Category — Apple

Streaming music service Spotify has launched on the iPhone and Android devices for its premium subscribers only. You can download it from Apple’s App Store here and the Android Market. Though plans to launch there are in play, the service is not yet live in the US, and it has already taken several European markets by storm. This iPhone app is basically identical to the leaked beta we reviewed in detail.
The mobile apps will allow you to play the entire Spotify catalogue and the ‘offline mode’ caches playlists so they can be played when you are offline, like on a plane. Spotify has set up a special mobile sectionwith more details. The launch of this mobile version now fires the starting gun on their US launch plans. A large number of record labels have actually invested in the Swedish-born, London-based startup, which is nowvalued at €170 million, or about $242 million, with a post money valuation of around €200 million. This is the first time Spotify has gone mobile with its service and it’s sure to cause a lot of interest. Spotify really is unlike pretty much any streaming service you’ve tried before, mainly because tracks start to play almost instantly due to the P2P technology employed. On a mobile the effect is impressive. See the video below. Though on the face of it Spotify appears to compete with iTunes,in reality, as we predicted, Apple appears to be relaxed about the service, presumably so long as the mobile app remains tied to premium subscribers.

Nearly two weeks after submitting the app to Apple, Facebook’s totally revamped 3.0 application is finally live on the App Store, according to the app’s developer Joe Hewitt . You can download it now here . The store currently shows that the app is version 2.5, but if you click the Download button anyway you’ll get the new version. The new self inking stamps application brings a slew of new features, making it what may be the most useful app on the App Store (be sure to read this post) for our full review. Among the additions are Events, which have frustratingly been omitted from previous versions. Now you’ll be able to look up where your Events are, and you can also respond to them and see which of your friends are attending (for anyone who has ever had to boot up the web version of the site just to look up an Event address, this is a big deal). You can also post video directly to the site if you have an iPhone 3GS — a feature that will likely see the number of videos on Facebook increase dramatically. Smaller changes include a News Feed that more closely reflects the feed you’ll find on the main Facebook site, as well as the ability to “Like” items your friends have created. One feature that users will be missing is Push Notifications, which we suspect will be rolled out in version 3.1, which Hewitt is already working on. There will also be support for landscape mode in the upcoming release, and we may also see support for the ability to watch Facebook videos from the phone (right now you can only upload them). It’s worth noting that the 11 day wait since Facebook originally submitted the application was enough to raise Hewitt’s ire (and justifiably so), leading him to condemn the App Store approval process and call for its removal entirely.

In the World of mobile OS, Google Android is a challenger still and plays a vital role, as the amount of devices used for the purpose of running the system are about to come out in the coming months along with the combination with its open approach.The main reason for the success of Apple’s App Store for iPhone/iPod is measured by counting the number of applications that has been developed for the platform, it is around 70,000 applications till now.But Google didn’t disclose the number of applications which are exactly available on Android Market, so it is difficult to compare the two on this particular level.But, I am very thankful to AndroLib,as it provides us a useful website from which we can browse Android applications from our PC.There are more than 10,000 applications and games available on this platform today and above all, majority of the applications are available at free of cost and to be exact atleast 64.2% of applications are for free. The company has to admit first that there are more than 10,000 applications tracked by them, but Google says that there is no way to get an idea of the exact number of applications in Android market.But,the Android market has grown upto 4.4 times in just four months.This is a great achivement for Google.

In the begining of this month a Facebook application for Android was launched, this is a much anticipated Facebook application specially designed for Android. Even though it is a official release ,as said by the company, but a news came out that this application was not released by Facebook, but Google has built this application themselves,as they thought that having a Facebook application was more important to them. In this Facebook application there is no messaging facility, just the news stream is displayed and it has a ability to post status updates and we can take/upload photos to Facebook. The cool stuffs which are available in Facebook 3.0 application for iPhone users are not yet available in Android. But,the application runs fast in Android when compared to iPhone. In iPhone many people goes to Facebook through browser as the application was too slow to use.But the application in Android is more quick as it can do three or four functions quickly without a single problem. Another wonderful feature is that,notifications of new events can be viewed upto date, as Android application has the ability to run in the background,even though you are not actively using the application you can see this stuff in the background.Below there is a video demo about this application.

Few weeks ago,users of Mac have heared a news that there are a few bugs in some pieces of software in the latest version of OS X,Snow Leopard,which was released a few days ago.The applications having such issues includes the developer version of Chrome and Chromium for OS X.We know that these versions are still under development and they are not complete yet, but inspite of knowing that, many people use them, which increases the stability of those developer version and they become usable for OS X Leopard.Google has fixed the bugs in it and has kept it smooth running along in Snow Leopard as well.I like to play with Chromium every day and have yet to notice a crash.Flash is working fine on it,but the book mark manager including the bookmark importer was available in builds last month but now it has been disabled temporarily.The latest builds of Chromium is available in the Google Chrome’s website, even the developer version of Chrome is available on it.The auto-updater of Chromium can also been found on the same.The testing of Snow Leopard seems to started as soon as possible by Google and the update will be available after the testing has been over.Another important thing is that, a new “about” screen is added to the Chromium recently.This can be found below the window.

Recently, I heared  a news from a Chinese forum, that iPhone 3GS is perfectly capable of playing  720p and 1080p video, when it is encoded with H.264; But,the playback resolution had currently been limited to 640×480 by Apple,I don’t know why Apple artificially limits the resolution that can be played.May be, battery will get depleted so quickly when we play a 1080p video.But, A forum goer came out of Apple’s restriction himself, by playing a 1080p video at 30Mbps.A Mac book, would really scream in horror, if anyone tries to play a 30mpbs video on it,even when Plex is used.So,I do say that it is possible technically to play a “Full HD” on any iPhone GS. It is probably a overkill of watching such kind of videos on our iPhone.May be, one day, Apple would release an adapter that allows us to output a 1080p video from our phone  onto an HDTV. So, for the duration of that playback keep your iPhones plugged now itself,eventhough it’s  not exactly going to be elegant.