What to do if you water, wine or vodka damage your iPhone

Hey guys. So we seem to have been referencing getting your beloved shiny iPhone wet recently. Tackling the hard to talk about stuff, as per usual…

We understand that it’s not funny when someone accidentally drops their phone into a pitcher of beer, or falls into a pool, or does something to a person that gets them so mad they revenge pee on their phone ( happened to a friend of a friend of ours…)

Well, no, scratch that. That stuff is really  funny, as long as it’s not your phone, and if it is your phone, you usually get your sense of humor back if, IF you can rescue your wet wet iPhone.

Here’s what you should do to try rescue that poor wet puppy!

1, Don’t freak out. Crying will just bring more wetness. Duh. Your phone needs you to be strong, just like your Grandfather when he used to, like, walk all day in the snow to get to work and stuff.

2,  If the phone is submerged, unsubmerge it. Dry the surfaces real quick.

3, If the phone is still on, turn it off ASAP. If it’s already off, don’t try and turn the phone on RESIST THE URGE! Trust us. If your iPhone refuses to respond to your touch and refuses to turn off, well… no you can probably cry a little bit.

4, From here, it kind of depends on what stores you have at your disposal. The easiest helpful drying ingredient most people can get their hands on is Rice.  Put some rice in a ziplock bag or tupperware container – anything airtight- and completely envelop the phone within.

5, Rice is a great option, but what’s better is Silica Gel. Silica Gel is the stuff that’s inside those little packets of stuff you get in Beef Jerkey bags.

You can buy these at craft stores ( It’s intended use here is for flower drying). Again, submerge your phone in an airtight container full of the sachet’s.

6, If you have a good hardware store nearby, you could try to get DampRid.Works the same as the Silica Gel. Again with the airtight container, submerge, etc.

7, Place the container/ziplock bag in a warm dry place.

8, DON’T TOUCH YOUR PHONE FOR 24 HOURS! Even if you think it might really be ok, and you’re expecting the most important text ever, leave it in there. We would actually recommend leaving the phone for a full 48 hours, but the minimum has to be 24 hours to give it the best chance of surviving.

Poor little fella.

If all of this fails, send him on over to us, we’ll give you some CASHMONEY and make a nice new home for him out here on the farm.  You can do this HERE. 

Image courtesy of gameconsoleworld.com, robotroom.com & countrylife.co.uk

The Next iPhone

Let’s talk about The Next iPhone.

We’ve already told you about the September announcement, (YAY- we’re still spinning) so here’s the short and sweet lowdown about what people are expecting to expect for The Next iPhone.

The Next iPhone will almost 100% be called the iPhone 5S, rather than the iPhone 6.

Above is a photo released into the world of an apparent prototype iPhone 5S next to an iPhone 5, said to have been taken by manufacturing sources of Macrumors. If it’s not fake, then we can go ahead and say that there will not be any super giant size or design changes coming up for The Next iPhone.

The phone will more than likely be released a few weeks after the Sept 10th announcement, around the 23rd, also coinciding with the public release of iOS 7.

It will have a higher resolution camera, purportedly 12 megapixel with possible slow motion video capabilities.

It will probably have duel LED flash capabilities on the rear camera, which according to the pictures sourced by Macrumors.com, look like they’re separated for Tungsten color balance and Daylight color balance. All round better low-light, basically. This is the picture from their source in one of the manufacturing companies:

The 5S will very likely have bigger battery capacity. Yay!

It is rumored to have an A7 chip, built by either Apple themselves or by Taiwan-based chip foundry TSMC. This lets them move away from previous contract chip manufacturers and rivals, Samsung.

It might have NFC Capabilities.

It will supposedly have an updated convex home button with an integrated fingerprint sensor. The home button will be made of scratch resistant sapphire glass. Sapphire? Fancy!

It will possibly come in a third color- Gold, or champagne.

Champagne, gold, double the flash and sapphires. We can deal with that…

Not long now until we’ll know everything for sure about The Next iPhone! Until then we’ll keep you updated with all the rumors, guesstimates, financial expert statements and stolen pictures taken from manufacturing plants! Like spies! Kinda. Not really.

Images courtesy of Macrumors and Cultofmac

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.

The Annual Apple ‘Back To School’ Promotion

Something for the learners & learned amongst us!

Apple have announced that to celebrate that magical time of year- the beginning of the school year- their annual Back To School promotion will be starting as soon as tomorrow.

The promotion offers students who purchase a Mac a $100 iTunes/App store gift voucher, and for those students who purchase an iPad or an iPhone, they will be offered a $50 gift voucher.

Sweet deal!

What’s sweeter? This promotion is added on top of the usual student discount of $200 off a new Mac.

To be eligible you must be a college student, parents buying for college students, teachers (including homeschool), school administrators & Staff.

Happy learning guys. Also, we apologize for calling the beginning of the school year magical.

Image courtesy of top10films.co.uk

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

iTunes Radio/ i wish they’d called it iRadio cos it’s easier to type

Yay! We really like this one.

iTunes radio is the Pandora-like radio streaming app we’ve all been anticipating from Apple, except it’s not standalone, it’s stuck inside iTunes. Which is actually a lot better, because it makes it easier for you to intertwine your own music and what you stream.

iTunes Radio provides a bunch of featured radio stations like ‘Summer songs’, around 200 genre based stations, as well as whatever songs/stations that are trending on twitter, and stations that your friends are listening to ( using Airdrop).

You can create your own station ( and share it with friends) based on genre, song name or artist. You can also start a station from a song in your own iTunes library.

When listening to a station, you can tell iTunes Radio to ‘play more like this’, ‘never play this song again’, or to add the song to your wish list. Like Pandora and Spotify, the app will learn from these actions and will intuitively play songs and artists more and more to your liking, whilst at the same time letting you discover new music.

You can look over your entire history on the app, as well as your wish list, giving you a super easy way to buy the songs you like from the store, straight into your itunes.

iTunes Radio is free, but it is supported by ads. If you are an iTunes Match subscriber than you get it free, with no ads.

Now, people have been freaking out a little bit since iTunes Radio was announced yesterday, saying RIP Pandora ( and Spotify and iHeart Radio etc) and other such way-ahead-of-yourselves-stuff, which we think is a little hasty. We love Pandora.

But here’s the thing. A yearly Ad-free subscription to Pandora is $36. A yearly subscription to iTunes Match, and hence ad-free iTunes Radio is $24.99. Some people will care about that $11 a year if the service and experience is comparable.We just don’t know that it is yet.

On the other hand, if you are like a lot of people and can just put up with ads, even if it’s the same damn one over and over and over again, then we can’t compare iTunes radio with any other radio streaming service yet, because the only hint to how many ads you’ll get is the word ‘occasional’.

One thing that Apple has over the other services is a whole other system built into some of the devices iTunes Radio will be used on. Siri wil be integrated into the service so that you can ask her to change the song, skip a song, ask who it’s by, ask her to play more songs like it, etc.

Apple promises first releases of new tracks and has apparently made deals with Universal, Warner and Sony in an effort to get access to a huge range of artists and songs. We can’t wait to try it, but until then, and maybe after, we still love you Pandora!

iTunes Radio is built into iTunes and will be available in the Fall with iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks across all devices, Apple TV and  iTunes on PC.

Image courtesy of Apple.

Apple vs Samsung Update

For those who have been enjoying the life of those who live under rocks, Apple and Samsung have been very unhappy with each other over the last little while. They have expressed this unhappiness through the law, as you do.

They have both basically been going back and forth calling each other big cheaters and copiers and tattle tales  over their technology patents being infringed upon.

This has been going on for a while, but this time, Apple has lost. The United States International Trade Commission are the people in charge, and they have just overturned a previous judgment from last year, which had ruled in Apple’s favor.

They are now saying that, yes, Apple did infringe on some of Samsung’s patents, specifically to do with their 3G technology, and have henceforth banned some of Apple’s products from being imported into the States.

What does this mean iPhone Antidote?

Well, at the moment it means that the following AT&T products are banned from US imports and sales; iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad 3G, and iPad 2 3G.

This doesn’t mean anything if you have any of those models currently, or are planning on buying a used model. It also doesn’t affect Apple very much to be honest, because those products are specific to AT&T and are all old models.

What it does do is pee Apple off, and worsen the relationship between the two biggest smartphone providers. Yaaaay?

Apple will be appealing, with the defense that Samsung made these patents available for use under FRAND terms. FRAND = Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory. This is used to cover technology that is a standard and is meant to prevent litigation like this, and it seems to have been ignored by the ITC in their ruling.

Hey, guys, why can’t we just get to the part where we’re all friends and making super awesome blow our minds technology? Huh?

Image courtesy of applerumors.it

Know someone who broke their phone this weekend?

So, three day weekend, huh? Did everyone have a good time? Yeah? Party? Yeah?

Well here’s a story from our weekend for you.

One of iPhone Antidote’s friends was having a really good time, a couple of kegs were involved, a flip was attempted, and, as you do, the dude tried to take a video of said flip. On his iPhone 5. Whilst he was doing a drunken flip.

Needless to say, it was hilarious. Also; now he has an iPhone that looks like this:

Good thing he’s friends’ with iPhone Antidote, cos he just sold that stinky broken phone to us, and now he has this instead:

And that bag holds exactly $325 cash! Happy friend.

Do you guys know of anyone who may have committed a similar party foul this weekend? Let them know that they can be a friend of iPhone Antidote too!

We’ll make it allll better. With money of course! And… maybe a video of a dude trying to do a flip. Trust us, it is really hilarious.

Party Apps!

I was going to write about some Apple’s quarterly numbers and some statistics for you guys, but then I realized it’s Saturday. Saturday evening.

If people are at a computer screen, they’re more likely to want to read cool things that they can do later at a party right?

At some parties showing off your knowledge of quarterly numbers might cut it, but lets try for something a little cooler huh?

Try these apps out:

Mixology– This app never gets old. Thousands of drink and cocktail recipes right in the palm of your hand including heaps of solid usability options like searching using certain ingredients and finding the nearest liquor store. If you’ve never heard of it, well…uh, now you have. You can be the star of the party! Now go make me a drink.

Karaoke Anywhere- Now that everyone’s had a few superbly mixed drinks, it’s time for KARAOKE! Everyone loves singing in front of people whilst tipsy right? RIGHT! Plug your iPhone into the TV, and start singing along with about 200 popular songs. The lyrics appear on the screen along with the melody, just like real karaoke and you even have the ability to record the performances. eep.

If you’ve had enough of Karaoke, use Piki. Piki is a new app that is similar to Pandora, but it’s user based. You join, start by picking a song, and then you can follow other users who have similar songs in their radio streams. You can connect to friends using twitter, Facebook or Turntable and listen to all of their picks wherever you are. You can ‘re-pick’ songs from friends or others that you want on your own station. And no ads! So, start using Piki, add your friends, then by the time a party hits, you are only listening to music all of you have picked! Sweet! ( As long as your friends have good taste in music…if not, just make them listen to stations of  strangers that do)

Face Swap! Is basically exactly what it says. It takes a photo, from your photo library, Facebook or from a photo you take at that moment, and it swaps the faces of the people in the photo. Sounds so simple and yet is so hilarious.

Lastly, to take a photo of all the fun you’re having, whilst still being in the photo, you can either download TimerCam to make your iPhone camera have an auto timer on it, or download Cycloramic, which lets you take a panoramic photo with you in it. WHAT? Well, you stand your iPhone on a level surface and tell it to take a panoramic photo. And it does. WHAT? Well, so far it’s only for iPhone 5’s. You can still get the app V2.0 for iPhone 4 and 4s but you still have to hold it whilst it takes the panoramic photo.

All of these are FREE from the app store except for Cycloramic which is $1.00 You’re welcome.

Oh and btw, Happy Cinco De Mayo! Don’t do anything the iPhone Antidote wouldn’t do!

Photo courtesy of Wired