Iphone App | featured news

It's probably not the kind of thing voters will use to choose the leader of the free world.
But the Web was taking no shortage of presidential potshots Wednesday over Republican candidate Mitt Romney's new mobile app, which embarrassingly misspelled "America." Yes, Internet. Welcome to AMERCIA.

Did "sexting" just get safer? Maybe, but probably not. A free and increasingly popular iPhone app called Snapchat allows users to take a picture, send it and control how the message is visible – between 1 and 10 seconds.

Poor Instagram users. First, their beloved photo-sharing application moves from iPhone-only exclusivity to the Android phone masses. A week later, Facebook swallows up the tiny startup behind the app for $1 billion. The purchase sparked worries that Facebook might shutter Instagram or change it for the worse by harvesting their personal information or shoving ads into their carefully curated photo streams.

Can a two-year-old photo sharing app really be worth $1bn? It would buy you some some 2,100 Rolls Royce Phantoms. Or 200 million mosquito nets to fight malaria. Or the whole of the New York Times company (with $50m change to spare). If you are Microsoft, it buys you some 800 AOL patents to fight the next patent war.

Oleg Kostour moved from Canada to Mountain View to build a 3D software startup. Instead, he built an app to stay in touch with the girlfriend he left behind in Canada. The iPhone app, Pair, launched in the app store this week. It creates a private shared timeline for couples that allows them to easily swap SMS messages, photos, videos and locations.

Ever find yourself frustrated with how smoothly Siri seems to work for the folks in Apple’s commercials but not for you? A New York man has filed a class-action suit against Apple, saying that the company has been “misleading and deceptive” about what the iPhone 4S virtual assistant can do.

Instagram, the iPhone photo-sharing app that turns almost anyone into an artful photographer, is growing at an astonishing rate.

Apple's voice recognition app operates in the Internet cloud. Commands are processed on a Web server and software developers can monitor Siri's responses, tweaking the program to improve it.

Apple has to decide whether it wants to play in the ad world or not. Eddy Cue will now make that decision.