Apple, Mac, & iPhone News...
January 21st, 2010
Happy Thursday folks,
Another day rolled around this morning, much to our surprise, but we managed to roust ourselves and now, here we are.
Lucky you.
Kidding, of course, and we've got some interesting, inspiring and infuriating news for you today from our trip through the interwebs. And yes, we do think we're clever for all that alliteration.
Can't We All Just Get Along?
BusinessWeek has reported talks between Apple and Arch-Nemesis Microsoft, purportedly to discuss making the PC giant's Bing search engine the default on the iPhone.
We don't know about you, but to us this feels like mummy and daddy getting a divorce. We love Google search, but aren't blind to the fact that Apple and Google's partnership went down the tubes when the Android phones started hitting the market, so what do you do? We're not nuts about Bing, but in the new step-mother of search engines departments we guess it could be worse. Apple could have gone to ask.com. (No offense to those of you who use it and love it, we swear.)
As always there are more factors involved than initially meet the eye: maybe Microsoft is calling in its $150 million in chips from 1997, maybe they'll give Apple a higher cut of the mobile ad revenue, maybe they just want to see Google take a hit. But we know that we'll continue to use the engines that get us the quickest results, regardless of pretty search result pages.
A Rate...Drop?
AT&T and Verizon have done the unthinkable--they've actually lowered their ulimited nationwide voice calling plans by $30 a month. You might think the news would have the cell phone using world jumping for joy in the huge reduction, but you'd be thinking wrong! Instead, we're all going, "What's the real deal here?"
Call us cynical,but we've been burned before. And on the heels of Ralph de la Vega's sinister insinuations that heavy data users will soon be paying a price for the privilidge we'd say that this "decrease" is actually a preparation for the stabbing pain in our wallet area that's coming. We guess we are cynical. But you watch...we'll be right.
iPhone Saves a Life
Amid the horrific devastation in Haiti, there are countless stories of miracles and of hope. We found one that made us--for the millionth time--thank whatever's up there for our iPhones: Wired has a story up about a man trapped in the rubble after the earthquake who used an app to treat his wounds and survive.
Dan Woolley, who was shooting a documentary on poverty for Compassion International, was stuck after the quake hit. For sixty five hours. With a compund fracture and head wounds. He used a first aid app on his iPhone to make bandages and tourniquets for his head and leg injuries, and then set an alarm on his phone to keep him awake and stave off the effects of the shock.
MacLife poster Brian Proffit made an excellent point about this: his life was saved because the app was on his phone already--for all the fun apps out there, we should make space for a first aid one, too. Go forth and download.
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Till Monday, Newsies...