Apple has acquired the indoor navigation company WifiSLAM. The Cupertino giant paid $20 million for the two-year old Silicon Valley startup.

WifiSLAM, as its name mildly suggests, has developed an indoor location method based on Wi-Fi signals coming from routers in the building. Read more »

Yesterday, we reported that Apple had implemented a two-step verification process for Apple IDs to add another layer of protection against unauthorized access to your account.

Shortly after that, however, a major security hole was discovered on the iForgot website (which allows users to reset their password) where you could reset the password for any Apple ID even if you have just the email and date of birth. This left anyone who hadn’t enabled the two-step verification vulnerable. Read more »

Sources close to Apple are suggesting that the hardware and human interface (software) design teams at Apple are getting closer and more involved in each others’ work.

It’s more evident now that pushing Scott Forstall out of Apple is working wonders in terms of increasing collaboration between Apple’s hardware and software teams. Allegedly Ive is currently pushing a more “flat design” into iOS’s next build. Read more »

Apple has introduced a new two-step verification process for accounts that use the Apple ID. This will help protect your account from being accessed from a new device by an unauthorized person.

What this does is whenever you or someone else tries to access your Apple ID from a new device, along with the usual username and password, the device will also ask for a verification key. This verification key will be sent to one of the devices that you have registered. You will then have to enter the verification key into the new device to complete the log in process. This way, if someone gets access to your Apple ID, they won’t be able to log in until they also get access to the verification key. Read more »

With the launch of iOS 6, the podcast feature in the music player app was dropped in favor of a standalone app that had to be downloaded separately from the App Store. As is the trend with recent Apple apps, the Podcasts app made heavy use of skeuomorphism for the UI, with a very realistic looking tape deck UI that had moving elements that kept track with the playback of the podcast.

Unfortunately, all that is gone now with the latest update. The new v1.2 brings with it quite a few new features but gets rid of the tape deck UI for a more conventional playback screen that looks like any other music player. Read more »

So it’s not a pipe dream after all – Google Now for iOS may even be in the works. At the Big Tent summit in India Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt was asked point blank when could we see Google Now on the iPhone and had this to say – “You’ll need to discuss that with Apple”, “Apple has a policy of approving or disapproving apps that are submitted into its store, and some of them they approve and some of them they don’t,”.

Although skillfully avoiding giving a direct answer to the question Schmidt didn’t dismiss it entirely giving this blogger the idea that just like it did with Gmail, Maps, Drive and Chrome, Google intends to push its Now service over to iOS. Read more »

If you’re currently jailbroken thanks to Evasi0n you might want to steer clear of that iOS 6.1.3 update as it patches one of the exploits the jailbreak tool uses.

So if you update not only will you lose your jailbreak but as team Evad3rs dev-member David Wang (Planetbeing) says you might need to wait a long time before a new exploit is found and jailbreak is available again. Read more »

According to a survey by Strategy Analytics which was gathered by data collected last fall Apple’s iCloud is the most popular cloud service in the US.

27% of those surveyed who use a cloud service have tried iCloud in US with Dropbox and Amazon Cloud Drive in second and third with 17& and 15% respectively. Read more »

It was just yesterday Apple released the iOS 6.1.3 update to address the lockscreen passcode bypass issue. Unfortunately, there is another work-around that will still give you access to the Phone app without entering the pass code.

To make this work though, all you need is a SIM ejecting tool or a paperclip. The good news is you can make your iPhone immune to this workaround by simply disabling voice dial in your passcode lock settings screen. Read more »

A recent Indiegogo project that has caught our eye is a nifty new virtual keyboard called Minuum that could forever change the way we type on a mobile device.

It does this by squeezing down the full QWERTY keyboard into one row, no longer forcing you to choose between precision and accuracy. Read more »

Reluctant to sit by the sideline, while Samsung is making homeruns with the Galaxy S4, Apple has launched a new ad campaign, highlighting the iPhone 5′s key differentiating features.

This time, Apple has chosen to make a dedicated web page rather than launching a new TV ad. That’s probably due to the fact that it wouldn’t be able to fit all the information in just 30 seconds.

Read more »

In the recent past, Google has been showing a lot of love for Apple’s iOS platform. It makes sense really, considering Google is in the business of advertising and collating user information, so supporting one of the biggest platforms out there is a no-brainer.

Few months back, Google added the voice search functionality to the Google Search app for iOS. Although quite useful, it’s not quite on par with the excellent Google Now feature currently found only on Android Jelly Bean devices. But it looks like that’s about to change shortly. Read more »

Apple has released two new TV ads for the iPhone, called Discover and Brilliant. Both the ads follow the same theme as the iPad ads that we saw a few weeks ago.

The ads concentrate on the wide variety of apps that you can get on the App Store, from education apps, to entertainment apps, utility apps and games. Read more »

Angry Birds has been one of the most popular games of the mobile age, with each title in the series becoming an instant hit across the platforms it’s available on. The company has now given itself a well deserved pat on the back as the different titles available on multiple platforms have already been downloaded a whooping 1.7 billion times.

More importantly, Rovio has announced the new series of Angry Birds cartoons, which will debut on March 16. The first season will contain 52 episodes and the show will be telecasted on Saturdays. Read more »

Opel (a.k.a Vauxhall) has announced the Adam Siri, a special edition that boasts Siri Eyes Free technology allowing it to pair with Apple’s personal assistant.

In fact, Siri integration will be offered in future models of the company as well via the IntelliLink app available on the infotainment system. Read more »