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Posts tagged with "iPhone"

Official Google+ App for iPhone Now Available

Google has just released the official Google+ app for iPhone on the App Store. The app is free and available here, and at the moment of writing this Google hasn’t updated its Mobile webpage to showcase the new app yet.

The Google+ iOS app provides a native interface to access much of the functionalities of the website, such as the Huddle group messaging feature – which was exclusive to Android devices prior to the app’s approval. The dashboard of the Google+ app presents a grid of icons to access the Stream, Huddle, Photos, your Profile and Circles, as well as a Notifications tab at the bottom that will open a vertical list of all your incoming notifications. Whilst much of the navigation seems to rely on web views optimized for the iPhone and fetched by the device, the animations when switching between sections are quite snappy and fast on iOS 4. Just like on the desktop, the Stream provides recent updates from the people you follow and your Circles, allowing you to check for new posts with the popular “pull to refresh gesture” and comment or +1 others’s posts. You can’t +1 from the home page – you have to open a single post and hit the + button in the upper right corner, while a text field at the bottom will let you leave a comment. You can also “mute” or “report” a post. The app is capable of sending push notifications for new comments, shares, and so forth. Read more

Nuance Releases Another iOS App, Dragon Go! with Intelligent Voice Search

Voice-powered search has become increasingly popular in recent years as more and more people purchase smartphones such as the iPhone or an Android device. Google has extensive voice-integration on Android and similarly has iOS Apps that include the ability to search by voice commands, others such as Microsoft with Bing, Nuance and Siri have done similar things. Furthering their previous efforts, Nuance yesterday released a new app, Dragon Go!, that combines Nuance’s top-notch voice recognition with the intelligence to do what is actually being said.

It plugs into various services from the typical Google Search to Pandora, Fandango, Wikipedia, Yelp, IMDB and many more – in fact at launch the app supports more than 180 options. Consequently saying, “What’s the weather like?” will pull data from AccuWeather, whereas saying “Super 8 showtimes” will direct you to Fandango.

Not only does Dragon Go! hear what people are searching for, but it understands what they want, giving them direct access to relevant results from 180 of the most trusted and reliable content providers, including AccuWeather, Bing, ESPN, Facebook, Fandango, iTunes, Last.fm, LiveNation, Milo.com, OpenTable, Pandora ® internet radio, Rotten Tomatoes, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yelp, YouTube, Yahoo! and many others – with the list of content providers growing each day

Dragon Go also integrates with the iPhone so that if you say “Play Coldplay” you can play music straight from your device, similarly it will integrate with the Phone app, the Maps app and more. This is now Nuance’s fourth iOS app, and it complements their Dragon Dictation app and the more tradition Dragon Search app. Earlier this year there had been a number of rumors that Apple was set to do a deal with Nuance to integrate a service similar to what this app offers, but at the base iOS level. Dragon Go! is available for free in the US App Store.

[Via AllThingsD]
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Ahead Of Next Week’s Earnings Call, Analysts Predict High Mac, iPhone And iPad Sales

Ahead of next week’s earning call, there are two reports out today by analysts that paint a rosy picture of Mac, iPhone and iPad sales. The first report by Barclays Capital anaylst Ben Reitzes, claims that Apple is likely to exceed 22% growth in Mac computer shipments during the June quarter. This is despite US market data that has been less optimistic, but Reitzes suggests that overseas sales may compensate for the “somewhat muted” US sales due to the fact that many consumers are waiting for new MacBook Air models.

The second report from Brian White of Ticonderoga Securities included some revised figures and claims that Apple is likely to have sold a record of 8.5 million iPads and an impressive 17.53 million iPhones in the June quarter.

After our recent trip to Asia, we indicated that we felt our iPhone estimates for the June quarter were overly conservative, while our iPad projections were achievable and well above the Street.

Apple’s previous record for iPad sales was last years holiday quarter where they sold 7.3 million units. The iPhone sales according to White would be less than last-quarter’s record 18.65 units but still more than double the 8.4 million units Apple sold in the same quarter last year.

While many larger tech companies rely on more cyclical trends to grow sales, we believe Apple enjoys the tailwind of strong secular industry trends, hot new products and market share gain opportunities

[Via Barrons, AppleInsider]