How to find out which apps are killing your iPhone’s battery life

 



Relatively poor battery life is one of the biggest complaints people have about Apple’s iPhone lineup, and the iPhone 6 isn’t really expected to make any huge advancements in this area. The next-generation iPhones are indeed expected to have bigger batteries than current models, but they’ll also have larger displays and other new power-gulping features.
As much as people complain about battery life, few actually make an effort to adjust their usage patterns in an effort to extend each charge as long as possible. For those interested in getting more out of their batteries, there’s a nifty new iPhone app that will be a huge help.

A new app by Kuro Labs called Normal has been making waves among iPhone users and if you haven’t yet checked it out, now might be the time. Normal sits quietly in the background and monitors all of the other apps on your iPhone in order to make you aware of which apps are killing your handset’s battery life.
From the app’s description:

Normal is a battery diagnosis service that suggests personalized actions you can take to extend your battery life. By aggregating data from hundreds of thousands of users, Normal is able to accurately and precisely pinpoint the battery hogs on your device, tell you whether or not this is also happening to other people, and project by how much time you will extend the battery by killing each hog.
Using Normal is simple: Install and run the app, perform any actions it suggests (at your discretion), and watch as your battery life increases!
Normal works by collecting generic usage data on your device over time—including what apps are running, what type of device you have, and the battery level—and aggregates it on our cloud platform. Normal then analyzes this data, along with data from all our other users, with proprietary statistical algorithms designed at UC Berkeley’s AMP Lab. The results, in the form of suggested actions and statistics about the battery impact of your apps, are then sent back to you.

Normal costs just $0.99 and it’s available in the App Store right now.
Download Normal

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Apple will unveil the iPhone 6 at Flint Center, the same place where Steve Jobs unveiled the Macintosh 30 years ago

Apple has officially confirmed: it will hold its next big event at the Flint Center in Cupertino on Tuesday, September 9th, and everyone expects the company to unveil the new iPhone 6 and Apple’s first wearable, the iWatch. This is a change for Apple - the company has not held an event at the venue in many years, and it usually chooses the smaller Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, or it hosts at its own Cupertino campus.

The Flint Center for the Performing Arts is located in Cupertino, the same town where Apple’s corporate headquarters is, and the beautiful building is already being decorated with some massive construction going on. Apple is styling it up to look more like a cube, and we expect the first sign for the upcoming unveilings to show up soon.

The Flint Center is also special for a number of reasons outside the fact that it is simply larger than Yerba Buena: it is the place where Steve Jobs unveiled the Macintosh 30 years ago in 1984, and that’s also where the colorful iMac that started the revival for Apple in 1998. It’s clearly a place with a historic meaning, and we expect Apple to live up to the legacy and reveal something equally huge this time as well.

Preparations for the September 9th Apple event at the Flint Center have already started

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source: MacRumors, 9to5Mac

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Online Apple Stores allow AT&T Next users to upgrade to a new iPhone

Back in July, we told you that Apple was working with the major carriers in the states, to allow subscribers of early upgrade plans, to use them to purchase the Apple iPhone. At the time, we told you that training for Genius Bar employees would run through Thursday. But Apple has apparently jumped the gun. On the online Apple Store, Apple now displays the $0 down option for AT&T Next users who are purchasing the Apple iPhone 5s, Apple iPhone 5c or Apple iPhone 4s.

While AT&T's Next plan can be utilized to buy an iPhone via the online version of the Apple Store only, the company has already been testing the purchase of its iconic smartphone via Verizon Edge and T-Mobile JUMP!, at certain brick and mortar Apple Stores. For some reason, those two plans are not yet available to use with the online Apple Store.

The online Apple Store goes into detail, showing how AT&T Next would work with the purchase of a 16GB Apple iPhone 5s. The 12 month plan would require the AT&T customer to pay $0 down and make 20 monthly installment payments of $32.45. After 12 payments, the subscriber is eligible for an upgrade to a new phone. With the 18 month plan, the monthly installment price is $27.05 with an upgrade available after 18 months of payments.

Online Apple Store supports AT&T Next

1. The online Apple Store now supports the use of AT&T Next for iPhone purchases

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source: AppleStore via 9to5Mac

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5 shortcomings in iOS that those who switch from Android would find annoying

In the world of mobile technology, there seems to be nothing as polarizing as the battle between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems. With fans ready to start a holy war over features that one platform ‘borrowed’ from the other, and the endless discussion over which one is smoother, has the better apps, looks and so on, it’s easy to forget that those differences are often very minute.

In fact, we can safely say that the two most popular mobile operating systems are in many aspects on par, and both deliver a great, satisfying experience to most users.

However, after recently switching to an Apple iPhone from an Android device, we could not help but notice that while Apple has done some simple things much better than Google, there are some extremely annoying shortcomings in iOS 7 that we hope the company fixes soon. What are they? Take a look below to find out.

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5 shortcomings in iOS that those who switch from Android would find annoying

1. Sharing on iOS looks completely broken in comparison with Android

Without a doubt, the most annoying change for Android users coming to the iPhone and iPad is the way sharing works on iOS. Put simply, in comparison with Android, iOS sharing looks completely broken: trying to share a photo from the camera roll to Dropbox or Google Drive straight from the gallery app (as you’d easily do on Android) is simply impossible on iOS. The same applies for all apps - they just don’t communicate with each other as apps on Android do.

2. Confusing notifications system

The notification dropdown has been a signature feature of Android since its very early days, and iOS has only recently added a similar dropdown. Similar, however, does not mean the same - rather than being a one stop shop for all your notifications, the iOS notification dropdown is actually divided in three tabs: the today tab for a quick weather report, stocks update, etc; an all tab with all your notifications, and a missed tab for missed notifications. This is just confusing: what goes in the ‘all’ tab and what is bound for the ‘missed’ tab? This seems like an overcomplication for the otherwise simple iOS.

3. No landscape orientation for many apps

We’ve gotten used to an almost universal capability to switch between portrait and landscape orientation on Android, but on iOS many apps where the feature is available on Android, don’t have it on Apple’s platform. We just find this strange and confusing.

4. No battery stats

Some users might think this is not something that really matters to them, but wait until some app starts taking a heavier hit on your battery. In Android, you can easily detect such an app, and take some measures, and while such misbehaviour is much less likely on iOS, having the option to monitor how much energy apps consume would have been nice.

5. There is no ‘Clear all’ button for notifications

Those who have more than a dozen apps know what we’re talking about: there is simply no way to press one button to clear all notifications from all apps, you have to go and painstakingly clear notifications app by app. Not just this, clearing all notifications from a certain app requires a double tap. Argh

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Google releases a new office productivity app on iOS and updates two of its existing ones

We already showed you a list of a number of Google apps and services that you can access from your iOS device, but it seems that this list has just become a tad longer. The search giant has just launched one of its fairly popular productivity apps on Apple's mobile platform – Slides. It joins the ranks of Google Docs and Google Sheets, which makes Google's productivity suite on iOS almost complete. Creating, editing, and sharing a presentation on the fly from any supported iOS device is now possible thanks to Slides.

But that is not the only novelty in the productivity department on iOS. Speaking of Docs and Sheets, Google has also polished and refreshed these two. The text-editing Docs has been updated with support for opening, editing, and exporting Microsoft Word files (“.docx/.doc”), while Sheets can do the same thing with Microsoft Excel files (“.xlsx/.xls”). The latter also now allows its users to view charts, insert various formulae into them, as well as make use of the find and replace feature for each and every chart.

These are some pretty neat and substantial additions to the productivity apps, which brings them almost on par with Microsoft's own Office Mobile app on the App Store. You can go ahead and download Slides from the links below for free, which is the usual case with Google.

Download:

• Google Slides (iOS) 
• Google Docs (iOS) 
• Google Sheets (iOS) 

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via: AppleInsider

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