Latest Gadgets, Tablets and Smartphones
Apple has launched iBooks 2. The new app comes as a free update to the original iBooks app and is compatible with the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
Several new features have landed in version 2 which includes multi-touch textbooks that bring diagrams, photos and videos to the user. 3D objects can now be found in books as well as videos and other interactive content.
As well as announcing iBooks 2 yesterday, Apple also unveiled a new way of letting users create content for iBooks 2. The app is called iBooks Author and it is available for free on the Mac.
Apple has released a new beta version of iOS 5.1. This time it’s Beta 3 which brings us another step closer to a final release.
Not many changes are found within beta 3 other than the usual list of bug fixes which iron out problems before the final launch. What has changed in this version is the Enable 3G toggle which was removed on the iPhone 4S.
Last week, Corning teased a new glass called Gorilla Glass 2. Other than knowing its a follow on from Gorilla Glass, there wasn’t any other information made available. Corning has now provided the details of what has changed between versions. As it’s glass, the details might be too much of a surprise, but at the same time this will help smartphones become a little sleeker.
LoveFilm has managed to strike up a deal with BBC and ITV in the UK. The new deal will bring a number of TV shows to the LoveFilm service. These include Inspector Morse, Cold Feet, Doctor Who and other shows.
Motorola fans appear to be getting a little frustrated with the company. Just like HTC and Sony Ericsson, Motorola had also promised fans that they would unlock bootloaders on Android devices by the end of 2011. This was subject to carrier approval. Unfortunately, not much seems to of happened with this and bootloaders are still locked in most cases. We will mention that some are unlocked, but not many.
Corning, the creators of Gorilla Glass, has confirmed that it will be showing up at CES 2012 along with version 2.0 of the glass.
Tobii has created a new system called Gaze that allows users to look at tiles on Windows 8 to open them. It requires the click of a mouse but has the technology built in to know which tile you are looking at.
Codecademy was started just 3 days ago and since launch it has already had 127,000 users sign up to the service. Visiting the welcome page at codeyear.com we can see that a large number of people are interested in learning to code. The site says:
Make your New Year’s resolution learning to code. Sign up on Code Year to get a new interactive programming lesson sent to you each week and you’ll be building apps and web sites before you know it.
Rovio had an impressive Christmas day in terms of the Angry Birds bunch of games. The three games saw a total of 6.5 million downloads on Christmas day alone, many of which will likely to be related to people getting new iOS and Android devices for Christmas.
Hackers have managed to extract the Silk browser from the Amazon Kindle Fire and port it over to various rooted Android devices. The Silk browser is Amazons attempt to speed up web browsing. It works by calculating some elements of a webpage server side which speeds up processing time. It also attempts to predict what links you will click on so that your next page will be already calculated and ready to download when you want to go to it.
Internet Explorer 6 usage in the US has finally dropped below 1 percent. Last year the company set up a website called ie6countdown that aimed to kill off the 10+ year old browser. Reasons for pushing users away from that browser is that its extremely old now and has a number of security issues as well as outdated code running it. By dropping usage to below 1 percent it allows developers to focus on current browsers when designing websites.
