Wow, it’s the middle of the work week again… already? How time flies when you’re having fun! Our daily recap is a rousing mix of Apple Store rumors, Angry Birds, an angry iPhone carrier in the Czech Republic, a botched native Gmail app for iOS and the return of Retrospect, once the most celebrated backup software on the Mac. It’s all right here and ready for your eyeballs on this Wednesday, November 2, 2011.
According to a report from BGR, Apple will be launching a new retail store initiative on Thursday with an update to their Apple Store iOS app. The update is two-fold: On one front, it will allow “buy online, pick up in store” ordering for even more cities after a trial run in San Francisco and New York City, but as widely rumored, the app will also allow for self-checkout at Apple retail locations as well. That means grab what you want from the shelf, scan it via the Apple Store app, tap Purchase and the payment method attached to your Apple ID gets charged accordingly. The truly crazy part? Supposedly you can then saunter out of the store like you own the place, and no one will tackle or molest you on the way out to make sure you’ve paid. We’re living in the future, my friends...
There’s little doubt that Angry Birds is one of the most downloaded mobile games in history, but how many times would you guess? If the answer was something like 500 million, you win the prize! (Okay, there’s no prize, but you can brag to your friends that you guess it correctly.) Developer Rovio took to their website today to do a bit of boasting of their own about the “remarkable milestone” -- and as they put it, Angry Birds has “no signs of slowing down.” The company estimates that 266 billion levels of the game have been played to date, with 400 billion birds “launched into action” and a total of 300 billion minutes played each day. Staggering...
Bloomberg is reporting that Telefonica Czech Republic AS won’t be getting the iPhone 4S -- and worse yet, they’re dumping all of Apple’s handsets, according to local spokesman Hany Farghali. The only reason cited is “Apple’s business terms,” but you can get Czech competitors Vodafone Group and T-Mobile International AG will be happy to mop up those customers as they start selling the iPhone 4S today.
Gmail fans had a reason to be stoked today -- but only briefly. As announced on the Official Gmail Blog, Google pushed out an official, free and universal Gmail app for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. The app was quickly met with yawns since it’s mostly composed of HTML5 code, and its most exciting function -- push notifications for incoming Gmail -- was unfortunately knee-capped by a lingering bug. Google quickly yanked the app while their engineers address the problem, although the search giant claims those who were quick to grab it can continue to use it just fine for the time being.
Remember the dark days before Mac OS X’s Time Machine, when everyone was forced to find a third-party solution for backing up their hard drives? Many of us relied on Retrospect for tape and optical disc backups in the days before hard disk prices plummeted like a stone, but the venerable Retrospect started having some issues around the time of Leopard and many users sought out other solutions. Now, the software is on the comeback trailer with Retrospect 9 for Mac, a five-user, $129 solution ($59 upgrade from prior versions) released by the newly standalone Retrospect, Inc. The software continues to work with Windows and Linux systems as well, and cloud-based storage is also part of the mix in an effort to bring the application into the modern day. Retrospect 8 users who purchased on or after July 20, 2011 are also eligible for a free upgrade, hit the website for more details.
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