Album art has never been perfectly centered on the iPhone or iPod touch Lock screens. It's been placed immediately on top of the slide-to-unlock bar. Because of the 3:2 aspect ratio of previous iPhone and iPod touch devices, however, and because the top of the album art and the reflection beneath it peak through the translucent time and slide-to-unlock bars, the visual weighting was close enough to appear centered and thus, balanced. Not so with the iPhone 5 and its 16:9 aspect ratio. Now the bottom alignment of album art lookes decidedly bottom heavy. Worse, there's a big black gap between the top of the album art and the bottom of the time bar.

The advantage of bottom aligning album artwork on the 16:9 display is that none of it is obscured by the name of the song, and even when you double-click the Home button to bring up the music controls, very little is obscured. The disadvantage is, in design parlance, "Oh god, my eyes, my eyes..."

So how to fix it? Placing the album art dead center wouldn't work either. There'd still be an empty black space between the top of the art and the bottom of the time bar. Butting the album art up immediately beneath the time bar, however, and filling the resulting empty space on the bottom with the traditional translucent reflection. The weighting would then be close enough to once again appear visually centered. When the Home button double-click brings up the controls, more of the top of the album art would be obscured again, but with a small tweak it wouldn't be terrible, and still better than it currently is on 3:2 devices.

Here are samples of how album art currently looks on the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 5 (left and center), along with a mockup of how it would look if fixed as described above. Beneath that is what the hero pic above would look like with the fixed album art.

I hope Apple considers fixing this in iOS 6.something (and yes, I'll file a radar!)

Because, damn.

Apple has released the taller, thinner, faster, lighter, brighter iPhone 5 -- and we've got your definitive iPhone 5 review right here -- and now Samsung is bringing their next-generation giant, the Galaxy Note 2 to market.

As much as Samsung has been labeled a "copyist" over the course of the last couple years, the Galaxy Note series has always been a big exception, literally. Due to its size, some have labeled it a "phablet", half phone, half tablet. While it's both of those things, it's also neither. It's really a Wacom-style digitizer put into highly mobile form. And as anyone who's ever used a Wacom knows, it resembles a stylus in shape only.

So what happens when you put Apple's precision up against Samsung's power? The iPhone 5's elegance against the Galaxy Note 2's enormity? Let's take a look.

Samsung Galaxy Note 2: Hardware and software

Android Central is working on a full review now, and we'll add a link to it here as soon as it's live. In the meantime, here are James Richardson's first impressions and hands-on with the Galaxy Note 2.

Powered by a quad-core 1.6 GHz Exynos 4 processor, the Galaxy Note 2 has some substantial horsepower behind it, along with a plentiful 2GB of on-board RAM. Combined with a whopping 3100mAh battery, we're expecting some serious longevity from this device. The Note 2 runs Jelly Bean out of the box, making Samsung's phone/tablet hybrid the first to ship with Android 4.1. And it now sports a 5.55-inch (non-PenTile) HD SuperAMOLED 1280x720 display, protected by Gorilla Glass 2. The extra size of the phone does add few of grams to its weight -- at 180 grams it isn't light, but it's not terribly heavy considering its monstrous size.

There are also numerous software enhancements, including the ability to command an on-screen cursor by hovering the stylus over the screen. This can be used to peek into gallery folders, calendar events expandable areas. And the usual selection of Samsung drawing and note-taking apps is included too, as are all of the software features of the Galaxy S3.

• Galaxy Note 2 hands-on

Apple iPhone 5: Hardware and software

The iPhone 5 has a newly re-designed unibody aluminum chassis to allow for a bigger 4-inch screen in a phone that's 12% smaller by volume. It's taller but not wider, thinner and also lighter. That 4-inch screen also uses in-cell technology to combine the touch sensor right into the LCD. At 1136x640 and 326ppi, it's still backlit LED, and still IPS, and technically the best, most advanced panel on the planet for now. Apple also rolled their own, custom Apple A6 processor this time, based on ARM v7s, for amazing performance and excellent power management. There's still no NFC, but there is CDMA, HSPA, and international LTE.

iOS 6 comes loaded on the iPhone 5, and includes a new, controversial Maps app, some great extensions to Siri, deep Facebook integration, Passbook, and enhancements to FaceTime, Mail, Safari, Photo Stream, and Accessibility. And because Apple makes both the hardware and the software, there's no integration, no added interface layers, and a seamless experience overall.

• Complete iPhone 5 review
• Complete iOS 6 review

Apple iPhone 5 vs. Samsung Galaxy Note 2: The bottom line

While the story of the Apple iPhone 5 vs. Samsung Galaxy S3 might remain one of precision vs. power, when it comes to the iPhone 5 vs. the Galaxy Note 2, the elegance vs. enormity line requires deeper inspection. A 5.5-inch phone display is something that fits the needs of a very specific niche -- namely those that want more than a traditional phone -- those who essentially want a mobile notepad.

For this reason, for most people, the iPhone remains the default choice, and the perfect blend of killer design and absolute ease of use. If you don't like something about the iPhone, there are also a bunch of great alternatives to consider, including the Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC One X, or the upcoming Nokia Lumia 920.

The Galaxy Note 2, due to its size and its Wacom technology, is a very, very specific one, and you'll likely know it you need it.

If you updated to iOS 6 on your iPhone 4S or iPhone 4 and despite all our battery life tips, still aren't getting enough power to get you through the day, or if you simply travel and need to recharge on the go, the PowerSkin Battery Case for iPhone is worth a look. Like other battery cases, the PowerSkin fits snugly over your iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S -- sorry, no iPhone 5 version available yet! -- and hooks into the Dock connector to supply power.

Unlike some competing cases, the PowerSkin isn't made out of hard plastic. It's soft and silicone, which means instead of you having to take it apart to put it on your iPhone, it's a single piece and you just slip your iPhone inside. The materials used for the PowerSkin also have some other advantages. First, they're light. The PowerSkin is lighter than a lot of other battery cases I've tried (though admittedly not sleeker). Second, the materials provide for a soft-touch finish, making it less likely you'll drop it to begin with. Third and most importantly, they're shock absorbing. So, it helps prevent you from dropping your iPhone, and when it can't prevent it, it helps your iPhone survive it. Double bonus. If you're going to have to deal with the extra bulk of a battery case, you might as well enjoy the benefits of some extra impact protection as well.

The PowerSkin Battery Case for iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 charges over USB and it'll charge your iPhone before topping itself up, meaning you'll have a fully charged iPhone and a fully charged PowerSkin at the end of the cycle. You can even sync with iTunes over the cable, if you haven't gone PC Free yet.

The battery inside the PowerSkin is 1500mAh which is roughly analogous to the one inside the iPhone, so you should get double the battery life overall. The PowerSkin has a battery level indicator that consists of 4 lights and shows you the remaining charge level -- 100%, 75%, 50%, 25%, or nothing. PowerSkin rates it as providing 5 extra hours of talk time and 200 extra hours of standby time.

The design is nice and the Matte Titanium PowerSkin model I was sent to review reminded me of the look of the original iPhone -- a metal back with a black swatch, albeit across the top instead of the bottom. My only nitpick is that the inside bottom of the PowerSkin doesn't join up flush with the bottom of the iPhone, leaving a gap, so dirt can get in. I'd prefer a closed design there.

All your iPhone buttons remain accessible when inside the PowerSkin Battery Case. There's a deep cutout for the ring/silence switch and volume buttons, but it's not too hard to get into. The on/off button is covered, however, and uses a pass-through which required quite a bit of pressure to successfully toggle. You might need to do some extra pushups first. The camera, likewise, is well cut out.

The good

• Provides as much power as a fully charged iPhone
• Silicone is light, soft-touch, and shock absorbing

The bad

• Botton doesn't sit flush

The bottom line

If you're rocking an iPhone 4S or an iPhone 4 and you absolutely need to make it through the day and then some, the PowerSkin Charge case is a solid choice. If you want something slimmer or sleeker, you'll need to look at other options, but if you don't mind the bulk offset by the lightness, soft-touch, and shock absorbing properties of the silicone, give the PowerSkin a look.

$69.99 - Buy now

When Apple changed the dock connector on the latest iPhone 5, new iPod touch and new iPod nano there was a lot or controversy over the decision mainly due to incompatibility problems with with expensive speaker docks and car audio systems. Thankfully the guys at CableJive are right on the ball as usual and are already shipping a solution to the problem.

So you love your brand new iPod or iPhone 5, but you wish you could use it with your old 30-pin iPod docking station or car stereo system, right? We've got just the solution for you! Introducing our dockBoss+ iPhone 5 Kit. Combine this kit with the Lightning-to-USB cable that came with your new iDevice, and you'll be able to charge and listen to audio from your Lightning-compatible iPod or iPhone through any iPod 30-pin docking station or system.

The dockBoss+ cable has a female USB port on one end which is where you connect in your own Lightning cable; this enables charging of your iPhone 5. The other end has a female dock connector which you clip into your speaker dock or dock connector cable from your car kit. If your equipment supports direct digital audio input, which a lot of high end speaker systems do then that's all you need to do. Your iPhone 5 will be charging and playing back high quality music through your dock. If your equipment doesn't support digital audio input CableJive has you covered there too. Simply plug the supplied 3.5mm audio patch cable into your iPhone 5 and plug the other end into the dockBoss+ adaptor and now you will have music playback and charging.

The dockBoss+ iPhone 5 kit is already available from CableJive and costs $29.95 plus shipping. CableJive have some really interesting products to make your life easier and are certainly worth checking out. When Apple changed the charging pins on the 30-pin dock connector a few years ago, CableJive were the first with an in-line adaptor which prolonged the life of my car audio interface by a few years and saved me a lot of money.

Do you like the look of CableJive's dockBoss+ iPhone 5 kit? Will you be picking one up to prolong the life of your current speaker dock or car audio interface?

Source: CableJive

Flurry for Twitter is a new iPhone twitter app in the App Store that is just absolutely stunning in design. It features gorgeous animations, intuitive gestures, great sounds, and more. Flurry for Twitter is by no means "fully featured", and although I'm always one to argue that less is more, Ash Apps may have left out a little too much to justify Flurry's price.

Flurry for iPhone isn't your average Twitter app. Sure, it offers the basic functions of any Twitter app, but Flurry presents them in a unique and artistic way. Every swipe and tap offers a subtle sound that you actually want to hear and actions like refreshing your timeline and posting a tweet include animations that are almost addicting to watch. For example, tweets will load by flipping up your screen and your timeline with give the illusion of backing up when your create a tweet.

Unfortunately, the fancy gestures, sounds, and animations, aren't quite enough to make Flurry a compelling buy. One of the features I was most surprised to find missing from Flurry is auto-refresh. If you want to see if any new tweets have come in, even when you first open the app, you are required to pull down to refresh. Flurry also doesn't include little thumbnails of photos in your timeline even though this feature has become the norm in other Twitter apps. And one of the biggest deal-breakers off all -- no push notifications.

The good

• Easy access to tweet actions by swiping on tweets
• Fast, beautiful, and non-intrusive animations
• Innovative Swipe-Back navigation system
• Conversation include in Tweet details
• Fun sounds
• Multiple Accounts and Lists support
• Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability support

The bad

• Crashes at during the second screen of the tutorial at initial launch
• No auto refresh
• No thumbnail previews of images
• No push notifications

The bottom line

Flurry for Twitter is a gorgeous Twitter app for the iPhone that has a lot of potential. But with highly important and valued features like auto refresh and push notifications missing, I can't recommend Flurry for anything more than eye candy -- and at $4.99, that's pretty expensive, especially when full-featured apps like Tweetbot, Twitterrific, and Twittelator Neue are available for less. However, if you have faith that developers will continue to add features to Flurry, you may want to grab it now since Twitter limits the number of tokens available to each 3rd party Twitter developer.

$4.99 - Download Now

I've read more than I ever wanted to about maps this week, but this story about how the original, Google-powered Maps.app was built for the original iPhone caught my attention. Here it s from Nick Wingfield and Brian X. Chen of The New York Times:

Including a maps app on the first iPhone was not even part of the company's original plan as the phone's unveiling approached in January 2007. Just weeks before the event, Mr. Jobs ordered a mapping app to show off the capabilities of the touch-screen device.

Two engineers put together a maps app for the presentation in three weeks, said a former Apple engineer who worked on iPhone software, and who declined to be named because he did not want to speak publicly about his previous employer. The company hastily cut a deal with Google to use its map data.

2 engineers. 3 weeks. Apple has spent the last year or more and who knows how many engineering hours trying to roll a new maps app. It looks nice, but iOS 6 Maps currently locates my house in the middle of a park, when I try to find a place to get my car rust proofed -- because winter is coming -- I get the wrong area code and a phone number that consists only of 443-0, and if I want to take a train downtown I suddenly need to buy an app for that.

Yet in 2007 Google's data was good enough for 2 Apple engineers to make a decent, if feature limited iPhone app in 3 weeks. That just goes to show you how important data quality is for something like maps, and how little a nice looking interface matters when you can't find something on it.

Apple's CEO, Tim Cook has already apologized for the current status of iOS 6 Maps, but not for taking away Google's much more reliable data (even though the results seem to have been fairly predictable. I don't expect him to either, any more than I expect Apple to apologize for dumping Safari RSS or X11.

People keep saying iOS 6 Maps will get better just by virtue of all of us using it. I'll correct my house, and use Google to find and correct the phone number of the anti-rust place (no idea how I can help fix the lack of train information though...) But it's going to take a lot more than me, or any of us, simply feeding Apple data to make a proper maps app. It's going to take Apple investing as heavily and determinedly as Google has over the last decade, but doing it much, much, much faster. It's going to take tons of money and a Herculean effort. Apple has tons of money. Let's hope Cook and company are serious about putting in the effort.

The Times also repeats that Google was "blindsided" by Apple ditching their mapping data, which at this point is so ridiculous as to just make Google look disingenuous at best and deceptive at worst. If Apple still used Google's data, iOS 6 Maps would be fantastic. Google still has Google data. The moment Apple bought a mapping company in 2009 Google should have had an independent iOS app started as a skunkworks project. The moment iOS 6 Maps leaked before WWDC, Google should have been going full tilt. 2 engineers in 3 weeks? How does Google not have an iOS Maps app of their own ready yet?

Source: The New York Times

If you just got a new iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad then you've also got Notification Center. It's Apple's attempt to bring order and sanity to the myriad alarms, alerts, messages, calls, announcements, and game challenges that flood our daily lives. But first you may need to bring order and sanity to Notification Center.

How Notification Center works

iOS notifications are presented in one of three different ways:

• Lock screen notifications
• Notification Center
• Banners and popups

All of the implementations show the icon of the app issuing the notification to the left, and a brief except of the alert content to the right. All three, however, work in different ways.

How Lock screen notifications work

If your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad is asleep (i.e. the screen is dark), Lock screen notifications will light it up briefly and show it to you. That way, if your device is sitting on a table nearby, you'll see the notification come in and be able to deal with it immediately if you want to. If you don't want to deal with a notification immediately, the Lock screen will keep a list of all the new ones for you, and show them to you the next time you wake up your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.

Depending on how many notifications come in, and what kind of notifications they are, you'll be presented with them in one of a few different ways.

• If it's a single notification, you get a single popup.
• If it's multiple notifications, you get a stacked list view.
• If it's a single notification but there have been previous unread notifications, you get a single popup but can view the complete list by swiping down from the time/date bar (a small gripper icon indicates when this is possible.)
• If it's a notification along with an option, for example an alarm with a snooze option, a button will also appear for that action.

You can slide notification icons to unlock your iPhone, iPod, or iPad, just as you would the normal slide to unlock control. Unlocking with the icon will send you straight to the app that issued the alert, and to the specific alert within that app.

Once you unlock, you also clear all Lock screen notifications.

Notification Center

When you're using your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad you can pull down Notification Center at any time by swiping downwards from the status bar. It can be dismissed by swiping back up from the small gripper icon at the bottom of the screen.

When Notification Center is open, it can display a Weather and/or Stocks widgets on the iPhone or iPod touch, and a Sharing widget on all iOS devices. (Because the iPad has no built-in Weather or Stocks apps, it has no Weather or Stock widgets in Notification Center.) If you don't like the location shown in the Weather widget, or the stocks listed in the Stock widget, or if you just want to turn one or all of them off entirely, you can configure them in the Settings app.

Tapping the Weather or Stock widget will take you to the Weather or Stocks app. Tapping the Twitter or Facebook button on the Sharing widget will open a Tweet or Facebook post sheet.

On all iOS devices, Notification Center can also display a list of pending notifications. Each list is headed by the corresponding app icon and name to the left, the date if it's for the calendar, and a far-too-tiny X icon to the right. If you don't like the default organization, you can change it in Settings app.

Tapping the X icon clears all notifications for that app. Tapping anywhere on the alert will take you to the app to view the information. You can control which apps and how many notifications per app are displayed in Settings.

Banners and popups

When your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad is unlocked and new notification comes in, a banner or popup notification will appear.

Banner notifications are typically used for non-urgent notifications like messages, mail, game challenges -- even turn-by-turn navigation directions. They show up briefly at the top of the screen and are animated with a roll down, roll back up effect. Tapping a Notification Banner sends you to the app that issued the alert and shows you the information. While far less obtrusive than the old-style popup notifications, the Banners can still obscure information and obstruct buttons, and when they roll-down unexpectedly can cause you to accidentally tap them rather then the top bar or button you'd begun to tap.

If a banner is getting in your way, you can touch them, pull slightly, and flick them away (technically you're beginning to pull down the Notification Center shade, which dismisses them, and then pushing the shade away again all in one smooth curve.

Popups are usually used for urgent notifications like alarms, reminders, and appointments. They pop up in the center of the screen and won't go away until you acknowledge you received them.

If you don't want popups or banners for a certain app, you can turn them off in Settings or if you just want to mute them temporarily, you can use Do Not Disturb.

The iPhone app for Digg v1 has been updated to be a universal app for both iPhone and iPad. The iPad version offers the same version as the iPhone, just offers a more pleasant reading experience on the iPad's larger screen. Speaking of larger screens, this update also includes support for the iPhone 5's bigger display.

In addition to iPad support, Digg has added a "Reading Sync" feature that allows you to close the app in the middle of a store on one device and pick up where you left off on your other devices. You can also share articles via text and some of the UI elements have been simplified.

Have you used Digg for iPad, yet? The first thing I noticed is that scrolling through thumbnails of stories is a bit laggy. I'm snob when it comes to polished scrolling in apps, so this was enough for me to be turned off and close the app.

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Facebook Messenger for iPhone has gone 4.0 and includes some UI improvements as well as support for the iPhone 5's larger display. The conversation view has a new design and now you can swipe left anywhere in the app to quickly see a list of who's available to send message. At the top of this list you can also mark the friends you message most as favorites. The speed and reliability of Facebook Messenger has also been noticeably improved.

I never thought the day would come where I started liking Facebook apps (no pun intended), but Facebook has been doing a great job with their recent updates. This update to Facebook Messenger is no exception.

What are your thoughts on Facebook Messenger 2.0?

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