Stories by Usman Qureshi

According to an official statement on Friday, Facebook is shutting down Beluga social text messaging service (aka BelugaPods) which the company acquired back in March 2011. As reported by GigaOM, this move is not unexpected since Facebook now has its own dedicated Messenger app for iOS. Facebook Messenger was developed by the founders of Beluga who worked for...

Nokia recently took the wraps off its latest iPhone 4S competitor, the Lumia 800 while Samsung is already claiming that its Galaxy S II is more powerful than Apple's latest iPhone. As folks at SlashGear got their hands on a Lumia 800 at Nokia World 2011 expo, they decided to pit Nokia's first Windows Phone 7 smartphone against Samsung Galaxy SII...

Jailbreaking your iOS devices is fun, but backing up all those jailbreak apps and tweaks manually isn't fun at all. There wasn't any simple backup / restore solution for Cydia apps available out there until PKGBackup was introduced. It not only provides the simplest, fully automated backup solution for all your jailbreak stuff including Cydia...

Last month we told you Adobe was developing Carousel, a perfect Lightroom alternative for iOS devices which would allow users to access their entire photo library on any iPhone, iPod, iPad or a Mac computer with seamless photo syncing across all these devices. Today, the company has released native iOS and Mac clients for Carousel which can be downloaded for...

A handful of hypothetical stories have been published all over the web regarding why Steve Job's car did not have a license plate. But iTWire claims to have finally uncovered the truth. In a one hour encounter with CTO of Entrust Jon Callas, who has also worked at Apple in the past as a senior security officer,...

Last week, one of our readers pointed out Canadian Apple Stores offering 'Reserve and Pick up" service for the iPhone 4S in which customers would just select their province, Apple store location, and choose an available model for in-store pick up. Today, Apple has taken this one step further by debuting its "Ship To Store" service in USA,...

Apple recently beat Nokia to become the world's largest smartphone maker, a company that led the global smartphone market for so many years. Today, Nokia has launched its brand new handset called the Lumia 800, supposedly targeting the iPhone's worldwide market dominance. It is also Nokia’s first smartphone powered by Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.5 Mango. As suggested...

Apple has started working on a solar farm adjacent to its massive new data center in North Carolina, according to a report by The Charlotte Observer (via Gigaom). Dubbed as Project Dolphin Solar Farm, the solar project will be built on 171 acres of land across the street from Apple’s planned $1 billion data center. It was previously...

DigiTimes is reporting that 2012 is going to be the year of LTE-enabled smartphones, especially in the US when Sprint Nextel starts kicking off its LTE services in the middle of the year. The company is planning to launch 15 LTE-enabled devices, including smartphones, tablet PCs and mobile data cards in mid-2012 as revealed by DigiTimes sources...

IRIS 9000 is quite an amazing first dedicated accessory for Siri, the iPhone 4S’s AI-powered digital assistant. Developed by ThinkGeek, it is a voice control module that lets you control Apple’s Siri voice assistant from across the room. Just place your iPhone 4S into the Iris 9000 cradle and tap the included micro remote control once to trigger Siri. The...

Over the past few years, one area that has been steadily improving in smartphones in the mobile camera technology. Back in 2007 when the original iPhone was launched, it was fitted with a camera which could barely shoot any decent shots with less megapixels, no auto-focus and no flash. Many people quoted it as "a...

Yesterday, we published a report suggesting that Apple is already working on an HD Television set. Today, another report from Bloomberg claims that the rumored Apple HDTV project is being led by iTunes creator Jeff Robbin. He is also the same guy responsible for creating the original iPod and supposedly is the perfect man for the job. The...