The iPhone Dev-Team has done it again, releasing a iOS 6 jailbreak just hours after the official release of the new Apple update.
Just under 24 hours since the release of iOS 6 and jailbreakers have already figured out a way to bring the modded operating system to Apple users who love their hacked apps. The functioning jailbreak is currently only available on devices running on A4 chips, meaning just those with an iPhone 4, 3GS, and 4th generation iPod Touch will be able to sample the modded iOS 6. To get it running, you will also need to perform a tethered jailbreak which requires a computer connection each time you reboot the device to get the jailbreak operating.
Of course, the swiftness of the iPhone Dev-Team to configure a jailbreak comes as no surprise. The group has been known to release jailbreaks no more than a day after new operating system updates come out, as we’ve previously seen in past iOS versions.
If you are interested in trying it out, instructions are fully available on Redmond Pie using the Redsn0w jailbreak. In our personal opinion, there’s really no need to jailbreak iOS 6 this immediately… but if you’re impatient and curious, then by all means give it a shot and let us know how it goes. In the mean time, we’ll sit back and wait for an untethered edition to make jailbreaking less of a hassle, and for more app options to appear on Cydia to accompany the iPhone 5.
Do you own a jailbroken iPhone? Stop by our best jailbreak apps and games list and see if anything there piques your interest.
In our second New Super Mario Bros U preview, we take a look at the Wii U adventure's novel take on co-operative, competitive multiplayer.
The last time I got my hands on New Super Mario Bros. U, I had nothing but nice things to say about it. The three level sampler Nintendo was demoing in the weeks after E3 was gorgeous, making the now too-familiar New Super Mario Bros. milieu pop in new ways thanks to an HD makeover and some subtly powerful background design. Mountains, starry skies, and flying squirrels—Maybe Super Mario Bros. games would start feeling like worlds to inhabit again, rather than glorified toy boxes like those in New Super Mario Bros. 1 and 2 on DS and 3DS?
We won’t know whether that’s the case until the full game is ready to rock on November 18th. The new chunk of game on display at last Thursday’s Wii U event in New York didn’t give a wide look at new levels, but inside of NSMB U’s new Boost Rush multiplayer mode. It’s hard to stop and admire the scenery in these speedy multiplayer challenges, but I can say this: Backing up players by creating platforms using the Wii U tablet controller is a whole lot more interesting than you’d first think.
Boost Rush is similar to the competitive Coin Rush mode from New Super Mario Bros. 2 on the 3DS. Rather than collecting as many coins as possible in three stages without dying though, the goal is to survive through an ever-scrolling stage. Survival isn’t enough though. The levels are difficult to pass through since they’re constantly moving to the right, and all the players controlling Mario, Luigi and Miis need to be extra swift, but to get the best score, you have to make it scroll faster. You do this by collecting coins in the stage.
Here’s where it gets extra tricky. Like in the regular game, the person using the tablet controller can support four others by tapping the screen and creating new platforms. You can save them from falling into pits, helping them up to reach more coins or items, or even halt them in their path. You can only create four blocks on the field at a time. Picking who on the field needs assistance in Boost Rush is difficult because of how big the stages are and how spread out players can get. It gets even more frantic when you try to get players to jump on four consecutively placed blocks. Do that and the blocks you place spout coins, raising the boost meter, potentially make the stage go faster.
Coin Rush in New Super Mario Bros. 2 was very much a larval version of Boost Rush. Where that felt like a diversion, Boost Rush feels like a substantial way to play Super Mario Bros. with other people. Just how substantial depends on how many levels Nintendo decides to include in the game. Only three samples were demoed, and each was ranked according to difficulty. Boost Rush through a typically fire-filled Bowser castle was naturally harder than rushing through a grassy plain, but if they’re always the same levels, they’ll start to get boring, even if the goal is to improve your time. Nintendo is promising downloadable content for the Mario series going forward though, so there’s hope.
New Super Mario Bros. U has a lot going for it. The sprawling levels of NSMB Wii have returned and show hints of even greater scale, a remedy to the cramped doldrums of NSMB 2. The interconnected overworld, hinted Miiverse functionality, and Boost Rush could make NSMB U the star of the Wii U launch, but it needs a little something extra to bring it up to par with the classic 2D Mario adventures: Surprises. That’s what NSMB 2 needed more than anything else. Boost Rush is a pleasant surprise already. Let’s see what else it’s got.
Samsung says it plans to add the iPhone 5 to its list of patent lawsuits against Apple.
If you somehow thought the new iPhone 5 would escape the wrath that is the Apple v. Samsung patent war, prepare to be mistaken. A U.S. court filing uncovered by Reuters reveals that “Samsung anticipates that it will file, in the near future, a motion to amend its infringement contentions to add the iPhone 5 as an accused product.”
The filing comes a week after Apple announced the iPhone 5, which hits stores on Friday. Apple says it sold more than 2 million iPhone 5 units within the first 24 hours after the device became available for pre-order on September 14.
“Based on information currently available, Samsung expects that the iPhone 5 will infringe the asserted Samsung patents-in-suit in the same way as the other accused iPhone models,” reads the filing, which was submitted to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California late Wednesday. “Samsung plans to file a motion to amend its infringement contentions to address the iPhone 5 as soon as it has had a reasonable opportunity to analyze the device.”
Samsung and Apple are currently embroiled in patent lawsuits in 10 countries around the world.
In a separate statement, Samsung asserted that “Apple continues to take aggressive legal measures that will limit market competition. Under these circumstances, we have little choice but to take the steps necessary to protect our innovations and intellectual property rights.”
Apple Korea responded to Samsung’s latest pushback, saying that the company values “originality and innovation,” and that it makes “products to delight our customers, not for our competitors to flagrantly copy.”
Apple won a sweeping $1.05 billion victory over Samsung at the end of August when a court decided that Samsung had violated a number of its design and software patents.
The court also ruled that Apple had not violated any of Samsung’s patents, a decision that has clearly not stymied Samsung’s commitment to fighting back against Apple.
In common with everyone else, I spent Wednesday night attempting to DDoS Apple's servers by hammering them with update requests for all my iOS devices, plus all the applications, plus the odd Mac system update too. iOS 6 is, by and large, brilliant. I love shared Photo Streams. iMessage finally works how I expected it would. Panoramas are great.
But there's one little problem: Maps. In short, it's the most half-cooked piece of software that Apple has released in my memory, which goes back far longer than I'd care to admit. Worse than Ping? I think so: Ping was, after all, easy to ignore.
Maps, on the other hand, is one of the core features of any mobile phone, and Apple has completely fluffed it.
Putting it bluntly, the maps on iOS are now so second rate that they're a key advantage for Android, and one that I would expect Google to exploit as ruthlessly as possible.
f you live in a major US city, I'm sure Apple's maps are OK. You now get turn-by-turn navigation, which is great, and while flyover mode looks like a novelty at first, it's actually a pretty smart way of orienting yourself.
Blurry maps and trapped streets
Outside the US, though, things are a little different. In London, the satellite images are decent enough, but weirdly the names of places are often slightly archaic. Step outside the M25, and the satellite images become blurry, pixellated, useless nonsense.
Weirdly, it even incorporates trap streets that Google got rid of years ago. Search for Woodland Way in Canterbury. See Newark Street at the end? Doesn't exist. If the satellite images were any good, you could see it going through two houses.
What Apple has done is concentrate on the engineering first, and the data second – and that's precisely the wrong way round for mapping. The Maps app is nicer to use than the Google equivalent on Android, integrating well with Siri (try telling Siri to "take me home" and you'll see what I mean) and although it has plenty of critics, I actually prefer the look of the maps themselves.
Will Apple improve its new Maps?
But in relying primarily on TomTom data for its locations, as it appears to have done, it's pitching arguably the weakest set of location data against the most extensive and accurate map set in the world. Google has spent billions on gathering data about locations, and constantly keeps it up to date.
It also has a massive pool of Android users which it constantly looks to get location data from, with virtually of its location-related products giving users the chance to improve data by reviewing places, marking them as closed, and feeding back inaccuracies. This is one area where the weight of numbers of Android users could prove to be telling, because almost all of them will use Google Maps.
In the short term, iOS users who want accurate location data can simply use the Google Maps website. Google even suggests you add the site to your home screen when you first visit it on an iPhone, and the help screen cheekily notes that it's "the same Google Maps, now in your mobile browser" – a clear poke at the absence of Google Maps from iOS.
iOS Maps looks like what it is: something cobbled together fast from multiple sources of variable quality. And the problem is that for a core part of a mobile operating system, that's nowhere near good enough.
Mobile technology has the capacity to liberate us from the punch clock, but instead, most of us elect to drag on our work days voluntarily. When is enough enough?
Technology is supposed to make our lives easier right? It should be bringing us greater convenience and saving us time. Mobile devices allow us to be connected everywhere. We can keep in touch with friends and family and find the latest news wherever we are, but the other side of the coin is that we are unable to disconnect. Our employers have a hotline to reach us. We are effectively always on call and the result is longer working hours than ever before.
Selling like hot cakes
Smartphones and tablets are leading the mobile technology charge. According to Flurry Analytics the Android and iOS platforms are the fastest growing consumer technology in history. Our adoption of smartphones and tablets is occurring ten times faster than the PC revolution, twice as fast as the Internet explosion, and three times faster than the social media craze.
If we look at smartphone penetration in the US, Nielsen reports that 55.5 percent of mobile subscribers now have smartphones. A staggering 74 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds now own smartphones. While the meteoric growth is showing signs of slowing slightly, those figures are still going up.
Blurring the work-life balance
Smartphones and, to some extent, tablets, are blurring the line between our social lives and our work lives. We use mobile technology for both. That means that there is no cut-off point when we leave the office at the end of the day. It has always been commonplace for certain professionals, like doctors, to be on call, but mobile technology puts us all on call.
Not only are we always reachable, but we can also easily take work home with us. The urge to check up on emails is virtually irresistible, and the worst part is that we are doing it to ourselves. Every time we struggle to switch off, check our inboxes during dinner, or send that “quick response that simply can’t wait” while lying in bed, we are create an expectation.
Good Technology polled 1,000 workers in the US and 1,000 in the UK on mobile work habits. They found that 93 percent of Brits and 80 percent of Americans continue to work after leaving the office. Of those, UK workers are doing an extra 183 hours a year on average and US workers are doing an extra 365 hours a year on average. That’s around 23 working days and 45 working days respectively.
Is your job that important?
Let’s face it: Things aren’t really going to grind to a halt if that email goes unanswered until the morning. Where does that pressure come from? What’s the source of that little voice that persuades you to have one last look at your inbox as you lie in bed ready to sleep? Why do you feel compelled to have a quick look at your work email first thing in the morning when you’ll be there in an hour or two?
According to that survey, 66 percent of UK workers check email before 7AM and 65 percent don’t go to sleep before a final inbox scan. In the US, 68 percent check it before 8AM and 69 percent won’t go to sleep without a last look. When do we switch off? Should work really be the first thing on your mind in the morning and the last thing at night?
Employers are rubbing their hands with glee
The expectation that we will be right on top of everything the second it happens is growing, even in jobs that aren’t really time sensitive. The BYOD (bring your own device) trend is a real boon for employers. We are buying our own mobile technology and using it to stay connected to work for longer each day. The productivity boost and hardware savings more than compensate for the increased IT headache.
According to the Cisco IBSG Horizons Study, 95 percent of the 600 US business and IT leaders polled now “permit employee-owned devices in some way, shape or form in the workplace” and 76 percent “categorized BYOD as somewhat or extremely positive for their companies.”
If employers are starting to provide more support for your personal mobile devices. there’s obviously an expectation that you’ll use them for work. Work-related apps creep onto your smartphone, your tablet may be subsidized, and before you know it, you can’t work without it. This mobile technology also enables another trend that is saving companies money – the rise of telecommuting.
The ultimate blurring of the line between work and the rest of your life is to work in your own home. Ditching the suit and the commute has its advantages, but it also tends to encourage you to work for longer. There’s a perception that working from home is a way for people to slack off, but employers are developing more sophisticated techniques for keeping tabs on remote employees.
Many preconceptions about telecommuting are out of date. This Stanford study focused on Chinese call center workers at a firm called CTrip and discovered that working from home resulted in a 13 percent increase in performance – people took fewer breaks and sick days, and they also performed better.
We bring it on ourselves
I love smartphones and tablets. I’m a strong advocate for mobile technology in general. I think it offers us a lot, but I’m also guilty of using it for working out of hours. The thing is, are we really being pressured to do this by employers, or are we tightening our own thumbscrews?
Many of you will be familiar with that last email check at night. The purpose is to ensure there’s nothing to worry about and then, in theory, you can get a good night’s rest, assured in the knowledge that you’ve done everything you had to do. Where that falls down is when there is something to worry about. Dealing with it as you lie in bed at midnight is often impossible anyway, so the result is anxiety and insomnia.
With the morning email check, you get to begin your strategizing while you shower and eat breakfast because you already have an idea what you’ll need to deal with in the day ahead. It also means you’re already mentally working long before you sit down at that desk.
Perhaps it’s time we imposed a cut-off. Resist that urge to check your inbox again, focus on your family while you’re at home, don’t let work encroach. If we aren’t careful then that voluntary extension of the working day will soon become an expectation.
