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?
Apple is approaching yet another App Store milestone -- this time 50 billion downloads. To celebrate, they're once again offering a big chunk of iTunes bucks, and a few bonus prizes as well. Apple says:
If you're in the market for a new iMac and you value raw speed over storage capacity, you may be interested in a recent change at Apple's online store. Apple is offering new storage options for iMac buyers interested in configuring their systems with Solid State Drives (SSDs), according to Eric Slivka at MacRumors. Now Apple will configure 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMacs with 256GB and 512GB SSDs. You'll add $300 or $600 to the cost of your machine, respectively.
If you own an iPhone 5, you'll soon be seeing the iOS 6.1.4 update show up if you haven't already. The update appears to only be for iPhone 5 users and contains an update to the audio profile for speakerphone.
If editing DSLR photos on an iPad in their original, RAW format is the holy grail for many professional photographers and hobbyist alike, editing DSLR photos on an iPad, in RAW, using Adobe's workflow is likely the holiest of holies. It just might also be a reality, if not today, then at some point in a future that's near-ish. In fact, it's already been previewed on popular photography podcast, The Grid. Here's the description:
The T-Mobile USA/MetroPCS merger has been finalized. The merged company will be known as T-Mobile US, Inc., and will trade under the stock symbol TMUS. T-Mobile will leverage the spectrum from MetroPCS in order to build out it’s LTE network, which they only began to rollout at the end of March. BusinessWire reports:
