geekosystem

The long-time excuse of husbands, boyfriends, and anyone else who subscribes to Playboy without wanting to admit they like looking at photos of naked women has been that they just read it for the articles. Well if that's the case, you're in luck, because Playboy's new iPhone app doesn't have any nudity at all.

T-Mobile, the fourth-largest cellular carrier in the nation, has finally gotten around to offering the iPhone. Sure, it's probably the fourth-largest carrier because it took so long to offer the iPhone, but as of next month T-Mobile customers will be able to purchase the device without having to unlock one from AT&T. T-Mobile customers can pre-register now to get their phone for the low-low price of $580.

Thorsten Heins, CEO of Blackberry, which was a popular business accessory back in the early 2000's, said in an interview he feels the Apple iPhone was outdated. This doesn't even count as a "pot calling the kettle black" situation. This is a whatever historically pre-dated the pot calling the kettle black, and it's awfully big talk coming from a company whose stock is trading at about three percent of Apple's.

Apple products like iPhones and iPads getting jailbroken is nothing new, but sometimes this freedom also leads to interesting discoveries within the digital bowels of these gadgets. Such is the case with a series of buttons within the iPad Music app found on jailbroken iOS 6.1 iPads by 9to5Mac. If these buttons are indicative of the future and not some leftover vestige of a former direction, it looks like some kind of radio functionality will be coming to the iPad.

Though we certainly can't get enough of them, video games like the Final Fantasy series aren't for everybody -- some people just don't appreciate the obsessive micromanaging that comes with the territory. Probably influenced by the closed-minded few that feel RPGs tediously plod along, Square Enix has just released Final Fantasy: All the Bravest for iOS devices everywhere: A game that brings everything you loved about the 16-bit generation of Final Fantasy games, but pumps it full of near lethal amounts of caffeine and amphetamines.

At first blush, Find My iPhone seems like pretty much the best. If you lose your iPhone, or have it stolen, you can track it via GPS in order to retrieve it. In theory, that's wonderful. Who wouldn't want to track down and find their lost smartphone? In practice, however, it turns out that our advanced technology is still basically a garbage in, garbage out kind of thing. Just ask Wayne Dobson, 59-year-old Las Vegas retiree. Find My iPhone has been mistakenly sending folks to his house for years.

The talk of the town this week has been the rumor that Apple would be manufacturing a cheaper iPhone in order to nail the low-end spectrum that the iPhone has traditionally eschewed. The idea would be to target the smartphone market in the same way that the iPad mini targets the tablet market. Unfortunately for anyone hoping this would actually pan out, Apple's SVP of worldwide marketing Paul Schiller told Chinese newspaper Shanghai Evening News that things like a cheaper iPhone will "never be the future of Apple products."

The Apple iPhones, since its launch, have been at the high end of the smartphone price range. Anyone hoping for a break in price has been relegated to buying previous versions, but there's a rumor going around that says that won't be the case for much longer. Apple may be releasing a cheaper version of the iPhone concurrently with the flagship model, similar to how they recently launched the iPad mini as a more affordable alternative to the full-sized version. This is just a rumor, and considering it's CES week, we'll probably be seeing a lot more of those.

In their annual series of "5-in-5" predictions, IBM predicted that by 2018 computers will replicate all five human senses. Seems like one company doesn't want to wait that long. Adamant Technologies in San Fransisco is working to get the iPhone a sense of smell. One reason the company gives for doing this is to warn people when they have bad breath, but we'd love to see the technology used to prevent us from drunk dialing our exes.

One of the unfortunate happenstances of the digital age we live in is the fact that items like iPhones have become increasingly more likely to be stolen. Everyone wants the latest phone, tablet, computer, or whatever the newest thing companies like Apple are producing. So when an iPhone is lost, chances are there's someone else out there fiddling with it. That's what happened to Nadav Nirenberg this past New Year's Eve. He lost his phone, and another scurrilous individual decided to keep it. How did Nirenberg know someone had it? Well, he received an email alert that the person had been messaging the ladies through OkCupid on it. That's when things got interesting.

Whatever hangovers, hookups, or regrettable strikeouts your New Year's Eve may have had in store, we're prepared to say your evening was probably still better than that of Apple Store employees in Paris, who not only had to work the holiday, but spent it being held up by a team of armed robbers. Just one employee was slightly hurt, thankfully, but the robbers escaped in a van brimming over with Apple gadgets before police arrived on the scene. The company isn't sharing the particulars of just what goods were nicked in this Grand Theft Apple, but they have put the price tag for the whole theft at about 1 millions euros, or close to $1.6 million. What goods could a theft that big from an Apple store have potentially netted the thieves responsible? We do the math below.

All these Internet-enabled phones and other gadgets that seem to hit the market on a daily basis really are a double-edged sword. While we're connected to more people and places than we ever could have imagined and have more entertainment options than we probably need, this technology can sometimes cause us to become withdrawn or rely on it for otherwise simple tasks that we can easily do ourselves. As a result of this dilemma, parents can be understandably hesitant to purchase smartphones and the like for their children. Not wanting her child to become an unsocial techie, a woman named Janell Burley Hofmann bought her 13-year-old son Gregory an iPhone as a Christmas present. "Gee, thanks, Mom," you can hear little Gregory delightfully say, but that was before Mrs. Hofmann went biblical and blindsided her son with a litany of 18 commandment-like responsibilities to be mindful of now that he has a new phone, possibly resulting in a not so jolly Christmas morning for either of them.

We can all agree size matters. For a while, phone manufacturers focused on making devices smaller, thinner, and lighter. No one wanted to be seen with a Zack Morris phone, but it seems like the Apple iPhone 4 was a turning point. Instead of trying to be smaller than the iPhone 4 companies have been going larger. Even Apple started increasing their screen size, albeit ever so slightly, with the iPhone 5. Huawei has unveiled a monster 6.1 inch Android smartphone, but is it too big?

Gone are those grim and dark days when iOS users were forced to access Google Maps via their phone's web browser or resort to celestial navigation. Google Maps is once again available for download on iTunes. For quite some time, those with iPhones pined for the convenience and unique features of Google's mapping service. Now that the grueling wait for the app is at last over, the world is now their proverbial oyster.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is the latest entity to jettison the Blackberry phones it has issued to employees for years, reminding people everywhere that RIM's increasingly maligned mobile devices are, in fact, still things that exist -- for the time being, anyway. For those of you still interested enough to be operating doomsday clocks for the company, you can safely move them a couple of minutes closer to midnight.