Get an iPhone 5 through AT&T for $100 Without an Upgrade!

Not eligible for an upgrade but still want to cash in on AT&T’s latest 50% off deal?!  No Problem!

So you saw our last post about how AT&T is running this incredible promotion where they are offering half off on their phones that are priced between $0 and $199.99, but you realized that you already upgraded your iPhone last year, right?  No problem at all!

As it turns out, AT&T is actually offering this promotion even to people that are not eligible for an upgrade!  That means if you upgraded earlier this year, or last year, you would actually still be able to take part of this deal!  When we tested it, our checkout priced at $136 + Tax for a brand new iPhone 5, pretty good deal if you ask us (especially since we buy iPhone 5’s for $350)!

Pretty easy way to make a few extra bucks cash (lets see,  $350-$136 is $214 profit!)  All just for extending your contract to two years from today, for a bunch of people, this might only be adding an extra 6 months or so to your contract!

Awesome deal!

Deal of the day

Listen up kids! One most excellent deal of the day, brought to you by AT&T.

Online only, for a limited time and with waived activation, you can now get a new phone on a 2 year contract for HALF the price at AT&T. That’s  a HALF price discount. Divided by two, people.

Here’s how you get it:

Step 1. Choose a smartphone priced between $0.99 and $199.99 ( we’d say go for the iPhone 5. Wait, was that obvious?…).

Step 2. Magic! ( also…choosing an appropriate plan and stuff)

Step 3. You get a 50% discount automatically applied to the phone in your shopping cart.

So, iPhone Antidote, can you give me an example?

We sure can guys! This means that you can get a 16gb iPhone 5 for only $100! That’s RAD!

You wanna know what else would be rad?  I got a couple more steps for you…

1. Buy shiny new iPhone online using 50% discount. Laugh maniacally.

2. Send us your old stinky iPhone. Laugh maniacally.

3. We give you a bunch of cash for stinky old iPhone, and hey, that new phone cost you next to nothing! LAUGH MANIACALLY.

This deal is only available online and for a limited time so get your butts into gear! As always, terms and conditions apply, check out the deal here: http://www.att.com/shop/wireless/devices/smartphones.html

Image courtesy of Forbes.

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!!

The New Mac Pro

We got a sneak peak today, with a big drum roll please announcement of the new Mac Pro.  Apple’s line of Mac Pro’s are generally used a lot by graphic designers, software developers, video editors, people who need a lot of power.

The new Mac Pro is innovative in it’s size and cylindrical design, and sounds just basically miraculous and perfect. And we’re not ones to go over the top. Much.

There are some people who say it looks like a giant pill. One of those ones that doesn’t go into your mouth…we disagree. We think it looks svelte and sexy, so there.

The Mac Pro is one of Apple’s products that haven’t had the privilege of being updated in quite a few years. And now it got the privilege, it got it all over the place. The old Desktop Mac looked like this:

This new one is 1/8^th of the size! But it’s also faster, better, stronger and, well, not harder. Just the first three then. The casing can be rotated using a handle at the top and the computer will use motion sensors to light up the input panel so you can see all the ports.

It’s assembled completely in the United states ( Go Patriotism!), we have no idea how much it costs yet ( but probably expensive) and it will be released later this year sometime vague.

So, here’s what’s so impressive about it apart from the new design and size. It’s 2.5 times faster than the previous model, and according to Apple, will provide twice the performance.

According to Apple, the specs are as follows;

The next generation Mac Pro is architected around an ingenious unified thermal core that allows the desktop to efficiently share its entire thermal capacity across all the processors. The result is a pro desktop with breakthrough performance packed into a design that is one-eighth the volume of the current Mac Pro. Next generation Intel Xeon E5 processors with up to 12 core configurations deliver double the floating point performance. With two AMD FirePro workstation-class GPUs, the all-new Mac Pro is up to 2.5 times faster than the current Mac Pro and delivers up to an amazing 7 teraflops of compute power. The new Mac Pro also features PCIe-based flash storage that is up to 10 times faster than conventional desktop hard drives and includes the latest four-channel ECC DDR3 memory running at 1866 MHz to deliver up to 60GBps of memory bandwidth. With all that power, the new Mac Pro lets you seamlessly edit full-resolution 4K video while simultaneously rendering effects in the background.

So, it’s super fast and powerful and stuff. And it looks really cool. We want one. For Christmas. Please. We’ll use it to make the best penguin meets llama animation that anyone has ever seen, promise.

Images courtesy of; Engadget, Inrumor, Gizmodo & Macrumors.

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

OS X Mavericks

We would have suggested OS Liger ( rawr!), but Apple went ahead without consulting us and decided with this system update to start over with the naming process, leaving the big cat names behind.

Coinciding with their new ‘Designed by Apple in California’ ads, and the announcement that the Mac Pro will be built solely in America, Apple have started a new naming scheme for their operating system based on locations in California.

To start it off, announced yesterday at WWDC, we have OS X Mavericks. Mavericks is a surfing location particularly well known for its dangerous big wave riding in Northern California, just north of the town of Half Moon Bay.

Now, it’s also the new Apple operating system. Is it as cool as beach with big wave breaks? Well, kinda? We may have trapped ourselves in that comparison- it might not be that cool, but it is very cool.

Here’s the double rainbow of coolness for you guys;

New Finder Tabs.

Just like in your Internet browser, you can now have independently controlled tabs in your finder windows. You can merge these finder windows and take the finder full screen.

Tagging.

Filed under ‘I wouldn’t have though of this, but now that you did, it looks really freakin useful’ is tagging.

With Mavericks you will be able to ‘tag’ documents and media – save it, tag it as sports, home, to do, etc. and it catalogues these under their tags in the side bar of the finder.

You can tag documents with multiple tags, create new tags on the go, and the best part? Searching using tags. For instance, searching for ‘iphone stuff’ and ‘the best’ will naturally take you directly to your saved iPhone Antidote Wallpaper.

Multiple Displays

Users will now be able to access the menu bar and dock separately on each screen with multiple display support. You will also be able to load separate and independent applications on each screen, and drag them from screen to screen.

Apple TV is not forgotten here either, as it can now be a fully powered OS X display, with access to menu bar dock and independent applications also.

Extended Battery Life

There is a heap of new processing elements included in Mavericks to extend your battery life and reduce CPU utilization by up to 72%.

We particularly like a new feature called app nap, which figures out what applications and web pages are in use, and which are not. The system will then simply stop giving power to the web pages and applications that you’re not currently looking at.

Compressed memory pretty much does what it says, compressing inactive memory to provide spare memory to running applications when needed.

Timer Coalescing groups low end operations together , creating tiny periods of time when your computer can enter into an idle, low power state, which in turn saves your battery.

Safari

Safari is updated with Mavericks, starting with an all-new homepage with top sites and a sidebar with your bookmarks and access to your reading list. This will also include shared links from people you follow on Linkdin and Twitter.

Safari uses less energy in this update and includes accelerated, smoother scrolling and one click bookmarking.  In your readin list, you will be able to scroll continuously through all of your articles, one after the other.

iCloud keychain

Cross device safe keeping of all your passwords and credit card information starts with iCloud Keychain.

This new feature will store all your passwords, across all your devices, so you don’t have to think about them ever again. Sounds pretty good right? The keychain will even suggest new passwords for you, and then will go ahead and put it in the cloud, encrypted.

With your credit card information, when shopping online, the keychain will offer the last four digits of all the cards you have stored, and you can pick one when paying and be done with it.

Although this sends little tiny shivers of scariness up the security part of our spine, it also sounds super useful and convenient.

Notifications

You can now get all your notifications, from all your devices, on your computer.

What’s also pretty great about this is you will have a number of new options for action within the notification when it appears on your screen.

You can respond directly to most notifications, (by replying to email, declining Skype calls etc.), within the notification banner when it appears.

Once you have actioned a notification, you won’t see it again on any of your other devices, and they will all be updated with your response to the original notification.

When the computer is awoken from sleep, all the alerts you may have gotten when it (and you!) were asleep will be listed.

Calendar

The calendar app has been updated in a really cool way- where now if you have appointments scheduled, the app will give you a ton of information you might need for them.

The calendar will now provide you with weather in the spot where your appointment is scheduled, as well as suggestions for restaurants etc if you require them.

We particularly like that the calendar will work out and tell you the travel time to and from your appointment, and will even add it to the calendar so you cant double book the time when you’re supposed to be on your way!

You will also get notifications of when you need to leave on your phone and/or computer.

Maps

Maps hits the computer with Mavericks! You can now access street maps, 3D flyover data and info cards. You can also push turn-by-turn directions to our iOS device straight from your computer.

iBooks

iBooks will be on your computer by Fall with this system update. Now you can access all the books in the iTunes store as well as your stored books and bookmarks, and read them full screen on your computer screen.

But what is really cool is for the educators and the learners amongst us.

iBooks for Mavericks will come with interactive textbooks, which feature videos and other media embedded within the normal text. You will also have the ability to highlight and make notes, and learn using study cards made from the material.

Sounds pretty awesome huh?

OS X Mavericks will be available to the public in the Fall.

All images courtesy of Apple. 

New MacBook Airs

MacBook Airs were given a small but quite amazing revamp in time for WWDC 2013.

The new 11-inch and 13-inch notebooks use Haswell processers, which provide better overall performance and most importantly- increased battery life or ‘all day’ battery life as described by Apple.

The 11 inch MacBooks will increase from 5 hours of battery life to 9 hours and the 13 inch MacBooks will increase from 7 hours to a pretty amazing 12 hours of battery life. I know we just said Amazing to describe that, but we totally think it deserves an Astounding too. Simply astounding battery life!

The new MacBooks also come with 40% better graphics performance, and up to 3 times faster Wi-Fi capabilities with 802.11ac compatibility.  802.11ac is the newest Wi-Fi standard, but as it is not common yet, Apple also announced a new Airport Extreme that is compatible with 802.11ac.

The pricing has changed a little (for the better) with the narrowing hard drive options, as the 64 GB is not available with this update. The 11″ MacBook Air starts at $999 with a 128GB hard drive and the 13″ MacBook Air with a 128GB hard drive starts at $1099.

Available online and in retail stores as of today (yesterday officially, but a lot of stores actually started selling them today).

Image courtesy of Ubergizmo.

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.

WWDC!

WWDC is here!

Apple’s annual developers conference starts today in San Francisco. Everything kicks off at 10am with the keynote address.

Go here to watch the live broadcast: http://www.apple.com/apple-events/june-2013/

or stay tuned for updates of all kinds of exciting Apple stuff!

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