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Posts tagged with "iPhone"

Verizon Now Accounts for 12% Of US iPhones

According to mobile ad firm Chitika, the Verizon iPhone now accounts for nearly 12%, or 1/8th, of iPhones sold in the United States. The number comes after weeks of measurements through a live tracker that keeps track of mobile ads being served to iOS devices, and most specifically iPhones. Chitika reported last month that Verizon iPhones were accounting for 3% of US iPhones after 24 hours of availability. That figure led to speculation that several existing iPhone owners were switching from AT&T to Verizon, although neither Apple or Verizon have provided official sales number. Other sources reported Apple wasn’t willing to share any numbers due to sales below expectations. But, then again, that was last month and more new customers or AT&T iPhone users may have recently switched to Verizon, if Chitika’s stats are correct.

Since the launch of the Verizon iPhone, we’ve been tracking iPhones through our system and breaking down what percentage come from AT&T vs. Verizon. As of today, Verizon is up to 12% of all iPhone web usage, based on data from the Chitika ad network.

Apple has expanded its partnership with Verizon Wireless to new devices lately, such as the CDMA iPhone and the iPad 2, which comes with native CDMA integration in a WiFi + 3G model rather than a separate MiFi bundle as we saw with the first generation iPad. There’s no doubt we’ll see more and more from Apple and Verizon in the next months. It’ll also be interesting to see whether or not Verizon’s intentions to discontinue the unlimited data plan this summer will affect the device’s sales in any way, or if Apple will ever release detailed sales number since the Verizon iPhone went on sale on February 10th. [via MacRumors]

Huge Update: Google Launches New Search App for iPhone

Remember the Google Mobile app for iPhone? With an official post on the company’s blog a few minutes ago, Google announced a major new version of the with a completely new look, new features and a new name: Google Search for iPhone. Simple as that, the app packs all the functionalities from the previous version in a new UI, easily accessible for everyone and built on top of iOS 4’s multitasking and fast app switching capabilities.

Google Search presents itself with a new search UI that makes it easy to start typing right away or perform a voice search through the iPhone’s mic. Search results can be tailored to your needs with a new toolbar that slides in and reveals more options as well as other Google applications.

Second, we’ve made it easier to pick up searching where you left off. If you leave the app and come back later, you’ll be able either to start a new search right away (just tap in the search box to type, hit the microphone button to do a voice search or tap on the camera icon to use Google Goggles) or get back to exactly where you were by tapping on the lower part of the page.

Finally, there are a number of improvements we’ve made to everything else you love in the app, including Google Goggles, Voice Search, Search with My Location, Gmail unread counts and more.

After launching the app for the first time, you’ll be guided through the new features of the app with an interactive overlay that places question marks on screen to explain what’s new and improved. Search, Goggles and Voice Search are still there, but placed next to the main search bar that is kept in a collapsible window you can open or dismiss at any time. The effect’s really cool as you can invoke search from anywhere in the app, even when browsing images or news results. A feeling I’ve got when trying the app is that Google is really trying to blend all its services together in this new Google Search app: with a single swipe, you can access Places, Images, Shopping search results, real-time updates, Blogs and more. It feels like they have rebuilt to app to unify all Google’s services in a single package, and I think that’s a step in the right direction. You can of course sign in with your Google Account and tweak the preferences to your needs.

Google Search for iPhone is a free download in the App Store. Check out the promo video and more screenshots below.

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Voice Brief: Listen To Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and Calendar On Your iPhone

Voice Brief, an iPhone app that’s free until this afternoon in the App Store, aims at enabling you to listen to information coming from your social networks, email inbox and more through text-to-speech technology. Voice Brief, available only on the iPhone for now, can plug into Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, RSS feeds as well as Weather and Stock Prices to “speak” rather than simply displaying information.

How does it work? You choose the voices you want in the Settings (announcer voice for when the app switches sections, reporter voice to read status updates and news), set the speed and then you add new contents. You can log in Twitter and Facebook from within the app and set the amount of tweets and updates to fetch, manually enter RSS sources (there’s no Google Reader support) and set other details for your location, and so forth. Once the contents you need are in place, the main page of Voice becomes a dashboard with a summary of all your events (Calendar integration is also supported), social activity, emails and news. Hit the play button, and all this information will be spoken out loud by the app. Voice quality is good, sometimes above iOS’ default text-to-speech capabilities, sometimes below average iPhone quality. Overall, I’ve found Voice Brief to perform very well with regular English sentences, but of course the app fails badly at Italian contents and status updates containing very specific terms like tech products and acronyms (very common in my Twitter timeline).

Voice Brief is an interesting project that’s worth checking out, for sure. I can see some people using an app like this in their car while driving to the office in the morning. Go download it here while the offer is still valid. Read more

Reports Suggest Apple Won’t Include NFC Technology In The iPhone 5

An article today by The Independent (a UK publication) has suggested that the previously rumored inclusion of Near Field Communication technology in the iPhone and iPad will not be coming this year. The technology is perceived to become a new way for consumers to pay for goods and services and it was hoped by many in the retail industry that Apple could set the standard by adding the technology to the iPhone.

It appears however, according to several sources in UK mobile operators, that Apple had decided against the inclusion of NFC technology in the next version of the iPhone. One source told The Independent “The new iPhone will not have NFC, Apple told the operators it was concerned by the lack of a clear standard across the industry.”

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Latest Reeder for iPhone Update Now Sends To Readability

If you take pride in supporting the writers and content creators that add thoughtful and insightful information about the topics you read about daily, you may already be a subscriber of Readability. Readability support was added in January, but now Reeder allows you to send articles to your read later queue so may share your public articles with followers or to read them in the new web app. Reeder has also addressed bugs and usability issues, fixing shared articles that didn’t sync, eliminating crashes, and overall improving the syncing experience. You can download the latest update for Reeder in iTunes, through the App Store app, or by visiting this link (App Store link).

#MacStoriesDeals - HUGE Friday

We’re sending thoughts and prayers to the people of Japan today. Also, today is iPad 2 day! Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

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Instagram 1.5 Released: Tilt-Shift Effect, News Feed

Image sharing service Instagram, very popular thanks to its 2 million users but still available as an iPhone-only app, has released a new update today bringing the application to version 1.5. The new Instagram introduces a new effect, performance improvements for previous ones, a completely revamped news feed and the possibility to share photos via email.

The new filter, Tilt-Shift, comes after several requests from users that were forced to apply this specific effect in other iPhone apps like Tiltshift Gen; now Instagram integrates the possibility to blur a portion of an image with a slider directly into its interface without leaving the app. All you have to do is pinch to adjust the orientation of the blur and focus area. Other filters got a speed bost as well and now feel much more responsive, especially on iOS 4.3.

The major new feature, however, is the News Feed that’s been redesign to include more activity from your friends. Together with follow and comment notifications, you can now see what your friends are doing, the comments they post, the photos they like and the people they start following, too. I’m not sure I like this News Feed as it brings a lot more social information into the stream and it might get annoying over time, but we’ll see. For now, it’s clear that Instagram is moving towards a more social approach besides the “simple app that takes photos” concept.

Upon taking a picture, you can also share it via email to your friends and family. I’m pretty sure this sharing option should also allow you to drop pictures onto your Dropbox using this service, and I’ll make sure to try it later. This is a welcome addition to the app. Last, you can tap & hold a username to initiate a reply – I don’t use Instagram much to reply to people but I guess the heavy Instagrammers out there will insanely love this option.

Instagram 1.5 is propagating now in the App Store; it’s available for free here. Check it out, it’s a nice update. More screenshots below.

Update: Associating a Send To Dropbox email address to Instagram won’t let you automatically save photos into your Dropbox. Just a text file with the email you shared.

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