The big news of the today is undoubtedly iOS 5 and iCloud, but Apple and its third-party developers have been pushing out updates and little pre-Halloween tricks and treats all day long as well. But that’s not the only thing going on for this mid-October hump day -- here’s the rest of the news for Wednesday, October 12, 2011.
Late Tuesday night, the first reviews of the iPhone 4S started pouring out and as you can imagine, they’re overwhelming positive for a device that was met with less enthusiasm at its debut a mere week ago. A million preorder customers on the first day can’t be wrong, and the reviewers tend to agree. MacRumors has the best roundup of reviews for the new handset, including TechCrunch, This Is My Next, AllThingsD, The New York Times and others.
The folks over at Engadget have a cool new tablet app available for the iPad today called Distro. If you’re familiar with Flipboard or Zite, you’ll immediately get the concept here, except Distro is “hand-crafted by the Engadget team” and only pulls in the best content from that particular venue. The 2.6MB app is free, so it’s certainly worth a look for iOS 4.2 or later users.
Late Tuesday night, Macworld followed up its iPhone 4S review with a report detailing how CDMA carriers Sprint and Verizon Wireless will allow the GSM SIM card slot to be unlocked on their devices -- a distinct advantage over AT&T for international travelers averse to paying inflated roaming charges. Unfortunately, Sprint has since gone on the record with Ars Technica, claiming that while international roaming is indeed supported with “the appropriate monthly plan,” the SIM card slot is not truly unlocked -- as in, you can’t stick another SIM card into it and go about your business. Kind of a bummer, but still better than nothing for those of you choosing CDMA carriers.
Not content to let Apple hog all of the software news today, Adobe pushed out a press release detailing a new promotion for the company’s Creative Suite 5.5 products. If you already own CS2, CS3 or CS4 and haven’t upgraded yet, you can get a nice 20 percent discount off those upgrade prices through December 31, 2011. Of course, the deal isn’t valid just anywhere -- you’ll need to hit up Adobe’s online store to take advantage of it.
You’re probably already aware that iCloud was released earlier today, but did you know you’ll need to update a ton of stuff to truly take advantage of it? In addition to OS X Lion 10.7.2 and iOS 5, the second-generation Apple TV now has a version 4.4 update which adds Photo Stream as well as new content from the National Hockey League and Wall Street Journal Live. That update also provides AirPlay mirroring for wireless playback from your iOS 5 device, and can be downloaded directly from your black ATV.
Last but not least, iPhoto 9.2 and Aperture 3.2 are both available now, providing iCloud Photo Stream integration as well as a nice range of bug fixes for Apple’s consumer and pro photo apps. Those updates can be found in the Mac App Store (assuming you bought one or both there), or via the Software Update mechanism after you’ve applied OS X Lion 10.7.2.
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