Apple has removed a number of copycat apps that mimicked the titles of successful games after they provoked a public outcry from developers over the issue. Drastic action has been taken against developers who fake app reviews to pump up chart position, “name squat” on titles that have become popular but haven’t yet released a genuine iOS version or, as it did today, take down apps that are clearly counterfeit versions of other apps.

The British newspaper The Guardian has even recently published a profile on Anton Sinelnikov, the coder behind a number of the fake apps — one of which, Temple Jump, actually hit the top spot in the paid app charts instead of the legitimate Temple Run. Apple has now pulled most of Sinelnikov’s apps, according to a tweet from Temple Run creator Keith Shepherd.

Apple has dealt with this issue before and has even faced criticism for being overly proactive in removing apps that are perceived as knock-offs. Last month, one developer accused game maker Atari of leveraging a “special relationship” with Apple to have as many as “hundreds” of applications resembling its own games taken down.

Apparently Apple is not facing this problem alone, Google’s Android platform has come across similar problems given the lack of an official review process on the official Android Market. The open nature of Android has even led to criticism by some content owners, developers and security firms over potential copyright infringement and malware concerns. The Mountain View California company recently revealed that it has begun employing a malware detector, but some security researchers wanted to see more from the company and continued to call for increased supervision on the platform.

Share your thoughts and comments below, and stay tuned for more information by following us on Facebook, Twitter, and/or subscribing to our RSS feed.

Nokia reveals Hello, which strives to make it easier if you’re trying to talk to someone who speaks a different language than you. Powered by Near Field Communication (NFC), Nokia Hello lets one user type a message in one language, and then swipe it next to another phone to get an instant translation on the recipient’s end.

There are several other apps that allow text-based translations, or even allow users to speak something in one language and have the translation read aloud. However, this project from Nokia unique because it actually sends the message between phones. Although, according to Nokia, it isn’t just about sending messages between different languages.

Nokia boasted in an official blog post – “The team working on the project estimate that the need for speech interactions with work colleagues could be eliminated entirely by 2015“. There have been many proposals for how NFC technology will revolutionize the market, but this is the first time we’ve seen someone talk about using it to prevent making from needing to exchange verbal communication.

Stay tuned for more information as it surfaces by following us on Facebook, Twitter, and/or subscribing to our RSS feed.

[Source: GigaOM]

According to a new study that was recently released, Apple’s phone-based tech support continues to remain the best in the industry but complains regarding wait times and call automation have caused a decline in customer satisfaction. The results are based on data from an ongoing study conducted by Vocalabs and show the quality of Apple’s phone support has declined substantially over the past year and a half. Apparently, it’s slowly sinking to reported levels of its competitors, no longer providing superior support.

The study was conducted as part of the research firm’s National Customer Service Survey, where 4,852 customers were interviewed between May 2008 and December 2011, each being polled on various service quality metrics regarding tech support calls to Apple, Dell, and HP. According to Peter U. Leppik, President and CEO of Vocalabs, “Apple was far and away the leader in technical support quality” but “in the end of 2011, the company slipped to merely [being] ahead of its competition in certain metrics, and with a downward trend. If this trend continues, Apple could even be trailing in support quality by the end of 2012.”

The company, which reached a peak in early 2010 has shown a 19% decline of customers who were “very satisfied” with their call, compared to the 5% and 2% drops in call satisfaction from Dell and HP respectively. The problem resolution aspect is also on the decline as the Mac maker showed a 17 point drop in problems solved over the phone, ultimately leaving one out of every two issues unresolved. The results bring Apple down to being within four points of Dell’s 46% rate of problem resolution and three points of HP’s 47%. Furthermore, in some cases, Apple has even been surpassed by its competitors, as in the 20 point increase in customers who didn’t experience problems with the company’s interactive voice response system.

Overall, the Cupertino California company has seen a drop in almost every surveyed area over the past 18 months, including the likelihood to repurchase, agent satisfaction, reaching an agent, as well as a rise in customers who noted problems with Apple’s call automation and wait time. The results are in no way signifying the death of Apple support as the company remains the industry leader in offering a satisfying problem resolution experience.

Stay tuned for more information by following us on Facebook, Twitter, and/or subscribing to our RSS feed.

[Source: Vocalabs]

This guide is for Windows only and will teach you how to jailbreak various iOS devices using the newly released tool, Absinthe. The current version of Absinthe is 0.3. It should be noted that this is an UNTETHERED JAILBREAK, meaning that you will be able to reboot your phone just like you normally would at any time.

This guide works with the following device/firmware combinations:

• iPhone 4S | 5.0 (9A334)
• iPhone 4S | 5.0.1 (9A405)
• iPhone 4S | “other” 5.0.1 (9A406)
• iPad2 (CDMA) | 5.0.1 (9A405)
• iPad2 (GSM) | 5.0.1 (9A405)
• iPad2 (Wi-Fi) | 5.0.1 (9A405)

It should also be noted that the team that put this jailbreak together included both Saurik and MuscleNerd, both of which are core members of the iPhone Dev Team; three members of the Chronic Dev Team including posixninja, pod2g, and nikias; and the legendary planetbeing, who is the iOS hacker/developer who is responsible for initially porting both Android and Linux to the iPhone) is accepting donations. Feel free to donate via PayPal if you want to show some support.

PLEASE READ BEFORE CONTINUING:

Absinthe create a backup and restores it onto your device as part of the way it gets files on the device, so we recommend the device is mostly empty when you start the process. To do this, it is advised to create a backup in in iTunes first (connect to iTunes and sync). If you are using iCloud to backup, go to Settings > iCloud > Storage and Backup > Backup Now.

Once you have backed up, on your device go to Settings > General > Reset > Erase All Content and Settings. As mentioned, make sure you have a backup of your content first. You don’t need to Erase All Content and Settings if you don’t want to, but the jailbreak could take up to 20-30 minutes to complete if you don’t, depending on your device that is.

Follow the steps below to successfully jailbreak your iOS device:

1. Download the Windows version of Absinthe 0.3 from the following link (http://cache.greenpois0n.com/dl/absinthe-win-0.3.zip)
2. Once downloaded, double click the zip file to unzip it if your browser didn’t already automatically unzip the file.
3. (Make sure your device is connected first) Double-click Absinthe to launch it and you will see the Absinthe home screen. Absinthe at this point should tell you what device and firmware version is detected.
4. Press the jailbreak button. Once you do this, Absinthe will go through a few status messages while it jailbreaks your device. It will stop for a bit at Waiting for reboot – not done yet, don’t unplug your device yet!
5. Once the device has finished rebooting, it will continue the jailbreak. During this process, do not touch or unplug your iOS device.
6. Once the process has finished in Absinthe, it will alert you to unlock the screen if necessary and tap “Absinthe” icon to finish the jailbreak. Remember, the icon may not be on the first pay, so you might have to scroll to find it.
7. Tapping the icon will bring up a webview with a white page, and then your device will restart. Just a quick note: If you see an “Error establishing database connection” error or a white screen, which lasts longer than 1 minute, please go to Settings and turn on VPN, and wait instead. The VPN connection will give an error (which is normal). At this point, a reboot should happen a few moments after the error.
8. You will see the Apple logo with a progress bar quickly as the device restarts and then your device will power back on. Just a quick note: The Set Up iPhone (or iPad) GUI you see when you restore an iOS Device will now appear. If you backed up with iCloud at the beginning of this tutorial, please choose Restore from iCloud Backup in the Set Up iPhone GUI, and restore from the backup you took at the beginning of this guide. The iDevice will then restore from backup, reboot, and you’re good to go.
9. Cydia is now on your device where the Absinthe icon was before

That’s it! Your device is not jailbroken.

If you have any questions feel free to leave them below. We’ll help where we can!

Stay tuned for more information as it surfaces by following us on Facebook, Twitter, and/or subscribing to our RSS feed.

This guide is for Mac only and will teach you how to jailbreak various iOS devices using the newly released tool, Absinthe. The current version of Absinthe is 0.3. It should be noted that this is an UNTETHERED JAILBREAK, meaning that you will be able to reboot your phone just like you normally would at any time.

This guide works with the following device/firmware combinations:

• iPhone 4S | 5.0 (9A334)
• iPhone 4S | 5.0.1 (9A405)
• iPhone 4S | “other” 5.0.1 (9A406)
• iPad2 (CDMA) | 5.0.1 (9A405)
• iPad2 (GSM) | 5.0.1 (9A405)
• iPad2 (Wi-Fi) | 5.0.1 (9A405)

It should also be noted that the team that put this jailbreak together included both Saurik and MuscleNerd, both of which are core members of the iPhone Dev Team; three members of the Chronic Dev Team including posixninja, pod2g, and nikias; and the legendary planetbeing, who is the iOS hacker/developer who is responsible for initially porting both Android and Linux to the iPhone) is accepting donations. Feel free to donate via PayPal if you want to show some support.

PLEASE READ BEFORE CONTINUING:

Absinthe create a backup and restores it onto your device as part of the way it gets files on the device, so we recommend the device is mostly empty when you start the process. To do this, it is advised to create a backup in in iTunes first (connect to iTunes and sync). If you are using iCloud to backup, go to Settings > iCloud > Storage and Backup > Backup Now.

Once you have backed up, on your device go to Settings > General > Reset > Erase All Content and Settings. As mentioned, make sure you have a backup of your content first. You don’t need to Erase All Content and Settings if you don’t want to, but the jailbreak could take up to 20-30 minutes to complete if you don’t, depending on your device that is.

Follow the steps below to successfully jailbreak your iOS device:

1. Download the Windows version of Absinthe 0.3 from the following link (http://cache.greenpois0n.com/dl/absinthe-mac-0.3.zip)
2. Once downloaded, double click the zip file to unzip it if your browser didn’t already automatically unzip the file.
3. (Make sure your device is connected first) Double-click Absinthe to launch it and you will see the Absinthe home screen. Absinthe at this point should tell you what device and firmware version is detected.
4. Press the jailbreak button. Once you do this, Absinthe will go through a few status messages while it jailbreaks your device. It will stop for a bit at Waiting for reboot – not done yet, don’t unplug your device yet!
5. Once the device has finished rebooting, it will continue the jailbreak. During this process, do not touch or unplug your iOS device.
6. Once the process has finished in Absinthe, it will alert you to unlock the screen if necessary and tap “Absinthe” icon to finish the jailbreak. Remember, the icon may not be on the first pay, so you might have to scroll to find it.
7. Tapping the icon will bring up a webview with a white page, and then your device will restart. Just a quick note: If you see an “Error establishing database connection” error or a white screen, which lasts longer than 1 minute, please go to Settings and turn on VPN, and wait instead. The VPN connection will give an error (which is normal). At this point, a reboot should happen a few moments after the error.
8. You will see the Apple logo with a progress bar quickly as the device restarts and then your device will power back on. Just a quick note: The Set Up iPhone (or iPad) GUI you see when you restore an iOS Device will now appear. If you backed up with iCloud at the beginning of this tutorial, please choose Restore from iCloud Backup in the Set Up iPhone GUI, and restore from the backup you took at the beginning of this guide. The iDevice will then restore from backup, reboot, and you’re good to go.
9. Cydia is now on your device where the Absinthe icon was before!

That’s it! Your device is not jailbroken.

If you have any questions feel free to leave them below. We’ll help where we can!

Stay tuned for more information as it surfaces by following us on Facebook, Twitter, and/or subscribing to our RSS feed.

Microsoft updated the Building Windows 8 blog with details on the next-gen platform’s new Storage Spaces feature. Storage Spaces based on the Drive Extender concept from Windows Home Server days, allowing the system to pool physical hard drives of various sizes and interfaces to redundantly store data for scale, resiliency, and efficiency.

The system works like a RAID setup but the physical hard drives are grouped into a larger storage pool, which is then split up into spaces. The disks in a pool can be of mismatched sizes and of different interface technologies, such as USB, SATA, and Serial Attached SCSI. New disks can be added anytime while others can be connected but kept on standby only to turn on when needed.

Storage in a pool is then distributed among one or more spaces. Each space can have its own redundancy policy, with three kinds of fault tolerance offered: 2-way mirroring, 3-way mirroring, and RAID 5-like parity. With the mirrored options, a space’s data is stored either twice or three times within a pool. With the parity option, the system will compute additional information and store this within the pool. If any disk in the pool fails, the data can be reconstructed using this additional information.

Spaces can be thin provisioned, allowing the creation of spaces that are larger than the underlying pool. This allows potentially simpler management—a large “media” space for TV shows and movies could be created with some large size, say 50 TB, with only 2 TB of physical capacity in the pool. As more shows are recorded or downloaded, and space becomes tighter, additional drives can be added to the pool; the space will then use this extra capacity with no further configuration required.

The new technology is far better integrated into the core operating system which makes it robust enough for mainstream use. The blog post implies that Storage Spaces are ready even for enterprise workloads, making mention of the ability to scale up to “very large-scale enterprise datacenter(s)”, with pools made up of “hundreds of disks”—not a promise anyone would make of the home user-oriented Drive Extender.

The company says that guidance will be offered on how to partition disks so that a partitioned boot disk can be added to a pool, but that straightforward booting unfortunately won’t be possible.

Storage Spaces will be a feature of both desktop and server editions of the operating system.

Stay tuned for more information as it surfaces by following us on Facebook, Twitter, and/or subscribing to our RSS feed.

Apple may be planning to put a quad-core A6 chip inside its next iPad or iPhone, according to recent references of Quad Core CPU’s discovered in iOS 5.1 Beta.

In this hidden panel, single-core A4s are referred to as “/cores/core.0″ while dual-core A5s are “/cores/core.1.” Now a new listing, “/cores/core.3,” is popping up which, if you start counting with zero, indicates a CPU packing four cores. This doesn’t mean that Apple even has this up and running on test hardware yet, though, merely that software support for quad-core chips is in the works.

Of course just from this discovery we can not conclude that Apple’s next-generation iPad and iPhone will include a quad-core chip, but it seems reasonable based on Apple starting with a single core chip in 2010 and moving to dual-core in 2011.

Stay tuned for more information as it surfaces by following us on Facebook, Twitter, and/or subscribing to our RSS feed.

[Source: 9to5Mac]

Indian government is planning a law that will require all phones to display how much electro-magnetic radiation they generate. Radiation is measured in SAR (Specific Absorption Rate) and the Indian limit has been lowered to match the USA’s 1.6W/kg, whereas before it followed the European ceiling of 2W/kg. But even handsets that meet this criterion may have to declare their SAR level, and also carry a message asking people to keep their calls or short or use SMS instead — implying that the Indian government regards radiation as dangerous at any level.

All the mobile handsets that will be manufactured, sold or imported from other countries in India will have to be checked for compliance of the SAR limit. The companies manufacturing handsets in India will be required to self-declare SAR value of each handset.

In case of imported handsets, apart from self-declaration of SAR value, manufacturers will have to specify the SAR information in their documentation and an appropriate authority will verify them.

A final list of SAR values of different mobile phones will be uploaded on the DoT and TEC websites. So far, India along with Europe, Japan, Taiwan and Australia have followed ICNIRP standards, while markets such as the United States, Canada and South Africa follow IEEE standards.

The government also wants the instructions in the consumer handset booklet or user manual to contain five new safety precautions, these include:

• Use a wireless, hands-free system with a low power Bluetooth emitter;
• Ensure that cellphone has a low SAR;
• Keep voice calls short or send text messages instead – an advice that applies especially to children, adolescents and pregnant women;
• Use cellphone when signal quality is good; and finally
• People with active medical implants should preferably keep mobile handsets at least 15cms away from the implant.

[Source: Time of India]

There were several rumors regarding the possibility of Apple’s next smartphone featuring NFC technology in the months leading up to Apple’s iPhone announcement in the fall. Many competitors in the market have had the wireless payment technology for some years but it really only started to gain some traction recently. As you can all tell, the rumors were ended up being false, since there isn’t any kind of NFC chipset in the iPhone 4S.

This doesn’t mean that Apple is completely looking over the technology though. The company was recently awarded a patent regarding Near Field Communications in mobile devices. According to the folks over at Patently Apple, Apple recently won its first NFC patent related to retail transactions. Their patent document explains a method of establishing a master/slave relationship amongst two smartphones, both of which use NFC. The whole procedure described in the patent sounds very similar to many of the rumors that were flying previously.

The patent seems to specifically narrow in on the technology being used in retail situations. What this means is that Apple may be amidst an NFC-based mobile payment system. It is quite possible but nothing is certain as of yet. Patent details can be found below (courtesy of Patently Apple):

Apple also recently updated its retail experience by opening up the option of utilizing Apple’s EasyPay application. The updated version of this application allows users to scan products that they plan to buy at Apple stores allowing you to read reviews and check prices, than ultimately give you the option to pay via credit card (allowing you to skip the long lines). The EasyPay application might be the foundation of something much bigger that Apple plans to venture in.

Would you like to see Apple using NFC technology in the next iteration of the iPhone? Share your thoughts below!

Source: Patently Apple

If you don’t already have an iPhone 4S, your wait will still apparently be long according to The Wall Street Journal. Anxious Verizon Wireless customers are reporting more than three weeks for their purchase to arrive. AT&T customers are waiting an average of 21 days as well, and Sprint customers have roughly a two week time period. This new report continues to prove previous claims of Apple experiencing a demand which was slower than expected for their iPhone 4S wrong. Apple stock previously went down due to these claims despite the initial success of the device.

According to the WSJ, the initial sales of the iPhone 4S were quite opposite of the rumors, calling them “unexpectedly strong” in the first month. According to AT&T president of emerging devices, Glenn Lurie, “We are having some supply issues in the sense that demand’s huge. We have had just record-breaking sales on it.” Verizon seemed to make comments similar to this, where a spokeswoman mentioned that the demand “continues to build” for the iPhone 4S. The Big Red also mentioned that it is working with Apple to increase inventory.

Apple’s own retail stores are experiencing a similar story as they are seeing daily stock-outs of their iPhone 4S. Furthermore, the Cupertino giant is in the midst of the fastest worldwide roll-out ever, with a very strong international demand as well. Apple continues to stay on its record setting pace with the iPhone 4S after selling more than 4 million iPhones in its first weekend. That specific weekend alone doubled the company’s previous record of 1.7 million iPhone 4 units in the summer of 2010.

Tim Cook previously mentioned in the company’s quarterly earnings conference call in October how he was confident that a new record for the iPhone 4S will be set in the current holiday quarter. Currently the previous record came in the company’s June quarter of this year, when Apple moved a total of 20.34 million iPhones.

With the holiday season around the corner, will you be getting an iPhone 4S for yourself or someone you know? Do you already have an iPhone 4S? Share any thoughts and comments below!

Source: Wall Street Journal