minis

An iPhone Mini priced at $330 in China would provide a healthy shot in the arm to Apple's Chinese smartphone sales, according to Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty.

A low-priced iPhone would add another 20 percent to the 10 percent Chinese market share currently addressed by the iPhone 5, the analyst said today. Smartphone prices are starting to stabilize in China, which will open up the market for such a phone. But a deal with China Mobile is also key.

Apple currently sells the iPhone to Chinese consumers through China Unicom and China Telecom. The company has been trying … Read more

Chatter in Asia has it that the total cost of the iPad Mini could increase by almost a third -- though no word on whether that would impact price.

Commentary in Digitimes, which is close to the chain of component suppliers in Asia, said the jump to a Retina screen means adding costly display components.

Apple's "limited innovation" in tablets this year will make it vulnerable to newfangled PCs -- so says a Citibank analyst.

Yes, you heard that right, PCs. While financial analysts write lots of research notes about Apple every week, this one from Citibank analyst Glen Yeung -- sent out early in the week -- got my attention.

Whereas we see limited innovation in tablets in 2H13, … Read more

There are a ton of great iPad apps out there, priced 99 cents and up, that are worth every penny.

But you know how it is. Sometime you catch yourself browsing the App Store for some free app that can offer some momentary entertainment.

Apple keeps a running tally of its most popular free iPad apps over on iTunes, which is updated constantly to reflect current trends. At our request, we asked Apple to provide us with a list of the Top 5 most popular apps based on their most recent weekly totals.

The following CNET Top 5 video recounts … Read more

It was a good day for the WebKit browser engine yesterday when Opera Software adopted it in place of its in-house Presto. But yesterday's developments also became an opportunity for a high-profile JavaScript programmer to lodge criticisms about WebKit.

"Each release of Chrome or Safari generates excitement about new bleeding-edge features; nobody seems to worry about the stuff that's already (still!) broken," complained Dave Methvin, president of the jQuery foundation and a member of the core programming team that builds the widely used Web programming tool, in a blog post.

"jQuery Core has more lines … Read more

It might have been a smart strategic move for Opera Software to move to the WebKit browser engine and scrap its own Presto, but some think it's a step backward for the development of the Web overall.

"A switch to Webkit might benefit Opera. It's just not going to benefit the open Web," Mozilla's Robert O'Callahan said today in comments on his blog about Opera's Presto change-o. "This will strengthen the WebKit mobile monoculture and make it even harder for us to promote Web standards over 'coding to Webkit.'"

Browser engines … Read more

Opera Software, an independent voice in the browser market since the 1990s, will dramatically change its strategy this year by adopting the WebKit browser engine used by Safari and Chrome.

The Norwegian company announced the move today and said it will show off the first fruits of the work with a WebKit-based version of its Android browser at the Mobile World Congress show in less than two weeks. But the company will move to WebKit for its desktop browser, too.

A browser engine processes the Web page instructions written in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS then renders the results on screens. … Read more

The evasi0n jailbreak team is already out with a new version that resolves a couple of persistent glitches.

Available from the evasi0n Web site, version 1.1 fixes one problem of long reboot times for any jailbroken device, according to blog site iPodnn. It also squashes a bug that caused the default Weather app to crash.

Both fixes had been posted earlier on the Cydia app store for jailbreakers, the evasi0n team tweeted today. Users who've already jailbroken their devices can grab the fixes from Cydia rather than installing the new version of evasi0n from scratch. People trying out … Read more

A new jailbreak that targets all of the latest iOS devices has proven a hit with the public.

Launched on Monday, the evasi0n tool is capable of jailbreaking every iOS 6 and 6.1 device on the market, including the iPhone 5, the iPad Mini, the fourth-generation iPad, and the fifth-generation iPod Touch. The tool itself is considered relatively simple to use, certainly in comparison with other jailbreak methods.

As a result, evasi0n had already been used at least 800,000 times in its initial six hours, according to Jay Freeman, who runs the Cydia app store for jailbreakers. Speaking … Read more