iPhone 4 gets on fire during a flight

A passengers iPhone 4 started glowing and smoking during a airplane flight in Australian. According to a press release made by the regional airline, the iPhone started emitting smoke after the plane landed. The smoke was quite dense and it was caused by a red glow inside the device. A crew member immediately intervened and extinguished the fire before any harm happened to passengers. Luckily no one was injured during this incident, and no serious damage to the airplane has occurred. The device was iPhone 4, which means it wasn’t the latest Apple’s model iPhone 4S. The device itself has been taken to federal Transport Safety Bureau for further investigation.

Apple launches iOS 5.1 beta

Apple has made the beta version of iOS 5.1 available to all certified Apple developers. This means that the next iOS is in the development phase and that we will soon have another version of Apple’s superb mobile operating system available for use. To get the beta version you should log with your Apple credentials and download the SDK (software development kit). You need to use iTunes for upgrading as this iOS update is not available through OTA (over the air upgrade).

Siri controlling a TV set

After the first Siri hack where a developer successfully controlled his thermostat with a Siri proxy and another one where car could be turned on and off, we have seen another great Siri hack. This time a user was able to control media content on his TV using the same Siri proxy hack. Siri proxy is positioned between your iPhone and Apple’s system, so it can directly receive your voice commands. You can also add additional voice commands independently from Apple.

Brazilian iPhone’s appearing on the market

Apple is trying hard to move some of iPhone producing plants into Brazil, and now it seems that at least some small number of Brazilian made iPhones had reached the market. According to a Brazilian Mac oriented website Mac Magazine, here are some pictures of these new iPhone’s. Keep in mind that the whole story is unofficially at the time we are writing this. On the back of the device instead of the usual ‘Made in China’ designation there is a different one: ‘Brazilian industry’. The label is written in Brazilian Portuguese. Another clue confirming this is that the model number includes ‘BR’ which is abbreviation for Brazil at the end of it.

Microsoft talks about Siri

In recent interview, head of Microsoft’s research department Craig Mundie comments on Siri, new voice assistant app recently launched by Apple. He claims that Siri is not an original idea at all and that Richmond company already had such an app for Windows Phone 7 called TellMe.

With TellMe you can easily create a text messages to one of your contacts through voice to speech technology. You can also do your web searches on Microsoft’s own search engine Bing, with your voice input only. According to Mundie, TellMe is just as good as Siri and more importantly, it is available for already a year now.

Siri can find out if a plane is flying above your place

You can do an amazing list of things with your iPhone, and the list just keeps growing. Siri, the new voice assistant app for iOS has added a completely new set of capabilities to your favourite smartphone and among other things you can now do, believe it or not you can find out with Siri’s help if a plane is flying above your location.

How does it achieve this? Apparently Siri uses your iPhone GPS and Wolfram Alpha ‘Computational Knowledge Engine’ to find out the distance, altitude and speed of every airplane flying near your exact location. To find out this, you only have to ask Siri for Wolfram flights and you’ll get plenty of data about flights nearby.

Apple delays release of iOS 5.0.2

Apple was expected to release iOS 5.0.2 as a sequel in the long quest to squash the pesky battery drain bug which appeared with iOS 5.0. But it seems that Apple’s engineering task force has yet again stumbled upon some unsuspecting bugs which will take more time to solve than previously expected. It seems that the mayor change which iOS 5.0 certainly was, was a rather hard nut to crack due to a bunch of completely new services iOS 5.0 includes like: iCloud, Siri, iTunes Match and others. To weave such a complex framework in a coherent and stable operative system, took Apple quite some time and a number of beta releases. But nonetheless, not everything was functioning flawlessly which was realized especially after the battery life bug rose its ugly head on iPhones runing on iOS 5.0.

iPhone 4S unlock

iPhone unlocking is something you have to approach carefully and with due precautions. It can be done and it was done many times before, but every time you need to follow instructions properly or you can experience more or less difficult problems with your iPhone. Most iPhone users have used UltraSn0w unlock solution for unlocking their devices, but as Apple developed countermeasures it was becoming harder and harder to successfully unlock iOS devices. Another solution was the Gevey Sim card but it was not as good and reliable as Ultrasn0w was in its best days. Now it seems that there is a solution for unlocking iPhone 4S with a brand new method which implicates that Apples lats iPhone model, the superb iPhone 4S, can be unlocked basically without any need for hardware of software tweaking. Want to know how?
Here is the story.

iOS 5.0.2 Coming soon featuring battery bug fix and Siri upgrade

According to latest rumors, Apple is working hard to finish the next iOS upgrade, and according to this rumor it could become available already during next week. This upgrade could finally solve the infamous battery drain issue and it could also introduce a set of new upgrades for Siri, which is now a core element of iOS for new iPhones. Siri could be used as a hardware controlling system so you could take a picture or turn on your Wi-fi connection with Siri only. If this iOS upgrade really hits the market next week, it could become one of the fastest released upgrades so far. And while this is good from the standpoint that it solves some problems, a hurried release usually includes a number previously unknown bugs. Especially so since no beta version of iOS 5.0.2 was made available to Apple developers community, which is another usual procedure for Apple.

Apple seeds iTunes 10.5.1 b3

Apple has just released the latest beta version of new iTunes software which is meant for developers only. This is another effort by Apple to solve all bugs and issues with their new service iTunes Match. This new version of iTunes offers a list of new security fixes and performance upgrades for iTunes Match, and is required upgrade for all developers which use iTunes Match. If you are an Apple developer you can download this version of iTunes directly from Apples web servers.