I made it my mission to discover the specific reasons for iOS battery drainage. This article is a product of my years of research and anecdotal evidence I gathered in the hundreds of Genius Bar appointments I took during my time as a Genius and iOS technician, as well as testing on my personal devices and the devices of my friends.
This is the definitive guide to increasing iPhone battery life. Read it and share it.
Rumor: Design of Apple's new big-screen iPhone will be cross between iPhone 5c & 7th-gen iPod nano
Rumor: Design of Apple’s new big-screen iPhone will be cross between iPhone 5c & 7th-gen iPod nano
I bet it’s going to look like an iPad Mini or an iPod Touch. Basically, curved metal.
Reporter is a new application for understanding the things you care about. With a few randomly timed surveys each day, Reporter can illuminate aspects of your life that might be otherwise unmeasurabl
Paid, Paymium or Freemium?
Dan Counsell discusses three different pricing strategies for apps. Paymium: paid at first, with paid premium features. Interesting stuff.
Apple investigating built-in solar power converters for iPhone, MacBook
Apple investigating built-in solar power converters for iPhone, MacBook
Some interesting new tech. It makes me remember that the only thing I want my iPhone to do is to last longer. If the iPhone 6’s only new feature is a much longer battery life, I would be the happiest man on earth.
How to help Touch ID recognise your finger more precisely
If you own an iPhone 5S and you use Touch ID to unlock it, you may have noticed that it sometimes displays a “try again” message, indicating that Touch ID did not recognise your finger.
A beautiful tip shared by Lun Esex on Monday Note offers an elegant solution:
Register that one finger twice with TouchID, as if it were two different fingers. It will then have twice as many datasets to compare against that finger when using it to unlock the device.
But as Grignon drove north, he didn’t feel excited. He felt terrified. Most onstage product demonstrations in Silicon Valley are canned. The thinking goes, why let bad Internet or cellphone connections ruin an otherwise good presentation? But Jobs insisted on live presentations. It was one of the things that made them so captivating. Part of his legend was that noticeable product-demo glitches almost never happened. But for those in the background, like Grignon, few parts of the job caused more stress.
This is the story behind the unveiling of the first iPhone on June 9th, 2007. A nice read on the NYT.
Here is the video if your memory is failing you.
[gallery]
This is a map of NYC by MapBox showing smartphone usage according to Twitter data. iPhone is red, Android green and Blackberry purple.
Canabalt, the story of a great iPhone game
Canabalt, the story of a great iPhone game
Hundreds of metres above a burning city, a businessman crashes out of an office window. He arcs across the sky before curling into a stuntman’s tumble. He loses no momentum as he lands on the roof below and straightens into a sprint, his suit jacket flapping in the quickening wind. He leaps over a gap, his arms rotating like helicopter blades as he soars across it. He lands, and, accelerating again, continues to bolt from the unseen terror in pursuit. He miscalculates the next gap and leaps prematurely, then falls in slow motion toward a grisly death on the sidewalk below. A postmortem appears on the screen: “You ran 1533m before hitting a wall and tumbling to your death.” This is what it’s like to play Canabalt, a video game that has sparked an entirely new genre of play for mobile phones.
Amazing story, amazing game.
Dots - a game about connecting
Dots - a game about connecting
Are you playing Dots? If not you should. Here’s the strategy guide, courtesy of Quartz. If you think you can beat my high score, follow me on Twitter and compare (what? a cheap technique?)
Ink for iOS
Ink is a canvas for instantly capturing a rough sketch or back-of-a-napkin idea. The only features are smooth ink on soft paper with built-in sharing. True to our philosophy: Feature number one should always be as few features as needed to perform the primary purpose.
Great app.
Rethinking the iPhone lockscreen
Rethinking the iPhone lockscreen
Good ideas by Brent Caswell. The iPhone lockscreen desperately screams for an updated interface. Suggetions like these are welcome.
5 things Apple should do with Siri
Interesting Siri wish list by Alex Layne over at GigaOM.
This made me remember that Siri is a beta product — meaning it’s not finalised yet. To make any product successful, you have to start small, simple and not overcrowd the first version with a lot of features. But when this new product is a defining feature of one of the most popular phones in the world, there is a problem. People will start screaming: why can’t it do that? or this?
That’s Apple’s gamble. Siri will not be complex at first even though it will lack basic functions like answering questions about the iPhone. (You can’t ask Siri how much memory you have left.)
Hopefully time will help solve this problem quickly, because a company like Apple can’t have half-baked products for long. Ultimately, it will damage its reputation.
Alex Layne’s Siri wishlist:
1. Show me more than just restaurants and movies.
2. Answer questions about my device.
3. Change my settings.
4. Remember what I said (history)
5. Learn other languages.
Facebook might let you auto-upload photos from iOS
The feature is a big deal for Facebook since photos are a core driver of return visits and time on site. Most people take way more photos with their phones than they upload to Facebook and the social network wants to close the gap. Instead of having to manually choose photos and wait for them to upload, Photo Sync makes this all very low friction, which could drastically boost the number of photos people publish.
You could upload all your photos to Facebook and restrict their visibility to only you. Thus, when you’d want to put a photo on Facebook, it’ll already be there. This is big for them; perhaps they should expect that Apple will block this.
Apple, AuthenTec and the future of the iPhone
I read this:
With Apple rumored to be attempting to acquire a security solutions provider, a new move by AuthenTec to sell a portion of its business suggests Apple is most interested in its fingerprint scanning technology.
Apple bought this company in July for about 350 million dollars. And it makes me think: if Apple puts a fingerprint sensor on the home button of the iPhone, they could enter the mobile payments industry by the big door. Plus, they already have so many credit cards with one-click purchases on iTunes and the App Store, it really looks like a logical next step.
What I’m interested in, instead, are suggestions that the unveiling of the iPhone 5 might provide a significant boost to the U.S. economy, adding measurably to economic growth over the next quarter or two.
Do you find this plausible? If so, I have news for you: you are, whether you know it or not, a Keynesian — and you have implicitly accepted the case that the government should spend more, not less, in a depressed economy.
Apple is emerging as a chipmaker
The A6, unlike its predecessors the A5 and A4, isn’t simply a rebranded ARM design with minor tweaks. Instead, as Anand Shimpi of AnandTech discovered, it’s Apple’s own creation, based on an ARM blueprint — which it also licensed in addition to specific generic processors — but bearing much more of Apple’s own direct input. In other words, Apple is finally emerging as a chipmaker in its own right, and this could have a huge impact on device performance and consumer-facing features in its smartphones and tablets going forward.
Since Apple can now build its own chips, it will focus on the most important thing: power saving. ARM was probably trying to make the best mobile chips anyway but Apple knows battery life is the single most important aspect of the iPhone.