Table of contents for 142 in iPad & iPhone User

We’ve been waiting for Apple to announce a spring event this year, as the company often makes at least one major announcement before its Worldwide Developers Conference in the summer. According to BuzzFeed’s John Paczkowski, we could be hearing about a spring event soon. He reports that Apple is working on an event for 25 March, which will be held at the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park. Sources tell BuzzFeed that the event headliner will be a new Apple news subscription service that works with the News app in iOS and macOS. Coincidentally, the Wall Street Journal reported in February that Apple wants a whopping 50 percent of the revenue that publishers generate through the service – a cut they won’t accept. The WSJ also states that publishers don’t…

The iPhone XS looks almost exactly like the iPhone X, and that similarity is leading many people to wonder whether they can use Apple’s spiffy new battery cases with the older handset. The answer appears to be a shaky yes, although enough doubt remains that I’m hesitant to recommend taking the £129 plunge. Apple’s official landing page (fave.co/2Uj5c2V) doesn’t explicitly say that the new case doesn’t work with the older phone. It only lists the iPhone XS under Compatibility. Initially this led to much gnashing of teeth on social media centring on supposed forced upgrades, but plenty of iPhone X users across Twitter are now reporting that it works fine. Over on the MacRumors forums, a commenter named beerfish89 also posted a photo of his new battery case doing its…

Samsung announced its new Galaxy Buds true wireless earphones last month, and they’re obviously designed for Samsung’s own Galaxy phones. (As a neat trick, you can even use the upcoming Galaxy S10 to charge the Galaxy Buds.) In design and price, though, Samsung is clearly attempting to make these little guys an attractive alternative to Apple’s AirPods – perhaps even for iPhone users. So are they? We managed to get our hands on a pair of Galaxy Buds ahead of the 7 March release date, and I formed a few impressions of how well they work with an iPhone XS Max. In some cases, yes, they actually come out ahead. In others, they’re a reminder that the AirPods are a far greater value than we often give them credit for.…

Leif Johnson looks at the best new releases This issue we’ve a little something to love for everyone, ranging from Roterra: Flip the Fairytale to the space-age adventures of Star Traders: Frontiers, or the one-finger hacking and slashing of Immortal Rogue. And if you didn’t got around to celebrating the newly arrived Year of the Pig, we strongly recommend you check out Spicy Piggy. Let’s see what treats we have in store, shall we? 1. Roterra: Flip the Fairytale Price: £4.99 from fave.co/2tRdFPt Roterra: Flip the Fairytale begins with a princess fleeing from a king and his knights, and in her escape she plunges off the side of a cliff. But this isn’t a tragedy, as traditional physics don’t apply here. This is the world of Roterra, a cubical land…

Buried at the end of Mark Gurman’s high-profile Bloomberg report about future Apple product announcements is a titbit that’s of enormous interest to anyone who loves using their iPad: Apple’s next OS update, iOS 13, will include… iPad-specific upgrades like a new home screen, the ability to tab through multiple versions of a single app like pages in a web browser, and improvements to file management. That’s a lot of information distilled into a small paragraph, but what jumped out at me most is the idea that the iPad’s home screen – which has spent almost nine years using a spaced-out version of the iPhone’s design – might finally be getting a redesign that addresses the fact that the iPad isn’t the same device as the iPhone. It’s exciting. After…

Apple has been long-rumoured to have a TV service in the works. Now, according to a new report from CNBC, the service is nearly ready to launch. It claims that Apple is finalizing its deals and software, with an expected launch in April or May. A separate report from Bloomberg says that Apple invited big Hollywood stars involved with Apple’s original TV series to attend a 25 March unveiling of the service. The stars include Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Garner, and J.J. Abrams. It would correspond with a new TV app for iOS and Apple TV devices that lets users subscribe to streaming services right within the app, and all their content consolidated within it. In that way, it will be similar to Amazon Channels, though we hope it…

The Shortcuts app simplifies complex tasks on your iPhone into a single action that could otherwise require a massive number of steps. So far, so cool. But as I’ve said elsewhere, finding the best Shortcuts outside of Apple’s pitiful in-app gallery typically involves taking gruelling longcuts into third-party pages like the Shortcuts subreddit (fave.co/2ESgPJ6), Routine Hub (fave.co/2tPo7a0), and Shortcuts Gallery (fave.co/2NIQIH4). So much to taking shortcuts. I’ve put together a list of the Siri Shortcuts that enhance the experience of iOS for all of us. You’ll find all of them in the gallery of your Shortcuts app after you download them, but to get the best use out of them you might want to give them their own icon on your home screen or set up a specific Siri command.…

Samsung recently took the wraps off its latest Galaxy S10 phones, along with an intriguing new folding phone/tablet called the Galaxy Fold. They were all the Internet could talk about, and with good reason: there’s some legitimately cool stuff there. But none of them present the existential threat to Apple. In fact, they probably won’t have a measurable impact on iPhone or iPad sales at all. The greatest threat to continued sales of Apple products is Apple, not the threat of a superior product from Samsung. ‘Must-have’ features are often overestimated The general thrust of the annual ‘Apple needs to worry about these new Samsung phones’ punditry goes something like this: these Samsung phones have more features for the same money. That’s not wrong. The £669 Galaxy S10e is priced…

Apple has had what can only be described as a tough year, with falling iPhone sales, Group FaceTime bugs, and a high-profile privacy squabble with Facebook and Google dominating the headlines. But a new rumour suggests that Apple is hoping to turn it all around with an update to one of its most popular products. I’m not talking about the iPhone or the Mac Pro (though updates to those are surely coming this year too). The product rumoured to be getting an imminent update is the long-in-the-tooth iPad mini, which still has the same specs as it did when the fourth-generation was released in September 2015. Even with four-year-old parts, the iPad mini 4 could still be a solid choice as an entry-level tablet. With an A8 processor (the same…

Apple announced that the company has no plans to merge iOS and macOS during its Worldwide Developers Conference last year, but it also said it’s working on a way for developers to write apps that work on both operating systems. Project Marzipan, as Apple calls it, wasn’t discussed in much detail at WWDC, but Apple described the News, Stocks, Home, and Voice Memos apps that come with macOS Mojave as examples of Marzipan at work. And we haven’t heard a lot about Marzipan since WWDC. In February, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Marzipan could be in the spotlight for this year’s WWDC. According to Gurman, Apple could release a software development kit at the conference that will allow iPad developers to port their apps to the Mac. Then, in 2020,…

While Apple has made some advances in iPhone battery life, most heavy users of their smartphone will run into that Low Battery warning at some stage of the day. And sadly the same is true of Apple’s iPhone X and newer iPhone XS. The iPhone X has a Li-ion battery capacity of 2,716mAh (10.35Wh). According to Apple, this will get you 21 hours of talk time, up to 12 hours browsing the Internet, up to 13 hours watching video, or 60 hours listening to audio – although not all at the same time, of course. The iPhone XS’s battery capacity is slightly smaller than that of the X, at 2,658mAh. While the phone’s A12 Bionic SoC chip should be more efficient, the smaller battery may mean that overall battery life…

Perhaps the most important feature of the modern era of the smartphone is the camera. The operating systems are mature, the processors and data connections are fast, the apps are plentiful, and the high-resolution screens are large and brilliant. Having a camera with us wherever we go has changed how we view the world and share our lives with others, and the thin shell of a smartphone puts some pretty severe limitations on photography. Compared to a decade ago, of course, today’s smartphone cameras offer eye-poppingly good image quality. But if you’re shopping for a new smartphone, the camera matters – and the competition is fierce. For years, Apple has promoted the iPhone as offering a high-quality camera, even if it didn’t always match up to competitors with more raw…

Apple’s plans to launch a subscription service for news are, by this point, an open secret. Just under a year ago, the company announced its acquisition of existing magazine subscription service Texture, which Apple executive Eddy Cue quickly revealed would be folded into the existing Apple News app. Since then, the news service has mostly been absent from the limelight, generally taking a backseat to the more prominent news leaking out around Apple’s upcoming video streaming service. But as recent reports have started to filter out that the news service and TV service may be announced by Apple at the same event in March, combined with rumours about the revenue split between Cupertino and its periodical partners, the news service is suddenly back in the front seat – as are…

When I first heard that Samsung was making a folding phone (shown above), I was excited. The idea that a phone could turn into a tablet intrigued me, and I closely followed the development of Samsung’s display technology leading up to the launch of the Galaxy Fold. Then I saw the Fold, and, well, my excitement waned. After dreams of giant screens opening to even bigger screens, the Galaxy Fold has some clear first-gen compromises. The outside display is only 4.6 inches, which is laughably small for a 2019 smartphone (sorry iPhone SE lovers). It opens to a 7.6in screen that has a giant notch on the right side for the cameras. And it looks like it’s thicker than two iPhones stacked on top of each other. A few days…