Google’s top trending searches 2013

What did we search for this year? Was it how to solve the never ending riddle behind how Pharrell doesn’t age?

Nope!

Google just released their annual year in review, with the worldwide and US based top trending searches listed from Most to Aaron Carter.

Just so you guys know, this is not actually or accurately the things that were searched for the most- as if Google would give us any kind of specific information like that! They have to keep all their knowledge and hence power in their sanctum! Duh! ( BTW we totally think the sanctum is kept on Larry Page’s super yacht)

Instead, trending searches, according to the Googleheads, “represent queries that had the highest amount of traffic over a sustained period in 2013 as compared to 2012.”

Here’s the worldwide top 10.

1. Nelson Mandela

2. Paul Walker

3. iPhone 5s

4. Cory Monteith

5. Harlem Shake

6. Boston Marathon

7. Royal Baby

8. Samsung Galaxy S4

9. PlayStation 4

10. North Korea

In the US, Paul Walker was number 1, the Boston Marathon was number 2, Nelson Mandela was number three, Cory Monteith was Number 4 and the iPhone 5S was number 5.

We feel like maybe we gotta start searching for some more happy things.

Google did give us some specific information on the most searched for people this year, and, you guys, it’s kind of disappointing.

1. Miley Cyrus

2. Drake

3. Kim Kardashian

4. Justin Bieber

5. Beyonce

6. Rihanna

7. Taylor Swift

8. Selena Gomez

9. Katy Perry

10. Kanye West

Kanye’s 10th?! He’s gonna be so upset, sitting there eating his fish sticks.

If you want to check out the lists for yourself, head here right now! 

Images courtesy of Iconarchive, Sodahead, Luxuo & Blacksportsonline.

What’s the top selling Smartphone of the last 3 months?

A dude named T. Michael Walkley, an analyst over at Canaccord Genuity did some counting, as analysts do, and figured out the top selling Smart phone at AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile for the months September, October and November of this year.

And the winner is?

The iPhone 5S!

Here’s the figures! (Via Appleinsider.)

The figures were following the same trend last year, with the iPhone 5 being the top selling smartphone of the last quarter of 2012, followed by the Samsung Galaxy S III, and then the iPhone 4 and 4S.

Yay iPhone 5S!

Images courtesy of  Youtube & Afuntab.

Walmart & Best Buy Holiday sales feature price drops on iPhone 5C and iPhone 5S!

So, this Friday is Friday the 13th.

Christmas Gift guide Part 3 – Tips & Tricks for buying tech this Christmas!

We told you we loved Christmas right? We also really like deals. Deals, tips, tricks, writlefifers, all of it. This is why we now proudly present the Christmas Gift Guide Part 3 – Tips & Tricks for buying Tech this Christmas!

( See our other Christmas Guides, Part 1 -Comprehensive Holiday Tech Gift Guide and Part 2 – The Really Really Expensive Gift Guide.)

According to Macrumors, Apple now has an official policy on price matching, which allows specialists to price match iPhones, iPads, and Macs, giving up to 10 percent off on products without authorization. Specialists are also allowed to give business customers up to 20% off a non-Apple accessory when purchased with an Apple product via special order.

Apple also has free shipping now through December 22nd.

If you’re thinking of buying that special someone a Smartphone this holiday season, you should get yourself along to Whistleblower – a fantastic tool that you can use to compare cell phone plans online, and see which one is best for your needs and your budget!

If you use Amazon ( and you should)  you should be aware of a couple of things. Firstly, they will price match on cell phones and televisions within 14 days of shipment of the product.  Click here to see the details. 

Amazon also offers 3-months of Amazon Prime Membership for free for parents & caregivers. This includes Free 2-day shipping on qualifying items, 30% off Select Diapers & Wipes which qualify for subscribe & save (15% discount + 15% S&S discount, an additional month of Amazon Prime for each $25 you spend on a single order (up to 1 year total of free prime) and exclusive e-mail discounts and offers.

Click here to check it out.

College students should also click here to apply for Best Buy’s student discounts, all you need is your student email address ( must end in .edu). With this, you’ll save $50 on MacBooks and receive similar discounts in your email.

College students also save up to $200 off a MacBook with Apple’s education pricing.

You guys should definitely check out the refurbished products on the Apple special deals page here. You can find deals like the iPad Mini Wifi 64 Gb with a 1 year warranty for $419, 13 inch MacBook air for $849, or Apple TV for $75.

Target’s markdown day is usually Monday for electronics. Markdowns usually take place every two weeks and items will continue to be marked down every two weeks until sold or the discount reaches 75 percent. Markdown schedule’s might vary from store to store, so it won’t hurt to check.

You can get a bunch of sweet Mac applications all in one go from MacUpdate in corroboration with Macrumors. For only $39.99, the bundle includes 10 applications such as iStopMotion 3, Anonymiser, and Backblaze. All up it’s worth a cool $360 clams.  Click here to check out the deal.

And here’s a couple of specific deals you should check out:

iPad Mini and iPad Mini with Retina Display Smart Cover by Apple – 19.99 for blue, 14.99 for all others including Red. Free Shipping. Click here to see the deal. 

Pioneer A4 WiFi Speaker w/ AirPlay Streaming $80 + Free Shipping save $120! Check it out here.

Get a Apple 15.4″ MacBook Pro for $1549.99 with a discount and rebate at MacMall.

Happy dealing and Writlefifing and Merry Christmas!

Images courtesy of Freechristmaswallpapers & Hqwallbase.com

The first guy to break his 5S

We just received our first iPhone 5S!  And it was, drumroll please:

Cracked!

Even though the guy at first was like:

We gave him $$$ CASHMONEY and turned that frown upside down!

Apparently, our lovely 5S customer was using his brand new shiny iPhone 5S in a crowded area, someone came running by and hit him in the shoulder and the shiny 5S went flying ever so prettily before smacking itself onto concrete. And there you have it- a cracked screen.

In his own words, just a bit of bad luck.

But good luck that he had heard of iPhone Antidote! Yay!

If you have an unlucky cracked or broken iPhone, or a stinky old used iPhone, go to iPhone Antidote right now!

We’ll give you CASHMONEY for those unlucky, stinky old iPhones and turn you from grumpy cat into happy, baller cat in one of the easiest, stress free transactions you’ll ever experience!

Images courtesy of Phonearena, Geeknation, Lol-cat & Pandawhale

HTC releases a phone with a fingerprint sensor

HTC have released a new smart phone, and it’s the second one in recent history to have a fingerprint Sensor. The first, of course, was featured on the home button of the iPhone 5S, and it was called the Touch ID.

HTC ‘s new phone is called the HTC One Max and the fingerprint sensor is located on the back of the device, near the camera lens.

You activate the sensor by swiping it and while it can only recognize 3 different fingers, each finger can be linked to different functions, i.e. unlocking the phone or opening the camera.

Unfortunately, the positioning of the sensor, the fact that you need to wake the phone from sleep before using it and no doubt it following so quickly in the footsteps of the highly viewed Touch ID means the reviews of the HTC Max One inclusion of a fingerprint sensor is coming under some quite loud criticism.

For example, we have this from The Verge –

“The fingerprint scanner implementation here is clumsy, awkward, and comfortably in line with the long history of failed attempts at making this technology work.”

This From Cnet:

“A big part of the frustration is that you can’t really see or feel the scanner to position your finger on it properly. Equally, it’s not obvious how the thing works — it doesn’t technically “scan” an image of your fingerprint, but instead measures the capacitance of your skin to create a unique signature. ”

And, lastly, this from Engadget:

“Overall, the fingerprint scanner could work better; it’s not quite as intuitive as Apple’s Touch ID, and we’d happily have given it up in exchange for something more useful, like optical stabilization in the camera module.”

Hmm.

Other than the Fingerprint sensor, the phone is said to be, well, eh. Eh-y. It has a huge screen at 5.9 inches diagonally, but doesn’t have the fastest Snapdragon 800 processor.  The thickness of the device and the camera are also not as great as expected.

If you think about it, it’s a wonderful thing for people to have great expectations for your company’s products, as many people do for HTC. Missing the mark one time? Not so bad. But we might wait for the next HTC phone.

Think it’s for you? The HTC Mac one will be available on Sprint and Verizon later in October.

( P.S. When you get it, sell us your stinky iPhone for CashMoney, make the world dance )

Image courtesy of Macrumors, Techradar & Sodahead.

National Geographic Photographer lurves the iPhone 5s

National Geographic photographer Jim Richardson went to Scotland ( lucky, cos Haggis and Irish whiskey is awwwwesome) and he took his iPhone 5S.

Uh…and?

AND he took a bunch of photos and said that the camera on the 5S is really, really sahweet. We may be paraphrasing.

He said this exactly:

“With intense use (I’ve made about 4,000 pictures in the last four days) I’ve discovered that the iPhone 5S is a very capable camera. The color and exposures are amazingly good, the HDR exposure feature does a stunningly good job in touch situations, the panorama feature is nothing short of amazing—seeing a panorama sweeping across the screen in real time is just intoxicating. Best of all it shoots square pictures natively, a real plus for me since I wanted to shoot for Instagram posting.

Once I figured out what the camera could do well I began to forget all the things it couldn’t do at all.
While the iPhone 5s still uses an 8-megapixel camera, it utilizes a sensor that has a 15 percent larger surface area, which means it will produce higher quality photos in low-light conditions. It also has a 5-element lens with an aperture of f/2.2, an improvement over the iPhone 5’s f/2.4 aperture and the pixels are larger, at 1.5 microns, for better light absorption. All in all, the iPhone 5s has a 33 percent increase in light sensitivity.”

Have you got an iPhone 5S? How are you finding the camera?

Check out Jim Richardson’s blog post on National Geographic here, or follow him on Twitter @jimrichardsonng

Image courtesy of Appleinsider.

Who wants to win a shiny Gold 5S? Anyone?

GUYS GUYS GUYS

Wanna win a brand new shiny iPhone 5S? In GOLD?

UH… D’UH? It’d be a bit weird if you didn’t, just saying.

The wonderful tech website 9to5Mac are teaming with a vinyl skin manufacturing company, dbranc inc. to promote their wares, which are all pretty awesome, and to give away an unlocked gold 64Gb iPhone 5S.

That’s right! You’ll also get a bunch of gold skins to use on any of your other devices to make them look fancy and shiny so they don’t feel all left out and jealous of your new phone.

To Enter: Make sure you’re following @9to5mac on Twitter and retweet the competition post or reshare it on Facebook.

Not this post, although, you can do that too, but it should be their post that you share. You’ll find it here.  And the share button is alllll the way down the bottom. 

Good luck! Actually, guess what we just decided. If we win, we’ll just give it to one of you guys. Deal?

Image courtesy of VH1, Sonny Radio & 9to5Mac

Virgin offering shiny new iPhones at shiny new prices!

Virgin Mobile USA, a subsiduary of Sprint Mobile, has begun selling the shiny new iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C!

And here’s the extra good bit- the pre-paid brand are offering a$100 discount from the normal (unsubsidized) pricing!

Sahweeeeht!

The 16Gb phones will be available both online and in retail stores whilst the 32 GB and 64 GB iPhone 5s and 32GB iPhone 5c are only available at Virgin Mobile’s website.

As is to be expected, stock is somewhat limited, especially on the gold iPhone 5s and the yellow 16Gb iPhone 5C models.

Another Sprint subsidiary, Boost, is expected to be offering a similar deal in the weeks to come.

Yay for Virgin!

Image courtesy of 9to5mac.com

iPhone 5S Touch ID MANIA

So there’s been a bunch of stuff doing the rounds about Touch ID, the Apple iPhone 5S fingerprint sensor. We thought we’d clear a little bit of it up for you, because some of it sounds stupid and some of it sounds  a little bit scary.

Number 1. Yes, apparently you can use the fingerprint sensor with your toe, or other ( cough) appendages. We haven’t personally tried it, because we don’t really get the point. But it is apparently a thing, so that’s cool we guess. Not as cool as this picture of Bruce Willis though.

Number 2, Yes, some dudes called the Chaos computer club hacked the fingerprint sensor, which allowed them access to someone’s phone without them having to use the owners finger.

But it’s really ok, guys. We mean, we don’t know what kind of information you guys have stored in your iPhones, but unless you’re James Bond or the like, chances are people are not going to want to go through what these guys went through in order to get into your iPhone. Especially when they can just make you tell them your PIN if you have one.

The German Chaos computer club used the same method that people do to hack into other fingerprint authentication systems, except with a few minor improvements because Apple made their fingerprint sensor using a super unusually high resolution scanner.

In their own words:

“First, the fingerprint of the enrolled user is photographed with 2400 dpi resolution. The resulting image is then cleaned up, inverted and laser printed with 1200 dpi onto transparent sheet with a thick toner setting. Finally, pink latex milk or white woodglue is smeared into the pattern created by the toner onto the transparent sheet. After it cures, the thin latex sheet is lifted from the sheet, breathed on to make it a tiny bit moist and then placed onto the sensor to unlock the phone.”

Simple stuff right? Ummm… not really. We think we’ll be fine.

It is still something to know and understand, of course, because it could lead to issues down the line – these are only the first guys to have successfully done it, there are no doubt plenty more guys out there trying to prove they’re smarter than Apple.

Until then, enjoy Touch ID. Just… if you’re going to enjoy it in weird ways, with weird parts of your body, let people know before they touch your phone, yeah? Yeah. Cool.