Because sometimes Siri is just a little too snarky…

(Credit:
Screenshot by Eric Mack/CNET)

If you’ve ever wanted to take out the day’s frustrations on your iPhone , go grab the nearest hockey stick and get ready to vent.

Today, G-Form–the Rhode Island company behind heavy-duty iPad covers that it likes to test by dropping tablets from great heights–is debuting its first rugged protective cases for the iPhone 4 and 4S. True to form, the product demonstration for the new “X-Protect” case is pretty punishing.

Check out the video below to see the $39.95 case turned into a puck and surviving what G-Form claims is an 82 mph slapshot. The iPhone case is also available in different colors and in an “Extreme Grid” design. It can be preordered now and is set to arrive by the end of the month.

[Read more]

Snap! The Gizmon iCA makes your iPhone look like a vintage camera.

(Credit:
Shawn Low/CNET Asia)

YOKOHAMA, Japan–We’ve previously reported on the Gizmon iCA, an iPhone case that makes your smartphone look like a vintage rangefinder. The company was at the CP+ Camera and Photo Imaging Show, and we learned it has plans to launch a whole system of special-effect lenses and accessories for its flagship case soon.

New filters and accessories are coming for the Gizmon iCA.

(Credit:
Shawn Low/CNET Asia)

In addition to the fisheye and macro lenses already available, future attachments will include tele, wide, tunnel effector, mirage, and circular polarizing special-effects filters. Sure, some of these effects could be easily reproduced using apps, but doing it the old-fashioned way and getting it right the first time without post-processing has a certain appeal. Other accessories include a car stand, mounted flash unit, mini tripod, remote shutter release, and silencer.

Admittedly, we’re fans of vintage film cameras and therefore found the iCA case to be pretty interesting during our brief hands-on with it. The prospect of “pimping” our smartphones is irresistible, especially with a range of optional attac… [Read more]

https://api.path.com/3/contacts/add

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Upon inspecting closer, I noticed that my entire address book (including full names, emails and phone numbers) was being sent as a plist to Path. Now I don’t remember having given permission to Path to access my address book and send its contents to its servers, so I created a completely new “Path” and repeated the experiment and I got the same result – my address book was in Path’s hands.
Path’s CEO and co-founder Dave Morin tried to address the concern raised by Thampi in the comments section, which has now also been updated in the blog post by Thampi.
Arun, thanks for pointing this out. We actually think this is an important conversation and take this very seriously. We upload the address book to our servers in order to help the user find and connect to their friends and family on Path quickly and effeciently as well as to notify them when friends and family join Path. Nothing more.
We believe that this type of friend finding & matching is important to the industry and that it is important that users clearly understand it, so we proactively rolled out an opt-in for this on our Android client a few weeks ago and are rolling out the opt-in for this in 2.0.6 of our iOS Client, pending App Store approval.
The major concern here is that the entire address book is being uploaded to Path’s servers without informing or taking an authorization from users.
points out that apps that typically use the address book, hash the data and save only the checksum rather than saving the entire data in plain text format on the servers. Morin has said that they would look at implementing the hashing procedure as that’s the industry best practice.
If you’re really spooked by this revelation then you can send a email to service@path.com and request them to delete your address book account from their servers.
We feel that though it was poor decision on Path’s part not to have the opt-in and the hashing procedure in place from the beginning, they have been extremely proactive and honest in dealing with the situation. It’s a young company and we’re sure  that this incident will put privacy on the top of their priority list when they decide on which new features should be rolled out next.
in case of users who used their initial version, which did not take off).

Apple may not be the world’s leading mobile phone maker but its cut of both profits and sales puts it firmly at the top.

Though it holds only around 9 percent of the global mobile phone market, Apple raked in 75 percent of all profits across the industry last quarter, according to Asymco analyst Horace Dediu.

That left rival Samsung with 16 percent of the profit pie, RIM with 3.7 percent, HTC with 3 percent, and Nokia rounding out the list of 1.8 percent. All together that pie represents around $15 billion in profits for the final quarter of 2011.

With heavy demand for the iPhone 4S, Apple also regained the top spot in mobile phone sales, capturing almost 40 percent of the industry’s overall revenue. Samsung took second place with 25 percent of all sales, followed by Nokia with 12.6 percent and RIM with 8 percent, according to Dediu’s calculations.

Drilling down further, HTC accounted for 5.5 percent of all mobile phone sales, Motorola 4.4 percent, and Sony Ericsson 2.7 percent.

Related storiesiPhone 4S propels Apple to massive earnings… [Read more]