Sprint on Friday announced a new credit incentive to encourage customers to switch to the carrier, offering new Sprint Framily subscribers up to $650 in trade-in and early termination fee credits.
"At Sprint, we believe in 'Happy Connecting' through the value of a Sprint Framily Plan," said Jeff Hallock, Sprint chief marketing officer. "We are seeing great momentum with the Sprint Framily plan, and we want to make it as easy as possible for customers to join our Framily."
When customers sign up for a Sprint Framily Plan, which has prices as low as $25 per line with 7 to 10 lines, they can get a $350 Visa prepaid card to cover early termination fees and a device credit of up to $300, for a total of $650.
Customers are required to bring their existing phone numbers to the carrier and choose a new phone when they subscribe, giving up their existing phones for credit. Customers will also need to submit a claim to receive reimbursement for early termination fees, providing Sprint with a bill showing the exact termination fees for each line.
Sprint's $650 offering emulates T-Mobile's January UnCarrier 4.0 initiative, which also gives customers up to $650 to switch to T-Mobile. Unlike T-Mobile's promotion, Sprint's offering is temporary and will end on May 8.
Earlier this week, Amazon launched its Fire TV media streaming box, entering a crowded market with devices from Roku, the Chromecast from Google and the Apple TV. With the Fire TV delivering a number of features rumored for a future Apple TV, reactions to Amazon's new box have certainly been of interest to Apple fans.
With an immediate launch for Fire TV, the device has already landed in the hands of reviewers and at popular repair shop iFixit, which promptly tore the device down. Early analysis of the Fire TV suggests the device has market-leading hardware that is hindered by less-than-perfect software.
On the hardware front, iFixit confirms the Fire TV is a powerhouse with a quad-core, 1.7 GHz Qualcomm Krait 300 processor, Qualcomm Adreno 320 dedicated GPU, 2 GB LPDDR2 RAM clocked at 533 MHz, 8 GB internal storage, 802.11a/b/g/n MIMO Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. The Fire TV has the power to play back HD videos, with extra to spare for games.
Though the hardware is impressive, early reviews suggest the device's blazing performance is overshadowed by a poor search experience that makes finding content on the Fire TV a chore, says Dave Smith in a review for ReadWrite. While Voice Search offers an improvement over typical manual input, its results are limited to Amazon services.
Due to the extreme limitations of Voice Search, browsing through Netflix — where you’ll probably spend most of your time, considering Amazon’s rather limited library of quality movies for free streaming — is, once again, manual labor.
In time, applications like Netflix and Hulu+ could support Voice Search—maybe even through a simple software update. But since searching is so important on this device, Amazon has really hung early-adopters out to dry. Even when Voice Search works, it can’t filter the results by movies or programs you can stream for free.
Because of its high-end hardware, Amazon couldn't undercut its competition and had to release the Fire TV at a price point that is on the high-end of the market as noted by Leslie Horn of Gizmodo.
"More features and more horsepower are rarely a bad thing, but in this case it's driven the price of Fire TV much higher than one might have expected from an Amazon product. In a world full of $35 Chromecasts and $50 Roku sticks — which definitely can't do as much as Fire TV, but can arguably do more than enough — forking over $100 for the ability to play some biggie-sized tablet games is a tough sell."
Scott Stein of CNET focused on the gaming feature of the Fire TV, saying it isn't groundbreaking and doesn't offer a compelling alternative to existing smartphone, tablet, or console games.
Don't expect anything more than what Android/iOS already offers: the Fire TV's initial offerings, while better than I'd expected, cover a lot of familiar bases. Terraria, Badland, Asphalt 8, Riptide GP 2, Dead Rising 2, The Walking Dead, even Minecraft Pocket Edition...you can already get all these in many other places.
To help set it apart from its competitors, Amazon included an app store, gaming and wireless controller support to Fire TV. Earlier rumors suggest Apple will bring similar features to its next generation Apple TV, adding support for games and Apple's iOS 7 controllers to the media box. Other rumors point to a device with the router features of the AirPort Express as well as a possible cable TV tie-in with partners such as Comcast.
Members of the press were given a tour of Apple's newest retail store in Istanbul, Turkey before its grand opening tomorrow, April 5th, reports Apple Toolbox. Leading the tour was Apple's manager of retail stores, Steve Cano, who confirmed that CEO Tim Cook will not attend the opening as originally expected. Turkish President Abdullah Gül also will postpone his visit until after the retail store is opened.
The 20,000 square foot store, which is located in the upscale Zorlu Center, features a unique cubic design with a glass ceiling and glass sides. According to Cano, the store uses more glass than any previous Apple Store and contains special glass materials that take full advantage of the sun light in the open area of the mall.
The Apple Retail Store at the Zorlu Center is set to open at 10:00 AM this Saturday, April 5, with Apple sending out announcements via email to Turkish residents. Similar to other retail openings, store employees will be giving away Apple t-shirts to the first 4,500 customers who enter the location on Saturday. The Istanbul location is Apple's 424th retail store worldwide.
Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brian White is touring China and reports to investors that demand for the iPhone 5s in the Asian country is disappointing, while interest in Chinese brands like Xiaomi is on the rise. This cool sentiment towards the iPhone may change when an iPhone 6 model with a larger screen arrives later this year.
Interest in a large-screened iPhone model among Chinese vendors and carriers is reportedly very high, possibly making the next iPhone launch a "special" one for Apple.
In the near term, we sensed disappointment around demand for the iPhone 5S. That said, we heard great enthusiasm around the potential for Apple to introduce a larger iPhone form factor in China this year with the iPhone 6. In our view, the iPhone 6 with a larger screen (e.g., 4.7-inch, 5.5-inch) has the potential to meaningfully accelerate Apple's growth trajectory in China during 2H:14. We have not heard this type of excitement in China around the iPhone in at least two years and thus we believe this could be a very special iPhone launch for Apple.
China has been a focus of Apple in recent years, with the company opening new retail stores and bringing both the iPhone and the iPad to wireless carriers in the Asian country. This year alone Apple has introduced a TD-LTE version of the iPad and launched both the iPhone 5s and 5c with China Mobile, the world's largest mobile carrier with approximately 772 million subscribers.
Apple's next iPhone model is expected to arrive in two display sizes, with one near 4.7 inches and the other at approximately 5.5 inches. The 4.7-inch model may debut this fall, while the 5.5-inch is rumored to land sometime in 2015.
Apple debuted its Touch ID fingerprint sensor in September of 2013 with the iPhone 5s, making it the first major smartphone to include fingerprint recognition technology. Samsung followed with its own version of a fingerprint scanner in the Galaxy S5, which is slated to be released on April 11.
A new YouTube video from Tanner Marsh compares Touch ID on iPhone 5s with the fingerprint scanner of the upcoming Galaxy S5, walking through the process of setting up fingerprint recognition on both devices and comparing and contrasting some of the available functionality.
The two fingerprint scanners are quite different, with Apple's Touch ID utilizing a round home button that captures a motionless fingerprint while Samsung's sensor is activated using a swiping motion that scans the finger from base to tip using a rectangular home button.
iPhone 5s users may be familiar with the setup process of Touch ID, which includes placing each finger on the home button multiple times in order to register a fingerprint from multiple angles. Samsung's setup is a bit different, involving multiple swipes downward on the screen over the home button.
Early reports suggested Samsung's fingerprint sensor was somewhat inaccurate, and the video depicts some of the same problems with fingerprint recognition. Marsh notes that he has to swipe directly over the center of the home button for a fingerprint to register and describes how the sensor on the S5 is hard to use with a single hand.
It seems like it's sort of hit or miss unless you swipe directly over the center of the button, covering most of it with your finger. Moreover because you have to swipe starting from the bottom of the touchscreen it makes the process nearly impossible with one hand.
As for the iPhone 5s, because the device essentially captures multiple scans of your finger in various positions you can literally unlock it from any orientation including upside down, left, right, or diagonally. It doesn't matter. It will almost always recognize your finger.
While Samsung's fingerprint sensor appears to have some issues, Apple's Touch ID faced its own problems early on, including "fade," or the increasingly erratic performance of the fingerprint sensor over time. iOS 7.1, released in March, solved the issue, bringing much-needed improvements to Touch ID's fingerprint recognition capabilities.
Apple also faced significant scrutiny over both hacking and privacy concerns after the launch of the iPhone 5s, leading it to publish multiple documents detailing how the feature works, assuring users that only mathematical representations of fingerprints are stored in the A7 processor’s Secure Enclave, which is walled off from the rest of iOS.
Samsung may face some of the same scrutiny following the April 11 release of the Galaxy S5, especially as the company has plans to allow developers access to the feature.
Samsung's S5 will also be compatible with PayPal's mobile payment app, allowing users to authorize PayPal payments with a fingerprint, a feature that could also cause concern with some users. Apple has plans to enter the payment arena with its Touch ID fingerprint scanner, but has yet to do so.
Apple today seeded build 13D33 of OS X 10.9.3 to developers, just under a week after releasing the fourth OS X beta, build 13D28, and a month after the first 10.9.3 beta.
The beta is available through the Software Update mechanism in the Mac App Store as well as through the Mac Dev Center.
Apple continues to ask developers to focus on Graphics Drivers and Audio, and Safari. As was discovered with the first beta, 10.9.3 adds new support for 4K displays, offering “Retina” resolutions that improve readability along with support for 60Hz output from the Retina MacBook Pro.
According to Fadell, a recent laboratory test revealed that Nest Wave, a feature that enables the device's alarm to be turned off with a gesture, could potentially be used to turn off an alarm unintentionally, thus delaying the activation of the alarm in a real fire.
During recent laboratory testing of the Nest Protect smoke alarm, we observed a unique combination of circumstances that caused us to question whether the Nest Wave (a feature that enables you to turn off your alarm with a wave of the hand) could be unintentionally activated. This could delay an alarm going off if there was a real fire. We identified this problem ourselves and are not aware of any customers who have experienced this, but the fact that it could even potentially happen is extremely important to me and I want to address it immediately.
The company is immediately disabling the Nest Wave feature until the issue is resolved and while a fix is being worked on, sales of new Nest Protect alarms have been halted. Nest urges customers with existing alarms to connect them to a Nest Account (if they are not already connected) so the Nest Wave feature can be automatically disabled. Customers without access to WiFi can receive a complete refund for their devices.
Nest states that no customers have been affected by the potential issues with Nest Wave and that the steps it has taken to halt sales are a precautionary measure. The company estimates that fixing the issue will take two to three months.
Apple is exploring touch screen technology that determines pressure sensitivity using a combination of capacitive touch and infrared light sensing, according to a new patent application recently published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (via AppleInsider).
The patent describes a method of determining the force of a user's touch on a capacitive screen using infrared transmit lines from transmitters and receivers positioned under the frame of the cover glass. Capacitive touch combined with light would determine both the position of the finger and distinguish a soft touch from a harder touch, allowing Apple to implement gestures that could vary with force.
Using infrared light to determine where a user touches a screen is a method known as Frustrated Total Internal Reflection, or FTIR. FTIR is essentially a light-based way to detect multitouch, bouncing infrared light off of the touch screen to detect interference from a finger. When combined with capacitive touch, the interference measurements can also deduce force.
FTIR has been used by Microsoft for its Perceptive Pixel products, as noted in Apple's patent application. Microsoft offers several large-screened multi-touch sensing devices that use FTIR and offers a technology called Microsoft PixelSense, which is used in the Samsung SUR40.
As implemented by Microsoft, the FTIR technology, which uses cameras to detect light refracted by pressure, allows multiple people to use the device at once and it also recognizes and distinguishes objects that are not fingers.
Though Apple has not yet built pressure sensitivity into the touch screens of its mobile devices, the company has been looking at various techniques for implementing pressure detection over the last several years. In addition to infrared light, Apple has explored force sensors, spring membranes, and pressure sensitive device casings.
Given Apple's continued interest in pressure sensitive touch screens and competing products that already include pressure sensitivity, such as Microsoft's Surface Pro line of tablets, the implementation of the technology in some form or another seems like a logical step for Apple's future mobile devices.
Apple purchased automatic speech recognition company Novauris Technologies last year, reports TechCrunch. Novauris' main product was NovaSystem, a server-based distributed speech recognition system.
According to the company's website, its technology is able to handle multiple simultaneous voice requests, recognizing complete phrases and analyzing syllable structure for better speech recognition.
NovaSearch doesn’t carry out recognition at the word or sequence-of-words level, but rather identifies complete phrases from start to finish by matching them against a potentially huge inventory of possible utterances. This enables it to assemble information about what has been spoken over utterances of virtually any length and take near-optimal decisions.
While the Novauris website does not mention its acquisition by Apple, TechCrunch notes that a phone call to the U.K. offices was answered with "Apple," by Novauris's co-founder, who confirmed that the team now works for Apple. Novauris's founders are well-known speech researchers and formerly worked at Dragon Systems, the company behind products like Dragon NaturallySpeaking and DragonDictate, now owned by Nuance.
One of the biggest differentiators about Novauris in terms of the competitive landscape, is that they operated in both the embedded and server space, and they also owned the core engine. This of course would make them a valuable asset for Apple, which had tried to acquire Nuance, the technology that powers Apple's Siri – a partnership that has long been known, but only officially confirmed last year.
Novauris's technology has been used by companies like Verizon Wireless, Panasonic, Samsung, Alpine, BMW, and more. It has also been used to power several different voice-activated mapping systems, as seen in the demo video below.
The acquisition took place in 2013 and the Novauris team has been working on improving Siri, Apple's voice-based digital assistant. Apple is rumored to be working on making some significant upgrades to Siri with iOS 8, possibly expanding its ability to interface with third-party apps.
Apple's customers may receive a boost in performance and improved battery life from the company's 2014 products thanks to improvements in Micron's LPDDR4 DRAM technology, claims Matt Margolis (Via 9to5Mac). According to Margolis, Micron is ramping up production of its LPDDR4 RAM and will supply Apple with memory chips for its 2014 iPad, iPhone and Mac models, which are expected to debut later this year. Margolis believes a "mystery" $250 million payment Micro received for "product to be supplied through September 2016" is from Apple as part of a multi-year deal.
Apple is a current DRAM customer of Micron Technology, having last used Micron’s LPDDR3 DRAM memory in 2013. Micron presented detailed benefits and product highlights regarding their LPDDR4 DRAM Memory technology almost a year ago. Furthermore, just yesterday Micron’s Vice President of Wireless Solutions Marketing published an article highlighting the benefits of Micron’s next generation DRAM LPDDR4, which tells me this technology is ready for the big show. Lastly, Micron received a mystery payment of $250m from one customer that was reported during their Q1 2014 conference call and their 10-Q indicates that the payment was “for product to be supplied through September 2016″.
Apple is in an arm’s race to improve the performance of their mobile, tablet and ultrabook devices and improve overall battery life. There appears to be little doubt that Apple is going to be showing off Micron’s LPDDR4 DRAM memory across their 2014 iPhones, Macbook and Tablets. You can take my word for it that Apple users are going to love how “lightning quick” the 2014 devices will be compared to the 2013 devices.
Though not confirmed, this transaction is plausible as Apple currently uses Micron’s LPDDR3 DRAM in its 2013 models under the brand name of Elpida, a company that Micron acquired in July 2013. Even earlier, Apple reportedly inked a deal for DRAM chips with Elpida in 2012 that purchased half of the capacity at the firm's main manufacturing facility in Japan.
This new LPDDR4 RAM technology offers two times the bandwidth performance of the previous generation LPDDR3, while keeping power consumption low, claims Reynette Au, Micron's Vice President of Wireless Solutions Marketing, in an article at Wirelessweek.
These technological advancements in LPDDR4 RAM may complement Apple's 64-bit A-series processor, which powers the iPhone 5s, iPad Air and Retina iPad mini. Detailed analysis from Anandtech claims Apple's current A7 processor is so powerful that users are likely to encounter RAM bottlenecks and battery consumption limitations before overextending the CPU.
Since late 2012, a number of accessory manufacturers have released docking stations taking advantage of Thunderbolt technology to allow users to connect a number of different types of devices to their machines with a single cable. Matrox was the first to reach market with its DS1, and similar offerings from Belkin and CalDigit have since been released.
Popular TV and video accessory maker Elgato has now released its own dock, offering three USB 3.0 ports, a pair of Thunderbolt ports to support pass-through, HDMI and Ethernet ports, as well as headphone and microphone jacks.
In addition to the hardware, Elgato has also released a free menu bar utility that allows for easy ejection of mounted storage devices while also enabling high-power USB support.
In terms of connectivity, Elgato's dock is most similar to CalDigit's Thunderbolt Station, with each supporting the same set of ports. Matrox's docking station offers only a single USB 3.0 port (plus two USB 2.0 ports) and only a single Thunderbolt port, which limits users to placing the dock at the end of a Thunderbolt chain. Belkin's Thunderbolt Express Dock does away with a dedicated HDMI port and instead expects users to use one of the dock's two Thunderbolt ports for display connectivity. Belkin's dock does, however, include a FireWire 800 port.
Sonnet announced an even more expansive dock including internal storage and DVD/Blu-ray drives a year ago, although its release has been pushed back as Sonnet redesigns it to include support for the new Thunderbolt 2 standard supported on the latest Mac Pro and Retina MacBook Pro models.
Elgato's Thunderbolt Dock launches today on Amazon (although currently listed as out of stock) with a suggested retail price of $229.95 with a Thunderbolt cable. A $199.95 version without cable is also available.
Major US companies from various business sectors have joined together to form a lobbying group that opposes pending patent reform legislation proposed by Congress, reports Reuters. The new Partnership for American Innovation includes Apple, DuPont, Ford, General Electric, IBM, Microsoft and Pfizer.
The change proposed by Congress would target patent assertion entities (PAEs), which purchase patents with the sole intention of licensing them to other companies or suing non-licensees for infringement. Companies, like Apple, want to limit the ability of PAEs to sue for infringement, but they are concerned that the proposed legislation may hurt actual innovations that need patent protection.
"There's a feeling that the negative rhetoric is leading to a very anti-patent environment," said David Kappos, director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office from 2009 to 2013, who advises the group. He is with the law firm Cravath, Swaine and Moore, LLP.
In particular, the group would oppose efforts to make software or biotechnology unpatentable.
Rather than limit what ideas are patentable, the group supports efforts to penalize patent trolls for filing frivolous lawsuits. Apple, Google and other technology companies recently asked the Supreme Court to make it easier for companies to collect attorney fees when patent holding companies lose infringement lawsuits. This allocation of fees, companies argue, would cut down on the number of frivolous suits.
Apple reportedly is the number one target for patent trolls with an estimated 171 cases filed against the company in the last five years. Apple recently confirmed it has been sued 92 times in the past two years and faces 228 unresolved patent claims still in the court system.
Apple today announced that its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) for 2014 will be held June 2-6 at the Moscone West convention center in San Francisco. The company also announced that application for tickets to the event will start today through Monday, April 7. Tickets will be issued to attendees via a random lottery.
“We have the most amazing developer community in the world and have a great week planned for them,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Every year the WWDC audience becomes more diverse, with developers from almost every discipline you can imagine and coming from every corner of the globe. We look forward to sharing with them our latest advances in iOS and OS X so they can create the next generation of great apps.”
To handle overwhelming demand for tickets, Apple adopted a lottery system that will issue tickets to developers chosen randomly from the pool of registered applicants. Developers who apply for a ticket via lottery will know their status by Monday, April 7 at 5:00 PM PDT. Scholarships will be given to 200 students, who will have the opportunity to attend the conference for free.
Apple's requirements for purchasing a ticket to WWDC include membership in one of the company's paid developer programs, including the iOS Developer Program, iOS Developer Enterprise Program, or Mac Developer Program. With the new lottery system in place, Apple also is requiring that developers be a member of a paid program prior to today's announcement, thus preventing last-minute signups from obtaining tickets.
As was the case in previous years, developers between the ages of 13 and 17 must have their tickets purchased by a parent or guardian who also is an eligible member. Tickets are limited to the applicant only and cannot be sold, resold or otherwise transferred.
Developer Subset Games today released its popular real-time strategy game FTL: Faster Than Light on the iPad, coming roughly a year after the title was released on Mac, PC, and Linux to much acclaim.
The game puts the player in the commanding role of a ship aligned with the Galactic Federation, tasked with getting vital data back to its headquarters. However, rebel ships are persistent in attacking the spacecraft, allowing players to engage in top down combat while maintaining and upgrading their ship with new weapons, crew members, and more.
The award winning PC spaceship simulation game from Subset Games comes to iPad!
Key Features: - Give orders to your crew, manage ship power distribution and choose weapon targets in the heat of battle. - Pause the game mid-combat to evaluate your strategy and give orders. - Upgrade your ship and unlock new ones with the help of seven diverse alien races. - Hundreds of text based encounters will force you to make tough decisions. - Each play-through will feature different enemies, events, and results to your decisions. No two play-throughs will be quite the same. - Permadeath means when you die, there’s no coming back. The constant threat of defeat adds importance and tension to every action.
The iPad version of the game also includes the FTL: Advanced Edition expansion, which offers new ship systems, events, weapons, drones, equipment, enemy types, levels and more in addition to user interface improvements.
Our sister site TouchArcadereviewed the game, regarding the iPad version of FTL as the “definitive version”, crediting the title's touch controls and regarding them as more intuitive compared to a traditional mouse and keyboard control scheme. Overall, the title was noted as the perfect “play while you do something else game” and given a five star rating. The full review is well worth checking out, as is a video walkthrough of FTL which can be seen below.
At a launch event in Los Angeles tonight, Fox and development house TinyCo officially revealed that its upcoming title Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff is set to launch a week from now. First revealed last month, the game is centered around the town of Quahog, with gamers helping Peter Griffin and the rest of the town’s residents rebuild their city after a destructive fight between Peter and Ernie The Giant Chicken.
In addition to featuring all the voice actors from the series, the game features new animations along with stories and jokes from writers at Seth MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door Productions. Much like EA's The Simpsons: Tapped Out, the game will be a free-to-play title that includes optional in-app purchases.
Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff will be available for the iPhone and iPad on April 10.
Earlier today Amazon launched its Fire TV media streaming box, entering a market that features fierce competition from Roku and its streaming boxes, Google's Chromecast and the Apple TV. To help set it apart from its competitors, Amazon included an app store, strong gaming support and much more for its box, which are features that have been heavily rumored for Apple's next generation streaming box. While gaming on a media streaming box is nothing new, as Roku has allowed users to play games like Angry Birds on its devices, Amazon has gone through great lengths, including purchasingKiller Instinct game developer Double Helix and reaching out to third-party publishers like EA, Disney, Ubisoft and Minecraft creator Mojang, to bring 133 high quality games to the Fire TV, with more arriving in the future. In addition, they've launched a $39 Xbox-like controller to make it easier for users to play advanced games on the box.
Apple has long been rumored to be including gaming support on the next version of the Apple TV with support for gaming controllers. More recently, Apple and third-party hardware manufacturers have begun shipping iOS 7 game controllers for iPhones, but they've been poorly received due to build quality issues and high price tags.
To power these high quality games, Amazon has outfitted its Fire TV with a quad-core processor, which Amazon says boasts 3 times the power of Apple TV, a dedicated graphics engine and 2 GB of RAM, which is four times the amount in the Apple TV.
While its unclear what specs the new Apple TV could sport, it's likely it gets a significant improvement over the currently used A5 chip to the much more powerful A7 chip, which is used in the iPad Air and would allow developers to easily port over their best-selling iPad and iPhone games and vice versa.
Other rumored changes for the new Apple TV include a brand new interface that blends TV listings with apps and video from the web rather than a the current setup of a grid of app icons. Amazon's Fire TV does something similar according to a hands-on report by The Verge, displaying various movies and TV shows next to apps and games when the device is turned on.
In addition, Apple has been rumored to want to include some sort of Siri-like voice control to allow users to easily navigate through the interface without a remote control. While Roku already had voice control on their media streaming box, Amazon has included voice control "that just works" on its Fire TV remote control, allowing users to bypass typing for voice searches.
However, the largest difference between the new Apple TV and Fire TV could be content. While Amazon says its streaming device is "open" and has an app store, Apple has been long rumored to also include an App Store to allow for a greater variety and quicker access to more "channels" than ever before. While that would put the two boxes at parity, Apple has also been rumored to be discussing a possible partnership with Comcast for a streaming TV service on the new Apple TV, allowing users to switch between live TV via Comcast, a Hulu-like on-demand video service and third-party apps like HBO Go, YouTube and Netflix.
Apple has been rumored to be launching their new Apple TV as early as April.
Blizzard Entertainment's digital card trading game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft for iPad soft-launched today in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, after launching for Mac in March.
The free-to-play collectible card game is set in the Warcraft universe, allowing players to compete with Magic the Gathering-style decks in one-on-one fights via Battle.net or against the computer. The iPad version of the game will connect to Battle.net accounts, syncing with the PC/Mac version.
JUMP RIGHT IN: Fun introductory missions bring you into the world of Hearthstone's intuitive gameplay.
BUILD YOUR DECK: With hundreds of additional cards to win and craft - your collection grows with you.
HONE YOUR SKILLS: Play in practice matches against computer-controlled heroes of the Warcraft universe. Thrall, Uther, Gul'dan - they're all here!
COLLECTION TRAVELS WITH YOU: Your card collection is linked to your Battle.net account - enabling you to switch your play between tablet and desktop with ease.
AND FIGHT FOR GLORY: When you're ready, step into the Arena and duel other players for the chance to win awesome prizes!
While the game is currently only available to players in New Zealand, Canada, and Australia, as a soft-launch for testing purposes, the game should launch worldwide soon. Blizzard is also planning to release an iPhone app later this year.
Auxo 2, the followup to 2012’s popular jailbreak tweak Auxo, is now available in the Cydia Store. The product of developers @Sentry_NC and QusicS, the new tweak includes a number of features including a unified view for the Control Center and app switcher, a Quick Switcher for moving between apps using gestures, a hot corners feature that allows access to apps by touching the corners of an iOS device, and more.
Unlike the stock iOS 7 experience, Auxo 2 allows users to access the app switcher, multitasking controls, and Control Center toggles entirely with the use of gestures, all while combining all three elements into one interface and offering a variety of settings for customization.
Auxo 2’s flagship feature is the Quick Switcher, which allows users to switch between apps by swiping from the bottom left of a device and releasing a finger on an open app. By default, the Quick Switcher is limited to six apps, but users may enable an unlimited amount of apps in the settings. The Quick Switcher features a fluid animation in line with the rest of iOS 7, and features dynamic full screen previews for each app.
Meanwhile, Auxo 2's Multi-Center feature combines iOS 7's toggles, App Switcher, and media controls into one interface. In order to achieve the sheer number of controls located within Multi-Center, Auxo 2 locates a few elements in different places, with the AirPlay/AirDrop buttons and control toggles at the top, which is followed by media controls at the bottom. Multi-Center animates in and out of an open app, and contains various customization settings.
Auxo 2 also offers a Hot Corners feature, which allows users to return to the home screen by swiping up from the bottom right corner of the screen or access the app switcher from swiping up from the bottom left of the display. This enables users to access both UI elements with only gestures as opposed to using the home button.
Among other features, Auxo 2 allows the user to scrub through iTunes Radio tracks with its media controls, something that is not possible with the stock Music app. Other toggles for turning off elements, accessing the last open app, inverting the Hot Corners feature, and disabling the tweak in selected apps are available as well.
Auxo 2 is out now on the Cydia Store for $3.99, and is available at a discounted price of $1.99 for users who bought the original Auxo tweak. iDownloadBlog also has a detailed review of Auxo 2 covering all of its major features and customization options, and can be seen in the video below.
Apple today seeded build 13D33 of OS X 10.9.3 to developers, just under a week after releasing the fourth OS X beta, 
Major US companies from various business sectors have joined together to form a lobbying group that opposes pending patent reform legislation proposed by Congress, reports 
