Posted by The Blogging Desk on Fri, Dec 03, 2010 @ 09:00 AM
Daring Fireball:
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When you sign up for Viber, they send a push notification to everyone in your address book who has already signed up for Viber. I’m not sure it’s right to call this a privacy issue, per se, because it’s only sending notifications to people whose phone number you have and who have your phone number, but I’m opposed to any service that sends notifications to others on my behalf without my consent. And there is no way to turn this feature off.
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As stated above, the Viber app attempts to serve as a replacement for the built-in Phone app — acting as a front-end for both Viber VOIP calls and regular cellular voice calls. But it’s not really a replacement for the Phone app — it can’t access your voicemail or your recent (voice) calls list. So you still need the Phone app.
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You don’t pay Viber a cent for using it, but when you’re on 3G, calls using Viber count against your data plan limit. And, given that Viber is iPhone-only and AT&T offers free calling between AT&T users, it raises a question as to why you’d use it. (One answer: the audio quality really is far superior.)
Yowza. Viber seems like the real deal. Can you imagine an iPod touch with 3G coming out? It could be a real game-changer. Especially for the enterprise market.
The iPhone is so prevalent now in the enterprise field that it would seem silly to not want to try and get things maintained on a VOIP network.
Posted by The Blogging Desk on Tue, Nov 23, 2010 @ 02:00 PM
MacWorld:
One of our favorite iOS 4.2 features is AirPlay, which lets you stream media from your iOS device to an AirPlay-compatible component such as the latest Apple TV or an AirPort Express. But we also want to be able to do the opposite: stream media from a source to our iOS devices. For example, a 32GB iPad can’t accommodate the 85GB of music and movies you’ve accumulated on your iMac. But if you couldaccess all that media from your iPad by streaming it over your Wi-Fi network, you might find that arrangement to be just as convenient. (In fact, the Apple TV lets you do exactly this, as does iTunes’s Home Sharing feature on Macs and Windows PCs.) Similarly, we’d love to be able to play, on our iOS devices, music and video on network drives—such as, say, a hard drive connected to an AirPort base station.
Posted by The Blogging desk on Fri, Nov 12, 2010 @ 03:00 PM
BGR:
If you’ve heard about the Kik messaging app, or as some would call it, “the new BBM”, you probably sat at the cool-kid lunch-table at school. Kik, a multi-platform messaging app designed to do one thing — communicate instantly and effortlessly with buddies — has absolutely exploded over the last few weeks. Originally on track to launch an innovative (and pretty cool) music-sharing, remote-controllable service, Kik soon found themselves creating a messaging app with some of their existing technology while the music service firmed up behind the scenes. After a pretty poor original launch (I tried Kik back then and the beta was definitely a beta — I uninstalled it soon after it was first installed), Kik stripped away almost everything until they ended up with one of the quickest and most reliable messaging apps around.