Table of contents for 201 in iPad & iPhone User

As expected, Apple began beta testing iOS 17.3 the day after iOS 17.2 was released. This update brings collaborative playlists to Apple Music (removed in a late beta of iOS 17.2) and enables AirPlay in supporting hotels. Perhaps the most interesting update in iOS 17.3 is a previously unannounced feature called Stolen Device Protection. When enabled, the feature makes it harder toperformcertainactions, including changing your Apple ID password, passcode or viewing your other passwords, when away from a familiar place. With just your iPhone passcode (which could be obtained simply by watching a user enter it), a thief can change the Apple ID password and wipe your iPhone, but Stolen Device Protection adds the layer of Face ID or Touch ID when away from your home, work, or other trusted…

Following the dramatic news in December that its flagship Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 smartwatches were being banned from sale, Apple has been hustling ever since to get them back on the market and keep them there. The problem is that the ITC has ruled that blood-oxygen sensors in the devices infringe patents owned by another company named Masimo. The initial ban lasted only a few days, with an appeals court granting Apple’s request for a temporary stay, but the future remains uncertain. The company wants the ban to be paused for the entire appeals process, which could last a year or more and comfortably take us through to the launch of the next generation of Apple Watches, but the ITC for one finds Apple’s arguments for this…

Look, I don’t know if that recent report about the new OLED iPad Pro costing between £1,500 and £2,000 is accurate. It’s always tricky to predict product prices since they’re decided deep inside Apple Park, not off on the supply chain from which most new-product rumours emanate. But I do know this: adding OLED to the iPad Pro is only going to make it more expensive. The current iPad Pro models start at £999 and £1,249 and go up from there. (A 2TB 12.9-inch M2 iPad Pro with cellular, an Apple Pencil, and a Magic Keyboard will run you to £3,197) I would be surprised, frankly, if any OLED iPad Pro starts at anything less than £999, and even a price that low seems unlikely. We’re talking prices getting pretty…

Apple’s Vision Pro mixed-reality headset is now available in the US, and the first wave of reviews has just landed. It’s probably fair to say that the consensus tilts towards the positive, but having spent longer with the hardware than was possible for the initial preview, early reviewers have all found reservations worthy of note. Let’s plunge in and check out the verdict. DESIGN AND WEIGHT Following the preview event, where testers were allowed roughly an hour with Vision Pro, there were concerns that longer sessions could prove less pleasant. And that’s borne out by reviews, which express mixed feelings about the device’s comfort. Writing for CNBC (fave.co/3w48Rt6), Todd Haselton strikes a happy note. “The build quality is superb,” he reports. “Apple used top‑of-the-line glass, screens, and metals. It feels…

Price: £114 from fave.co/49fbTsT P hotographer Chase Jarvis said: “The best camera is the one you have with you.” And for just about everyone, that means it’s a smartphone camera – and unless you’re a serious photographer, you’re not carrying another camera wherever you go. You know what else people aren’t carrying with them? Printers to output any photos shot on a smartphone camera. If you do find yourself in a situation where you’d like to have the ability to instantly print the photos you shoot with an iPhone, you don’t have to lug around that hefty all-in-one. As part of its Instax product line-up, Fujifilm has portable photo printers that are very easy to carry. This review looks at the Fujifilm Instax mini Link 2, a smartphone printer that…

While we all value our privacy, it’s also good to know that if something should happen to us, our friends and family would know where we were. Or, if you’re wondering where a friend is when they said they’d meet outside the cinema twenty minutes ago, you can quickly monitor their progress. There’s plenty of reasons to share your location with a chosen few, and here’s a few ways to achieve this on your iPhone. 1. ENABLING LOCATION SERVICES To be able to use the location sharing features on your iPhone, you’ll first need to make sure that a few related settings are turned on. Here’s how to check whether they are enabled or not. 1. Open Settings > Privacy & Security. 2. Select Location Services. 3. Enable Location Services.…

If you’ve discovered that weird appointments and reminders are appearing in your iPhone’s Calendar app, you may be afraid that you have an iPhone Calendar virus, or that your iPhone Calendar has been hacked. What’s more likely is that you have been subscribed to a third-party calendar, which is generating annoying spam appointments. This kind of calendar is becoming prolific, with more and more cases, so you are most certainly not alone in seeing these annoying appointments appear on your iPhone – in fact iPad & iPhone User staff have also been affected by this phenomenon. Thankfully, iPhone calendar spam is not dangerous and should be easy to get rid of. This isn’t an iPhone Calendar Virus, but it certainly feels like one when a cluster of strange appointments appear…

At the Chaos Communication Congress in late December (fave.co/3Su9CVl), representatives from Kaspersky revealed the details of Operation Triangulation (fave.co/495SlqM), a set of iPhone exploits that was described as “the most sophisticated attack chain [the researchers have] ever seen”. Designed to target iPhones running iOS 16.2 or earlier, the Operation Triangulation attack is initiated with an iMessage text that includes a malicious spyware attachment that runs automatically without user interaction (a ‘zero-click’ attack). The spyware then takes advantage of four iOS vulnerabilities to allow arbitrary code execution. The four vulnerabilities include one documented as CVE-2023-38606 (fave.co/3StjMp6), and Kaspersky points out that this allowed attackers to bypass the hardware-based security for the kernel in the iPhone chips from the A12 to the A16 Bionic. Apple provided a security patch for this vulnerability…

Apple’s eagerly awaited Vision Pro mixed-reality headset has arrived in the US. We assume it will eventually come to the UK and other countries, but no time frame has so far been given for the wider release. According to a new report, however, that may come a little sooner than expected. In a recent article (fave.co/3Hp2naJ), the reputable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicts that Vision Pro is likely to launch outside the US before WWDC 2024, which likely takes place in June. That gives us an upper limit of four months’ delay, and potentially rather less given that Apple won’t want news coverage of the wider launch to bleed into publicity for WWDC. Could Apple make the announcement at its traditional spring event in March/April? Perhaps that would be pushing it.…

Price: £799 from fave.co/3tGiQEi The Apple Watch Ultra is squarely aimed at adventurers: divers, hikers and other athletes who need a rugged, long-lasting smartwatch that can cope with endurance events and extreme weather. But in exactly the same way that people buy 4x4s with absolutely no intention of ever driving them off-road, the Ultra has also proven popular with ordinary folk that are never going to test its water resistance to a depth of 100m or rely on following waypoints out in the wilderness. They just love its looks and the fact it lasts twice as long between charges compared to a regular Apple Watch. It has almost become a status symbol because of its high price, although not quite to the extent that the original Edition models did. The…

The growing hype ahead of Vision Pro’s launch has reminded me how much fun it can be when Apple launches something genuinely new. (Goodness knows it doesn’t happen often.) But the world, as Anton Ego explains at the end of Ratatouille, is often unkind to new creations. The new needs friends. Who will be friendly to Vision Pro? The critical response, in fact, has been pretty positive, with our own Roman Loyola’s first impressions described as an “emotional, immersive, and completely captivating” experience. Just this month, the first real-world reviews arrived (see page 57) and largely agreed, with reviewers calling it “the best wearable display I’ve ever put on” despite some glaring first-gen flaws. But as always, the difficult thing will be translating critical nods into actual sales. Because Vision…

Price: £130 from fave.co/3upbLbo I ’ve reviewed a bunch of impressive portable multi-device wireless chargers recently, and this newcomer, the Matrix Ultimate, lives up to its name, offering maximum fast iPhone and Apple Watch wireless charging with the ability to detach the iPhone charger as power bank and the Watch charger to slot into any USB-C port. The whole package is portable and even comes with a soft but stiff felt carry case, mini USB-C wall charger, and cable. But the most impressive feature is magnetic MagSafe wireless charging support (iPhone 12 and later) thanks to a removable 5,000mAh battery pack. There are smaller and higher-capacity alternatives, but the Matrix Ultimate is one of the few that charges three Apple devices while delivering a full 15 watts to an iPhone.…

Apple makes it simple to turn on an iPhone’s torch from the lock screen – too simple. All of us have found ourselves noticing our pocket is glowing, or lift our phone and assault someone in the eye with our phone’s LEDs. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t offer a way to disable the torch button (nor the Camera button) from your lock screen. However, if you find it a common annoyance, you can make a trade-off in ease of waking your phone to avoid triggering the torch (or Camera app). In Settings > Accessibility > Touch, disable Tap or Swipe to Wake. With this option off, you need to press the side/top (standby or wake) button to activate your iPhone so you can then use a passcode, Touch ID or Face ID.…

The prominence of the iPhone in North America and much of Western Europe belies a simple fact: Apple has never been the top-selling smartphone brand across the globe. Blame it on Apple’s unwillingness to compete in the budget phone space, perhaps, but the number one spot usually belongs to Samsung. While Apple no longer gives sales figures for the iPhone, market analysts track shipments carefully, and now two of them, IDC and Canalys, both say that Apple sold more smartphones in 2023 than any other brand. Samsung dropped to the number two spot. The gap is close to be sure. Canalys says both brands round off to 20 percent, with Apple having the slight edge. IDC says that Apple shipped 234.6 million smartphones, to Samsung’s 226.6 – just a few…

The release of iOS 17.3 may quietly be one of the most important Apple has issued in a long time. Yeah, there are features like AirPlay support for hotel TVs (in a very limited number of hotel rooms, for now), and collaborative playlists for Apple Music (a feature other music services have had for years). But it’s the new security feature that makes this a must-have. No, not the kind of security feature you’re thinking of. Not some underthe-hood, fixing-a-hacker-exploit thing that keeps bad people from running malware on your iPhone (although there are those, too). This one helps protect your important digital data and access from physical iPhone thieves. STOLEN DEVICE PROTECTION KEEPS YOUR CRITICAL INFORMATION SAFE Our iPhones have all sorts of very, very important data. Not just…

Switching from a Fitbit smartwatch or tracker to an Apple Watch does means changing the way you view your goals, targets and achievements, and will initially alienate and frustrate Fitbit users switching to the Apple fitness regime. You’ll get used to it, but Apple hasn’t made it easy for switchers to find a natural match for their beloved Fitbit familiarity. As with getting fit, you need to work at it. In the end, you’ll miss some Fitbit features but prefer the Apple Watch experience. Apple’s Activity app focuses primarily on Movement, Exercise and Standing rather than Fitbit’s more straightforward Step, Floor and Distance measurements. Fitbit users will be put out by Apple’s different approach to fitness and health metrics, but there are ways to make the transition easier and force…

If you are thinking of buying an older generation or used iPhone, or wondering whether it’s worth updating your current handset, one important factor to consider is how long Apple will be offering support for that handset. There are two ways in which Apple supports iPhones. One is the software – ensuring that any bugs and security flaws are addressed. The other is the hardware – providing the parts and labour to fix a problem with your phone (for a price, of course). It’s for this reason that we dissuade people from buying particularly old iPhone handsets. The risk that a fault could occur or that you might be exposed to security risks is too high. The good news is that Apple does support iPhones for a reasonably long time.…

Storage space on an iPhone is definitely at a premium, what with the quality and size of photos and videos increasing all the time and our photo libraries now stretching back years. If you use iCloud though, then there’s an easy way to reduce the amount of space your images are taking up on your iPhone without having to remove them from your device. In this article, we explain how to reduce the amount of storage taken up by photos on your iPhone by moving them to iCloud and help you avoid some of the pitfalls that come from not fully understanding what iCloud offers. SAVE PHOTOS TO iCLOUD iCloud Photos is part of Apple’s iCloud service for storing and syncing data. If you choose to use iCloud Photos, all…

The Camera app on an iPhone or iPad makes it a snap (sorry for the pun) to take pictures in either portrait or landscape orientation. But what do you do when the rotation is incorrect, either when making the shot or reviewing it later? CHECK FOR THE ROTATION IN THE INTERFACE Camera uses subtle signals to let you know that your photo will be captured in landscape or portrait. Certain text and icons rotate to the position that Camera registers the photo will be captured as. In the figure, you can see that if your iPhone or iPad is in portrait orientation, the symbols at the top and the text for magnification appear in that orientation (note the magnification factors enlarged and highlighted in the red circle at right). Now…