BGR Daily Breaking Stories

Daily Headlines TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2014

Revealed: 12 secret iPhone apps only Apple employees have access to There are nearly 1.3 million apps currently available in Apple’s iOS App Store. Spanning from media players, music streaming apps and mobile messaging solutions to email apps, calendars, news apps and everything in between, you can find an application to handle just about anything you can think of in the App Store. But there are some secret iPhone apps that are nowhere to be found in Apple’s on-device application portal because only Apple employees are allowed to use them. And now, they have been revealed.  MORE → Here is everything on sale at Best Buy for Black Friday Tech fans and gadget lovers are surely waiting for this year’s Black Friday sales bonanza to kick off, and the first Black Friday ads have already been published, including Best Buy’s 47-page Black Friday listing which was dug up by BFAds.  MORE → BlackBerry teaches us how to ditch our iPhones and Android phones for a BlackBerry phone BlackBerry’s share of the smartphone market might be at an all-time low right now, but that hardly means the company is done pushing its devices and services to enterprise customers and, on occasion, to certain groups of consumers as well. With BlackBerry’s stock up more than 69% over the past 12 months, investors appear to be more than content with the company’s efforts, and confident that those efforts will pay off down the road. The company has used a variety of tools and tactics in its effort to get customers to dump more popular platforms in favor of BlackBerry 10, and now a new post on BlackBerry’s official blog shows us how easy the switch can be.  MORE → Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak thinks large iPhones launched too late Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told CNN Money in an interview that Apple could have done a better job of battling Samsung in past years by launching a big-screen iPhone earlier than it did. The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are Apple’s first iPhones to tout significantly larger displays, with screens measuring 4.7 inches and 5.5 inches, respectively, and the company is currently selling as many iPhone 6 units as it can make, according to its most recent quarterly earnings call.  MORE → It turns out Samsung had a tough time making metal iPhones After having defended for years against criticism for the plastic in its Android smartphones, Samsung has finally come out with smartphones made of metal, albeit they’re not the flagships some users expected, and they look too much like old-generation iPhones. But it appears that making metal smartphones isn’t an easy thing to do even for a giant such as Samsung, SamMobile has learned.  MORE → This is Microsoft’s first Lumia smartphone, and it’s not spectacular Just as previously teased, Microsoft on Tuesday announced the first Windows Phone smartphone that doesn’t have Nokia branding, the Microsoft Lumia 535. And just as previous reports suggested, the first Microsoft Lumia phone isn’t a flagship device. Instead, the handset offers mid-range specs and will be quite affordable when it launches later this month.  MORE → One online tool will ensure you get all the best deals this holiday season The most stressful time of the year has arrived: it’s holiday shopping season, and the chances of your bank account coming out unscathed are slim to none. Thankfully, The Wall Street Journal is debuting its Christmas Sale Tracker this year to keep consumers up to speed with all the best deals from around the Internet, as retailers constantly readjust their prices to stay one step ahead of the competition.  MORE → Europeans won’t be able to get one of the year’s best Android phones The Droid Turbo is Motorola’s latest flagship device — and one of its best ones yet — but not many international buyers will be able to get their hands on one. Exclusive to Verizon in the U.S., the Droid Turbo will be sold as the Moto Maxx in certain Central and South American markets, but that doesn’t mean the handset is coming to Europe as well.  MORE → Delusional TV execs say people love paying $100 a month for hundreds of channels they don’t watch With the launch of HBO’s standalone streaming service hitting sometime next year, you may think that the traditional cable bundle is starting to come, well, unbundled. Cable and TV executives deny this is the case since the pay TV bundle has been a hugely lucrative business model for them and they want to keep the bundle around for many more years to come. BuzzFeed has a nice roundup about what TV bigwigs are saying about the future of bundles and, wouldn’t you know it, they all think people still love paying big sums of money for hundreds of channels they never watch.  MORE → Why Microsoft’s new CEO took a hatchet to Ballmer’s ‘devices and services’ plan New Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has done things very differently from the way former CEO Steve Ballmer used to do business, although toward the end of his term Ballmer recognized that Microsoft seriously needed to change to remain a dominant force in the tech world. Ballmer’s strategy was to reposition Microsoft as a “devices and services” company that would produce its own hardware that acted as a showcase for its software and services such as Microsoft Office, Azure and more.  MORE →