AT&T has just launched Aio Wireless, a new prepaid cellular service that boasts the iPhone as one of their flagship devices. Since it is a prepaid service, Aio offers plans without a contract, and users can either bring their own compatible device, or buy it from Aio at full price. AT&T touted the simplicity of the service in a statement today.
T-Mobile has released their Q1 2013 earnings report, and it shows good news for the carrier on the iPhone front. The iPhone 5 only launched officially on April 12, yet T-Mobile reports that they have sold around 500,000 units to new and existing customers. Perhaps coincidentally, they're also reporting an uptake in net customer additions for the quarter, standing at 576,000.
Apple has apparently started removing an increasing number of apps that allow users to search App Store contents and recommend apps to their friends. Apps that have been found to violate App Store regulation 2.25, which prohibits apps that could be confused as app stores, have been removed, and Apple seems to be broadening the scope of that rule. According to PocketGamer.biz:
Since the dawn of time, BlackBerry smartphones have been the mobile communicator of choice for the United States federal government. The federal National Institute of Standards and Technology has been approving hardware and software to meet the FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) since 1995, and today iOS 6.0 was granted FIPS 140-2 certification. Specifically, the iOS CryptoCore Kernel Module 3.0 was assured to to meet the security requirements of the government.
With potentially billions of customers on the line, Apple is reportedly having trouble negotiating with wireless providers in emerging markets like Russia and China, and in established markets like Japan. The carriers are, apparently, holding out for better terms from Apple than those currently enjoyed by carriers in United States under the subsidy model. Bloomberg reports:
Fortune has released a new version of their annual Fortune 500 list, and Apple has jumped eleven places since last year, moving from seventeen to six on the list. Fortune noted that while Apple continues to grow, they have hit some rough spots in the last year, especially in public perception.
Samsung has just released a new commercial for their new flagship phone, the Galaxy S4... and it's pretty good. The sheer size of the Galaxy S4 is evident in the ad, as are features like Drama Mode, which lets you capture a series of images -- think multi-exposure sports pics -- and Air Gestures that let you navigate without touching the screen with sticky -- in this case tasty rib covered -- fingers. Some of the other features, like Hover, which feels like a terrible violation of Fitts' law, and S Beam, which is like Bump over NFC, are a tad more gimmicky, and more demo-ware than software, but they come off okay in commercials for just that reason. (Samsung even suggests their screens support smell capture, which was probably a bad idea since injecting farce into an otherwise real, if strange, feature set only creates confusion.)
Whenever Apple does something, hoards of excited people usually follows. Today's opening of the very first Apple Store in the German capital, Berlin, was absolutely no exception. As is tradition, huge crowds of eager Apple fans queued up for as long as 10 hours prior, according to the Berlin Morgenpost.
U.S. Cellular, the fifth-largest carrier in the United States, will start selling Apple products later this year. Announcing their Q1 financial results, the carrier said that they hope that adding Apple products to their lineup will help convice people to switch.
An iOS game called Simply Find It, when run through BitDefender’s virus scanner, reportedly returns a positive result for Trojan.JS.iframe.BKD. This has drawn into question the effectiveness of Apple’s App Store approval process. Is this something that Apple should have caught, and is it something App Store customers should be worried about?
