iOS

It's been little more than a year since Apple introduced its iAd mobile-advertising platform, and now the company is changing up the way it sells to advertisers.

Apple is offering advertising firms a way make large iAd buys that can be doled out to companies at a lower volume than what Apple sells directly. The idea is to make the service more approachable to advertisers that want to run smaller campaigns.

Apple's first big deal is with WPP's GroupM as part of a spending commitment for more than $1 million from its clients, The Wall Street Journal says. … Read more

Less than 24 hours after jailbreakme.com went live with an online jailbreak solution for iPad 2 and iPhone 4 users, more than 1 million iOS devices had been jailbroken. Apple, however, has stated that it will close the exploit with its next iOS update.

While the news of surpassing the 1 million downloads mark in less than a day is big for the jailbreak community, the excitement comes with a bit of impending doom. The cat and mouse game between jailbreakers and Apple is heating up, and everyone knows it.

According to @chpwn, when announcing the jailbreakme.com numbers … Read more

Could Apple's iPad 2 soon be getting a better-looking sibling instead of a replacement? That's the new rumor.

Citing multiple anonymous sources, Joshua Topolsky over at This is my next says Apple's cooking up "a new entry into the iPad family" that will sport a 2,048x1,536 resolution screen and be called the "iPad HD." Topolsky says this device will sit alongside the existing iPad 2 model, which presumably will continue to be sold by Apple, with the HD model being akin to a high-end Apple MacBook.

"The idea behind the product is apparently that it will be a 'pro' device aimed at a higher-end market--folks who work in video and photo production possibly--and will be introduced alongside something like an iPad version of Final Cut or Aperture," Topolsky suggests.

That Apple would break a product category into multiple tiers does not seem like much of a stretch. But if the crowning new feature of this device is just a better screen, that could be a hard sell to existing iPad 2 buyers, and could also potentially cannibalize sales of that device. Apple already has 18 different variations of the iPad 2, accounting for color, capacity, and 3G wireless networking options. Assuming that same configuration was placed on an "HD" line, that could quickly confuse the situation even more. … Read more

Over 15 billion applications have been downloaded from Apple's App Store, the company announced today.

"Thank you to all of our amazing developers who have filled [the App Store] with over 425,000 of the coolest apps and to our over 200 million iOS users for surpassing 15 billion downloads," Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, Phil Schiller, said in a statement.

The App Store's growth over the last few years has been nothing short of astounding. It took Apple nine months to hit 1 billion downloads, and its store finally hit 5 billion downloads … Read more

Nintendo says that it has no plans to develop for mobile platforms, including Apple's iOS or Android, the company told Bloomberg in a phone conversation today.

Nintendo's Yasuhiro Minagawa told Bloomberg that its long-standing strategy of developing games only for its own hardware "hasn't changed and won't change."

Prior to Minagawa's comments, Nintendo's shares were on the rise due to speculation that the company might follow Pokemon and develop games for smartphones, since it's a minority stakeholder in that company. However, Nintendo told Bloomberg that Pokemon is an independent company, and … Read more

A tool that lets people remotely jailbreak their iPhones could be modified to attack iPhones and iPads with malicious PDFs and appears to have prompted Germany's government to issue a security warning to consumers.

The Dev-Team, and specifically member Comex, today released the latest version of JailbreakMe.com, which allows people to "just browse to http://www.jailbreakme.com on your device and install it from there!"

While, the tool gives iOS device users the freedom to run any application they want, including software not sanctioned by Apple, it could also be modified and used to deliver … Read more

Hacker group Dev-Team (specifically noted jailbreaker @comex) has released the latest version of its popular iOS device jailbreaking tool, available entirely online.

This comes as a great comfort to users who may have been considering jailbreaking their iPhone or iPad but were not feeling confident in their device-hacking skill set.

The site works pretty simply. Log on with the iOS device you wish to jailbreak and follow the onsite instructions to forgo Apple's iOS and install Cydia. Supported devices for jailbreakme.com:

Just months ahead of when Apple is set to make tweaks to the software keyboard that ships with its iPad, the Guinness World Record for typing on it has been broken.

Fox News reports that the 15-year-old son of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili is the proud new owner of a Guinness World Record for typing the entire English alphabet (A-Z) on the iPad's software keyboard. His time? 5.26 seconds, which beats out former record-holder Charlie Joseph McDonnell's 6.31 seconds set in late June of last year.

Fox says Saakashvili "spent months getting ready" for … Read more

When it comes to racing games on the iOS, you have plenty of choices. Whether you want to race cars, motorcycles, ATVs, jet skis, or planes, the iTunes app store has excellent options.

Probably the most recognized racing games would be Firemint's Real Racing, the Need for Speed franchise, or the Asphalt racing games, all of which offer 3D racing action. But we've found that sometimes it's the arcade racing games that can be more fun if you're in the right mood.

This week's collection of iOS apps is all about arcade racing games. The first is a recently released 2D top-down racer with unique controls and six-player local multiplayer. The second moves toward combat racing with upgradable cars and tons of levels to conquer. The third is an excellent physics-based racer with a focus on skidding and sliding around corners to get to the finish line.… Read more