Hail or Fail The keynote speech at Apple‘s Worldwide Developers Conference may have kicked off with a demo of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion that we’ve seen before – the only real news was its launch date, July, and low price, $30 (£18) – but the iOS 5 and iCloud announcements were packed with juicy details.
It’s crucial to look ahead. Many of yesterday’s announcements seem to be catch-up manoeuvres, but they reveal on closer inspection the potential to push iOS and iCloud well beyond the competition.
Here’s what we think of the key new features.
iMessage
Like the iOS-only, Wi-Fi-only FaceTime, iMessage connects iOS 5 users – and no one else. How many folk you converse with by instant message own an iDevice? Most of mine don’t.
BlackBerry Message, iMessage’s nearest alternative, gets used because companies buy BlackBerrys en masse, and colleague messages colleague. Maybe if big business starts buying iPhones too, iMessage will take off, but for most consumers, with pals on a variety of platforms, it’s a non-starter. Read the rest of this entry »
Many men are facing a dilemma in the coming days. Thanks to the Royals, a great, great, yawning maw of consecutive weekly Bank Holidays looms large. With enforced downtime, this means a stark choice: either face the family, or retreat to the Garden Shed. To help you make this choice, here are some suggestions.
My desk at Vulture Central is like many an attic – colleagues dubbed it the “vintage computer museum”. I suspect many of you have got stuff that includes gear we’re keen to get rid of, but can’t get round to eBaying or even moving. And it never seems to diminish. Old stuff is replaced by even older stuff.
Here, I’ve tried to set a challenge. What’s the best computing kit you can get for under £100 – preferably with some unique feature that modern computers can’t replicate? In other words, it’s not old for the sake of being old, or nostalgia. It has to have a bit of real utility.
To make it even harder, I’ve excluded hire-purchase deals. You can get a thoroughly modern computer in half an hour, if you pick it up from a mobile network or Carphone Warehouse. But, obviously, that’s cheating.The cost isn’t really £50 or £100, that’s merely the first instalment. And there must be a word for that sinking feeling people have when they look at an Atom netbook purchased on a two-year contract that still has months to go, and is as alluring as a four-day-old kebab.
So here are five suggestions, and then a roundup of what didn’t make the cut – and some of the absences are quite surprising. Read the rest of this entry »
iOS App of the Week It’s holiday time! But we’ve all heard horror stories about people coming back from holiday and getting hit with a huge bill for using their smartphone outside the UK.
Settings on the iPhone
So, when I went off to Portugal recently I was determined not to make any unnecessary calls or to use apps that might run up data roaming charges and that ruled out the standard Maps app on my Apple kit. Read the rest of this entry »
iOS App of the Week There isn’t a proper version of Firefox available for iOS, but the 360 Web Browser is perhaps the closest alternative I’ve seen so far. Version 3.0 has just been released and its feature list is ridiculously long, including an option to sync with Firefox, a built-in download and file manager, the ability to upload files to a Dropbox account, and a plug-in architecture similar to Firefox.
360 Browser makes use of a phone-friendly scroll-wheel-style UI
In the end, though, the main thing that prompted me to cough up the mere 59p developer Digital Poke is asking for the browser was simply its highly efficient browsing interface. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s not often that a mere cable merits a review of its own, but the Digital AV Adapter that Apple recently launched along with the new iPad 2 is worth a closer look.
The cable plugs into the dock connector on the base of the iPad 2, and is also compatible with the original iPad, the iPhone 4 and the current fourth-generation iPod Touch. The other end of the cable provides a full-sized HDMI interface so that you can connect it to an HD TV, along with a pass-through dock connector so that you can still charge up the iPad at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »
