40Tech

The launch of the iPhone 4S set new records in the smartphone market in 2011. Hitting the shelves in the UK, US and Canada in October, with a staggered global launch continuing to the end of 2011, Apple shifted 30 million units. It has helped their profits soar and has also quietened the naysayers who thought the iPhone 4S might not have the same impact on the market as its predecessors.

Yet the iPhone 4S might have had an even bigger and more important impact on the smartphone market, aside from the eye-watering sales figures. Reports suggest the dominance and popularity of Apple’s latest device has been so extensive, the firm’s competitors are putting off launching their own handsets because of fear that they won’t make enough of a splash.

Both the iOS App Store and the Android Market offer an abundance of camera apps. There are so many, that it takes either great functionality or a unique twist for an app to stand out. One that does so is Paper Camera, available as an Android and an iPhone/iPad app. Paper Camera lets you use your camera to output real time cartoon and painting effects that have to be seen to appreciated.

We’re always looking for a better way to filter and experience all of the content we discover on the web. Thankfully, there are a ton of great feed readers and news discovery apps out there. Three of the standouts, Flipboard, Zite (which we somehow never wrote an article on, directly), and PressReader, have recently received some significant updates. Some might even call them game-changing. Either way, they’re significant enough that we feel the need to share them with you, so read on! Enjoy! And comment, of course…  

My little girl is three. Three-and-a-half, to be exact — and before now, we never had to worry about her putting things in her mouth. I’m not sure what changed, really, but now we have to watch her like a hawk. And we do — but, unfortunately, it was already too late for my iPad stylus. For both of them…

The first one, she chewed on. It was pretty much a write-off. The second one, she decided it would be fun to see what the business end tasted like. Now I’m down two pens. They were the cheap kind, thank the tech gods, but that’s still about $40 down the drain! So I decided: the next stylus will be one of my own making. One that will cost me nothing to make, and that I can easily repair. And thanks to the wonders of the internet, making that happen was easy peasy.

Now I’ve seen everything. Would you have more incentive to go to the gym if you knew that a missed workout was going to hit you where it counts – in the wallet? If so, check out the New York Times’ coverage of GymPact, an iPhone app that can provide this type of monetary incentive to working out.

How are you?” “Finer than frog hair, Kevin.” According to What Siri Is Saying, those are two examples of responses you might get from Siri. For those of you who somehow have avoided the Apple PR juggernaut, Siri is a voice-operated assistance interface, available only on the iPhone 4S. You can ask Siri a question, or ask it (her?) to perform a variety of tasks, such as setting an alarm, sending a text, or getting a definition. Of course, much like the sometimes humorous responses from the iPhone’s autocorrect feature, Siri sometimes returns a funny answer. What Siri Is Saying has collected many of those responses, and allows readers to vote and comment on them. If you’re quick, you might even win a prize by submitting your own Siri question – even if you don’t have an iPhone 4S.

When we first told you about Hotspot Shield, it was to use the free Virtual Private Network to bypass blocked media, as well as increase your browsing security. Over a year later, we posted a tutorial on how to use the VPN to watch US Netflix outside of United States, using your iOS devices. Unfortunately, the Hotspot Shield sign up process for iOS was broken soonafter, and their customer service team didn’t have a lot to say about it. Now we know why: Anchorfree, the creators of Hotspot Shield have released an iPhone app that makes all of the steps go away, and even solves a few of the problems.

Flurry posted the results of a recent study of app usage, taking a look not only at how Android stacks up against iOS, but also at app retention rate – the percentage of users that continue to use an app in the 12 months after acquiring it. The results are somewhat stunning, showing that the retention rate in the first month after acquisition is only 38%. That number then drops steadily, reaching 4% after 12 months. Do you find yourself discarding apps at such a fast rate?

Although Apple’s new iPhone did not electrify either the media or the stock market quite so much as Apple might have hoped, it has certainly proved popular with their most vital audience: the consumers, who have made it the most successful iPhone launch ever, with 4 million sales already. It’s achieved worldwide success, including unprecedented penetration in the Chinese market.

Many people probably picked up the 4S for the Siri Personal Assistant, or the much-improved 8Mp camera, or just because it’s fun to have the very latest high-end phone. Hopefully they will sooner or later appreciate the true power of this new handset, which goes far beyond what we’ve come to expect in smartphones, particularly in several areas crucial to gaming: notably processor power, graphics chip, and the possibilities unlocked by the iCloud and AirPlay services.

In keeping with their Big Push, Google released a new version of Gmail with a major facelift, as well as released — and then pulled — their long-awaited native Gmail app for iOS.

The new Gmail look, as is to be expected, has a few minor annoyances to accompany some great new features, and the app is actually very cool, but was pulled due to a notification system problem.

Check out the feature-list for both below.