During the last Mac OS upgrade, Apple was concerned that everyone didn’t have a good-enough internet to download a 4GB update, therefore offering a $69 USB stick with the update. However, this time around, the OS X Mountain Lion upgrade won’t be offered on a USB stick. Why? Apple believes the App Store is enough for the upgrade. Think Apple’s hinting you should upgrade your internet? We think so.
Remember the jailbreaking “dream team”? Remember 4 days ago they successfully jailbroke the iPhone 4S? Remember your envy of them and hoped that they would release it soon? Well, here it is! The “dream team” has released the Absinthe A5, which provides an untethered jailbreak for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2. Yup, the whole family’s finally free! What made this possible is that over ten million users submitted crash reports which allowed for discovering the exploit used in the jailbreak. Curious to get started? Head over the source link and cut those shackles on your A5 devices.
9to5Mac has dug up several images from the latest iOS 5.1 beta that details the number of cores. In the hidden panel, single-core A4s are referred as “/cores/core.0″ while dual-core A5s are “/cores/core.1″, and now a listing, “/cores/core.3″ popped up. After some simple counting, this should indicate a CPU that has four cores. However, this doesn’t mean that Apple is planning to incorporate quad-core A6 chips, as Apple loves to put misleading details in their firmwares. Although that is usually true, it is logical to presume that a quad-core iPhone or iPad will hit us one day. Perhaps after the Meizu MX get’s a quad-core CPU?
Tired of hearing Samsung and Apple together in a post? Well, here’s another one. A new Samsung ad has an incredibly similar feel to an Apple one, and it even features the same girl as the iPhone 4S Camera ad. Incredible (not the HTC phone), right? Yup. Especially since Samsung had so many ads that made fun of Apple’s iPhone. Will they stop bickering at each other? Probably not. Anyways, hop after the break for the video ads, and let’s hope they brighten your New Year’s Day!
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We know Siri can recognize our voice, but in the future Siri might recognize how we look too and will not put up with our comments on Siri’s appearance. An Apple patent application released today includes a facial recognition system that uses minimal computing power, and works whether you’re inside or outside. The technology compares your look with a reference model user profile obtained from the photo it took when setting it up. Does this remind you of something? Oh right, the facial recognition feature on ICS. Let’s hope this will work better when Apple makes use of it: maybe on Siri’s 5th birthday?
It’s only a few weeks since pod2g showed us his untethered jailbreak for iOS 5, and now… it’s here! The exploit is incorporated into redsnow 0.9.10, the Pwnage Tool and Chronic Devteam’s Cydia package. It frees the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 (including the CDMA variant), iPad 1, iPod Touch 3G and 4G from its shackles as long as they are on iOS 5.0.1. Also, pod2g is now looking for a way to free A5-based devices from jail too, but he’ll get some rest for now – since it takes a lot of energy to free devices from Apple’s shackles. Instructions are at the source link, so hop on.
Also, readers have reported some bugs, and here’s some fixes for the common ones after the break.
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Earlier on, Siri was ported to iPhone 4, iPod Touch 4G, and the iPhone 3GS by hacker Grant Paul (chpwn on Twitter). Today, Grant Paul, along with Steven Troughton-Smith and Ryan Petrich, released Spire, an installer that will easily set up Siri on any jailbroken iOS 5 device. Yes, ANY iOS 5 device. That includes the iPads, iPhone 4, iPod Touches and the iPhone 3GS. Wait, wasn’t it possible before? It’s now completely legal, unlike the copyright infringement in previous hacks.After installing, the program will download a 100MB Siri off Apple’s servers, so it’ll be better to do it over WiFi. However, you still need to set up a proxy server with info from an iPhone 4S to connect to Apple’s Siri servers. The program’s available on Cydia now though, so hop on if you have good friends with an iPhone 4s. Also, Troughton-Smith has reassured that once the iPhone 4S is jailbroken the proxy server issue should be fixed.
A few times this year, Apple’s work on “HiDPI” modes in OS X Lion was discovered. This option gave Apple’s OS support for ultra high-resolution displays that offer greater pixel density with a similar increase in image quality that is like the iPhone’s Retina display. The last rumor was on Apple’s work on a 15” MacBook Pro with a resolution of 2880 x 1800 that’s set to release early next year. This means Apple doubles the resolution in each dimension from their existing 1440 x 900 to achieve four times the number of pixels and provide developers an easy way to manage their artwork on the new systems.
Further evidence of Apple’s work on HiDPI shown up in developer builds of OS X 10.7.3, in the “Get Info” window for applications having the option “Open in HIDPI mode“. Upon clicking, we found that it wasn’t functional.
Yesterday’s release of Build 11D36 to developers had that option removed. This may imply Apple’s not ready for it yet, or the Cupertino company doesn’t want everyone to know of its next refresh. Whichever it is, we shall not be kept in the dark for long.
After Apple’s win over HTC and starting yet another battle with Samsung, Apple has added another weapon to their arsenal. The company has been granted a patent for a “portable electronic device with graphical user interface supporting application switching”. This basically means a multitasking smartphone. Since this basically covers almost all the smartphones on the market, a device accused of infringement would have to copy almost every nook of the design to be considered stepping on the wrong side of the line. Although that sounds hard, Apple’s lawyers are probably looking high and low for devices that would infringe the patent and help Apple succeed in court.
The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) has issued a ruling on Apple Inc.’s side, banning the sale and import of certain HTC phones in the U.S. This ruling reports HTC’s violation of a pair of patents by Apple regarding the formatting of data in otherwise unstructured documents allowing users to interact with them (like phone numbers in emails). The ban is scheduled to be enacted on April 19th, 2012, to give HTC and Google time to address the court’s concerns. HTC could just simply remove the features from its phones to avoid the ban, but that would take away an important ability in their phone.
The ITC did not find HTC violating the other two patents in question, which was related to realtime signal processing. Of course, this battle is far from over and we expect these two (along with almost all the other mobile manufacturers) to continue battling in the courts, instead of the “free-market”.
HTC has responded that they will indeed remove the feature off their phones to avoid banning.
