• Apple Officially Addresses Location Data Controversy

    // Gradly // Apple, blog, Conspiracies, iPhone, News, Rants & Raves, Scandal 1 Response

    Apple officially acknowledged the growing controversy over the logging of location data on the iPhone and iPad. The document comes in a Q&A format. In it, Apple addresses some common concerns and explicitly states that they are not tracking the location of your iPhone/iPad, has never done so, and has no plans to do so.

    Why is my iPhone logging my location?

    The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple.

    Apple states that all data that is transmitted to Apple is anonymous and encrypted and can not be tied to the identity of the user. They also note that findings that the database continues to grow despite Location services being off as a bug that will soon be addressed.

    Apple is planning on releasing a free iOS update in the next few weeks that performs the following:

    • Reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone,
    • Ceases backing up this cache, and
    • Deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.

    [via: macrumors]

  • Next iPhone with 3.7 Inch Larger Screen Image Leaked In China

    // Gradly // Apple, blog, iPhone, News, Rants & Raves, Rumors No Responses

    M.I.C Gadget posts two images of what to appear as a white iPhone with a larger display, possibly the alleged 3.7 Inch according to the rumors emerged recently. The images seem way legitimate. it appears to be closer to 3.7 inches than 4 inches. Of note, the image features a white iPhone bezel with Apple’s new proximity sensor.

    The device we seeing here is surely not the white iPhone 4 which appeared in the UK last week. Yes, it has the new proximity sensor, same as the white iPhone 4. Anyway, maybe this is the prototype iPhone with an A5 processor that game developers are using to prepare their iPhone 5 apps.

    iPhone 5′s with larger displays have long been rumored with being 4 inches, edge-to-edge display and Joshua Topolsky saying 3.7 inches.

  • New Evidence On Possible Retina Display For Mac

    // Gradly // Apple, blog, Download, Rants & Raves, Rumors, Tech. No Responses

    As reported earlier about the possibility of Apple planning a retina display for Mac, just like what we have on the iPhone 4. In addition to the beautiful and huge wallpaper, new icons with higher resolution have now been discovered as well.

    MacMagazine.com.br has found several icons with resolution of 1024×1024 compared to what we now have in Snow Leopard – 512×512. Click the image above to see it in full resolution.

    This is probably a first step towards Apple’s release of retina display in their desktop computers, when the hardware allows them to.

  • Apple Testing iPhone For T-Mobile With A5 Processor

    // Gradly // Apple, blog, Gadgets, iPhone, News, Rants & Raves, Rumors No Responses

    A bunch of photos surfaced recently by BGR shows an unreleased white iPhone 4 device running on T-Mobile USA network. It looks like an iPhone 4, although, the proximity sensor looks different than the one shown in the final white iPhone 4 that’s been already sold in the UK. The device is running an old and internal test version of iOS 4, confirmed by the several Apple internal and field-testing applications like Radar and Apple Connect or the preference panels to measure the performances of the device.

    That’s right, you’re looking at photos of an iPhone prototype with T-Mobile USA 3G bands. The actual internal model is N94, and if you remember, the Verizon model is N92 while the standard GSM variant is N90. We have verified that the phone itself is running a test version of Apple’s iOS, much like the one we saw in those videos from Vietnam, and it includes internal Apple test apps like Radar and Apple’s employee directory app. Additionally, the front of the white iPhone pictured looks a little different from the photos of the retail white iPhone 4 that surfaced recently — specifically, the proximity sensor has changed on the retail version.

    The model number of this iPhone 4 is N94, its related to the A5 chip — which is implemented on the iPad 2. Remember that there is the prototype iPhone with an A5 processor that game developers are using to prepare their iPhone 5 apps. That sounds a lot like this phone. The only question now is if that is a prototype ’4S’ or ’5′.