Free iPhone

Do not — repeat — do NOT put WD-40 or any such substance in your iPhone or iPad — it won’t permenantly fix your Home button and may, in fact, damage it far worse. The idea that repeatedly squirting WD-40 into your iPhone or iPad Home button could fix responsiveness began floating around the internet last month and has gotten some attention — that needs to be stopped immediately. Keep in mind we’re huge fans of DIY repair here at iMore. We have a weekly column focused on DIY repair. But putting WD-40 on your iPhone is not DIY repair. It’s dangerous, particularly for iPhones and iPads that are built with moving, plastic parts.

WD-40 may be non-conductive but the solvent in it will break down plastic. Your home button is plastic as well as some of the internal parts. Your speaker assembly is plastic and sits directly below your home button. Also, WD-40 is a liquid and you’re spraying it dangerously close to where the wiring for the dock — the place you charge your iPhone or iPad — sits. The only substance that should ever be applied to an iPhone or iPad is high concentrated alcohol to remove corrosion from a logic board after it has been damaged by another liquid. None of the other components should ever come in contact with liquid. Including WD-40.

iPhone 4 home button and flex cable

To understand what causes a sticky home button you need to understand how the home button works. On an iPhone 4 there is a flex cable that connects to your dock and comes around the front. This piece has a contact on it that is connected to the home button with adhesive. When this button is depressed too many times, the contact starts to wear and get thin. Eventually this results in a “tacky” home button or clicks not registering as the contact is not thick enough to apply the correct amount of pressure to register to trigger a click. It was bad design on Apple’s part, especially after introducing the double-click to launch the Fast App Switcher in iOS 4.

iPhone 4 home button next to an iPhone 4S home button secured with rubber gasket

The iPhone 4S Home button was re-designed to fix these problems. The button is actually stuck to the main assembly with a rubber gasket. Then a bracket is put into position behind that, similar to that of the iPad 2.

Your iPhone or iPad Home button isn’t a squeaky old spring or noisy hinge that a couple of squirts of grease can easily fix. If the Home button flex cable wears down over time, nothing but replacing the Home button flex cable will solve the issue. Spraying a substance like WD-40 into your device will only make matters worse or damage other components inside your device. If you’re under warranty Apple will swap out your iPhone 4 at no cost. If you’re not, you should repair it the correct way or send it in to someone who can. Here are some good software fixes to try on your own first –

How to troubleshoot a buggy home button Get around a broken home button with an Activator gesture (jailbreak)

So put the WD-40 can down and slowly back away, then tell everyone you know — including the people who post these tips — to do likewise.

Sounds like Google has hired away Simon Prakash, formerly Apple’s senior director of product integrity, to work on a “secret project” deep in the heart of the Googleplex. Reports VentureBeat:

Simon Prakash worked at Apple for more than eight years and was most recently the senior director of product integrity at Apple, according to his LinkedIn page. That means he was responsible for product quality across all of Apple’s products, from iPhones to Macs. Apple has the best reputation for product quality, according to consumer satisfaction surveys by J.D. Power.

The hiring is notable for a couple of reasons. First, Apple and Google had an infamous no-poaching pact in place for many years, a gentlemanly if potentially actionable agreement not to actively solicit or hire each other’s talent. The U.S. Justice Department is still investigating the arrangement on the grounds it unfairly limited employee work options and compensation. Combined with the strains in Apple and Google’s relationship, that agreement seems no longer to be in place.

Second, it shows Google is continuing to evolve into a company that values design and polish as much as features and engineering. The knock on Google used to be that their stuff worked great but wasn’t much to look at — that it felt designed by committee and that no one had tried using it before it shipped. Over the last year they’ve given facelifts to all their major online properties, and it looks like they’re only getting started.

With Prakash’s hire, the burning question is, what “secret project” will he be working on? He’s a hardware guy in a company that’s so far been content to let partners like Samsung, HTC, and Motorola make all their hardware. Google is in the process of buying Motorola, but claims they’ll be running it as a separate business. Merely helping oversee the quality of partner hardware doesn’t seem that “secret” however.

With co-founder Sergei Brin running all sorts of experimental initiatives over at Google, it really doesn’t have to be phones or tablets — it could be flying saucers. But everyone’s going to think it’s phones and tablets, right?

Source: VentureBeat

Do you use mobile health and fitness products?Mobile Nations Health and Fitness Month has begun and we’re all already picking out goals and getting into gear — but I wanted to find out where we were all starting from first? CES 2012 showed us that mobile is increasingly becoming more than just communications, it’s becoming lifestyle. A big part of that is health and fitness.

There are stand-alone gadgets like Fitbit or Jawbone UP that keep track of your movement (or lack thereof!), and sleep activities, and let you enter food information. They connect to our iPhones to share data and deliver reports so we can see how we’re doing and adjust according. The are also stand-alone apps that don’t need extra hardware and just do similar things right on our iPhones. Both often have social network connections to, so your friends and family can see your progress, be it weight lost, distance traveled, calories burned, sleep enjoyed, or food consumed. That adds accountability and some peer pressure that could help keep you motivated and on track.

Have you tried any of them? If so, which gadgets or apps or accessories did you like best? Have you tried them but ended up not using them, or simply not tried any health and fitness apps or accessories at all? If not, why not?

Vote in the poll up top and give me all the details in the comments below, and don’t forgot to jump into our new Health and Fitness Forum — you can attain your goals and get entered into our big iPad 3 giveaway. Sweet!

iPhone 4S Made Simple is a new book from Apress written by Martin Trautschold and our very own editor-in-chief extraordinaire, Rene Ritchie, and tech edited by none other than Leanna Lofte. That’s right, there’s a huge iMore presence throughout this book — I forgot to lock the cages one night, who knew? — which means it’s super detailed, super informative, and has everything a regular person needs to get started with their brand new iPhone 4S.

More than 1,000 screen visuals and clear-cut instructions guide you through both basic and advanced features of iOS 5 that’s on your iPhone 4S, iPhone 4 and earlier models, from email and calendar tips to navigating the App Store and understanding Bluetooth and Wi-Fi networks to the revolutionary Siri personal assistant.

If you have that special someone in your life who needs extra help figuring out how to use their iPhone 4S, send them to iPhone 4S Made Simple. You — and your stress level! — will be glad you did! (And don’t forget to leave a review!)

$9.95+ Amazon store link

We all used to see Apple at the top of all the companies and that's not a new thing we hear about Apple, because last week Apple reported to us that it sold 37 million iPhones in the last three months making number one smartphone manufacturer, but today we have got a new research from the folks at IDC which claims that Apple now is the third largest Smartphone manufacturer in the world. The new research from IDC says that with the release of iPhone 4S it pushed Apple towards and make it more popular and right now Apple takes the third place in Smartphone manufacturer while the first one is Nokia and the second place is Samsung. Although it doesn’t look like Apple will be climbing the chart any further anytime soon — Samsung and Nokia have a fairly hefty lead — it’s pretty impressive that the “computer company” managed to become the third largest mobile phone manufacturer in a matter of 5 years.
[Source]

According to the latest data from IDC, Apple was the third-largest mobile phone maker in the world during 2011. In the fourth quarter of 2011, Apple’s 37 million unit shipments accounted for 8.7 percent of the mobile phone market, bested only by Samsung’s 22.8 percent and market leader Nokia, which accounted for 26.6 percent. For 2011 overall, Apple shipped 93.2 million iPhones, good for six percent of the market, again bested only by…

Fake Carrier pour iphones Jailbreakés changer nom a la place de vôtre opérateur ( gratuit )
Petit " tutoriel " ou je vous donne une application, pour changer vôtre nom a la place de l'opérateur en haut a droite de votre iphone / ipad / ipod . Pour iDevices jailbreakés essentiellement. From: To0MVaaL Views: 0 0 ratings Time: 02:54 More in Howto & Style

For years, GelaSkins has made decorative stickers for pretty much every consumer electronics device imaginable, including iPads, iPhones, and iPods. HardCase ($35) represents the first time the company has branched out to something different; rather than a sticker, it's a polycarbonate shell for the iPhone 4 or 4S. While we're not enthusiastic about shells for the easily-damaged glass iPhones, the big selling point here is design. As with all of the…

In an interview with AllThingsD, recording artist Neil Young revealed that he had discussed high definition music formats with Apple's Steve Jobs prior to his death. The interview is summarized by CNet, in which Young claims that MP3s have just "5 percent of the data present in the original recording." Young is concerned that there is no suitable high definition available to consumers. Higher definition music, of course, would require much larger files. Young reportedly approached Apple and specifically Steve Jobs about it:When asked if Young had approached Apple about the idea, Young said that he had, in fact, met with Jobs and was "working on it," but that "not much" ended up happening to the pursuit. Of note, Young made mention that Jobs was a vinyl fan, despite having helmed the company that would spearhead the way people listened to and purchased digital music.Apple presently offers their iTunes Music store at a quality of 256 kbps AACs. Apple does support a lossless audio format that can be used on their iPods and iPhones, but these files take up considerably more space than standard AAC files, and are not sold on the iTunes store. Based on the interview, it seems there is no present interest from Apple in such an offering.

roundup The maker of iPads and iPhones is hardly alone among tech companies that rely heavily on Chinese factories under scrutiny for labor practices. But it's become the flashpoint.