iPhone 6 to feature curved display, enhanced sensors: Report

Apple Inc is developing new iPhone designs including bigger screens with curved glass and enhanced sensors that can detect different levels of pressure, Bloomberg reported on Sunday, citing a unnamed person familiar with the plans.

With screens of 4.7 inches (11.9 cm) and 5.5 inches (14 cm), the two new models would be Apple's largest iPhones, the person told Bloomberg.

The new handsets are still in development and plans haven't been completed, Bloomberg said citing the person, adding Apple probably would release them in the third quarter of next year.

Two spokeswomen for the Cupertino, California-based technology company did not immediately respond to requests from Reuters seeking comment.

Apple To Release Two Larger iPhones With Curved Displays In 2014

According to a new report from Bloomberg, Apple may have plans to release two larger iPhones with curved displays some time in 2014. The two rumored iPhones are believed to have 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch displays, both much larger than the current 4-inch screen offered in the iPhone 5S and 5C.

Apple’s biggest competitors in the smartphone world all have flagship phones with displays around the 5-inch mark. I have to admit that Im actually surprised that Apple still hasn’t approached the market with a larger device, but it looks like 2014 may be the year Apple answers its Android foes.

“Two models planned for release in the second half of next year will feature larger displays with glass that curves downward at the edges, said the person, declining to be identified as the details aren’t public. Sensors that can distinguish heavy or light touches on the screen may be incorporated into subsequent models, the person said.”

Sources believe that the two larger iPhones will be the successors to the iPhone 5s and 5c, and will launch in the fall of 2014.



Interestingly, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard reports about the next iPhone having a larger display. The Wall Street Journal recently reported the same exact thing. However, this is the first time that we’ve heard about a curved display being considered for the next idevices.

The Bloomberg article goes on to mention that Apple is also working on enhanced sensors that can detect different pressure levels, being able to tell the difference between heavy and light touches on the display. However, this technology will most likely not be included in the next generation of iPhones, but rather in the generations after.

The $99 iPhone app that could save your life

Cardiologist Eric Topol had just taken a seat on a cross-country flight last June when he received an urgent e-mail from a patient. The 63-year-old man’s heart was racing and he wanted to know what to do about it.

Receiving data from the patient’s $99 i-Phone app that analyzes heart rhythms, Topol was able to dispense advice –take a higher dose of medicine — and calm his patient, who suffers from a dangerous condition called atrial fibrillation.

“It’s good I got on the Internet on the plane, otherwise he would not have had an answer for a long time,” said Topol, a genomics professor at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California who prescribed his patient an ECG Check app made by Park City, Utah-based Cardiac Designs. “Many times this helps keep a person from having to go to an emergency room.”

Devices once only in the hands of doctors, such as heart or blood pressure monitors, are now in the pockets of consumers, putting them in charge of their health and making medical care more accessible. Consumers are also increasingly armed with “wellness” apps — simpler devices to monitor diets, exercise and weight to help them stay out of the doctor’s office — that make up most of the 97,000 health related mobile-apps available.

The market for these apps is estimated to reach $26 billion by 2017, according to a March report by Research2Guidance, a Berlin-based consulting company. Most of the revenue will come from related services and products, such as monitoring devices and sensors, with just 9 percent of sales coming from downloads of the applications in the next five years, the report said.

Engaged Patients

Apps “engage the patient more closely with their own health care,” Murray Aitken, executive director of the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, said in an interview. “When we talk to physicians that’s the No. 1 benefit of apps. Ultimately it’s about improving outcomes.”

Andrew Freeman, director of clinical cardiology at National Jewish Health in Denver, Colorado, tells patients “You’re the captain, I’m the navigator.” He uses CardioSmart Explorer, an app designed by the American College of Cardiology, on his iPad to give patients a better idea through graphics and animations of what their heart condition is doing to their body.

While the number of available health apps may be growing, quality and function vary widely, according to the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, part of health-care data collector and researcher IMS Health. The group analyzed 20,000 health apps in the Apple Inc. iTunes store in an Oct. 30 report that found only about 5 apps account for 15 percent of all health-care downloads while more than 50 percent of health-care apps achieve fewer than 500 downloads, the report said.

Out of a score of 100, more than 90 percent of apps received a functionality score of 40 or less. In other words, consumers don’t find most apps all that useful.

“Apps can be health care in your hand,” Aitken said. “We’re not there yet but we expect we will be in five years.”

The Food and Drug Administration has embarked on a push to regulate apps that could impact health should they fail. Most apps, however, fall into the wellness category and won’t be subject to FDA scrutiny because they pose no risk to consumers should they malfunction. They range from tools that provide information on medications to help quitting smoking and losing weight. Many cost a few dollars or can be downloaded for free, like Lose It!, which helps people that want to lose weight meet calorie goals, and Nike Inc.’s running app that records pace, time and distance.

Wellness Apps

One app in the wellness category that has met with some success is Fooducate. It’s free with paid upgrades available and can tell consumers whether foods they’re putting in their shopping carts rate an A or D based on nutrients, ingredients and processing all in one swipe of a barcode with a phone opposed to tediously reading a label.

For instance, a high fiber Trader Joe’s cereal gets an A- for being 100 percent whole grain and naturally high in vitamin C though it contains two teaspoons of sugar per serving. A cherry Nutri-Grain cereal bar from Kellogg Co., however, earns a C for its artificial colors and high fructose corn syrup.

Fooducate was chosen by Apple as the best new health app of the year after its introduction in 2011 and took first place in the U.S. Surgeon General’s healthy app contest last year.

Hemi Weingarten, chief executive officer of Fooducate Ltd., founded the company after a purchase of glow-in-the-dark yogurt by his wife made him turn to the nutrition label for the first time in his life.

New App Lets You Unlock Your Mac By Knocking On Your iPhone

Can your mobile phone become a replacement for manually typing in a password? That’s the promise of a new application called Knock, launching today, which uses an iPhone paired with a Mac desktop or laptop computer to log you in to your locked machine. The system takes advantage of the newer low-energy Bluetooth technology to enable the connection between the two devices, allowing you to just knock (you know, knock, like on a door) on your iPhone to login. But the company has ambitions to expand beyond unlocking computers, and envisions bringing Knock to browsers to log into websites, and eventually letting you “knock” to open anything, including even your home’s front door, perhaps.

The company was founded by William Henderson, who previously worked on the Wallet team at Square, and Jon Schlossberg, who led user experience at Bonobos. The two teamed up earlier this year after being introduced by a mutual friend. They soon had their first Knock prototype built after just a few weeks.

Henderson says that working at Square inspired him to think about how the user experience can be applied to other areas where it’s been systematically neglected, such as security, similar to how Square proved you could have a great user experience around a financial product. He had also worked with Bluetooth LE while at Square, which gave him the idea to apply the technology to passwords and logins.

“When I met Jon, we were talking about this problem with passwords, and it was obvious to me that Bluetooth LE could help with that,” says Henderson.

The original prototype they built worked using proximity, but the team found that users didn’t like that their Mac unlocked just because they were near it. They wanted to signal in some way that they meant for the unlock to happen. “It was cool,” Henderson says of this first idea. “But people got freaked out by it. They didn’t know it was going to happen, and they weren’t expressing their intention in any way.” He equated the problem to the way people still hit the “lock” button on their car keys even though their car will automatically lock for them – they still need to feel like they’re taking an action.

Now in its 1.0 release, Knock users signal their intention by gently knocking on their phone’s screen. This works even when the phone is in your pocket, which seems almost too easy.

USING KNOCK

Getting started with the product is also simple. You first download the free Mac app and the $3.99 iPhone app. Because Knock uses Bluetooth LE, it will only work on iPhone 4S and up, as well as on newer Mac computers (2011 MacBook Air or newer, 2012 MacBook Pro or new, 2012 iMac or newer, 2011 Mac mini or newer, and the 2013 Mac Pro).

You then launch the app on the Mac and iPhone, and you’re prompted to turn Bluetooth on if it’s not already. Then Knock instructs you to lock your phone. Unlike with Bluetooth, that’s the extent of your involvement with the pairing process – the app sets itself up on its own.

After the setup is complete, you’re asked to knock twice on your phone to confirm the pairing, and you enter in your Mac’s password in the box provided. And then you’re done. From that point forward, when you get back to your computer, a ring around your avatar will signal that Knock is running and you can knock on your phone to login.

Your password is encrypted using standard RSA encryption and stored on the phone, while the key that’s being used to decrypt it is stored on your Mac.

The company has been running a small beta with around 100 users for over half a year in order to get the experience right, and have pulled out some features ahead of today’s launch. One of the things they already have in the works is a way to use Knock on the web. “We chose unlocking the Mac because it’s a small thing we knew we could do in a 1.0 product, and we knew people would pay for it,” Henderson explains. “But if things go well, we have much larger ambitions. None of us like passwords, and we want to get rid of them.”

Using Knock on the web would require more work, and attention to security, he says, but it’s likely the step for Knock, along with an API launch. That feature would probably also come before addressing the needs of Android users. That’s not because they’re an iOS-focused company, however, but because Android software today offers more limited support for Bluetooth LE than iOS does – only the latest version supports the technology at all, and there are some differences in how it’s implemented currently which allows iOS to use less energy.

Longer term, Henderson imagines a future where Knock could unlock anything. “I’d love to be able to unlock my house and my bike with Knock,” he says. “The phone, whether you like it or not, is becoming this universal authentication device, and it’s a little scary because of the level of access.”

But he and Schlossberg want to address that problem by focusing on how they can take advantage of sensor data from the phone itself to know when it might be lost or stolen…maybe even before you do. It could then send you a notification on your devices, asking you to confirm your identity following whatever odd behavior it saw – another idea inspired by time spent at Square, where detecting potential fraud is ongoing a concern.

Knock is a bootstrapped team of just the two co-founders, which is why Henderson is based in Portland – the labor market is cheaper there, he says. That will allow them to stretch for longer without raising funding, or last longer if they do.

In testing, the app works as promised and easily, too. But getting users to adopt new behaviors can be challenging – just look at Bump, for example. Its technology let you exchange data by knocking devices together, but never became a runaway success, eventually forcing the company to find an exit by selling to Google. Knock could face similar challenges, though at least it has a revenue mode built in, and unlike Bump, it doesn’t require multiple users for the thing to work.

Pandora Sees 9% Jump In Listening Since iTunes Radio Launch

When Apple first announced its iTunes Radio service, many believed that it would be a “Pandora-killer.” Admittedly, I even predicted that Pandora Radio would take a huge blow from Apple’s latest music endeavor.  However, it looks like the exact opposite has happened: Pandora listeners have actually increased.

Pandora’s own CFO, Mike Herring, even called the iTunes radio service a “credible threat” to his product. Today, he was pleased to announce that Pandora has actually seen a 9% increase in listening since the launch of iTunes Radio.



Of course, much of its recent jump may be credited to the fact that Pandora dropped its time limited listening restrictions right before iTunes Radio launched. The lifting of the restrictions allowed users to enjoy even more music on the service per month.

It’s also important to note that Pandora is a cross-platform service, whereas iTunes radio is only available on iOS and OSX devices. This gives Pandora a much larger overall reach, especially considering the chunk of market share that the Android platform currently holds. Being cross-platform also gives users with multiple devices less of a headache, enabling them to easily keep their music synced across all of their handsets.



The music streaming business has become extremely competitive with major players like Spotify and Rdio also now offering free radio streaming. So we can definitely assume that the folks over at Pandora are surely thrilled with the recent jump in listeners.

Pandora finally comes to Chromecast via Android & iPhone apps

The biggest setback to Google’s streaming media stick Chromecast is the sparse selection of available applications, which until now hasn’t included any third-party music services. (You could, however, access Google Play Music All Access as well as listen to playlists of music videos on YouTube.)

Today, however, Pandora announced that its Android and iPhone applications will now offer support for the streaming stick, meaning you’ll now be able to push whatever song you’re currently listening to on your phone or tablet to your television set.

Why is this a big deal? Well, it makes the ultra low-priced ($35) Chromecast a bit more attractive on the consumer end. For Pandora, the move could be an extension of its strategy to branch out to television screens, which it began doing after releasing its HTML5 TV web app back in June. Yeah, the new Chromecast support means it’s available on yet another device, but more importantly Pandora has another place where it may one day advertise.

In a Google+ post from Google, the company revealed that Pandora Chromecast support will be available on iPads in the near future.

Fantastical 2 for iPhone wants to be your all-in-one calendar and reminder app

From its humble beginnings on OS X, Fantastical's contextual input changed the way plenty of people set appointments and reminders. When it arrived on the iPhone last November, the app became the first calendar software to reach number one on the App Store. Almost a year later, and Flexibits is looking to build on that success with Fantastical 2, a $2.99 upgrade that offers a new design and plenty of iOS 7 specific features.

When you first load Fantastical 2, you'll notice that the app retains the the familiar DayTicker and event list layouts. Flexibits has dropped the skeuomorphic elements of old, opting instead for a brighter and more vibrant UI that fits with Apple's minimalist aesthetic. Fantastical 2 remains as speedy and lightweight as its predecessor with most of the app's improvements found below the surface.

To make it easier to upgrade, Flexibits figured out a way to read the settings from the original Fantastical app so you don't have to set it up all over again. The technique utilizes data stored in the iOS 7 keychain, a detail that many other developers appear to have overlooked.

When the app launched last year, it didn't use its own alerts. There was a good reason for that: Apple restricted iOS 6 background processes to its own titles. Relying on those own services wasn't the most desirable option but it allowed Flexibits to guarantee alerts were received and appointments were synchronized no matter what device they were created on. Released as an iOS 7-only app, Fantastical 2 eliminates that headache by taking advantage of Apple's new background app refresh APIs to automatically sync events, reminders, alerts and tasks, whether it is open or not. You can toggle between Apple's and Fantastical 2's own alerts in the settings.

Among the new features in Fantastical 2 are reminders, an improved parser, new themes, the addition of a week view in landscape mode, TextExpander support and birthday reminders. "We tried to focus on an doing an upgrade that had a ton of new features," Flexibits' Michael Simmons says, "truly making it a Fantastical 2."

The refined parser lets you create reminders by starting sentences with "reminder", "todo", "task", or "remind me to." Like the default app, you can set time and location-based reminders with a minimum of fuss. Fantastical 2 also has improved support for repeating events, letting you set reminders for the first or last weekday of the month and other contextual commands. Flexibits really has spared no expense bringing in all of your favorite features from other reminder and to-do apps.

Although Fantastical 2 supports any iPhone running iOS 7, it provides extra feature for owners of an iPhone 5 or one of Apple's newer models. Utilizing the bigger 4-inch display, Flexibits created a custom keyboard (displayed above) that positions a row of numbers at the top, so you don't have to keep switching between letter and number settings when you input dates and times. Birthday reminders get some love, allowing you to either text or call your friend or loved one on their big day. If you're feeling particularly generous or you've forgotten to buy a present, Flexibits happily allows you to "Give the gift of Fantastical" to make sure the person you forgot about can celebrate with you when you get another year older.

Simmons believes that the company's success helped show developers "that calendar apps can be awesome," inspiring them "to do a better job." While other app makers might be able to achieve better ways of fixing different problems, Simmons says that Fantastical's mission was always to be "the best, fastest, friendliest and easiest calendar app for the iPhone." He believes Fantastical 2 stays true to that mission but feels that adding social, assistant or lookup features would deviate away from the calendar and towards trying to do everything. "You can't do everything good, and it leads you down a path of over promising and under delivering," Simmons tells us.

Fantastical 2 really excels when you type like you talk. Tell it that you want to "Meet Daniel Cooper at 8pm tomorrow at Liverpool Street Station" and the app will automatically detect and create a calendar appointment with all of the necessary information filled in for you. Now that it has Reminder support, bringing in location notifications, it replaces Apple's own apps and gives you little reason to ever use them again. The design is simple and very easy on the eyes, allowing you to see at-a-glance what you need to to be aware of the coming days or weeks.

If you're looking for Foursquare support or weather notifications, Fantastical 2 won't be able to help you. But if you're after a slick app that'll keep you on top of all of your appointments, to-do lists and reminders, today's update will deliver all of that in a way that no other calendar apps can match. While today's update is iPhone-only, Flexibits is working on a separate iPad app, which is expected to launch next year.