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Amazon Cloud Player now gives unlimited music storage for $20 per month
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Internet, Music, Storage,
Amazon said late Wednesday that it will allow customers to store an unlimited amount of music on its Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, provided customers purchase a storage plan.
Amazon also announced a Cloud Player web app for the Apple iPad.
Amazon launched its Cloud Player in March, a companion to the Amazon Cloud Drive. At the time, the service came with up to 5GB of free, online music storage, expandable to 20 GB with the purchase of an MP3 album at the Amazon Music Store.
Additional storage plans start at $20 per year for 20 Gbytes of storage.
To encourage users to subscribe to those premium plans, Amazon is effectively eliminating MP3 files against that tally, allowing users to store 20 Gbytes of photos (or documents, or other content), rather than divvy it up. Amazon also said that users can store all of their MP3 or AAC files that they purchased through Amazon for free, and they won't count against the quota, either. Those files cover new files that a user might purchase as well as older files that a user bought before the new promotion.
Click to continue reading Amazon Cloud Player now gives unlimited music storage for $20 per month
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There are now over 100,000 iPad apps available
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News, Handhelds, Software,
Apple has what is clearly the top tablet on the market with the iPad, and now it has an another achievement to celebrate. As of Tuesday, there are more than 100,000 iPad-specific apps on sale in the App Store.
The milestone comes a little over a year after Apple unveiled the original iPad. According to MacStories, it took Apple 452 days to surpass the 100,000 iPad app mark to land at 100,161 dedicated iPad apps. At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), the company announced that it had 90,000 iPad apps, but it appears that number has grown in less than a month's time.
Click to continue reading There are now over 100,000 iPad apps available
E-readers are beating tablets in US adoption
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Handhelds,
The increase in U.S. adults who own e-readers is outpacing the growth of tablet owners, according to a new phone survey by the Pew Internet Project.
Adults who owned ereaders like Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook doubled from 6 percent of the U.S. adult population in November 2010 to 12 percent in May 2011, according to the survey of 2,277 respondents aged 18 and over. The survey was conducted in both English and Spanish.
Over the same period, the share of adults who said they owned a tablet such as Apple's iPad grew as well, but by just 3 percentage points. About 5 percent of respondents in an earlier Pew survey from November of last year said they owned a tablet, while 8 percent said they did in the most recent one, conducted between April 26 and May 22.
Click to continue reading E-readers are beating tablets in US adoption
Apple makes jailbreaking and downgrading tougher in iOS 5
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Smartphones, Handhelds, Software,
Apple has reportedly changed a part of iOS 5 to make it impossible for iPhone users to downgrade their phone's firmware, even if they'd rather run an earlier version.
The iPhone Dev Team, a well-known group of iPhone hackers, first discovered the change in an unlocked developer's version of iOS 5, which is expected to be released this fall.
Normally, to restore your iPhone to an earlier version, you'd save "SHSH blobs" (which are like digital signatures to authenticate software) at a specific timestamp and use a third-party app to restore your firmware back to that time. The SHSH blobs are static and can be used as often as you like.
But the team found that in iOS 5, Apple has prevented people from being able to save these blobs for a specific timestamp. Instead, Apple will re-assign your phone a new SHSH blob each time your reboot your device in jailbreak mode, making saved blobs irrelevant since Apple can just reject ones that were saved.
Click to continue reading Apple makes jailbreaking and downgrading tougher in iOS 5
Will Apple replace Google Maps in iOS 5?
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Google, Rumors,
Apple could be ditching Google Maps in favor of its own navigation software in iOS 5.
MacRumors uncovered a new section in the legal disclaimers section of iOS 5 called "Map Data" that references several different third-party mapping and naviation companies such as CoreLogic, Getchee, Localeze, and TomTom, among others.
It wouldn't be much of a shock if Apple ditched Google Maps and launched its own mapping service. In recent years, Apple has snapped up a couple of mapping companies, Placebase and Poly9. Apple has also been hiring engineers with mapping and navigation experience to join the iOS team. On top of that, when Apple responded to the outpouring of media scrutiny about iPhone location tracking in April, the company revealed it was creating its own traffic database.
Click to continue reading Will Apple replace Google Maps in iOS 5?
Apple secures iPhone patent that could be huge blow to rivals
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Smartphones, Editorial,
Apple has been awarded its long sought-after patent on the iPhone. Intellectual property experts say it's so broad and far-reaching that the iPhone maker may be able to bully other smart phone manufacturers out of the U.S. market entirely.
Some three-and-a-half years after filing for a patent on the iPhone, Apple on Tuesday was awarded U.S. patent number 7,966,578 for "[a] computer-implemented method, for use in conjunction with a portable multifunction device with a touch screen display, [that] comprises displaying a portion of page content, including a frame displaying a portion of frame content and also including other content of the page, on the touch screen display."
That's just the beginning of the abstract for Apple's iPhone patent, which the company filed back in December 2007. It gets quite a bit more technical in its full form, but there's one thing patent experts consulted by PCMag agree on—Apple has been awarded an incredibly broad patent that could prove to be hugely problematic for other makers of capacitive touch-screen smartphones.
Apple's patent essentially gives it ownership of the capacitive multitouch interface the company pioneered with its iPhone, said one source who has been involved in intellectual property litigation on similar matters. That's likely to produce a new round of lawsuits over the now-ubiquitous multitouch interfaces used in smartphones made by the likes of HTC, Samsung, Motorola, Research in Motion, Nokia, and others that run operating systems similar in nature to Apple's iOS, like Google's Android, said the source, who asked not to be named.
Click to continue reading Apple secures iPhone patent that could be huge blow to rivals
Here’s what happens when you use up your iCloud storage
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Internet, Storage,
When Apple introduced iCloud at WWDC 2011, the big news was that the service would be free. Of course, Steve Jobs did make sure to mention that the 5 GB of storage included with iCloud would be more than enough "for most users," and we believe him. However, there are others out there (like us) who fall outside of that category. For example, I am only currently able to have iCloud back up just my iPhone 4. When I try to also add my iPad 2 to the backup, it errors out, telling me that I don't have enough space available, and that I need to buy ore storage space. Of course, since iCloud is still in beta, I'm unable to do that. Another iCloud user has come very close to hitting his 5 GB quota, and received the email above from Apple. Surprisingly to us, it says that once he reaches 5 GB stored, he won't even be able to receive any new email messages. Sounds like people are gonna have to really keep an eye on how much storage they are using, especially if they have more than one iOS device backing up to the cloud.
Read More 
| MacRumors
Video: Latest Apple iPad 2 ad: ‘Now, There’s This’
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Handhelds, Videos,
Apple has debuted a new ad for its popular iPad 2, touting things that Cupertino said wasn't possible before its tablet.
The ad, titled "Now," highlights the versatile nature of iPad apps. "Now, you can watch a newspaper," a voiceover says, zooming in on someone flipping through the Wall Street Journal app. "Now you can listen to a magazine," the voice says, switching to an interactive "Fantastic Mr. Fox" feature from Spin magazine.
The ad also flashes to someone watching "The King's Speech," video chatting via FaceTime, and taking an online class. "Hold an entire bookstore [via iBooks] and touch the stars," the ad concludes, flashing to an astronomy app, "because now, there's this."
This, of course, is the iPad 2, and the commercial ends with a shot of the updated tablet sitting on a table, presumably waiting for you to dole out hundreds of dollars for the pleasure of its company.
Click to continue reading Video: Latest Apple iPad 2 ad: ‘Now, There’s This’
TiVo announces Premiere Q and Preview boxes, but won’t sell them to you
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: HDTV, Home Entertainment,
This morning TiVo has announced their new TiVo Premiere Q and TiVo Preview boxes, alongside an update for the TiVo iPad app. Unfortunately for TiVo fanatics, the new hardware won't be available for direct sale, which is a shame. The Premiere Q is a four-tuner device that can also stream video to up to three other TiVo boxes on the same network, including the new TiVo Preview, which lacks a built-in hard drive and only functions as a TV viewing box and streaming client. The new TiVo app will hook in to your cable providers video on demand services, and will let you flick that over to your TiVo for viewing. This is all well and good, but the fact that the Premiere Q and Preview will be relegated only to cable company rollouts, coupled with the fact that there will be only two of those partnerships at first (RCN and Suddenlink,) mean that this is more of a non-announcement from where we sit than anything else. It's like they're teasing us!
Jailbreak iOS 5 with Redsn0w 0.9.8b1
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Mods / Hacks, Software,
For anyone who decided to give up their jailbroken version of iOS in order to upgrade to the iOS 5 beta, you're about to get the best of both worlds again. Using Redsn0w 0.9.8b1 on the Mac, you can perform a tethered jailbreak that let's you bring Cydia and all the jailbreak apps into the iOS 5 fold. Of course, being a tethered solution, this means you'll need to plug in your device if you need it to be rebooted, which means we're personally gonna wait until the untethered option is available.
Read More | Dev Team
