As the rush to put video on mobile devices continues, HBO will apparently be throwing its hat into the ring next month, if a YouTube teaser video from the cable channel is any sign. The HBO Go service first debuted in April 2009, and has slowly been expanding its breath of programming, although you’ve had to visit the HBO Go website.
Tag Archives | Apple iOS
iOS 5: What Should Be
MobileCrunch’s Greg Kumparak has a personal wishlist of features he wants to see in Apple’s iOS. It’s remarkably similar to my personal wishlist. Do you have one?
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Ping May Be Pinging Away At Your Battery Life
Along with a host of other features that came with the release of iOS 4.3 earlier this month was the addition of Apple’s music-based social network to iTunes on iOS devices. Now it appears as if the service may be placing an additional strain on battery life, and users are seemingly not too happy about it.
The issues seem to come from the fact that while listening to music through the iPod application, information is being transmitted to and from the device in order to make the social networking functionality work as intended. Data usage is one of the fastest drains on your smartphone’s battery, so your iPhone or iPad could die a lot quicker than you’re used to.
The problem can be easily fixed though, and anecdotal reports indicate battery life returns to normal after Ping has been turned off. To do so, open up the Settings app, then tap General and then Restrictions. After this tap Enable Restrictions, and tap the slider by the Ping option to set it to off. Ping will then be disabled.
I’m curious to hear if you have seen a decrease in battery life. I’m a heavy data user, so frankly I’ve noticed nothing out of the ordinary — but maybe you’reusing the iPod functionality more than I am. Let us and everyone else know if changing this setting fixes any battery issues you may have had.
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I’m Sorry, the Future of Phones is Unknowable
Research firm IDC–a sister company of my former employer, PCWorld–has released its latest estimates of the current and future marketshare of major smartphone operating systems. The headline news: It’s predicting that Android will continue to boom and that Microsoft’s Windows Phone, currently on the ropes, will bounce back to second place by 2015.
Here are IDC’s numbers for 2011 and 2015 (I swiped them from Don Reisinger’s post at Cnet):
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More Pointless Privacy Trolling Over Color
As if the Chicken Little “the sky is falling” privacy recriminations over the Color photo-sharing app since last week’s launch weren’t enough, privacy advocates are ready to pounce once again. This time a security researcher says that the application is vulnerable to “geolocation spoofing,” essentially meaning a user could fake his location to view images at that location.
Veracode chief technology officer Chris Wysopal is the man behind this latest statement, and said the spoof is done by use of a unofficial third-party app on a jailbroken iPhone. Of course, the whole flaw is dependent on that — normal iPhones would not be susceptible to this as Apple would never let such an app in the App Store. Most iPhones aren’t jailbroken.
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What Will We See at Apple’s WWDC?
Apple has announced that its Worldwide Developers’ Conference starts June 6th in San Francisco:
“At this year’s conference we are going to unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “If you are an iOS or Mac OS X software developer, this is the event that you do not want to miss.”
WWDC is one of the most important weeks in the Applesphere–the iPhone 3G, 3GS, and 4 were all announced during previous editions of the show, as was Apple’s move to Intel processors–but it’s not a given that Apple will announce any new hardware at the event. In fact, The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple, who has one of the best track records of any Apple reporter, says there won’t be any new devices. Of course, that doesn’t rule out new Apple hardware being announced before June 6th. And if all WWDC does is spell out the next version of iOS in detail, it’ll be really interesting.
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Is HeyTell the Next Killer Smartphone App?
I have a confession to make. I am absolutely addicted to HeyTell, and I’ve actually managed to get a good portion of my friends on it. What is HeyTell? Putting it simply, it’s a smartphone app for both iOS and Android which gives you “push-to-talk” capability. Users send messages to one another by recording messages. The company says that these audio files typically are no bigger than an e-mail, allowing them to be transferred quickly.
The fun factor of this app hasn’t escaped mobile phone users: about four million registered users are now on the app. The most surprising thing may be the fact that there is no huge company behind this: it’s merely a husband and wife developer team–Steven Hugg and Jen Harvey.
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Your Shot at an iPod Touch
Quick reminder: We’re giving away the new iOS game Tapper World Tour–preinstalled on an iPod Touch. Go here for details on how to enter.
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Win Tapper World Tour–and an iPod Touch to Play It on
Tempest. Tapper. Rampage. Popeye. Dig Dug. Those are my five favorite classic arcade games, and I’m really not sure what order I’d rank them in. Tempest would probably come out on top–but Tapper would have a shot, too.
Tapper debuted in 1983 and existed in two versions. In one, you played the part of a bartender who served Budweiser beer, in an early example of product placement in games. The other edition was Root Beer Tapper–shown above–in which you were a soda jerk serving non-alcoholic refreshments. The gameplay was identical: You ran around tapping beverages and flinging them down counters at hordes of impatient customers in various settings. It was twitchy good fun, the graphics and sound were excellent for their day, and I know that the game has held up well–I played it, repeatedly, just a few months ago at the amazing California Extreme arcade mega-event.
And now there’s Tapper World Tour, a new version for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad from Warner Bros. and Square One. You may not be surprised to learn that the graphics are more ambitious this time around, and you serve drinks in a lot more settings. But the basic drink-flinging gameplay looks like it’s come into the modern era intact, as it should:
Lovers of 1980s gaming have another reason to be interested in this revival: Its graphics were designed by Don Bluth, whose animation studio produced the animation for Dragon’s Lair (1983) and Space Ace (1984), two games which used laserdiscs to provide astoundingly rich animation and audio for their era.
Interested in playing the new Tapper? It’s scheduled to show up on the iOS App Store in early spring. And courtesy of Warner Bros. and Square One, you have a chance at a free copy–and an 8GB iPod Touch to play it on. We’ll be giving an iPod Touch with Tapper World Tour preinstalled to one lucky winner.
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Now Readability is in Trouble With Apple
Readability, the cool minimalist reading interface for Web content, is built into Apple’s Safari. And its creators were planning to bring a version to the iPhone and iPad. But Apple has rejected the iOS version on the grounds that that it uses a system other than Apple’s In-App Purchases to obtain content. Even though Readability isn’t selling content–it’s a subscription service that lets you read free content provided by others. Bottom line: It looks like Apple expects anyone with an iPhone/iPad app that involves ongoing fees to (A) offer In-App Purchases; and (B) turn 30 percent of revenue from In-App Purchases over to Apple.
It’s increasingly clear that we really don’t know yet what the upshot of Apple’s new 30-percent-fee will be: There are many cases where the math just doesn’t work. Maybe Apple will reduce or rescind the fee, at least in certain cases. Maybe third-party developers will radically rework their business models, or somehow convince book publishers and music companies to take a much smaller cut. But something big is going to happen in between now and June 30th, the deadline for amending apps to follow the new rules.