Two former iPhone factory workers in China, who were critically injured at Apple supplier Wintek’s plant in 2009, are looking to take advantage of Apple’s yearly meeting on Thursday to attract further attention to the conditions at factories where Apple’s most important products are assembled. Read more »
Apple is being sued by Brandywine Communications Technologies over multimedia voicemail in its iPhone and iPad products. In the complaint filed Tuesday in the U.S. district court for the middle district of Florida, Brandywine claims that Apple is infringing on two patents related to mobile voicemail. Read more »
Berlin is famous for its thriving music scene — and now local startup wahwah.fm is taking on the idea of pirate radio with a social, mobile app that lets you broadcast to your friends. Read more »
Many school districts are rolling out student programs, where most computing is done with the iPad. By more closely integrating with iOS, the upcoming OS X Mountain Lion release should help in schools that make heavy use of iPads and still want to use Macs. Read more »
After running OS X 10.8, or Mountain Lion, for the past few days, I am reaching more for my iPhone than my Galaxy Nexus. The “grand unified user experience” approach of Apple has everything to do with that, and it could blunt Android’s momentum. Read more »
The iPhone 4S will arrive March 9 on China Telecom, China’s third-largest carrier. It’s an important step for Apple, which has highly prioritized its China business, but the number of reachable customers pales in comparison to the 650 million customers China Mobile serves. Read more »
While the iPad has solved the problem of too many paper magazines accumulating in my office, it has created another problem — me spending way too much on impulse magazine purchases. Here are my experiences with Zinio, the Amazon Kindle app and Apple’s Newsstand. Read more »
It’s been less than a week since Apple sent independent auditors to evaluate its third-party factories in China. The auditors have publicly given hints about what they’re finding, but aren’t getting into specifics. On Friday they told Bloomberg they were finding “tons of issues” at Foxconn. Read more »
A Wall Street Journal investigation finds that Google was tricking Apple’s Safari browsers into dropping their ad-tracking protections in order to promote Google+. What does this say about Google’s attempts to promote its services? And about Apple’s proprietorship over its users? Read more »
OS X Mountain Lion looks to improve on Lion with UI refinements and some significant changes for developers. Most of those changes appear to be out in the cloud. Here’s a list of changes that Apple is rolling out, and how they will affect developers. Read more »
One of the new features of OS X Mountain Lion, coming this summer, is Messages for Mac, which replaces iChat. Apple’s iMessage service is available as a beta version to download for use with OS X Lion today. Here are our first impressions. Read more »
Seven months after Mac OS X Lion, Apple is releasing its first developer preview of what comes next for its desktop OS, which will be called Mountain Lion. Like its predecessor, Apple’s upcoming desktop OS is starting to bear more than a passing resemblance to iOS. Read more »
Apple has once again cut prices on its iAd system for rich in-app advertising on iOS applications, as ad buyers continue to balk at the up-front cost of participating in Apple’s vision of how mobile advertising should work. Read more »
It’s kind of amazing to consider how passé the iPod, the gadget that defined a decade of music, has become at Apple: the iPhone is the now the halo maker, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook. Read more »
Have the patent wars — that have dominated mobile in recent years — finally come to cleantech? And what does that mean for startups? Read more »
It’s pretty much a given that Apple is getting ready to introduce the next version of the iPad. The timing is right, and little leaks of information are beginning to slip out more frequently. Here’s what we’ve heard so far. Read more »
Almost a month after Apple introduced its own interactive e-book publishing platform, iBooks Author, iPad publishing startup Inkling is introducing its own version, called Inkling Habitat. It’s a free, cloud-based publishing platform aimed at professional publishers. Read more »
Apple is in the middle of a legal dispute in China over who owns the “iPad” trademark. A company called Proview has asked its government to ban the import and export of iPads, which could be problematic for Apple since the tablet is built in China. Read more »
Apple stock hit an all-time high of $503.83 in early trading Monday, surpassing the magic $500 mark. It has since gone back down a bit, and at the time of publishing, AAPL was at $499.22. The stock has gone steadily upward since Tim Cook became CEO. Read more »
U.S. sales of all consumer gadgets hit just $144 billion last year, which is actually a half percent dip when compared to 2010. But last year’s results weren’t terrible news for all CE companies. There is one company that’s doing pretty well in the U.S. Read more »
Following weeks of outrage and some protests regarding the working conditions at the factories of Apple’s third-party suppliers, Apple announced Monday that it is requesting extra audits of the health and safety conditions at factories where its iPhones and iPads are built. Read more »
In yet more legal news on the Apple front, on Friday the company filed another lawsuit against Motorola. It’s asking a district court to prevent Motorola from suing Apple in European courts over technology in mobile devices Apple says it’s licensed to use via Qualcomm. Read more »
Apple filed a complaint earlier this week in a federal court in San Jose citing two patents and asking for an injunction against the Korean electronics maker. One of the patents at issue concerns the spelling and autocorrect feature found on iPhone and iPad devices. Read more »
Just a week after Motorola was awarded two significant victories in a German court over Apple, the companies’ luck have changed. On Friday, a judge ruled he would not grant an injunction against Apple products on the basis of a 3G/UMTS patent claimed by Motorola. Read more »
The scheduled delivery of petitions asking Apple for better treatment of workers in factories that produce iPhones and iPads happened on schedule in New York City on Thursday morning. Observers say there were far more press in attendance than protestors. Read more »
In 1991, when Steve Jobs was still at NeXT, the FBI opened a file on him. He was up for a presidential appointment, so the bureau was charged with clearing him via a thorough background check. The heavily redacted document is now online. Read more »
AllThingsD is reporting that Apple will hold a press event to announce the successor to the iPad 2 the first week of March. It’s said to have faster chips, better graphics, about the same form factor and a retina display or “something close to it.” Read more »
Path and Pinterest are getting some significant backlash because of recent decisions that appeared to put their interests ahead of their users and a lack of disclosure about that behavior. It’s a welcome reminder that the trust of users is not something to be taken lightly. Read more »
Sprint sold 1.8 million iPhones in the last three months of 2011, or just a quarter of the number of iPhones that AT&T did. But it’s actually good news for the nation’s third-largest carrier, which announced its quarterly earnings Wednesday. Read more »
Could the app economy be the cure for United States’ employment doldrums? A new report suggests that the nascent app economy spurred on by iOS, Android and Facebook apps has generated 466,000 jobs in the U.S. economy since 2007. Read more »
Apple is reportedly looking to partner with TV operators for the launch of its upcoming iTV product. Why would it? Because doing so would give it more content, enable it to offer a better user interface, and give it wider distribution. Read more »
Mobile World Congress is still three weeks and an ocean away, but Samsung is already threatening to steal the show. Analytics blog Anlytk has compiled Twitter data on the most referenced terms surrounding MWC and found that Samsung is already generating an enormous amount of buzz. Read more »
The challenge is getting the best video quality possible, as well as making the call as convenient to manage as possible. And believe it or not, the trick is to use a smartphone car mount with a hand mirror. That’s right, a common household hand mirror. Read more »
Both Apple and Samsung have sold a historic amount of smartphones in the past year, and coming up with a tally of who sold more is harder than you’d think. But The NPD Group says they’ve done all the number crunching and have a winner. Read more »
With $100B in cash, there have been quite a few whispers about an Apple dividend, starting when Tim Cook officially become CEO. But after years of wishful thinking on the part of longtime investors in Apple, it’s starting to look like it could actually happen soon. Read more »
Your smartphone is already your mobile stereo. Why not make it the centerpiece of your car’s sound system too? That’s what makers of the Devium Dash, a kit you install in your car that makes your iPhone or iPod touch fit right in your car’s dash. Read more »
The iPhone may have passed over Android in total U.S. smartphone sales, but Google’s platform still has one key advantage: it’s attracting more mobile data newbies. According to the NPD Group, 57 percent of first-time smartphone buyers last quarter chose Android handsets. Read more »
Calendar apps are great, but sometimes you need to track how many days until a future event or project. In some cases, you might want to track days from the past. D-Day is a free, simple iOS program that manages both scenarios on iOS devices. Read more »
Former iPhone marketing manager Bob Borchers tells students how Steve Jobs originally approached the iPhone team with the challenge of building the iPhone, a device that to date has sold 183 million units in less than five years. Read more »
Romanian startup Skin Scan is selling an iPhone app that lets consumers take pictures of questionable moles and get back information on its threat level. However, the company has much grander goals than helping consumers figure out whether to see a doctor. Read more »
