Siri now lets users access the entire Best Buy product catalog

9to5 Staff

As noted by RazorianFly, Siri can now help users retrieve the best deals for consumer electronics and gadgets sold at Best Buy. How does she handle this, you might ask? Well, Siri gets some of its answers from the acclaimed answer-engine Wolfram|Alpha.

Wolfram Research announced yesterday they are leveraging data from Best Buy’s public application programming interface, allowing users to browse more than 35,000 appliances and consumer electronics products sold by Best Buy.

Third-party applications and services that integrate with Siri automatically benefit, so Siri is now able to deliver answers to your product-related queries sourced from Best Buy’s vast database.

In addition, taking into account Wolfram|Alpha’s clever decision-making and analysis engine and Siri’s natural-language interface, you can ask her to, let’s say, list plasma TVs larger than 50-inches. Even though Best Buy-sourced answers are laid out as any other information Siri sources from the web, Apple could -in the future- take advantage of Best Buy’s public APIs to produce rich results sporting product images, categories, more meta data and so forth.

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Your best Black Friday deals are on at 9to5Mac and 9to5Toys

9to5 Staff

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Like everyone, we’re gearing up for Black Friday with the best online and offline deals on electronics products that our readers are after.  Always ongoing, 9to5Toys.com has the best deals on Apple products and accessories from around the web, including some cool new stuff you might not have seen elsewhere.  However, starting on Black Friday morning at Midnight, we’ll be promoting the best deals throughout the day on 9to5mac.com, making sure you have the lowest price options on all of your Apple products and accessories.

As always, we aren’t just going to barf out a list of prices from retailers.  We curate to only find exceptional deals.  For instance, we were the first to find the Apple Store Black Friday Ad which showcases the 11.6″ MacBook Air starting at $898.

Also, no one touches this Best Buy $200 off  13-inch MacBook Air we dug up earlier this week.  We’re seeing 1080P displays falling below $100 (here and here) at MacConnection already.  We’re finding iPods and iPads which will be at their lowest prices ever and often be bundled with free accesories and giftcards.  There is tons of Free Music at Amazon. The list goes on and on.

Make sure to stop by on Black Friday and as always 9to5Toys for the latest deals. Read more

aTV Flash (black) hack from FireCore goes 1.0, on sale

9to5 Staff

You don’t need this software to hack an AppleTV but it makes things easier.

aTV Flash (black) is a user-friendly software package that supercharges your new black AppleTV, unleashing a plethora of new functionality. Don’t worry about the technical details – aTV Flash (black) is simple to use and safe for your AppleTV. Installation is a snap and doesn’t require any physical changes to the AppleTV.

MacUpdate has it for the sale price of $19.99 today only.  AppleTV (2010) went on sale for $89.99 at Amazon matching Best Buy so you are looking at $110 for the whole shebang.  If you have an old AppleTV, they’ve got you covered there as well.  Full features below:

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Review: Lifeproof case is like a dry suit for your iPhone

Seth Weintraub

I had a chance this week to demo a iPhone 4 and 4S case from a company called LifeProof that purports to offer 100% waterproof and military graded shockproof protection to iPhone 4 and 4S.  There are other cases that offer this type of protection, but this one is relatively thin and also allows you to hear the speakers and use the mic thanks to micro-holed that are so small that water can’t get through but sound can.  It also allows easy plugging in of a charging cable (forget docks) or headphone set with a convenient little O-ring adapter.

Well, it is certainly waterproof (even if it is really hard to let your iPhone go into the water the first time – what if you forgot to snap even one bit and it leaks?!  There goes $600!).  But it does work as advertised.  At the showstoppers event, LifeProof were throwing them on the carpeted floor which didn’t seem all that harrowing.  At home, I dropped it on hardwood from waist high (accidentally, incidentally) and the phone didn’t even see a scratch.  The underwater images below were taken after the drop so the case appears to have weathered the storm as well.

Whenever my toddler gets the iPhone 4, he also gets the LifeProof case.  You can pick up the LifeProof Cases at Best Buy for $79 in Black or White Read more

15% off Apple iTunes Gift Cards at Best Buy

9to5 Staff

From 9to5Toys.com:

Best Buy takes 15% off all Apple iTunes Gift Cards. With free shipping, that’s the best deal we could find on these cards and the first time we’ve seen them discounted since June, when Target took 20% off in-store only. After the discount, a..

$15 gift card costs $12.75

$50 gift card costs $42.50

$100 gift card costs $85, among others (3 pack of $10 for $25).

They’re good for music, videos, iBooks and iOS/Mac app purchases. Read more