On any given day, a quick check of the top-selling paid apps list in the Mac App Store will reveal Apple's Keynote, Pages and Numbers in the top ten. It's surprising, given that each of those apps was originally bundled as Apple's iWork '09 productivity suite, released in, you guessed it, January, 2009. It makes me wonder when or if we'll ever see an update to them.
Google Now: one of the signature features of the update to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and beyond. Initially launching at the 2012 Google I/O developer conference, its grand purpose is to give you the information you want, without having to go and get it. Be that local weather, traffic information for your commute to work, sports scores, even now pulling in flight and package shipping information. If you travel to another country, Google Now will provide handy cards to calculate costs using the current exchange rate, for easy translation into the local tongue and even to tell you what the time is back home. Google Now is supposed to be your intelligent assistant. And now, it's with us on iOS.
iTunes, iBooks, and App Store gift cards as well as app promo codes are all redeemed the same way, with one of those ways being through iTunes on your computer. If you've received a gift card or a promo code, you can fire up iTunes and redeem your card for store credit in just a matter of seconds.
According to research by Cannacord Genuity analyst Michael Walkley, Apple still rakes in a whopping 57% of the profits in the mobile industry, while Samsung grabs the other 43%. Note that I said “mobile industry” not “smartphone industry”. In case you’re wondering why this adds up to 100% despite the presence of other players, it looks like the small profits from guys like BlackBerry and HTC are offset by losses from LG, Motorola, Nokia and others. The report also apparently goes into some detail on how Samsung should overtake Apple to be #1 in profitability. This is a red herring, and here's why...
The Incipio OVRMLD case is engineered with raised NGP barriers to protect the soft touch finish from unpredictable scratches and surface wear. The dual-injected design combines impact resistant, semi-rigid NGP with a rigid plextonium frame in a slim form factor. Comes in a variety of colors to choose from!
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.
Write for Dropbox is a pretty fantastic text editor for the iPhone. When we first reviewed it, we loved the UI, the gesture control, the vast sharing options and fast syncing. What we weren't so fond of was the lack of iPad support, as an app as good as Write is crying out to be used on the iPad. Those days are behind us now, with the launch of the Write for Dropbox iPad edition. And, to celebrate, the iPhone version is free for a limited time.
Google has released code that gives developers the ability to have links open directly in Google Chrome instead of Apple's built-in Safari browser, and return users right back to their app with a single tap. A developer has to add Google's code -- a URL scheme with x-callback -- to their app, and you have to have Chrome installed on your device, but the execution is seamless. The example used on the Chromium blog blog is YouTube: tapping on a link in a YouTube listing opens Chrome and provides a back button at the top left to easily return to the YouTube app.
S-Voice is Samsung's Bizarro-like clone of Apple's Siri voice assistant service, and like any Bizarro worth its chalky skin, it seems to be hugely conflicted about it's progenitor. Alex Dobie of Android Central reports:
