T-Mobile on Thursday gave iPhone users on its network a new means of accessing on-demand and live video content with the debut of the T-Mobile TV app in Apple's App Store.   ...

Though the combined sales of Android smartphones continues to best Apple as a platform, Google's mobile OS continued to lose marketshare in the US in the latest quarterly comScore survey, as Apple solidified its position as market leader despite the lack of any new iPhone model in since before the holidays. Apple's share of the US smartphone market is now 39 percent, up 2.7 percent since December. Though Samsung was able to increase its US share slightly, the other three major Android vendors all lost ground in the most recent quarter.... ...

Are you a man? Then you'll want to take a look as the apps Vern Seward has lined up in this week's Free on iTunes. iPedia Wiki, Uncrate, and WhatKnot.

136.7 million people in the United States owned smartphones during the three month period ended in March, and nearly 40 percent of them used iPhones.

According to the latest metrics from comScore, Apple was the top smartphone manufacturer in the U.S. during the quarter, capturing a 39 percent share of the market, up from 36.3 percent in the prior quarter. With a 21.7 percent share, up slightly from the 21 percent it posted in December, Samsung placed second in comScore’s rankings.

Bringing up the rear: HTC, Motorola and LG, which all claimed less than 10 percent shares after quarter-to-quarter declines.

On the smartphone platform side of the business, Google claimed the top ranking despite a decline in market share from 53.4 percent to 52 percent. Apple placed second with a share that rose to 39...

Market research firm comScore on Friday released a new study that shows Apple is leading the smartphone market in the U.S. The study focused on a three month average ending March 2013.

Germany turned out in force for the opening of the first Apple Store in Berlin on Friday. RuptlyTV posted a video of the opening and the huge crowds, while ifoAppleStore.com tweeted that employees handed out 4,500 shirts commemorating the event. It looks like it was a fun day and we wish we could have been there.  [Via Fortune]

Yesterday I reported on the clever economics behind Apple's US$17 billion bond deal, specifically pointing out that the interest Apple will owe on each share it repurchases will be less than the dividend it would have otherwise been responsible for.

Going a bit further, Businessweek did some calculations surrounding Apple's $17 billion bond deal and deduced that the company is avoiding a $9.2 billion tax hit by borrowing the money as opposed to using its own cash pile.

Specifically, if Apple wanted to raise $17 billion by using its foreign stash of cash, it would have had to repatriate upwards of $26.15 billion. With a 35% corporate tax rate, Apple would have owed about $9.15 billion in taxes to Uncle Sam.

Instead, Businessweek notes...

Apple's iPhone took U.S. subscriber share from Android in the March quarter, according to new data from comScore. iPhone users accounted for 39 percent of smartphone subscribers during the period, up from 36.4 percent in the December quarter. Google's Android remained the top platform during the same period, but saw its share decline to 52 percent from 53.4 percent in the December quarter.

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As of March, Apple boosted its share of the U.S. smartphone market to 39 percent, according to the most recent statistics from market research firm comScore, with a three-month percentage growth outperforming Samsung by a factor of four.  ...

Samsung has a new legal argument in its ongoing litigation with Apple over the sale of certain Android based smartphones in the US. While the basis of Apple's case is patent infringement claims, Samsung is now arguing that allowing Apple a permanent injunction would "intimidate and confuse" customers.

The drive of Samsung's case, according to an examination by FOSS Patents, is that the injunction "would not stop any ongoing infringement, for Samsung has either discontinued the accused products or designed around any infringing features in ones that it still sells."

Apple won a massive US$1.05 billion award for damages in the case this past August, however at the end of April it was announced the companies would be...

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In a conversation with a Google employee who is working on the Glass project, Frederic Lardinois was informed that they are adding more-complete iPhone compatibility to Glass “very soon”:

 Glass, the Google employee told me, will soon be able to handle these features independent of the device the user has paired it to (and maybe even independent of the Glass companion app).

While Glass will happily work with any iPhone over Bluetooth or use any Wi-Fi connection to get online, iPhone users are currently unable to get turn-by-turn directions through Glass – one of its killer features. Those direction are pretty useful while you are navigating a new city and they do show off the power of location-based apps on Glass, but the software will currently balk if you ask it to give you directions while it’s connected to an iPhone.

For...

I've always been a sucker for soundscapes -- those looping sound effect CD's that whisk you away to the beach, or a rainforest or whatever. As I have a hard time "shutting down" my brain, these sounds give me something to get lost in and focus on, helping relax me. I think it's the same way for a lot of people, but when I introduce them to Naturespace's audio by way of their app, they are blown away. Naturespace captures incredible 3D audio and puts a vast library of it at your fingertips.

If you've never tried the app, I highly recommend you download it. The free samples which come with it are enough to get you started, but since the App Store's debut the Naturespace team has consistently grown the in-app purchase content. There's now a dizzying array of sounds, from the real to the...

Samsung has some advice for buyers of the 16-gigabyte model of its new Galaxy S4 stung by its low storage space: if that's not enough storage for you, that's why we put in a microSD card slot.   ...

There are only six known working Apple I computers in the world, and one of these units will go on sale later this month. According to a report in Computerworld, German auction house Breker will be auctioning off the machine that was owned by Fred Hatfield.

The Apple-1 includes the original manual, a letter signed by Steve Jobs and a circuit board that bears the name "Woz" on the back. The vintage computer is expected to fetch up to US$392,000 when it hits the auction block on May 25. You can check out the Apple-1 in the video below and hop over to Breker's website for the detailed photos of this classic machine.

[...

Yesterday in the MacNN forums, Moderator "P" started a discussion about Intel's new graphics processors, focusing on the specs of the various models as well as the newly-announced naming scheme. Also yesterday, Professional Poster "shifuimam" was looking for a way to speed up a recently-purchased 20-inch (first-generation) iMac G5....  ...

This week at Apple's online store, take advantage of a vast array of refurbished MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models. The 11.6-inch MacBook Air with a 1.7GHz Intel dual-core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM and 128GB of flash storage has been reduced by $190 to $909. A $240 price break is offered on the 13.3-inch MacBook Air with a 1.8GHz Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM and 256GB of flash storage, now $1,159....   ...

Harry Marks’ “My Valiant Return to Reading” is hilarious. Clearly making fun of some people that quit the Internet.

∞ Read this on The Loop

ItsOn, a company building software for carriers that provides users with dynamic pricing plans on mobile devices, last year announced plans to partner with one of the big U.S. carriers for its launch early this year. We’ve since learned that the carrier is likely Verizon, and that ItsOn will be launching as a consumer facing MVNO later this month (Verizon and Vodafone who both share ownership of Verizon Wireless are both investors).

There’s no word on exactly what the announcement will consist of or what the ItsOn service will include, but based on the company’s software we expect to see flexible pricing plans that, of course, run on Verizon’s robust LTE network. Despite executives expressing doubts about the service running on iOS devices in previous interviews, we also believe that an iOS version of the service is indeed coming, but at launch the service will...

Like it or hate it, Google Glass has recently been discussed on a lot of tech blogs. Tim Stevens at our sister site Engadget has been trying out his Glass around the house and on hot motorcycles, and a lot of other tech bloggers shelled out $1,500 to get the developer version of the device. One big negative for Apple fans has been that at the existing time, only Android users get support for navigation and SMS text messaging. Now, Frederic Lardinois at our other sister site TechCrunch has news that iOS support may be coming soon.

Lardinois was at the Google New York office yesterday picking up his own Glass and was told that turn-by-turn directions and SMS will soon be possible "independent of the device the user has paired it to."...

While many pundits insist that Apple must make a larger screen iPhone to keep pace with the offerings from Android licensees, Google's own stats indicate that all big phones, tablets and phablets put together are a tiny 10 percent fraction of active users.  ...

A suspicious iframe link has been detected in an App Store program. Here's why you shouldn't worry.

Subscribers to the tablet editions of Hearst Magazines publications have finally broken past the 1 million mark, says company head David Carey. The executive at one point said the company would have 1 million subscribers by the end of 2012, but ended up with a figure closer to 900,000. "I'm glad we got there," Carey remarks. "We were just 90 days late."...  ...

Samsung and BlackBerry are good enough for government work.

Late Thursday, the U.S. Department of Defense granted security approvals to BlackBerry’s new BlackBerry 10 devices — the Z10 and Q10, and to a version of Samsung’s Galaxy S4 that’s outfitted with Knox, the company’s new security software.

Though DOD approval won’t result in immediate product orders for either company, it does clear the way for orders to be placed in the future. Good news, since the Pentagon currently has some 600,000 mobile device users. More important, however, are the implications of the agency’s endorsement.

Certification by the Pentagon is the gold standard in mobile device security. And it opens the door to all sorts of lucrative contracts from government customers and those from highly regulated industries like healthcare and finance.

So, truly a significant milestone for BlackBerry and Samsung...

Apple surprised many last year when it priced the iPad mini at $329 ? more than $100 higher than the Amazon Kindle Fire and Google Nexus 7. But the same premium approach will probably be used to successfully introduce a more affordable iPhone, a new analysis concludes.  ...

When smaller U.S. carriers started selling the iPhone a couple years back, one carrier was a noticeable holdout.

U.S. Cellular maintained at the time that the numbers just didn’t add up. On Friday, though, the company announced that it plans to start selling Apple products later this year.

“We have a number of strategies in progress to increase loyalty and attract more customers, including our announcement today that we will begin offering Apple products later this year,” the company said in a statement accompanying its first-quarter earnings. “By further strengthening our device portfolio, we’ll give consumers another great reason to switch to U.S. Cellular, and enable our existing customers to choose from an even wider variety of iconic smartphones, and enjoy the outstanding U.S. Cellular customer experiences they deserve.”

We checked in to see what has changed...

There are a lot of communication tools that help you stay connected with family and friends. One that recently caught my eye is DabKick, which stood out because it lets you share and communicate in a variety of ways. It's a real-time photo viewer, video sharing tool, walkie-talkie, instant messenger, music jukebox and more.

DabKick is useful for people who want to share their life with loved ones who are far away from them. It's not a static service like Facebook, which allows you to post photos and add captions. It lets you connect to others in real-time and share photos, YouTube videos and more.

DabKick is geared primarily to share photos and videos. You launch the DabKick app on your iPhone, load up the media you want your friend to see and then select the person with whom you want to share. The person to which you are connected will see your photos or videos as you swipe through them on your iOS device.

A...

U.S. Cellular, the Chicago-based carrier serving around 5.8 million customers in 126 markets, will likely start offering the iPhone later this year, possibly in addition to other iOS devices. Per 9to5Mac, the carrier announced today in its first quarter results that it will soon begin carrying Apple products, but didn’t provide any further information regarding when or what specific products it might launch:

“We have a number of strategies in progress to increase loyalty and...

Like Facebook and Angry Birds? How about putting the two together, which is exactly what Rovio did with its new Angry Birds Friends for iOS. The game lets you team up with your friends to fling birds and blow up pigs, just like in other games in the Angry Birds franchise. You can challenge your friends to games, participate in tournaments with new levels every week, and if you're playing Angry Birds online, your games will stay in sync. Angry Birds Friends is free and available for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch at Apple's App Store.

Hearst Magazines has hit its goal of one million digital subscribers on devices like Apple's iPad, as well as competing tablets such as the Amazon Kindle Fire.  ...

US Cellular will start carrying Apple products sometime later this year, the company revealed today during a quarterly earnings report. It hasn't identified which hardware it will be offering, or any special subscription plans. Devices will presumably include the iPhone and/or cellular-equipped iPad models. The carrier could, in theory, be in a position to help launch the so-called iPhone 5S this fall, as well as a fifth-generation iPad, second-generation iPad mini, and possibly even an Apple smartwatch, if it comes with any cellular functions.... ...

Geri Reid brings up a good question. Skeuomorphic design took the world on quite a ride, but it seems to be out now. While I don’t agree with her that Microsoft “struck a winning blow with the flat interface of Windows 8,” there is no doubt a change is coming.

I would like to see Apple update their interfaces, but not eschew Skeuomorphic elements altogether.

Remember Apple’s previous keynotes. The crowd didn’t roar and applaud for the flat design elements, they cheered when the Passbook app shredded a card with a realistic shredder that popped up on the screen.

Apple needs to refine that design, not replace it.

∞ Read this on The Loop

This might come in handy.

Lat Thursday, Apple released iOS 6.1.4, a 107 megabyte download offering the following fixes for its iPhone 5 handsets:

- Updated audio profile for speakerphone.

iOS 6.1.3 is available via iTunes or Over-The-Air updating and requires an iPhone 3GS, 4, 4S, 5, iPad 2, third or fourth-gen iPad, iPod Touch 4th Gen or iPad Mini to install and run.

If you’ve tried the update and have any feedback to offer, let us know in the comments.

If you love to listen to podcasts on your iPhone or iPad, you’re probably familiar with Vemedio’s Instacast, a $5 app that lets you consume your favorite shows through an elegant and well-thought-out user interface.

Despite all its great features, Instacast was an iOS-only affair—until now. The folks behind it have now released a public beta of Instacast for OS X, and we’ve taken the Mac version for a spin to see how it holds up.

Podcasts a-go-go

Like its mobile cousin, Instacast for Mac revolves around a simple and intuitive user interface that emphasizes your content, organized according to your tastes.

Instacast is all about the content. The interface features Mail’s familiar three-pane configuration, with...

U.S. Cellular has reversed its stance that it wouldn't carry Apple's iPhone, and has said that it will be on board later this year. The carrier had previously called Apple's terms unacceptable, choosing to pass on offering the popular combination smartphone and iPod to its subscribers.

The Mac Observer Spin:
Good news for T-Mobile. Now the company can say it wasn't the last to get the iPhone.

Apple's $17 billion bond sale -- meant to help finance a $55 billion stock buyback, part of a plan to return $100 billion to shareholders by 2015 -- is saving the company about $9.2 billion in taxes, according to an estimate from Moody's Investment Services. Had Apple decided to use repatriated foreign cash, it would have paid a 35 percent tax rate, and hence owed the US about $9.2 billion....  ...

Shawn Blanc takes a look at Backblaze’s new iPhone app for managing the off-site backup of your desktop computer.

∞ Read this on The Loop

Last fall, Twitter bought We Are Hunted, a “music discovery” startup that made a popular app for Spotify.

Apparently Spotify is paying attention: It just bought Tunigo, another music discovery startup with a popular Spotify app.

Spotify isn’t announcing terms for the deal, but says that all of the Swedish company’s 20-or-so employees will come to work at Spotify’s offices in Stockholm and New York.

The Tunigo Spotify app will keep running (there’s also an iPhone app), but presumably Spotify’s new hires will be put to work on Spotify’s main service, which has 24 million users and 6 million paying subscribers. The company had reportedly raised $3 million.

The We Are Hunted and Tunigo...

Eclipse is one of the most popular board games around right now -- it's a vast, involving epic "4X" game, where those four Xs stand for eXploration, eXpansion, eXploitation (as in mining crops and resources from various planets), and eXtermination (as in finishing off your alien opponents). It was recently announced that Big Daddy's Creations would be adapting the game for iPad, and the iOS version has now arrived on the App Store, available for $6.99.

As a board game, I think Eclipse is terrific -- it's very well balanced, and all of the various things you can do offer plenty of different strategies to play with. There are three resources (money, science, and material) that you can use to exert your influence on various areas of a galaxy, research new technologies for starships or your empire, or build up those ships and...

U.S. Cellular, the Chicago-based carrier serving around 5.8 million customers in 126 markets, will likely start offering the iPhone later this year, possibly in addition to other iOS devices. The carrier announced today in its first quarter results that it will soon begin carrying Apple products, but didn’t provide any further information regarding when or what specific products it might launch:

“We have a number of strategies in progress to increase loyalty and attract more customers, including our announcement today that we will begin offering Apple products later this year. By further strengthening our device portfolio, we’ll give consumers another great reason to switch to U.S. Cellular, and enable our existing customers to choose from an even wider variety of iconic smartphones, and enjoy the outstanding U.S. Cellular customer experiences they deserve. Our...

Apple has been pushing for a permanent injunction blocking the sale of certain Samsung Android-based smartphones and tablets in the United States over patent infringement claims, but Samsung thinks that's a bad idea. The electronics maker told a Federal Appeals Court that granting Apple a permanent injunction would only serve to confuse and intimidate the buying public.

By issuing bonds to finance its stock buyback, Apple will avoid paying $9.2 billion in taxes to the U.S. government, making its decision to take on debt a "no-brainer."   ...

The year’s most specific update from Apple does nothing but provide an updated audio profile for the iPhone 5’s speakerphone.

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

TUAW readers who watched this week's TUAW TV Live got a sneak peek at the nifty device in this review -- Bodelin's ProScope Micro Mobile (US$149), a tool for turning an iPhone (4/4S/5), iPad mini, or 2nd- through 4th-generation iPad into a professional-quality microscope.

That's right -- if you need to take close-up images or video of evidence, circuit boards, stamps, coins, you-name-it, then the ProScope Micro Mobile is the best choice for you.

Design

The Bodelin ProScope Micro Mobile (PMM) is a small and lightweight (2.1 ounces) unit that needs an iOS device as a viewing tool. As such, purchasing one includes a sleeve for your iPhone, iPad, or iPad mini that the device clips onto. The sleeve holds the PMM in place over the rear-facing camera lens on your iOS device.

Gallery:...

Apple quietly added a new built-to-order option for the iMac that lets users choose either a 256 GB or 512 GB solid state flash drive instead of a traditional hard drive. Previously, iMac buyers could choose from hard drive or Fusion Drive solid state/hard drive hybrid options.

Compared to recent Apple announcements, the secrecy surrounding the next release of the company's mobile operating system, iOS 7, has almost been hermetic. There have been reports of improvements in email and calendar apps, as well as a possible expansion of the operating systems' gesture library so it will match Apple's OS X products. Apple is working feverishly to get iOS 7 ready for its app makers in June, when it will host its annual Worldwide Developers Conference.

GTVsource has discovered that at least some versions of the ASUS CUBE offer Airplay functionality right out of the box, a somewhat surprising find given that Google is known to be working on an open alternative to Airplay.

The explanation is that the CUBE software is based on ViMu Player, which incorporates Airplay as an experimental feature. Airplay functionality is currently limited to video – still images and music don’t yet work. Click More for video demo …

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Google’s own remote-play functionality is currently limited to ...

Martin Hajek

What if Apple’s long-rumored low-end iPhone isn’t targeted at the smartphone market’s lower reaches? What if it’s targeted at the middle?

What if it isn’t low-end at all, but simply mainstream? Not a $150 phone or even a $200 one, but a $350 one? A “mid-end” iPhone?

That’s the theory put forth by Gokul Hariharan and Mark Moskowitz over at J.P. Morgan, and it’s a pretty compelling one, with strong historical precedents.

With a starting price tag of $329, Apple’s iPad mini was initially dismissed as too pricey to attract budget-conscious consumers drawn to Google’s Nexus 7 and Amazon’s Kindle Fire, which, at $249 and $199, respectively, were significantly cheaper. But the device proved wildly popular, and has since established a new...