Applemob

Apple News & Reviews from the UK

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Applemob is closing down!

Because of other interests, this site will be closing down within the next few weeks. I have tried to keep all information up-to-date, but I just cannot spend the time anymore researching new topics and news items. I would like to keep the site open and relevant so if you have articles or information that you would like to have included please let me know, if the response is not forthcoming this site will close up by the end of November 2011.

Many thanks to all contributors in the past, and to everyone who has read our articles.

Thanks

Pete

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OSX Lion thumb drives available

For those of us who do not have access to fast broadband, which for a significant number in rural areas of the UK is a reality, then now is your chance to get Lion for OSX on a tiny thumb drive. The drive can be ordered direct from Apple for £55, and reportedly will ship in one to three business days. The flash drive requires 7Gb of free space, and also requires a minimum of Core 2 Duo processor with 2 Gb or RAM installed. Apple has stated that if you have installed Lion from a thumb drive then you won't have the option to use the Lion recovery tool, but instead will have to resort to using the thumb drive again should you need to re-install Lion.

If you have already installed Lion from the app store and require a disk version, then you can can download the 'Lion Recovery Disk Assistant' from Apple for free. This will allow you to make a boot disk to a CD or removable media.

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Apple opens new store in Basingstoke 20th Aug

Apple have today announced the opening of it's new Apple Store in Queen Anne's Walk, Festival Place, Basingstoke. The doors open at 9:00am on Saturday 20th August, and the first 1000 customers will get a commemorative T-shirt.

As with all Apple Stores, it will have a Genius Bar, Workshop areas for beginners and pros for all hands-on training, plus One to One training for help getting started, and of course their Business Team for handling all business related questions and sales.

Interested in making a visit?  Apple have a dedicated page for you to get directions.

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WiFi Storage for your iOS device from Kingston

Kingston have just announced the Wi-Drive (Flash memory based) which gives you either 16 or 32Gb from device that looks remarkably like a iPhone 3GS with a coat on!

To get started you attach the device via USB to either a Mac or PC and load it up with what ever takes your fancy, Pictures, Music & Video would seem like the logical choices then choose the Wi-Drive signal in your WiFi setting on your iOS device. You will have to get the special Wi-Drive app from the app store to get access to your drives files.. but it is free and you can connect up to three users that can access the drive simultaneously, sounds like a ball!

For those with a more practical need, documents can be put on the drive for access on your iOS device too, which might be useful for the out-of-the-office occasions when you would rather keep your documents portable for all your devices rather than only on one, and it might stop you having to email documents to yourself just to be able to transfer from one device to another.

The Wi-Drive is available from Cancom at £89 for the 16Gb and £119 for the 32Gb and although you can order them now, Cancom reports they are out of stock, although the truth being known is that they are taking orders for when stock comes in, the device is also available through Solutions inc., Square Group, Farpoint, Western Computers, MCC Group, Micro Anvika Stores and Ebuyer.

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CoPilot Live Premium Reedem codes - first come!

We have some time ago written about Copilot and have always considered it to be among the very best in Sat Nav apps for the iPhone, with a rich display and features you'll only see in a purpose made Sat Nav, but with the newly release version, which is also available for the iPad puts this app into the top slot yet again.

I have been using this for day-to-day use for a couple of weeks now and I have found it to be very reliable and very user friendly, I know it's considered to be costly by some compared to the other Nav apps on the store, but quite frankly you get what you pay for! And quality will always cost, but if your serious about having a mobile Sat Nav then you could do a lot worse than having Copilot to hand when you need it.

The first thing you will notice is that the interface is much cleaner and more professional, with a one-tap link to the most used functions right from the drive screen, changing to the drive menu gives you access to the list functions of your route to give you a turn-by-turn run down of what to expect, or you can change the view to 2D to give a better view of turns, and there is also quick access to routes. Another nice feature is the change from or to, walking mode if you should need it straight from the drive screen - so that as soon as you leave your car you can pick up on the remaining route via the walking function.

There are a few in app (paid for) functions including Active traffic and personal Connect allowing you to publish you route and whereabouts via Facebook and Twitter.

'Edit a trip' sounds great but in reality for me at least I found it hard to understand. Setting a point from A to B should give you a route, but then you should be able to edit that route to give stops, however in practice this wasn't all that easy, but I'm sure if you persist enough you could work it out.

We are lucky to be able to give away some redeem codes for some of our users to try, but it will be on a first come first served basis, so if you would like to get your hands on a code, use our contact form, we have 5 iPhone and 5 iPad codes for you to get your hands on, one per person, and please specify either iPhone or iPad, the iPhone version is UK/ireland and the iPad is the Europe version.

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Blogtouch for Wordpress is now on sale on iTunes

Applemob and Applemobmedia announce the release of Blogtouch, it has been a long time coming, and a great deal of work has been put into it to ensure that the end result is ease of use, if you are a blogger or have your own self-hosted Wordpress site, why not give it a try - it's available on iTunes now!

Blogtouch - for Wordpress The professional way to write, amend or create posts, articles or Pages within a Wordpress.com or self hosted Wordpress website. Insert pictures from either Dropbox or the iPad library into your posts. Choose from a list of creative fonts, and style them with a colour picker. Blogtouch writes in html but with help from a fully featured formatting bar you can apply links to text, or add bold, italic, paragraphs or bulleted lists and more to give you ultimate control over your posts content.

Create on-line or local drafts (incremental saves) to keep your posts available for amending until ready to publish. We have included our own simple mini-browser which also doubles up to preview your posts - so you can see how they look before publishing.

Other features include: - Create new Categories & Tags or choose from existing ones from your website. • View comments from your website, which include 'Pending', 'Post Specific' or 'All comments'. Mark and remove spam comments, or authorise pending comments if your blog is set up this way. • Create new pages or amend existing ones • Post specific date for publish • Push your posts to Twitter or Facebook as you publish your posts • Add your location to posts

Simply the best way to control the content of Wordpress websites.

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Applemob starts writing iOS apps

A big sorry goes out to all our readers here at Applemob, as we have been a bit neglectful in the last few weeks but, we have been very busy building a new website which will be active soon, and also bringing our talents to bear on writing an app... which is still a bit secret at the moment, but we hope within the next couple of weeks to be unveiling our very first application for iPad, so please hang on there and we will be back to normal bringing you more UK apple news and reviews.

Many Thanks - applemob

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iPad 2 arrives on Friday 22nd March

Apple has stuck with it's plans to release the iPad 2 in the UK and 25 more Countries this Friday. The iconic second generation tablet will be available from Apple Stores and Authorised Resellers at 5pm so the press release says and the prices start at £399 for a 16GB Wi-Fi only Model some £25 cheaper than the original iPad, the 32GB version £479 and £559 for the 64GB model. If you after a Wi-Fi and 3G iPad2 then the starting price for the 16GB is £499, 32GB is £579 and the 64GB model is a huge £659

Other countries getting the ipad this Friday include: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.

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iOS 4.3.1 to land in next couple of weeks

iOS 4.3.1 update could be available in the next couple of weeks which is purely a bug fix release, which includes: Baseband updates for the 3GS and iPad1: fix memory hangs when reading from USIM filesystems: fix for authentication problems with NTLM: fix for third party apps not recognising the gyroscope on iPad2, and finally a fix for iPad 2 jailbreak vulnerability. Nothing here that really lights my fire but I'm sure they mean something to developers out there!

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Rumour: iPhone 5 to loose glass back

The iPad 2 isn't even out of the box yet and already there are rumours of iPhone 5 circulating. The Japanese site Macotakara is reporting that Apple will discard the glass back as per the iPhone 4 and go back to the aluminium as in the first generation iPhone, but then if the iPad 2 is anything to go by, and certainly the picture from Macorakara show this to be a similar shape to the new iPad, then this would keep the mobile line in a design theme.

Also reported was that the antenna would be housed directly behind the Apple logo which would be made of some kind of resin, presumably to allow for better signal attenuation due to the iPhone 4 antenna problems. The iPhone 5 is likely to be announced sometime in June/July if previous versions are anything to go by, and that leaves plenty of time for more rumours and mock-ups to hit the blogs before then.

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iTunes 10.2.1 update ready for iOS 4.3

It can't be a week since the 10.2 iTunes update and yet this morning Apple released iTunes 10.2.1 which is in readiness for the iOS 4.3 update due in the UK about 6:00pm this evening. According to the release notes iTunes will allow you to browse and play music and video from your computers iTunes Library onto your mobile devices once synced to version 4.3, however it is likely that you will have a limit of only 3 mobile devices.

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New MacBook Pros could be in stores by Monday

More rumours are lurking about today of an early shipment of MacBook Pros which will arrive at European resellers as early as next Monday, they are said to be on 'sealed palettes' and are secret enough for apple to have told resellers that they could pull the right to sell from under them if they breath a word of it. Only Apple cloud there products in such a mysterious way, which is why they get the blogs pounding and buyers interested.

The MacBooks models are probably pretty predictable, a couple of 13 & 15-inch models and maybe a 17-inch version with smattering of Intel's Core processors, faster hard drives and graphic cards.

Apple has been said to have been toying with the idea of a faster more flexible form of optical cable interface called Light Peak, but this has only been speculative so far. But if your in the market for a new lappie, it might just be worth holding on a few weeks, you never know the prices might even have dropped, then again, Jordan might just get a breast reduction!

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RBS Six Nations Rugby iPhone app

If like me your a rugby fan, then you will no doubt be watching the RBS 6 Nations, and with England doing so well at the moment, who would want to miss it... so don't, this app gives you dates for the upcoming matches plus the kick-off times, plus the low down on all the teams with pictures of individual players and there stats.

News features heavily on the app as well, plus you can get videos on an in app purchase to watch the games you have missed or would just like to see again, England vs Italy for instance! The app is free but the videos are priced at £0.59p each but they are split into two halfs so it will cost you £1.18 to watch a whole game, alternatively you can get the whole lot for £2.39 but I would expect that to go up as more matches are played.

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Apple Launch Subscriptions on the App Store

Apple announced today that they have released the subscriptions update to all publishers, which has been talked about since 'The Daily' was released in the US with just such a service. The update is for content-based applications on the App Store which include magazines, newspapers, video, music and the like.

It will allow publishers now to set an in-store app billing system that will charge for the length of the subscription, which could be either, weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, bi-yearly or yearly. The end user would just choose from the subscription options available when purchasing the app.

As with all apps purchased via the app store Apple will earn a 30pc chunk for every new subscriber Apple brings to the app, but when a publisher brings in an existing customer or a new subscriber outside of the app, then the publisher keeps 100pc and Apple gets nothing. Judging from the uproar that the publishers originally made about subscription via the app store, this may keep them happy for the time being.

Publishers can sell their subscriptions via the app or by by-passing the App Store altogether and try to make you pay via their websites, In a nutshell, they are going to go to great lengths to get you to renew outside of the app store, which in turn probably means you will get nagging pop-ups when you get near the end of the current subscription, that will take you off to sign up outside of the application, and you might also get email from them persuading you to do just that, after all it is well worth their while!  Since Apple would not be involved in these transactions there would be no revenue sharing involved.

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iPhone telephoto lens with 8 x zoom

If you have been looking for that all important shot with your iPhone, but need a bit more zoom then try the strangely named Photojojo, the lens is part of a case kit, which looks a bit like the incipio feather that I have on my iPhone 4, but their case has a small screw thread on the back which is ready to accept the lens, which you just screw on and gives up to 8 x zoom.

It is compatible with iPhone 3G/3GS  and iPhone 4. The kit cost $35 about £22 and comes with the case the lens and a mini desktop tripod an connector, you will have to pay and extra $12 about £7 for shipping from the US but I think for a total of £30 it doesn't sound to bad, although I haven't personally tested it.

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Korean director shots movie entirely on iPhone4

A south Korean film director has shot a whole 30 minute movie costing $130,000 using only iPhone 4's which is showing currently in Korean theatres, the somewhat charismatic director Park Chan-wook (a name to remember I'd say) said: "The new technology creates strange effects because it is new and because it is a medium the audience is used to," Park told reporters. Paranmanjang, which means a 'life full of ups and downs,'  "is about a man transcending his current and former lives. He catches a woman while fishing in a river in the middle of the night. They both end up entangled in the line, and he thinks she is dead. Suddenly, though, she wakes up and attempts to strangle him, and he passes out. When the woman awakens him, she is wearing his clothing and he hers. She cries and calls him "father."

Intriguing plot, don't you think?

The directors attached lenses to the iPhones and everything was shot as in a regular movie using several iPhones to get the effects they wanted. Lee Jung-nyan, who plays the woman says "the film has a bit of everything"... the mind boggles!

However judging from the sample I don't think Roman Polanski has much to worry about. But it just goes to show what you can do with an iPhone some time and quite a bit of the old paper stuff.

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W3C targets 2014 for HTML5 Standard

Apple as we all know kicked flash into oblivion last year, and took up on the side of HTML5 for their preferred choice of webpage standard, which they have had some success in it would appear according to HTML5 readiness (at least with browsers) and WC3 now confirms that May 2011 will be the last call for the working draft level before it expires, with the final target being 2014 which does seem to be a long way off. The standard is not sitting still and has been taken up with nearly all browsers with just a few areas dragging behind, 3D transforms has so far only been taken up by Safari for instance.

We know from recent tablet releases, most if not all will support Flash 10.2 or an variation of it, although how many websites will adopt HTML5 as a standard is unclear, and if Apple decides to continue building hardware without integration with flash, then we could once again see a them and us split that could potentially lead to some sites (as they are now, but worse) being unusable for Apple's mobile products. Don't get me wrong, I am not personally a lover of Flash, but it can get very frustrating with some mobile content, so should Apple concede for the sake of the consumer, or should they at least give us the choice?

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