iLounge

Apple has started to seed non-developer end-users with a pre-release version of iOS 5.0.1 for testing. According to 9to5Mac, the new software is being offered to a small number of customers who have complained about battery life issues in iOS 5. The invitation email apparently warns that their devices cannot be downgraded to iOS 5.0, but that they will be allowed to upgrade to the final version of iOS 5.0.1 once it’s released. The report goes on to state that Apple Stores have been given a memo regarding battery life issues, which instructs them not to replace any phones that don’t exhibit hardware issues during regular testing, and to inform customers that Apple is aware of battery life issues in iOS 5 and will release a software update to address those in “a few weeks.”

Programmer Conrad Kramer has discovered a hidden Panorama mode inside the Camera app of iOS 5. According to Kramer’s Twitter account, activating the feature is as easy as changing the key for “EnableFirebreak” from “NO” to “YES” inside the com.apple.mobileslideshow.plist file. Speaking with Gizmodo, Kramer said that the feature only works on the iPhone 4 and later devices, as it is dependent on an internal gyroscope. This file is only available for editing to those who have chosen to jailbreak their devices; however, it does serve as proof that the feature exists, and suggests that Apple may plan on activating it in a future update to iOS 5.

Apple has seeded iOS 5.0.1 beta 2 to its registered iOS developers, the second beta release of the point update this week. According to the release notes for the first beta version, iOS 5.0.1 “fixes bugs affecting battery life, adds multitasking gestures for original iPad, resolves bugs with Documents in the Cloud, improves voice recognition for Australian users using dictation,” and “contains security improvements,” and also “introduces a new way for developers to specify files that should remain on device, even in low storage situations.” iOS 5.0.1 beta 2 is listed as build 9A404, and is available now as a download from the iOS Dev Center.

Apple has released iOS 5.0.1 to its registered iOS developers. According to the release notes, the new beta—listed as build 9A402—“fixes bugs affecting battery life, adds multitasking gestures for original iPad, resolves bugs with Documents in the Cloud, improves voice recognition for Australian users using dictation,” and “contains security improvements.” Notably, the update also “introduces a new way for developers to specify files that should remain on device, even in low storage situations,” seemingly addressing an issue recently brought to light by Instapaper developer Marco Arment. An Apple spokesperson confirmed that some iOS 5 users were experiencing battery life issues early today, telling The Loop, “A small number of customers have reported lower than expected battery life on iOS 5 devices[.] We have found a few bugs that are affecting battery life and we will release a software update to address those in a few weeks.” iOS 5.0.1 beta for the iPad, iPad 2, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, and third- and fourth-generation iPod touch is available now as a download from the iOS Dev Center.

Google has released an official Gmail application for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad providing a native Gmail experience on the iOS platform. Google has had an HTML 5 mobile web app for some time that provided an iOS enhanced experience via the Safari browser, however it suffered from the same limitations as other web applications in its inability to provide notifications and limited offline access. The new official Gmail application is designed to be fast and efficient and provides full native access to Gmail including notifications for new messages, support for threaded conversations, archiving, labelling, starring, deleting and reporting spam. The app also includes support for Gmail Priority Inbox, auto-completion of names from Google or iOS Contacts and Gmail search. Users can also send photos as attachments from directly within the app. The iPad version also provides a standard split-screen view and the application takes advantage of touch gestures such as pull down refresh and viewing labels by swiping right. Gmail is a universal app requiring iOS 4.0 or later and is available from the App Store as a free download.

Update: Google has removed the app from the App Store, indicating in its blog that “it contained a bug which broke notifications and caused users to see an error message when first opening the app.” The post goes onto indicate that the company is working to release an updated version soon which fixes the bug and that users who have already installed the app can continue to use it.

Apple has released a free update to its highly acclaimed GarageBand music creation app adding universal device support. Chosen as iLounge’s 2011 App of the Year for iPad, GarageBand 1.1 can now be used on the iPhone and iPod touch and adds a number of other new features and enhancements including the ability to create custom chords for Smart Instruments, support for additional time signatures, the ability to transpose songs in semitones or full octaves and additional quantization options for recordings. Users can now also take advantage of additional export quality settings for AAC and uncompressed AIFF output and adjust velocity settings for Touch Instruments. The update also contains a number of other smaller enhancements including automatic fading, and arpeggiator control on the Smart Keyboard and improved audio import options. GarageBand 1.1 requires iOS 4.3 or later and is available from the App Store for $5.

Apple has been awarded a patent for its iOS devices’ “slide to unlock” feature. BBC News reports that U.S. patent number 7657549 states, “A device with a touch-sensitive display may be unlocked via gestures performed on the touch-sensitive display. The device is unlocked if contact with the display corresponds to a predefined gesture for unlocking the device.” As noted in the report, the broad language of the patent would appear to cover not only Apple’s unlocking method, but those used by rival platforms, including Android and Windows Mobile. The patent was originally filed in June 2009, and lists Apple senior vice president of iOS software Scott Forstall as one of the seven inventors.

Ten years ago today, Apple announced the original iPod, an early step in the computer maker’s evolution into a consumer electronics giant. Designed solely to store and play music, the first iPod was distinguished by its unusually small size for a then-considerable 5 Gigabytes of storage space, enough to hold roughly 1,000 songs. With a clear and white plastic face and a mirror-polished stainless steel back, the iPod used a physically moving Scroll Wheel and four physical buttons to navigate black text menus on a white backlit screen.

At the time of its introduction, the original $399 iPod was embraced by some Apple Macintosh computer fans, but derided by others—and much of the existing PC marketplace—as overpriced and lacking in features. iLounge’s founder Dennis Lloyd immediately fell in love with the minimalist design and created this site to gather information about it, launching around the iPod’s November 10, 2001 release date. By the end of its first year, only 125,000 iPods had been sold, but the numbers began to climb the next year as PC-compatible iPods were released, and then jumped considerably in 2003 with the introduction of more affordable, USB-compatible models with Dock Connectors. The iPod family continued to grow in popularity and market dominance as Apple added color screens with support for photos, videos, games, and apps, combined with lowered prices, and the evolution of the original Scroll Wheel into various types of touch interfaces.

This video shows the unveiling of the iPod at Apple’s headquarters on October 23, 2001. No one, including then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs, had any idea just how successful the iPod would eventually become. As of today, over 300 million iPods have been sold. The DNA of the iPod resulted in the iPhone, Apple TV, and iPad, while influencing the design of Apple’s Mac hardware and software. Elegance and simplicity were taken to new levels in the Apple products that followed the original iPod, leading to a widespread perception that Apple’s offerings were uniquely capable of catering to users of any age and skill level. The iPod’s “halo effect” led Apple to change its name from Apple Computer to Apple Inc., reflecting its shift into consumer electronics, and eventually to Apple’s valuation as one of the largest companies in the world. Yet the iPod family has recently received comparatively modest attention from Apple as the iPhone, iPad, and Mac have continued to surge in sales; even today’s anniversary has proceeded without a mention on the forward-looking company’s web site.

If you’re reading this or listening to something on an Apple device right now, there’s a pretty good chance that the iPod’s success is at least partially responsible for that. And we wouldn’t be here right now if it wasn’t for the little music player that could. Happy 10th anniversary, iPod!

Apple has added a toggle for turning iTunes Match on and off to the Music section of iOS 5’s Settings app, suggesting an imminent launch for the service. Announced in June at WWDC, iTunes Match is a $24.99/year service that matches tracks in a user’s iTunes library with tracks stored on the company’s iTunes Store servers, uploading any tracks it can’t match, and offering users full access to all their music — up to 25,000 tracks — from any of their devices. The appearance of the toggle — which currently activates an alert stating that “You are not currently subscribed to iTunes Match. Use iTunes on your computer to subscribe” — has some suggesting that the service may launch ahead of Apple’s “end of October” estimate, however, the service does require iTunes 10.5.1, which is currently in developer beta and not available to the public at large. [via Mac Rumors]

Reporting its fourth quarter 2011 financial results today, Apple said it sold 6.62 million iPods during the quarter—a 27 percent decrease compared to the same quarter last year. Apple sold 17.07 million iPhones in the quarter, a 21 percent increase year-over-year, and down slightly from the 20.34 million units sold in the third quarter. Apple also sold 11.12 million iPads during the quarter, up 166 percent from 4.19 million units in the year-ago quarter. The unit sales of iPhones, iPods, and iPads bring the cumulative unit sales for the three device categories to 145.96 million, 321.18 million, and 39.85 million, respectively. The company posted revenue of $28.27 billion and net quarterly profit of $6.62 billion, or $7.05 per diluted share, compared with revenue of $20.34 billion and net quarterly profit of $4.31 billion, or $4.64 per diluted share, in Q4 2010.

“We are thrilled with the very strong finish of an outstanding fiscal 2011, growing annual revenue to $108 billion and growing earnings to $26 billion,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Customer response to iPhone 4S has been fantastic, we have strong momentum going into the holiday season, and we remain really enthusiastic about our product pipeline.”

“We are extremely pleased with our record September quarter revenue and earnings and with cash generation of $5.4 billion during the quarter,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO. “Looking ahead to the first fiscal quarter of 2012, which will span 14 weeks rather than 13, we expect revenue of about $37 billion and we expect diluted earnings per share of about $9.30.”

Marco Arment has released Instapaper 4.0, a major update to the popular offline reading app for iOS devices. The new version features a number of significant improvements including completely redesigned interfaces with a new grid view on the iPad version and a unified and restyled navigation view on the iPhone/iPod touch versions. Users can now also perform server-side searching of the full content of their entire Instapaper archive and can select multiple articles to archive, delete or move in a single operation. The update also adds support for hardware brightness control in iOS 5, draggable scrollbars for quickly navigating through documents and the inclusion of article authors, published dates and site titles in articles whenever available.

Instapaper 4.0 also expands Friends support allowing users to browse recent links from their Facebook news feed, Twitter timeline and Tumblr dashboard and users can also customize the number of liked and archived items stored on the device, take advantage of integrated Wikipedia lookups from within articles and opt to use the built-in dictionary under iOS 5. A number of other smaller enhancements and bug fixes have also been included. A detailed overview of the new features is available in a post at Macro Arment’s blog. Instapaper 4.0 is a universal app requiring iOS 4.2 or later and is available from the App Store for $5.

Apple has released iTunes Movie Trailers, a new iOS app that allows users to access new and exclusive movie previews in HD on their device. Users can browse trailers, clips and featurettes for both major Hollywood films and independent cinema along with high-resolution photos, a year-long calendar of movie releases and location-based showtime info. The application also allows users to purchase movie tickets directly from their iPad or iPhone. Favorite movies and theatres can be saved for quick access and images can be saved to the iPad photo gallery to use as desktop wallpapers or share with friends. AirPlay is also supported allowing users to view trailers on their Apple TV, and favourites can be pushed to multiple iOS devices via iCloud.

iTunes Movie Trailers requires iOS 4.3 or later and an iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad, iPad 2 or third- or fourth-generation iPod touch. iCloud sync requires iOS 5 or later and a valid iCloud account. iTunes Movie Trailers is available from the U.S. App Store as a free download.

Apple has released iOS 5 updates to its three iWork apps—Pages, Numbers and Keynote—adding support for sharing documents via iCloud. The latest versions allow users to automatically store presentations, spreadsheets and word procession documents in iCloud and automatically keep them up to date across all iOS devices. Documents can also be downloaded to a Mac or a PC from iCloud.com in either native iWork, PDF, or Microsoft Office compatible formats, and new compatible files can be uploaded to iCloud.com for automatic synchronization to iOS 5 devices.

Several other new features have also been added to each of the apps in addition to iCloud and iOS 5 support. Keynote 1.5 introduces the ability to stream presentations wirelessly to an Apple TV via AirPlay along with support for navigating slides, viewing presenter notes and using the virtual laser pointer while giving a presentation. Keynote also adds several new builds and transitions, advanced presentation controls including loops slideshows and autoplay and support for hyperlinks between slides.

Pages 1.5 adds voice dictation support for the iPhone 4S, the ability to create footnotes and endnotes in documents and character, paragraph and page counts. Numbers 1.5 improves formatting and data entry features adding sliders, steppers and pop-ups to simplify entering data and support for merging cells and hiding rows and columns. All three apps also improve compatibility with their iWork for Mac and Microsoft Office counterparts and include improved support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean language input.

Pages, Numbers and Keynote 1.5 are universal apps and require iOS 5.0 or later. Each is sold separately from the App Store for $10.

As expected, Apple today released iOS 5 for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. The anticipated update offers over 200 new features, including a new Notifications system, Reminders app, Twitter integration, Camera enhancements, full support for iCloud, Wi-Fi Sync, PC-less setup, and more. iOS 5 is available now for the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad, iPad 2, third-generation iPod touch, and fourth-generation iPod touch via the Update feature in iTunes 10.5.

iLounge has confirmed that the new white models of the fourth-generation iPod touch are now available at Apple Retail Stores, as scheduled. Announced during Apple’s “Let’s talk iPhone” event, the white models are virtually unaltered from the prior version, save for the fact that they arrive with iOS 5.0 pre-installed. The new white models of the fourth-generation iPod touch are available for purchase now and are priced from $199.

Updated: We’ve added additional photos, including one comparing the white model with the existing black version.

Updated x2: We have now received our test white iPod touch 4G unit, and have posted a complete unboxing gallery, which is available on Flickr.

Apple has released an iOS version of its Airport Utility for configuring and managing Airport and Time Capsule wireless devices. The free universal app provides similar functionality to the Mac version, allowing users to manage Airport Express, Airport Extreme and Time Capsule devices from an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. Users can see a graphical overview of the Wi-Fi network and devices, get more information about a connected Wi-Fi device and view and change base station and network settings, including restarting devices and updating firmware versions and configuring passwords, DNS and router addresses and DHCP reservations and port mappings. AirPort Utility requires iOS 5 and is available from the App Store as a free download.

According to the latest data from comScore, the iPad accounted for 97.2 percent of all tablet traffic in the U.S. in August 2011. The research firm also found that iPads have also started to account for a higher share of Internet traffic than iPhones, representing 46.8 percent of all iOS device traffic, compared to 42.6 percent for the iPhone. Despite Android’s larger share of the smartphone market, iOS had the highest market share of connected devices and smartphones in use with 43.1 percent, compared to Android’s 34.1 percent, a difference largely attributed to the iPad’s dominance in the tablet market. iOS as a platform also accounted for the largest share of Internet traffic among such devices, representing 58.5 percent of all non-computer traffic in the U.S., compared to a 31.9 percent share for Android.

Mobiata has released an update to FlightTrack and FlightTrack Pro adding support for the upcoming iCloud release and integration with the new Twitter features in iOS 5. With FlightTrack 4.2 users can now synchronize their flight lists and FlightTrack settings across multiple iOS devices using iCloud and post flight updates to Twitter using the new integrated iOS 5 Twitter integration. The update also fixes a number of bugs, improves performance when tracking large numbers of flights, adds thousands of additional airports and provides more readable and concise airport weather forecasts. FlightTrack is available in both standard and Pro versions: FlightTrack ($5) includes a full set of flight tracking features including weather radar, gate and baggage claim information, flight delay forecasts and SeatGuru charts; FlightTrack Pro adds push notifications, airport delay and closure information and TripIt synchronization. Both apps are universal and require an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad running iOS 4.0 or later; iCloud and Twitter integration features require iOS 5.

Facebook has released an update to its iOS application adding the anticipated native iPad support. Originally reported by the New York Times in June to be appearing in the “coming weeks,” the app was inexplicably delayed, prompting a prominent developer to leave Facebook in frustration and report that it had in fact been “feature complete” as far back as May. Many later expected the rumoured iPad update to be released at Facebook’s f8 developer conference in September, however the event came and went with no mention of iOS at all.

Today’s update to Facebook 4.0 finally adds native iPad support to the existing Facebook application providing an iPad optimized user interface with higher resolution photos, improved navigation and access to Facebook apps and games. Users can also zoom in on photos, updates and stories and share photos and status updates without leaving the news feed. The update adds several new features to the iPhone and iPod touch version as well, including improved searching and browsing, similar games and app support, bookmarks and improved navigation. Facebook 4.0 is available from the App Store as a free download.

App Cubby has released Tweet Speaker, a new Twitter client that allows users to listen to their streams spoken aloud. The app features an attractive user interface displaying a single tweet per screen with standard buttons for replying, marking favourites, retweeting and viewing conversation threads, with a radio dial styled time indicator displayed at the bottom. Tweet Marker support allows synchronization of timeline positions with other Twitter clients such as Twitterrific and Tweetbot.

Tapping the playback button begins reading back tweets from the current timeline position using a synthesized voice system specifically optimized for Twitter; replies, mentions, hashtags and even external links are interpreted and read appropriately—for example Tweet Speaker will attempt to follow short links and read the actual web page title rather than simply speaking an unintelligible URL. Users can also adjust the reading speed and the application includes AirPlay support. Tweet Speaker requires iOS 4.2 or later and is available from the App Store for $3.