous landmarks, famous people, the people doing awesome things.

Even though the app is designed to be almost purely superficial, it is human nature to respond to other triggers within the photo that suggests personality traits that are more admired- success, adventure, fun etc.

The user average (in our area at least) was 18-24 for girls, and mid to late twenties for boys, but there were ages up to 70 in both genders.

In our testing, guys will say that they like a girl far more easily than girls will say that they like a guy. Kinda like the world, right? Am I right?

Out of about 30 matches, only 2 people messaged after the match, one was super graphic, one was really nice. Sorry really nice guy, iPhone antidote was just testing!! Bad iPhone antidote.

So, Tinder. Definitey an addictive ego boost. Definitely useful for singles, but only if you and the person you match with are in it for the same reasons and you actually talk to the people you match with! Also, kinda like life.

Next time: Bang with friends. Review. Bang with friends review.

Image courtesy of Businessinsider.com

More iOS speculation

More speculation yesterday about Apple’s upcoming iOS 7!

So far, we all ( think we) know that the system update will be flatter and less skeuomorphic than the iOS we all know.

This means that some such features originating under Steve Jobs, such as the Notes app looking like a real notepad and other real world aesthetic replication will be gone under the leadership of Mr Jony Ive who took over in October last year. Gone also will be the shine and gloss of app icons.

Now, according to website 9to5mac, as well as being flatter, iOS 7 will have a monochromatic design and according to their sources, each app will have a white back with a splash of color individually assigned to that app.

Jony Ive is said to have made his mark throughout the whole of the updated version of iOS 7, which is due to be announced and previewed at the keynote address of WWDC on June 10th in San Francisco.

Looking forward to it Jony!

image courtesy of Redmondpie.com

Yahoo acquires Tumblr!

The acquiring of Internet social media/blog sensation Tumblr by old school industry stronghold Yahoo made headlines when it was announced on the 15^th of this month.

Tumblr has become a super popular social media icon both by hosting over 108 million blogs and by the public blog content increasingly creeping into other popular social media sites such as Imgur and Reddit.

Yahoo acquired Tumblr for a mere 1.1 billion dollars. That’s billion, not, like, a hundred. 1.1 Billion.  That, for those counting at home, is the most money anyone has paid for a social media company in years, the closest being Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram for 1 Billion dollars.

Yahoo has promised, and I quote; “Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business”. If they stick to it, this is good news to extremely loyal Tumblr’s who have been (and are)  scared that Yahoo will ruin their beloved social media site and who have threatened to boycott the site under the control of Yahoo.

Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO since July last year, seems to be making changes and acquisitions in an attempt to bring Yahoo into the future by gaining new technologies, and focusing on new trends in the tech industry.

As well as Tumblr, so far this month, Yahoo has also acquired the following:

Astrid – Productivity

GoPollGo – real time surveys)

MileWise – Travel Search

Loki Studios – Mobile Gaming

Playerscale – Online Gaming.

Fewf. To top it all off, on Friday  may 24^th, Yahoo submitted a formal bid to buy Hulu, the video service currently owned by Newscorp and Disney.  They are bidding against at least five other companies, and their bidding price, although undisclosed, is rumored to be between 600-800 million dollars.

Although Yahoo is still a popular website, Miss. Mayer, one of Time magazine’s top 100 influential people, is trying to envision a path to take Yahoo into the cool, trendy, (moneymaking) future.

Good Luck Yahoo! ( and Tumblr….)

Image courtesy of Redorbit.com

50 billionth App downloaded

On Thursday, Apple reached the awesomeness of 50 billion downloads from their App Store.

That’s 7 Apps per humanoid on this planet.

If Bill Gates bought every single download for one dollar… well he’d still have 17 Billion dollars left.

If every App did cost $1, you could use this note to pay for them-

Just kidding! ( Sorry Zimbabwe…)

If only one person per year was allowed to download an App, then it would really suck.

The earth is slowly receding from the moon, and will continue to do so for another 50 billion years. Take that Apps.

Anyway. Some facts for you :

The Apple store started off in July 2008 with a pitiful, measly-assed 500 apps available to download. Now there are more than 800,000.

In March 2012,  there were 25 Billion downloads from the App store. We’ve doubled it in just over a year.

The 50 billionth download was a game called  “Say The Same Thing” by Space Inch. It was free, and downloaded by a dude in Ohio, who now receives a  $10,000 App Store Gift Card. THAT’S SO MANY APPS.

According to Apple at the beginning of May, here are the top 5 paid and free Apps ( for iPhone) as per download popularity.

Paid

-Angry Birds

-Fruit Ninja

-Doodle Jump

-Cut The Rose

-Angry Bird Seasons

Free:

-Facebook

-Pandora Radio

-Instagram

-YouTube

-Skype

Us kids sure love games, huh. Speaking of which, the last app we downloaded was Mushroom Wars. Awesome, fun and challenging game known from Playstation- check it out, free from the App store (D’uh) but keep in mind you’ll be soon wanting to make one of those in App purchases in order to play it more!

So, 50 Billion Apps. There you go.

Images courtesy of Wired.com and CNN reflectively. 

iOS 7 Testing

In the lead up to WWDC, beginning June 10th in San Francisco, the guys over at Apple have been working their little butts off to get OSX 10.9 and in particular iOS 7 software updates ready and perfect before announcing them both at the conference.

After the debacle of Maps last year (press inflated or not), the dude in charge, Jony Ive, is stealing people from the OS X team to work on iOS 7 instead, and making everyone work double time if all reports are true.

What is also happening is a large amount of real time testing using the updated software- both on iPhones and iPads.

Companies in the tech industry, such as Macrumors and Onswipe have both noticed that since the beginning of May, there have been spikes in visits to both their sites and their partner sites from devices with Apple’s block of IP addresses; devices using iOS 7.

The devices are being tested in Cupertino and San Francisco, with 75% visiting from iPhones.

This means that Apple is in the final testing phases for the software update, which is proposed to have a major redesign with a flatter, non-skeuomorphic interface. Good news us, not so much for those predicting that Jony Ive wouldn’t make it to WWDC with a previewable product!

WWDC, is only a few days away! ( 24 totally counts as a few. Yessir.)

Image courtesy of  igeeksblog.com