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

AT&T discontinuing HTC First!?

The Facebook phone, otherwise known as the HTC First, is not doing so well, guys. First released just over a month ago on April 12th, the phone is the first Android device to have Facebook’s interface- Facebook Home- preloaded.

The phone, once in critic’s and customer’s hands, was given overall generally positive reviews, especially for a low-end phone. The downsides were also duly noted by all, in particular a less than stellar camera with limited functionality, and the fact that your phone and therefore life was now taken over by Facebook. The phone actually encourages 25% more time on Facebook. eek.

Now, the end seems just a little nigh for the HTC First. On May 13th AT&T started selling the phone at a discount. Instead of paying $99 for the phone on a two year contract- now it’s just $0.99. If you wanted to pay for the phone off contract, you’re looking at a $100 price cut from $450 to $350. Take that anyone who bought the phone on the 12th!

The price cut is apparently due to poor sales, with less than 15,000 phones being sold since the phone’s launch and less than 1 million people downloading the Facebook Home interface for their Android phones.

Although this has yet to be confirmed, according to the guys at website BGR.com (who have secret AT&T sources, d’uh), AT&T has made the decision to discontinue the phone altogether, selling off as many units as they can before sending any unsold inventory back to HTC.

I’m fighting back tears, here.

But, it’s ok guys, really it is. It’s not the end of the line for Facebook Home! The Android interface is still available to download, and both the App and the joint App + device marriage will, after a bit of tweaking, be back. And better, maybe. And available on iOS at… well… some point. If we want it.

Until then, you can just  click on that little blue F whenever you want to, and spend that 25% of your time like, dancing instead. Yay!

Image courtesy of BGR.com

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.

The 2013 Webby Awards

The 17^th annual Webby Awards were held on Tuesday, celebrating the best of the best from the internet world. This is relevant because, well, we’re both on the Internet right now aren’t we? …right?

Each category has a people’s choice winner, taken from votes from over 200 countries and territories as well as a winner as judged by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

Here are a couple of highlights from the people’s choice!

Best User Experience– Tumblr! They also snagged best community. Let’s hope it stays that way, eh Yahoo?

Best Writing on the Internet goes to – The New Yorker. Don’t worry, I’m not crying, it’s just been raining on my face…

Best Business Blog goes to Mashable. Yay! We love Mashable!

Best Cultural Blog goes to mentalfloss.com. Awesome site- check it out if you haven’t already!

Best Game was angry Birds Star Wars edition.

Best Social Media Winner was Pinterest. We don’t really get Pinterest yet, but looks like we’re going to have to give it a try!

The Webby Person of the Year was Frank Ocean, for his use of the internet ( specifically Tumblr) to come out as bisexual, which in turn will hopefully help to combat homophobia in the hip-hop world. That escalated quickly…

The Webby Awards are well known for restricting the winners to an acceptance speech of five words, which was demonstrated quite nicely on Tuesday night by Steve Wilhite, the creator of the GIF ( Graphics Interchange Format), who received the life time achievement award. His five word acceptance speech was thus:

“It’s pronounced JIF, not GIF.” Groovy.

Jerry Seinfeld, while accepting his award  for outstanding comedic performance (for his web series  ‘Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee’) said this:

“Why five words? It doesn’t…”

oh, that Jerry.

A full list of the 2013 Webby Award winners can be found here: http://winners.webbyawards.com/2013 but be warned, ironically enough, the website is a little clunky.

Image courtesy of geekosystem.com

Life lessons from the smartphone sector

A life lesson for you kids today, brought to you by Intel.

Way back in the day before the smartphone ( I know it’s hard to think about, but it wasn’t that long ago), Apple offered Intel the opportunity to put their chips inside the first, as of yet unreleased, smartphone. The iPhone.

Paul Otellini, the CEO of Intel at the time, said no. No thank you. His reasons were financial, predictive, and perfectly reasonable.

Apple moved on and offered the opportunity to Intel’s competitor, ARM, who are now market dominant -in 2010 they had 95% share in the smartphone market.

Oops.

In an interview with The Atlantic, this is what Mr. Otellini had to say about his decision to say no:

“The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I’ve ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut. My gut told me to say yes.”

A life lesson for us all! Thanks, Paul!

Paul retired from his position as CEO of Intel yesterday after 8 years in the role, and 39 years in the company.

Image courtesy of Techpinions.com

Tuesday Deals

Here at iPhone Antidote, we care about you! Well, we mostly care about you in relation to iPhones and Apple stuff, but we care a lot about that.

So here are some deals for you guys to keep an eye out for right now. Whether it be your first time delving into the Apple iPhone world, or if you need to replace a stinky old/broken iPhone (and we all remember what to do with that stinky old iPhone once you get a shiny new one right? Am I right? Here’s a hint- it starts with…um, us. )

T-mobile currently offers shiny new iPhone 5s for a low low $99 with financing, Sprint is offering $100 off for new iPhone customers switching from another carrier, and there are very (very) strong rumors that Verizon are about to start a new promotion reducing the iPhone 5 by $100 around the end of the month.

If it’s not appropriate or even if it doesn’t feel right to be switching carriers right now, and you’re already on contract, we’ll soon be talking about the upsides of upgrading within contract, when, how and why you should do it.

Photo courtesy of The Security Auditor

New iPhone release speculation

More conjecture recently about the next iPhone release date has proposed that the phone will go into mass production in June, ready for a Fall announcement and public release.

There were earlier suggestions that the phone could be announced at WWDC in June, however now it seems that the consensus is that the main products on display at WWDC will in fact be iOS 7 and OS X 10.9, leaving the new iPhone to be released in the Fall.

Japanese Newspaper Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun has reported that Sharp will begin manufacturing LCD panels for the new iPhone in June, which would make sense for a September release.

This would also make sense looking at the history of Apple’s past iPhone release schedule, as although the iPhone 4 was announced at WWDC in 2010, the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 5 were both announced in September ( Sept. 27th 2011, and Sept. 12th 2012 respectively).

Just to keep everyone on there toes, popular tech Twitter dude @evleaks posted that Verizon will be offering $100 off the iPhone 5, leaving some to speculate that this is so they can make room for the new iPhone- which points towards an earlier release.

We here at iPhone Antidote suspect that this is not the case, but, as always with Apple,  no one can be a hundred percent sure on exactly when the next iPhone will come out and exactly what features it will include!

Even so, we love playing the game, so we’ll be doing our best to keep you up to date with specs, release date and as much secret source stuff as you can handle! (…About the new iPhone…)

Photo courtesy of iboomer.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