From what Apple has said now, they have long discontinued that promotion, but that’s not so. It’s actually fairly easy to obtain your from iPhone bumper whether it be a 4 or a 4s, on Sprint, Verizon, or AT&T, it doesn’t matter. And I’m going to tell you how.

For most iPhone 4 users, this process will be a lot simpler.  First off, your iPhone still has to be under the one-year warranty from Apple.  Second, you need to have a lot of free time on your hands.  Let me tell you how this happened for me.  I called Apple telling them that I was getting the death grip on my iPhone 4S (which I was, but it wasn’t something that couldn’t deal with). I explained to them what was going on, and they transferred me to the Technical Support Department.  When you’re talking to them, you will have to troubleshoot your phone while on live support.  The support staff suggested to:

-Restore the device

-Reset network settings

-Restart the device

After none of those worked, I told the specialist that I had read online about how the bumper fixes that problem, and that I would like one sent out to me.  She agreed, but couldn’t find it in her computer.  So we scheduled a call for the next day from a Sales Executive to get this sorted out.  The bumper was then sent out and I received it in two days.

Now my iPhone works perfectly with no dropped calls!

Have any of you had this issue with your iPhone 4S’?  Leave a comment down below!

However, since then, it has been rock-solid.  Well, that was until about two weeks ago.  I noticed that the headphone jack was becoming quite loose and would not “grab onto” the plug when upon insertion.  If you moved the just a tiny bit, it would lose the connection and switch back to the internal speakers.  I took it into Apple, and they replaced the Logic Board.  All was well, or so I thought.

That same night, I started to notice the system locking up and freezing.  I started getting the 3 beeps of death- signifying a RAM error.  I figured that the 8 GB of ram that I’d upgraded from 4 GB had been installed incorrectly.  It had been.  The one stick was not pushed in all the way.  So, I did that, and my issues ceased for a bit.

Two days later, I left my MacBook Pro on for a few hours to do a Time Machine backup.  When I came returned, I was getting the 3 beeps of death again.  I had to force it to shut down.  I went to power the machine back on again, and it wouldn’t power on.  I just got a blank screen and the 3 beeps.  Back to the Apple Store again!

The Genius who assisted me wanted to replace the Logic Board again.  This would have been the third Logic Board in six months.  I refused.  I wanted a new machine.  The Genius went and talked to the manager for a bit, and he granted my request.  The next day, I picked up a new, Late 2011 15 inch MacBook Pro, with the 2.2 GHz quad-core i7 processor, to replace the buggy refurb that I’d purchased in November.  Apple also extended the warranty until May of 2013.

I have had no issues in the past 2 days of using this machine, and I hope to keep it that way.

Have you ever had a bad experience with an Apple product, or any computer in general?  Leave me a comment down below!

We’ll start off by having a look at the hardware that powers the Galaxy S3.  The first thing you’ll notice is the massive 4.8″ display — cheekily just 0.1″ bigger than its nearest Android competitor, the HTC One X.  The Super AMOLED screen runs at HD resolution (1280 x 720), but still uses the Pentile sub-pixel arrangement that was criticized in the Galaxy Nexus.  The front of the phone has a 1.9 megapixel camera and the back includes an 8 megapixel shooter with LED flash and 1080p video recording.

Inside, things get better.  There’s a powerful quad-core chipset of Samsung’s own design, the Exynos 4412.  It runs at 1.4 GHz and is backed with 1 GB of RAM and 16, 32 or 64 GB of internal storage.  This can be augmented with up to 32 GB of micro SD storage, too.  There’s also a massive 2100 mAh battery (also removable) which can be charged wirelessly with an official Samsung Galaxy S3 charger.

All of this is stuffed into a massively thin 8.6 mm chassis available in nature-inspired colours: Marble White or Pebble Blue.  The general shape of the device is reminiscent of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and is notably more curved than its predecessors – possibly to avoid patent infringement claims from Apple.

A big part of the appeal of the Galaxy S III comes from its unique software.  Unlike HTC, who chose mostly stylistic additions to Ice Cream Sandwich on the One X, Samsung has provided one of the biggest enhancements found on an Android smartphone, with a custom nature-inspired theme as well as a load of custom functionality.

One of the most interesting additions is called Smart Stay, which makes sure the screen never turns off while you’re looking at it by monitoring your eyes with the front-facing camera.

S Voice is another useful addition, which is essentially an Android version of Apple’s Siri – but a lot more polished than previous Android interpretations of the app, and the first to be baked into the phone to the same level that Siri is with iOS.

Finally, Pop Up Play is an enhancement I can definitely see myself using a lot.  It’s pretty simple – Picture-in-Picture multi-tasking that allows you to place a video window on top of any other application, so you can watch YouTube and surf the web at the same time – very very cool.

Another way Samsung is attempting to differentiate the S3 is with some rather cool i9300 accessories.  In addition to the wireless charging dock described earlier, there’s also a DNLA wireless media sharing dongle that plugs into HDTVs, monitors and projectors.  There’s even a custom Galaxy S3 stylus that should give Galaxy Note level functionality to the phone – not a bad haul.

Ultimately, it’s impossible to predict how well the Galaxy S3 will do.  While its specifications and software look great, we don’t know how well they’ll actually work in hands of consumers.  Expect a much closer look at this hot handset when it launches at the end of the month.

To get around Safari’s default blocking, Google exploited a loophole in the browser’s privacy settings.  While Safari does block most tracking, it makes an exception for websites with which a person interacts in some way—for instance, by filling out a form.  So Google added coding to some of its ads that made Safari think that a person was submitting an invisible form to Google.  Safari would then let Google install a cookie on the phone or computer.

Google halted the practice once it was contacted by The Wall Street Journal about it, but has tried to downplay the impact of the issue.

In a statement, Google said: “The Journal mischaracterizes what happened and why.  We used known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled.  It’s important to stress that these advertising cookies do not collect personal information.”

Four advertising companies have circumvented Apple’s protection.  Apple is expected to release a fix for this flaw in the near future. Jonathan Mayer, who is a graduate student at Stanford University, discovered the exploit.  He has written an extensive blog post on the issue.

Do you think this is acceptable behavior on Google’s part? Or do you think they need to be punished for their actions? Leave a comment down below!

The design of the headphones is simple and clean with the theme colors of black and green.  Now, taking a look at the sound quality, these headphones sound great with great highs, mids, and lows.  I would prefer more lows thou in these headphones, but the lows still sound great.  These are wired headphones and offer a very long cord and durable even thou I did end up slicing the wire with a knife.  There is a small controller on the cord and it offers chat, volume, bass, and mic control.  The microphone is decent for video chats and games, but its in no means of professional quality.

So overall, I love these headphones because of the great sounds, but my only problem is that you need a USB to power these headphones. Check out this video review down below!

Do you own a pair of these headphones?  Leave a comment down below with your thoughts!

• The Community

The minecraft community is big, and never disappoints. I have seen replies on the minecraft forum within minutes of posting. In game is very friendly as well.

• Never Gets Boring

Minecraft has many mods, texture packs and servers with different plugins, you can shape it so many ways it’s very hard to get board of it!

• “Technical Side”

If your more than a gamer, like more of a geek, you can program your own items or blocks and other mods in Java and give the to the community!

• Always Updating

Mojang releases snapshots of minecraft every week. These are really fun to check out and will be incorporated in the next update!

• Supported: Linux, Mac or Windows. Not a problem!

Because it’s Java, Minecraft runs on Linux, Mac and Windows – making it easy for anyone to play! Thanks for reading!

Do you play Minecraft? Leave a comment down below with why you play it!

As smart television sets are becoming more popular one has to wonder if they’re too smart for their own good.  I’m not talking about the smart TV taking over the world, but I am talking about smart TV becoming far too fragmented and ruining the entire user experience of watching TV.

Before we get too far into this I want to explain to those of you who don’t know just what exactly smart TV is.  Smart TV is a television set with built in features such as internet and social media built right in.  Most of these televisions have very different, fragmented UIs, and it’s simply becoming a hassle.  With tablets and smartphones becoming smarter by the day, you start to wonder if we might simply want to go back to the days of “dumb” television.

This may not be a popular opinion, but hear me out before you go against it.  With streaming from your phone and tablet such as Airplay on iOS why do you need a smart TV?  Is it worth it to deal with the complicated UI just to be able to tweet while watching a show?  You can do that from your smartphone.

So the question is, is the short life of smart TV coming to a close?  Put simply, I believe smart TV is dying as fast as 3D TV.

What do you think?  Do you think smart TV is dead?  Or do you think the technology is just getting started?  Leave a comment down below!

The Mac App Store was first released to the public on January 6th, 2011 and has since grown to an incredible size at a very brisk rate.  Apple has claimed it as “The fastest growing PC software store in the world.”  While I’m not sure I would go that far, I will give credit where credit is due.  The Mac App Store deserves some respect.  Where other app stores have failed, Apple’s has seen great growth in a tough economic time.  The Mac App Store passed 100 million application downloads last December and with the way Apple computers are selling, I would estimate that they have already passed 125 million downloads to date.

The Mac App Store is set to be of huge importance to not only the end user, but to the way Apple as a company operates.  With OS X 10.7 Mountain Lion coming this summer, the App store is going to be more important than ever before.

If you own a Mac, do you use the App Store?  If you don’t, why don’t you?  Leave a comment down below!

Here are the pros and cons of Sparrow.

Pros:

• Supports GMail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL, Google Apps, and any other IMAP server
• Support for unified and priority inboxes
• Interface is adjustable to be as minimal as the Twitter app for Mac, or as robust as any other popular email client
• Powerful search features
• Integration with Cloud.app and Dropbox- no need to attach files if you don’t want to!
• Supports native GMail features, such as spam filtering, labels, and archiving mail
• Excellent threaded conversation view
• Quick Look is supported with email attachments- no need to save them to your hard drive first!

Cons:

• You can’t archive messages when searching for them

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As you can see from the pro-heavy list above, Sparrow is a very powerful email client loaded with features. It does cost $10, but I feel that it is totally worth its price tag.

Check out Ryan Schultz’s review of Sparrow for OS X below.

The new chips incorporate greatly improved graphics and media performance on top of the increased clock speeds.

So the question that many of you may be asking at this point is, does this mean it’s not safe to buy a new computer at this time?  The answer is that it would be best to wait.  Most of the new Ivy Bridge chips will not be out into Macs and PCs for many months with only a few exceptions.  There have been manufacturing delays which have caused Intel to delay the main rollout of these new processors.  You can expect the processors to be worked into most PC manufacturers products’ by the end of the quarter, as well as Apple working them into their Mac lineup over the next six months.

Are you excited for the new Ivy Bridge processors?  Leave a comment down below!  We’d love to hear what you have to say about this announcement!