Jelly Bean Tips Past Majority Adoption Among Android Users With 37.9% Share

Google updated its Android version usage stats today, and for the first time Jelly Bean has pulled ahead as the most-used operating system. That’s probably been helped by a number of OEMs pushing out Jelly Bean updates to their handsets recently, including the AT&T Galaxy S2. Gingerbread is still a close second, however, indicating a lot of older devices are still in use.

Google provides monthly updates on OS version share and this one takes into account data collected (based on Google Play store usage) over a two-week period ending today, July 8. Jelly Bean has been approaching a majority share, but this is the first time it has passed it, thanks to a 32.3 percent share for versions 4.1.X, and a 5.4 percent share for versions 4.2.X. Ice Cream Sandwich, which was sandwiched between Gingerbread and Jelly Bean, is less popular than both with the next biggest chunk of 23.3 percent.

Jelly Bean is the most current version of the Android mobile OS, so this is good news both for developers and for Google. OS updates almost always bring new features for developers, but developers need the OS to actually be used by a large number of users before they can adopt those new features, and adopting those new features is what Google and other mobile platform operators will attract and keep new users.

Fragmentation is often cited as a big problem for Android, and Google has taken steps to address that, including expanding its Nexus program to include more devices. Both Samsung and HTC now offer their flagship handsets (the Galaxy S4 and HTC One) via Google’s own Play store, featuring “Google Edition” monikers that grant them updates in time with Google’s own Nexus line of devices, which is to say as soon as they become available.

That, combined with ongoing efforts to push updates out faster to eligible hardware via carriers, is helping Google make progress in terms of getting people on newer versions of the OS faster. I’d still prefer that every Android phone had the option to change it to a “Google Edition” quickly and easily, without expert technical knowledge, but maybe that day’s not too far off, if Google really wants to ramp up the speed of adoption of new OS versions.

Samsung Said To Launch Four Versions Of The Galaxy Note III By The End Of The Year

Talk about trying to cover bases. Korean news outlet ETNews reports that Samsung’s Galaxy Note III isn’t going to be an only child when it launches later this year — instead, it will be joined by up to three siblings that will apparently debut at the same time.

The Google translation makes it bit tricky to discern what’s going on, but ETNews claims that while the four devices will feature the same applications, processors, and hardware platforms, they’ll sport different configurations of displays, cameras, and cases in a bid to appeal to certain sorts of computers. As the report goes, the most premium of these Note IIIs will feature a flexible display and a metal chassis, components that won’t appear in the more cost-conscious variants meant for different markets. What’s more, the size of the display will vary slightly between those different versions — they’ll reportedly range between 5.68 and 5.7 inches.

At this stage though, the Note III itself is still a wild card — techies and pundits expect Samsung to officially reveal the device at the IFA trade show in Berlin like it did with the Galaxy Note II. Earlier rumors also alleged that the Note III would have a 5.9-inch display (which doesn’t jibe with this new report) — either way the device will definitely strain some pockets, but thankfully not as much as Sony’s gargantuan 6.4-inch Xperia Z Ultra. Rounding out the purported spec list is a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chipset clocked at 2.3GHz and 3GB of RAM, which would propel the phone to the top of the heap in terms of horsepower (though LG’s Optimus G2 may be right up there with it).

As always, you should take all this with a hefty grain of salt, but this is nothing if not a well-worn strategy for Samsung — the company has made a habit of crafting what they imagine will be a popular new smartphone, and then pushing out spin-offs based on that original design meant to appeal to different niches. We saw it with the Galaxy S III and its little brother the S III Mini, and Samsung saw fit to expand the Galaxy S4 family in a big way with three curious variants revealed over the past few months. So far the Note series of phablets haven’t been subjected to Samsung’s desire to endlessly tinker, but it wouldn’t be a surprise to see if that wasn’t the case for very much longer.

Nintendo Cracks After Month Long Hacker Bombardment

Hackers bombarded Nintendo for a month with 15.46 million bogus login attempts, out of which 23,926 struck the jackpot, exposing names, addresses, phone numbers and other personal details of corresponding Club Nintendo customers.

The blitzkrieg lasted from 9 June to 4 July, Nintendo said in a press release issued on Friday.

The breach was eventually discovered on 2 July - last Tuesday.
Company spokesman Yasuhiro Minagawa told Network World that the login attempts were limited to Japanese accounts.

Nintendo, which is based in Kyoto, has suspended accounts and passwords used in the brute-force attack and is urging members whose data may have been breached to change their passwords, according to The Japan Times News.

Club Nintendo is a customer loyalty program that lets users earn rewards in return for consumer feedback and loyalty. Customers can earn credits or "coins" that can get them goodies such as playing cards, tote bags, extended warranties on certain products or downloadables.

The machine translation of the press release is, as they tend to be, garbled. But Sophos's Chester Wisniewski has a hunch that the following passage indicates that the hackers might have thrown gobs of already-leaked passwords - from the likes of Sony, LinkedIn, Zappos et al. - at Club Nintendo.

"This time, membership site that we run " Club Nintendo that an unauthorized login of 23,926 cases were performed using the ID · password that seems Regarding ", and flowing out of the other services were found." [emphasis added]

I was still waiting to hear back from Nintendo's public relations people at the time this article posted.

If his interpretation is correct, it would mean that the Nintendo accounts that were hacked were casualties of earlier public disclosures of stolen logins from other breaches.

It would also mean that at least 23,926 people didn't listen when they were told to change passwords after those earlier hacks.

We're still waiting to find out if that's true. But to stay on the safe side, all Nintendo users should probably change their passwords, just in case. After all, Nintendo stopped the attack, but those who haven't changed old passwords may still be vulnerable.

Nintendo is only the latest gaming company to be victimized.

Last week, Ubisoft had to jump on the change-your-password-NOW bandwagon after learning its account database had been hacked.

Of course, the mother of all gaming hacks was the PlayStation Network breach of 2011, which saw the personal data of 70 million users compromised and forced the network to shutter its doors for a week.

Gaming. Yikes. It's all fun and games until somebody gets pwned.

Fortunately, it looks like both Ubisoft and Nintendo, at least, didn't store credit card data with account information.

But that might not help matters much for any affected Nintendo customers who use the same name and password for other sites. Breaching one set of login data can be the key to accessing all of a customer's sensitive financial data in such a case.

It's just one more example of why we shouldn't repeat passwords on multiple sites.

If you know of gamers (or people in general, of course!) who are guilty of password reuse, do them a favor:

Tell them to hit pause on whatever game they're playing. Then, urge them to change their passwords to ones that are unique and hard-to-guess.

Teach them about password management software, such as LastPass or KeePass.

Using a password manager can both generate good passwords and store them so we don't have to remember them, write them down, carve them into our desks or commit password crimes with stick-it notes.

Only then can any of us hit "resume" with at least a bit more confidence that we won't get targeted and bilked - or, if we do, that the damage is quarantined.

Microsoft to help Pakistan fix IT infrastructure

A sustainable economy needs sustainable infrastructure, but fixing the infrastructure still remains a major challenge in Pakistan. Unless the country addresses this challenge, it can’t realize its true potential, Microsoft Pakistan’s Country Manager Amir Rao said.
He was speaking during a media round table – Empowering businesses through technology innovation – at the company’s liaison office on Monday.
In what can be described as an analysis of Pakistan’s technology sector, Rao shared various examples, ranging from energy to education and healthcare, and highlighted the importance of sustainable IT infrastructure and its impact on the economy.

MS Pakistan is going to unveil its detailed plan for a national broadband highway in a month, Rao said. MS has been working on a broadband penetration plan and the technology giant would like the country’s broadband penetration increase by at least 20%.
The company is going to present its plan to the government that will include suggestions on how the latter can fix the IT infrastructure and link it to schools, hospitals, law enforcement agencies, land revenue department, etc.
“In order to take this country forward, we must stay abreast of all technological innovations because these advances promise a sustainable economic future,” Rao said. “People make up for societies and societies make up for countries and that’s the main theme of our mission statement,” he added.
The MS Pakistan’s chief, who was previously associated with telecom and infrastructure development, said if the country had a one-window system for services like birth certificates, national identity card, land revenue, property registration, law enforcement and healthcare and linked it to an IT system, it would have benefited a great deal.
This kind of one-window system for public infrastructure would save the country a lot on costs, improve transparency, reduce frustration levels of citizens and improve the quality of life, he said.
However, the one-window system needs layers and layers of infrastructure, Rao said, adding, “we only need to identify the right domains of public infrastructure – schools, hospitals, law enforcement and information.”
He further said that MS already has a citizen care framework technology, but it needs support infrastructure.
Explaining how technology can bring about change, Rao used the example of the 2013 general elections. People were informed and they made educated decisions, he said. Similarly, when they are connected and have access to education, health and information, their true potential can be realized.
The MS Pakistan chief also stated that for a country like Pakistan the infrastructure should come at zero net cost. “We are willing to provide every kind of technical support, you [the government] just take the initiative,” he said.

Lytro Enables Its Camera’s Hidden WiFi Chip, Launches A Companion iOS App.

It sure doesn't seem like many people have bought Lytro’s crazy light-field camera (the one that lets you focus your photos after you take them) — but if you’re one of those who did: go plug that thing in. Lytro has just released a firmware update that enables the camera’s dormant Wi-Fi chip, along with an iOS app that lets you wirelessly access and share your photos.

Oh, and it makes animated GIFs!




Even if you own a Lytro, there’s a pretty good chance you didn’t know there was a Wi-Fi chip inside. Surprise! The company hadn’t really mentioned it much until now, as it previously served no purpose. When the FCC’s teardown of the Lytro revealed the chip shortly before the device’s release a year-and-a-half ago, the company responded to inquiries about it with “Connectivity is important to us, and we’re working on it.”

The Lytro Mobile app’s main purpose is to serve as an on-the-go interface for uploading, tweaking, and sharing photos from a Lytro camera without having to hook it up to a computer. All of your photos are pulled into the application over the air, where they can be geotagged, refocused and perspective-shifted on a screen that’s a good bit more finger-friendly than the relatively tiny one found on the Lytro itself. New photos will show up in the app as you shoot them, with a transfer time of around 5 or 6 seconds. You can also peruse photos shared among the Lytro community.

The company also confirmed to us that an Android app is on the way, though they declined to pin down a date for it. A Wi-Fi-enabled syncing app for the Mac or PC, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to be on their roadmap.

Plus, as mentioned, you can make totally crazy looking GIFs. Check out these total dreamboat (*cough*) examples of my big dumb head recording the above video. On the left is the parallax shifting effect; on the right is the foreground/background refocusing effect (And in the center of each is my busted-ass iPhone cable):
                                                
                                                

Once you’re on the new firmware, connecting your Lytro to your iPhone is pretty dang simple: you swipe up on the Lytro’s screen to bring up the taskbar, and hit the little Wi-Fi icon to turn your Lytro into a hotspot. You connect your iPhone to the Lytro’s Wi-Fi signal, launch the app, and you’re set.

Facbook's New Picture Viewing Interface

Just shifted slightly upwards!

Sweden Up Against Google Cloud

Swedish bureaucrats have instructed a town in the Scandinavian country to say "No" to Google.

Salem, a municipality approximately 30km south-west of Stockholm, wanted to ink a deal to use Google Apps, but the Information Commission thought otherwise.

When I first spotted this story, my immediate thought was that it would have something to do with PRISM.

If you haven't been following computer security news lately, that's the USA's controversial programme to conduct widespread network surveillance of foreigners.

You can see why overseas jurisdictions might want to discourage their residents from using cloud services offered by companies which are themselves regulated by US law.

But Sweden's broadside against Google has nothing to do with whether the US government does or doesn't have its digital eyes on the cloud storage of non-US residents.

This is an argument directly with Google over its own privacy provisions.

The Swedish data protection mandarins already disagreed with the Municipality of Salem back in 2011, arguing that Google's contractual land-grab over its customers' data "for the purposes of providing, maintaining and improving the services" was a step too far.



The municipality apparently felt that this was reasonable because it would help to improve Google's IT-related services to everyone - in other words, that the people of Salem could tolerate this clause for the greater good of all.

But the Swedish Datainspektionen ordered Salem to renegotiate with Google, on the grounds that the clause was too open-ended to be safe.

The decision noted, amongst other things, that the contract was too loose about how the data might be handled by subcontractors, or by Google after the contract ended.



Salem did go back to the negotiating table, and came up with a revised deal last month, but it still wasn't enough for the regulators, whose decision is that the earlier shortcomings have not been addressed.

So Salem must negotiate again with Google, or find another way to deliver its IT services.

On the surface, this may sound like Nordic bureaucratic pettiness, but I think we should applaud the Swedish privacy experts here.

It's one thing to outsource your own IT services - personal email, blogging, web site, and so forth - to save time and money. That's your own choice to make.

And it's fair enough if you're a company whose customers can vote with their chequebooks (yes, they still exist, at least in Australia!) if they don't like the service provider you've chosen.

But as a "customer" of a local government, you don't have that liberty, so you are stuck with the privacy-related decisions made by your council.

I suppose, as Google's own Eric Schmidt once famously joked, "you can just move, right?"

But that's the same Eric Schmidt who's on the record as having said that "Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."

Let's see if Salem can win the battle to get Google to back off a bit in the next round of negotiations...

Hey Silicon Valley, The British Are Coming (To Learn Your Startup Secrets)

Doing a startup in Europe is challenging for all sorts of reasons. But one key issue is cultural — even if the gritty realism of European entrepreneurs is ultimately tied to the relative difficulties of raising larger investment rounds in the region. The can-do attitude of Silicon Valley is undoubtedly fuelled in part by the amount of investor money flying around. But that’s not the only reason. Failing in the Valley isn’t seen as an end point in the way it can be in Europe.

Being exposed to a little of that ‘fail and move on’ and ‘nothing is impossible’ attitude is a key part of the rational behind a new internship programme for U.K. computer science graduates that’s placing them with Silicon Valley startups for a year, starting in August. The Silicon Valley Internship Programme (SVIP) is aiming to get some of this Valley chops to rub off on 15 students from nine U.K. universities by giving them real-world startup experience in the place that knows how to do it best.

Programme founder, Michael Hughes, explains the idea for SVIP sprung from a conversation he was having at a meeting in San Francisco involving British entrepreneurs, UKTI reps, the British Ambassador and British Consul General, talking about — inevitably — why Silicon Valley has such a successful startup culture, and how the U.K. can emulate the Valley vibe.

“The meeting was to discuss why Silicon Valley was so successful and what could be done in the UK to try to stimulate similar levels of entrepreneurship,” he tells TechCrunch. ”A big theme coming from the entrepreneurs was that the prevailing ‘feeling of the possible’ in the Bay Area meant that you really felt like you could give things a go in this environment and hence, a lot more people take the leap to start a business knowing that even if they fail, they can have another lash.

“In Britain however (generalizing terribly), there is more of a tendency towards critique of ideas and it is harder to have your career recover from a failed venture.  So if your view is that entrepreneurial success comes with a big dollop of luck, the more people having a go the better.”

What better way to instill a sense of the possible in young coders than by exposing them to startup life for a year. After the year is up, SVIP grads return to the U.K. with a year’s worth of experiences under their belt and — hopefully — bring back a little bit of the West Coast positivity to contribute to the local startup scene.

“Ultimately the goal of the programme is to have a cadre of top engineers who combine the technical expertise with the experience and attitude to start companies once they return to the U.K. after the programme.  My dream is that a few of the guys on the programme get together and start something in the U.K. when they go back, supported and advised by the network they will have developed in the Bay Area,” says Hughes, himself a startup co-founder.

His startup, LoopUp, is one of the nine that will be accepting the 15 paid student placements in the first year’s intake. The other startups are EdgeSpring, Nimble Storage, EAT Club, PostRocket, Caring.com, viagogo, GuideSpark and Coffee Meets Bagel. Hughes says he got the others involved by reaching out to friends in the Stanford community and also hiring a Programme Manager to do more outreach.

“All the guys are coming out on a one year visa which requires them to return to the U.K. after.  Realistically, we all know that some of them will find a way to stay in the U.S., but even if they do, I don’t see this as a disaster for the U.K. After all I am a Brit, living in the U.S. for 17 years, yet with our start-up we employ 40 people in London and have fostered strong technology interchange between the companies,” he adds.

Facebook Will Launch A News Reader At June 20th Press Event

The upcoming death of Google Reader  and the addition of hashtags signal Facebook will likely launch a new way to discover and read news at the June 20th press event it’s just sent out mysterious invites to. It could be a sort of “trending articles on Facebook” feature, or a more full-blown RSS reader-style product.

Either could take advantage of Facebook’s massive treasure trove of aggregate data on what people share to surface popular and personally recommended news articles.

The event invite, first spotted by Joanna Stern of ABC News, says “A small team has been working on a big idea. Join us for coffee and learn about a new product.” The conspicuously analog invite was sent out via paper snail mail instead of by email like Facebook usually does. There’s also a coffee stain on the invite. You know where else you find coffee stains? On the newspaper, while you’re reading it, over coffee.

Nobody knows what Facebook knows. Since most users share semi-privately, it can’t be scraped for trending topics. But Facebook’s algorithms see all. Similar to how it offers ad targeting data in anonymous aggregate, Facebook could surface what articles are being shared most frequently across its user base without violating privacy.

The product could potentially ket people follow outside sources of news through a format like RSS, but we can’t confirm that. The product is likely to take advantage of hashtags that Facebook users can now add to posts to help its algorithms understand what topics different news articles are about.

When I asked Facebook about what more it could do with its data on what people share, it initially offered to put me on the phone with someone, but ended up just referring me to the hashtag announcement from earlier this week. That blog post notes ”Hashtags are just the first step to help people more easily discover what others are saying about a specific topic and participate in public conversations. We’ll continue to roll out more features in the coming weeks and months.”

A better way to surface news could be that next step. In fact, I’m pretty much positive it is, though I couldn’t get anyone at Facebook to confirm on the record.

Whether the new product includes formal RSS reading capabilities that take advantage of the long-running content syndication standard remains to be seen. Asking users to choose different sources and subscribe to feeds of them could be a lot of work and seem somewhat redundant for the average Facebook user. Still, that kind of functionality could find an audience amongst hardcore Internet users.

As our Ingrid Lunden wrote yesterday, “Lines of code referring to “rssfeeds” have recently started to appear in Facebook’s Graph API code (as spotted by developer and Facebook sleuth Tom Waddington). Linking the RSS feed to a user’s Facebook ID, the code schema also covers such aspects as title, URL and update time. Each RSS feed subsequently has entries and subscribers.” This code could be part of the new product, but it also may be unrelated, having to do with a user’s own posts being an RSS feed, rather than a user reading feeds produced by others.

A Facebook news reader with RSS would come at a perfect time, just two weeks before Google shuts down Google Reader for good. The June 20th launch date might give Facebook just enough time to help people migrate onto its version.

Alternatively, Facebook’s new product could more resemble Reddit or a list trending articles based on what’s being shared the most on the social network. That would make it instantly and easily valuable to people.

Whatever it’s exact design, I hope it won’t just be a clone, but something that combines the unique social signals Facebook has access to with tried-and-true news consumption mediums.

A reader of any form would certainly qualify as a “big idea”, as Facebook is all about connecting you to people, things, and information you care about, and news is by definition what people care about. A successful launch could drastically increase time spent on Facebook, fill it with useful data about what topics people are interested in, offer new advertising opportunities around current events, and most importantly, make us all better informed citizens of Earth.

Is Facebook Running Out Of Ideas?

This morning when I logged onto my Facebook account, I was shocked to see a friend of mine using a hash tag.

According to my research this is the 2nd item that Facebook seems to have copied from twitter.

1. Firstly it was the Follow feature.
   

  2. And now secondly it is the Hash Tag feature.

Well to be honest, I don't understand the logic Facebook copying stuff from others. If we jump back to 2004, the year when Zuckerburg rolled out Facebook, it was quite a unique website at that time. I mean the whole idea of the thing was pretty different from all other social networking giants like Myspace, Friendster & Orkut. They sort of kicked off their journey with the idea of "Uniqueness", also in the years that came, all the new features introduced were very much different from others. So i think that Facebook should continue its factor of Being Unique instead of trying to be Samsung.

Samsung Just Killed Nokia’s ‘True PureView’ Windows Phone And It’s Not Even Unboxed Yet

Poor Nokia. Samsung doesn’t stop. It’s just announced a new iteration of its flagship Galaxy S4 handset which has a digital camera embedded in its rump. The Galaxy S4 Zoom has a 10X optical zoom lens on the back, giving it two clear aspects: from the front it looks exactly like Samsung’s flagship S4 smartphone. But from the back it looks like a point and shoot digital camera.

The result is a hybrid handset that squeezes the ability of Nokia’s carefully crafted PureView cameraphone brand to stand out. Sure, Nokia’s high end phone lenses might still have better — or at least decent — low light performance, but to the untrained consumer eye which device is going to look more capable in the camera department?

This one:

Or this one?

And that’s before Nokia has even got around to launching the long rumoured ‘true PureView’ Lumia. Which will possibly look a little like the original (Symbian-based) 808 PureView — so something along the lines of this:

If you’re going to ask consumers to lug around a bulky, heavy phone, might as well make it look as much like the camera they used to own as possible. Familiarity will aid the trade off, helping them justify carrying a much larger device because it clearly melds two functions. Meanwhile Nokia’s PureView brand has to shout even louder to get noticed. And no matter how great their camera algorithms are, a lens that relies on digital zoom alone simply doesn’t look as capable as an optical zoom lens.

As well as a 10X optical zoom, the Galaxy S4 Zoom has a 16 Mega Pixel CMOS Sensor, Optical Image Stabiliser (so it’s raining on the Lumia 920′s parade too) and Xenon Flash. So basically Samsung is pushing into all the areas where Nokia is trying its utmost to differentiate its flagship Lumias vs the Android-powered competition (i.e. low light photography and extra steady video). Nokia could still push the boat out on megapixel count — if it launches a 41MP Lumia — but that’s a nerdy specs game to play that’s unlikely to have an impact on the mainstream consumer.

Beyond looks and specs, Samsung has also embedded new camera functions into the S4 Zoom designed to tie hardware and software together. For example, a feature called Zoom Ring allows the user to activate an in-call photo sharing feature by twisting the zoom ring on the device and then capturing and sending an image to the caller via MMS — all without having to suspend the call. The Zoom Ring can also be used to activate the Quick Launch and Shortcut features to navigate to the camera and through its modes quickly, again by twisting the ring.

Of course, the S4 Zoom will stand and fall on camera performance — so there’s a lot riding on the quality of the optics and the smoothness of its functions. But from the outside, at least, Samsung has created a device that bellows a heck of a lot louder than Nokia’s Lumias do, for all the marketing cash Nokia has poured into PureView. Even if Nokia can produce some camera comparisons that rank its kit over Samsung’s, being technically better isn’t always enough in the fiercely competitive smartphone space. Having the marketing brashness and brass neck (and massive budget) to get noticed is what counts.

Samsung has not released full details of all the markets where it intends to sell the S4 Zoom but has confirmed the handset will be coming to the U.K. this summer, and the U.S. and other parts of Europe from Q4. Like Nokia with the original 808 Pureview, Samsung dabbled in this area before with last year’s Galaxy Camera but that device was a Wi-Fi/3G/4G connected camera only, so did not include a phone dialler function. The Galaxy S4 Zoom is a full hybrid of phone plus camera, and yet another iteration of a flagship brand. This is Samsung continuing its strategy of iterating its portfolio to saturate the market by pushing its hardware into all the niches, large and small.

Nokia, meanwhile — which used to follow a similar strategy to Samsung, i.e. by producing a vast portfolio of devices across multiple price-points and form factors — now has a larger mountain to climb to get its camera-focused flagship phones noticed by the general consumer. Since switching to the Windows Phone platform, Nokia has had to rein in its portfolio to fit the shrinking size of its business, no longer having the resources to spread its hardware so far. But even while it’s focusing its remaining energy on specific niches, like high end cameraphones, Samsung is harrying those efforts by pushing its fingers in all the smartphone pies.

Apple Introduces iOS 7

We heard it would be flat. We heard it would be black and white. We heard that it would be a totally different experience.

It is. iOS 7, the latest version of Apple’s flagship mobile operating system, is here, and it’s almost entirely different from the versions that came before. Gone are the skeuomorphic designs and 3D effects, replaced by Sir Jony Ive’s “flat design.” Rumors had been flying for weeks about the new OS and now it’s here and it is, at least at this early reckoning, a massive change for the six year old operating system.

First, we must remember that Ive, Apple’s industrial designer now in control of software following the departure of Scott Forstall, isn’t a believer in interfaces that copy real-world objects. In the past, making the Notes app look like a legal pad or the calendar app look like a Moleskine calendar notebook were part of the iOS design philosophy, as ingrained in the OS as “Slide To Unlock.” All that is gone now.

Are you ready for a whole new world?

NEW LOOK:

• iOS 7 has a new font leading the way, which seems to be a sort of Helvetica Neue Ultra. It’s very skinny, clean, and it was hinted at in the iOS 7 banners that went up for WWDC yesterday.
• Instead of white bars on a black background, Apple will now tell you what kind of service coverage you have with five little dots, which are white and grey depending on how strong the signal is across a translucent background.
• The lock screen is changed for the first time in iOS’s history, with no more shine top or bottom bars for slide to unlock or the clock. Instead, Slide to unlock is translucent above the background image.
• Default app icons are now flatter, but not quite flat, just as predicted.
• Jony Ive’s hand has had its way with iOS notifications. The notifications panel isn’t laced with dark grey linen anymore, but actually has a very flat look to it. There is a today view, that lets you see friends birthdays, upcoming invitations, calendar, stocks, and a quick look at tomorrow.
• The apps all seem to have a white base, except for the stocks app which has a black background and the weather app, which shows motion in the background to convey the current weather.
• The keyboard is more white, than grey, with a translucency that lets you see what’s underneath the keyboard.

NEW FEATURES

CONTROL CENTER

• Control Center is a pull-up tray that is available in your lock screen.
• You can adjust brightness, volume, and other settings including Wifi, Airplane mode, rotation lock, or Bluetooth.
• The Control Center even offers a flashlight, along with tabs for music, camera, and other quick-access apps.
• The Control Center takes on the environment it’s in, so if you swipe up while you’re in mail, it will have the same blue and white coloring under that translucent panel.

MULTITASKING

• iOS 7 lets you multitask between all third-party apps with much better battery consumption.
• You can double-tap the home button to enter into multi-tasking mode, just like always, but the interface for multitasking has been revamped. It appears to offer live previews, but Apple wasn’t clear about that.

SAFARI

• Safari opens straight into full screen mode now, with the option to pull down to bring up the search bar at the top.
• The search field has been improved to be a unified smart search field, which lets you have access to all your favorite websites with a single tap.
• Tabs come with a totally new interface, scrolling in a vertical carousel, and there are no longer any limits. In other words, you can have as many tabs as you want, as opposed to just 8 like before. Swipe a tab off to the side to throw it away.
• The new Safari is integrated with iCloud keychain from OS X Mavericks, and also comes with parental controls.

AIRDROP

• You can share sharesheets with other people by simply tapping their name. No NFC required.
• Airdrop supports iPhone 5, iPad 4th gen, iPad Mini

CAMERA AND PHOTOS

• The Camera app lets you swipe between your various camera types, such as panorama or HDR so you can quickly take a pic instead of fumbling around with settings.
• Photos marks the first update to the photo gallery on iOS since it was introduced.
• You can search based on date, and location, within the photos app.
• Instagram must be flattered — Apple has introduced photo filters so you can add a little professionalism to the picture.
• Users can share via AirDrop, iCloud photo-sharing, as well as shared Photo Streams.
• You can even share video with iCloud photo-sharing.

SIRI:

• Siri has a new voice! It sounds similar, but also weird. You can choose a male or female voice, if you like. Voices include languages like French, German, and other languages “over time.”
• The visual UI has also been upgraded, with a sound wave going along the bottom.
• Siri has also been integrated with settings, letting you tell her to turn on bluetooth, or lower the screen brightness.
• The company has also added support for Twitter, Wikipedia, and shows web search results direct from Bing.

IOS IN THE CAR

• iOS in the Car depends a lot on Siri.
• It puts the iOS homescreen on the screen of your car, and lets you search for directions, listen to music, etc.

APP STORE

• You can now search for apps based on location. In other words, search for apps by the Louvre and see a lot of French museum apps.
• The App Store also automatically updates apps for you in the background now. Hallelujah again!

ITUNES RADIO:

• Apple has finally introduced the much-anticipated iTunes Radio, which gives a Genius-like experience to the entire 26-million title iTunes catalog.
• You can see the full list of songs on each station by clicking history, with purchase and preview buttons built right in to send you to the iTunes store.
• iTunes Radio also lets you customize each station by clicking a star to show that you want more of this type of music.
• iTunes Match users will get an ad-free experience, but others will be able to use the app for free with a few audio and text ads.

ACTIVATION LOCK:

• This is for those of us who have had an iPhone stolen.
• If a thief steals your phone and tries to turn off Find My iPhone, they can no longer turn the device back on without your iCloud password.
• Users can also block messages and calls from other users.