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Early this month Fiksu reported that iOS 8 adoption is slower than the gains demonstrated by iOS 6 and 7 in their first weeks after launch. Apple launched iOS 8.1 (which adds Apple Pay and Continuity) and the good news is that version 8.x is now on over half of the devices.

The bad news is that Apple's developer page points to 52% adoption of the latest iOS branch, that's 13% or so more than three weeks ago. That's starting from just under 40% adoption after the first three weeks of availability, then at the iPad event Tim Cook announced the number had grown to 48%.

However, that was two weeks ago meaning iOS 8.x adoption grew only 2% a week since then. Over the next month it will become clear if people were just waiting for the 8.1 goodies or prefer not to update at all.

The botched 8.0.1 update certainly put some people off (it interfered with the fingerprint sensor and even mobile connectivity). That has since been fixed but the jump to iOS 8 still requires plenty of free storage – as much as 5GB, which is painful for those on 16GB devices. Apple's 2014 devices still start at 16GB, which is sure to be an issue when iOS 9 comes around.

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[Editor's note: You can preorder the iPad Air 2, the iPad mini 3 now at Future Shop. The new iMac should be available within a week. I will post an update with the links as soon as more information is available.]

Cupertino - Apple today hosted a special event in their campus where they unveiled the iPad Air 2, the iPad mini 3, updated OS X Yosemite and iOS 8.1 as well as new Mac mini and an iMac with 5k Retina Display to round off this year's product offerings.

A year after they released the thin and light iPad Air, Apple improved on their 9.7-inch tablet with a model that's even 18 per cent thinner and which has improved display technology as well as the inclusion of Touch ID and a new gold colour variant.

The new iPad Air 2 also weighs less than a pound, and at just 6.1 mm, "is the thinnest tablet in the world,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “iPad Air 2 has a new Retina display with anti-reflective coating, second generation 64-bit A8X chip, all-new iSight and FaceTime HD cameras, faster Wi-Fi and LTE wireless, and includes the revolutionary Touch ID fingerprint identity sensor.” While the Touch ID will help users with authorization, the new iPad Air does not include an NFC chip for the Apple Pay function.

The new iPad Air sports an Apple A8X chip, which the company says delivers a 40 percent improvement in CPU performance and 2.5 times the graphics performance of iPad Air, and still delivers the up to 10-hour battery life. Also new are an 8MP sensor and advanced optics in the iSight camera.

Also updated was the iPad mini 3 with Retina Display which now features Touch ID functionality although many of the specs and features will be identical to the exisiting iPad mini models. A new gold colour variant was added to the mix while the 16GB, 64 GB and 128 GB capacities are being offered for the WiFi and WiFi plus LTE versions.

Also unveiled here today were new Macs, namely a new Mac mini with newer Haswell processors, Thunderbolt capability and a lower starting price point. The big reveal, however, was the new iMac with a 5K Retina Display, the first iMac to feature an Ultra HD display.

The new iMac is also the most powerful one ever shipped with 3.5GHz up to 4.0GHz Intel Core i7 quad-core processors, Hybrid Fusion Drives which merge an SSD with a Hard Drive and improved graphics. Ideal for photographers dealing with large images or video editors working on up to 4K video, the new iMac allows editing in full-resolution without the latency and wait times usually experienced in pushing that many pixels.

More than just the hardware, Apple demoed many of the features coming to iOS 8 as well as OS X Yosemite. The Continuity and Handoff features include routing voice calls, text messages and file transfers from desktop to mobile as well as automatic tethering to mobile hotspots.

Many of these features will work for existing users updating to Mac OS Yosemite (available today) as well as iOS 8.1 coming on Monday.

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Ever since Google announced the release of Android 5.0 Lollipop, manufacturers have been scrambling to announce the update for their flagships. Samsung has already teased Lollipop for the Galaxy Note 4 without any release date, Sony has announced the update for a multitude of devices and now LG has posted to Facebook that its flagship G3 will be getting the update by the end of the year.

While no extra details were given, the Q4 release will be a quick one. It should be less than two months at the latest after the official release of Lollipop by Google, which is faster than many updates have rolled out before. However, this won’t mean that all LG G3 devices will be getting the update in Q4. Remember that carrier-branded devices will have to wait for the carrier to approve it, which might take a long time.

With both HTC and Motorola stepping up their update game, we’re hoping that LG and Samsung follow suit. More specifically, we hope that the companies will focus on updating carrier devices in a timely manner. LG G3 owners, are you excited to get Lollipop? Let us know in the comments!

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As expected, T-Mobile today announced its Q3 2014 results, and it looks like The Magenta Crew had itself a pretty good quarter.

T-Mobile added a total of 2.3 million customers in the third quarter of 2014, a figure that includes 411,000 prepaid adds and 1.38 million postpaid customers. This led T-Mo to its best growth quarter ever and helped bring it to a total of 10 million new customers added in the past 10 quarters. T-Mobile finished Q3 2014 with 52.9 million customers.

Turning to hardware, T-Mobile says that it sold 6.9 million smartphones in Q3 2014, which turned out to be a whopping 93 percent of all phones that it sold in that quarter.The arrival of the iPhone 6 likely made up a large part of that stat, as T-Mobile reports that the launch of Apple’s new phones resulted in its biggest device launch ever.

T-Mobile’s network grew to include 250 million 4G LTE markets in Q3 2014, meaning that T-Mo hit its end of year milestone a few months early. Now Neville Ray and Co. plan to expand their LTE network to 280 million Americans by mid-2015 and 300 million by the end of next year.

In other network news, T-Mobile is working to roll its LTE service out on 1900MHz PCS spectrum and it continues to push out its 700MHz A-Block spectrum as well. Wideband LTE is rolling, too, with availability in 19 markets right now. That figure its expected to grow to 26 by the end of 2014.

T-Mobile’s Q3 2014 financials include service revenues of $5.7 billion, which are up 10.6 percent year-over-year, and an Average Billing Per User of $61.59.

T-Mobile will hold a conference call tomorrow, October 28, to discuss its Q3 2014 earnings, so stay tuned and we’ll update you with any juicy tidbits of news or funny John Legere remarks that may occur.

Via: PhoneDog
Sources: T-Mobile (1), (2)

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Use Fleksy? If so, we’ve got some good news for you today. And if you don’t, well, we’ve got even more good news.

Fleksy just announced that it’s going to be pushing out a version 3.3 update to its Android app today. Included in the update are new backspace and shift key layouts, improved accuracy and a mess of bug fixes. The full changelog provided to us by Fleksy is as follows:

New Backspace and Shift key layout: A much-requested keyboard layout update. Disable Legacy Button Layout under Advanced Settings to move the shift and backspace keys to the bottom letter row.
Minimal Layout language selection: It’s now easier to change languages when in Minimal layout — tap and hold on letters, and slide to the next or previous language buttons.
Improved accuracy: Fleksy’s engine has been improved to provide smarter word correction.
Bug fixes: Squashed bugs related to swiping, punctuation and spacebar.

Fleksy also has some exciting, more “inside baseball” news to share. The company has secured a $2 million venture capital round from a number of partners. Additionally, its Android app has gotten more than 2 million downloads since its launch in December 2013, and its recently-released iOS app has hit No. 1 in Apple’s App Store in 25 countries.

Finally, Fleksy is putting its app on sale to celebrate all of this exciting-ness. You can now snag its keyboard app for $0.99.

Do you use Fleksy? If not, are you going to buy the app at its discounted price?

(Playboard) | (Play Store)

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Welcome back to our weekly Top 10 Android App Updates column, where we take a look at the most frequently upgraded apps for the week. We’ve found that one of the best ways to discover useful apps is to find the ones that are actually being updated by the developers rather than selecting the apps with the most installs. As in the past, we’re going to filter out minor updates for the super-popular apps that have over 10 million installs, but we’ll make exceptions for apps that have had significant updates. We hope you enjoy this weekly feature and that you discover some apps that end up being useful.