Shutdown of Apple iOS piracy service Installous seems to be a short lived relief for App developers as a new Chinese application is suddenly in limelight offering an "easy-to-use" alternative for "Installous" - and the kicker is that now the device does not even have to be jailbreaked in order to use this one.

The Windows desktop application and iOS application offered by Chinese startup named kuiayong enables any user to simply plug-in and download paid AppStore applications for free, no matter which iOS version and whether jailbroken or not.

Hackulous - the development team behind the Apptrackr website and Installous iOS application which have been one of the most popular sources to get pirated paid apps published on Apple's App Store announced closure of there services with immediate effect.

The website now shows the following notice and Installous app displays : "Outdated version. Installous will now terminate" or "API Error. API unavailable." followed by an forced quit.

Hactivating an Apple iPhone can be a tricky business specially when your iPhone 3G/3GS is having the "iPad 6.15" baseband for retaining software unlock. After, repeated failed attempts to have an Apple iPhone 3GS running iOS 4.0 with baseband 6.15 hactivate using custom IPSW and redsn0w the following worked for me.

With all the IPSW firmware versions, various Apple devices and a variety of tools for jailbreaking the whole process becomes very confusing. While working with custom firmwares and jailbreaking one must follow the correct sequence of steps with right tools and software versions, otherwise iTunes throws an error and the device gets locked down in a restore or DFU loop.

One such often encountered error while restoring an custom IPSW file using iTunes is - "An unknown error occurred (Error 1600)." as shown below.

When a giant like Microsoft has a very little effect on the war between Pepsi and Coca-Cola of cellphone operating-systems - Apple iOS and Google Android. What can one expect from a new mobile OS which claims to offer the very first real alternatives to these operating system. Watch the Sailfish OS video demonstration below and decide for yourself.

As we approach Thanksgiving, the holiday much anticipated by the Americans, more and more companies give significant discounts on their popular applications and some even go so far as to provide for a complete free offer. And today the picked freebie is named iMobie AppTrans - a specialized Windows Application made to transfer iOS Apps from old iDevice onto the new-bought iPad 4, iPad mini, iPod touch 5, as well as the iPhone 5.

Probably you need to keep a watchful eye on this if you are facing such a problem - “How to move my Apps to the new device along with the intact App data (e.g. game progress, achievements and personal settings). I would definitely hate the idea of starting a game on their new device from the very beginning.”

iTunes do allow you an option to restore App data from existing backup, but it is risking losing all personal data on the half way. And generally it is not worth a full iTunes restore just for moving few Apps. Another advantage of AppTrans is that if you want to add just one (or very few) game onto iPhone/iPad, you don’t have to perform a full sync. These newly added Apps even won’t erase existing ones.

Of course this can be done via iCloud, but once you put one step closer to iCloud, you will find NOT ALL iPhone iPad game saves (records and progress) are available for iCloud backup because only select-few developers even care to associate their games with iCloud. Besides, the task is likely to be long and arduous side backup, especially since it is better to have a stable and fast internet connection to iCloud as transfer tens if not hundreds of megs of applications may be long very long…

Now, AppTrans will make all things easier by providing three intuitive App Transfer modes. You are able to choose to transfer Apps to new iDevice with or without App data, or only copy App data directly from old device to the new one, no data losing. AppTrans is just as what you expected - an easy-to-use yet powerful tool.

We have seen the excellent Google Voice capabilities in Android 4.1 and how it beats Apple Siri hands down. The good news is Apple iPhone users without Siri, now need not mess with hacks and tweaks like SiriProxy to get voice search functionality as Google has now officially launched the Google Voice Search for Apple iOS.

The new Google Search app for iPhone and iPad lets users perform enhanced voice searches using accurate voice recognition technology which works with many different accents world-over. Watch the demo videos posted ahead.

Apple has made changes to how they will be distributing Apple products in India, and as scheduled the latest Apple iPhone 5 will be made available to Indian users officially from coming November, 2nd.

As evident from the pre-order page at airtel, the 16GB iPhone 5 will be available from 02.11.2012 with shipping in 5-6 days at Rs. 45,500.

However, Indian customers need not to wait as cheaper deals to buy Apple iPhone 5 are already available at trading portals as shown below.

Users relying on software carrier unlock ultrasn0w must use sn0wbreeze created custom IPSW firmware to upgrade there iDevice to an upgraded iOS version without updating the baseband which breaks the unlock. However, Apple iTunes prevents users from upgrading or restoring to these custom IPSW files and errors out the process with codes 3194 and 1600 - for which we have shared solution earlier. Here is an step-by-step guide to restore an custom IPSW file to iPhone using iTunes the correct way without any errors.

Apple blocks users from restoring older iOS firmware's, while this is a good security feature and a method to avoid OS fragmentation. This also prevents users from using jailbroken and carrier-unlockable software versions.

This practice makes iOS upgrade difficult for users relying on software unlock like ultrasn0w which is supported on older basebands only, If you are trying to upgrade an Apple device to an non-supported iOS version even when using TinyUmbrella - the iTunes restore process may throw up error 3194 and 1600 as shown below.

Here are solutions to get past these errors and flash custom, snowbreezed IPSW files to your Apple iPhone, iPad and iPod's.