iPhone - page 405

Rumors are circulating about a new design feature in the upcoming iPhone 5: An edge-to-edge screen.

The scuttlebutt originated a couple of months ago with a post on iDealsChina, and has been re-enforced by the appearance of a case for such a design on AliBaba, a disreputable online clearinghouse for buying cheap crap from China.

It all sounds pretty shady, but these kinds of sources predicted other Apple products in the past. Even more compelling is that the Wall Street Journal claims a source that has seen a prototype of such a design.

The rumor is either true or false. Who knows? Regardless, an edge-to-edge screen makes sense. If it’s possible to engineer, it’s likely to be built.

Here’s why: There is a fundamental tension in mobile design between minimum case size and maximum screen real estate. For the overall size of the phone or tablet: the smaller, the better. For the size of the screen: the bigger, the better.

Something’s gotta give.

At the top of this week’s list of must-have iOS applications is one of our favorite instant messaging tools: IM+ Pro. It has already featured in our list of the ‘Best iOS Apps for Instant Messaging‘, but the introduction of its new Neighbors service meant we couldn’t help but shout about it again.

TweetyPop is a super new Twitter application from TapFactory that allows you to view and interact with your tweets in a unique new way. It throws away the chronological list you get with every other Twitter client and delivers a 3 dimensional Twitter space.

Adobe first announced its first three Photoshop Touch applications at Photoshop World back in March, and they’re now available to download from the App Store. Color Lava, Eazel and Nav are all designed for the iPad and aim to enhance your desktop Photoshop experience with the help of a touch-based device.

Find out more about the applications above and check out OmniOutliner – this week’s final must-have – after the break.

(Update: Many — but not all — of the users in the Apple Support Communities are now reporting that the activation servers are back online, and their devices working again.)

Looks like the Lion Beta 3 Preview might not be the only problem Apple’s dealing with this morning.

As of last night, an ongoing problem with Apple’s activation servers seems to be leaving many iDevices recently updated or restored to iOS 4.3.3 bricked around the world.

Remember that gorgeous $32 cardboard desk concept from yesterday? Wouldn’t one of these Dieter Rams inspired wooden iPhone and iPad stands by Frog look absolutely great on the corner of one?

In addition to unveiling a display today that could give the iPad 3 a Retina Display, Samsung has just debuted a new foldable AMOLED display that could be used to make your next iPad fit into your pocket, your next iPhone an iFlipPhone.

The courts smacked Apple down today in a suit against Kodak, and it could cost Cupertino up to $1 billion in licensing fees.

Adding insult to injury, the ITC judge also ruled one of Apple’s patents invalid.

If you thought Android would be the choice of the pin-stripe business crowd, think again. Turns out the iPhone is the pick for the cubicle, as well as the art studio.

“A club to make them do what we want.” That’s the way one Google executive described the gauntlet device makers must pass to get Android certification. So much for being “open.”

I loved Tweetbot in my review and I firmly believe it’s one of the nicest Twitter clients to grace our iPhones, however, when it first launched it was lacking some features that we are looking forward to in future updates. One of those features is landscape view, and thankfully this comes with the Tweetbot 1.1 update that’s just hit the App Store.

I love the soft tappity-tap of popping out an email, text, IM or 348-page novel on my iPhone’s virtual keyboard. Some people, though, prefer banging around on actual keys.

For them, then, NUU’s new MiniKey might make sense (currently $80 at Amazon): It’s a Bluetooth-enabled keyboard/case with a frilly feature list that includes backlit keys, text-editing shortcuts and a power-saving function that puts the little guy to sleep by severing the BT connection after a lapse of activity; start typing again and voila, it reconnects.

Looking for a new camera with the look and power of a DSLR, but in a smaller digicam footprint? You might want to check out Panasonic’s new Lumix G3 Micro Four Thirds.

A handful of components said to come from the guts of the next iPhone have hit the web. Or they might just be a piece of junk taken from some tinker’s pockets. If they’re for real, though, consider at least a couple of the juicier rumors about the hardware of the iPhone 5 debunked.

Sources in Apple’s supply chain have revealed that Foxconn Electronics is currently facing supply and labor shortages that could delay shipments of both the iPhone 4 and the iPad 2 during the second quarter.

As jailbreak tweaks go, this one is probably the most simple, but it’s also rather handy. It’s never a good idea to continue to charge a battery way beyond its full charge, and this tweak ensures it doesn’t happen by alerting you when your device’s battery is full.

Sick of iPhoto ’11 splitting all your events into fragments when you import your iPhone photos? Version 9.1.3 is here, and should set you right.

The popular IM+: Instant Messaging application from Shape Services has just been updated to introduce an innovative new feature called ‘Neighbors’, which offers users the ability to find new friends in their vicinity who share the same common interests.

When users are signed into the Neighbors service, they will be greeted by a map that allows them to locate and chat with friends in their area, post and view local announcements, and initiate conversations with other people nearby.

Wow. Is developer GhostBird really shoe-horning this much functionality into the second iteration of their legendary photo-editing app, PhotoForge? Looks like they’ve crammed practically every post-processing tool and feature on the planet into what will probably amount to an under-$5 app: curves, real layer support (including masking), ability to edit raw files (and images up to 20MB), editing timeline and a big pile of sharing options.

Add to that a smorgasbord of filters that simulate papers, processes, cameras and you’ve got the makings of what looks like the killer photo app. GhostBird also claims fast processing times — how they’re able to pull this one off, and just how fast it’ll clock on the slower processors of the 3G/s is the big question, though; we’ll know in a couple of weeks, the timeframe the developer has suggested for the app’s release.

It sounds like the poster boy (or product) for “have your cake and eat it too”: Third Rail Mobility‘s new backpack-battery system is a slim case (callled the Slim Case, just to be confusing) that allows their removable 1250 mAh Smart Battery to snap on. Smart? Heck, the battery sounds like a genius: Besides being able to power other electronic devices off its micro USB port, “stacked Smart Batteries will automatically and seamlessly transfer power to create as many fully-charged batteries as possible,” says the press release.

The whole kit runs $90, or the case and battery can be bought individually for $40 and $60, respectively. And right now, it’s only available for the iPhone 4 (Android flavors coming soon).

Are Apple sales cooling off? That’s the belief of one Wall Street analyst who tells investors Wednesday the Cupertino, Calif. firm may have seen a 7 percent drop in April sales, compared to a historical increase of nearly 5 percent increase for the third quarter. But when we’re talking about Apple, a “slowdown” needs to be put in some context.

Now that several reports show the iPad eating into sales of traditional low-cost PCs, the blame game has begun – starting with Acer. You may recall Apple sales in the U.S. recently surpassed Acer, which fell 42 percent. The computer maker’s former CEO now blames the company’s slowness in responding to the iPad threat.

“I already saw if we want to become a major player in this new world, we needed to do certain investments, mainly on software and on smartphones and tablets, on touch,” ex-CEO Gianfranco Lanci told a blog earlier this week. Lanci resigned in late March amid reports he was blamed for the iPad cannibalizing Acer’s market.

iAd slots in iOS applications designed for children will no longer be filled with adverts, according to an email one developer has received from Apple.

Mike Zornek, the developer of the Dex a Pokemon browser application for iPhone and iPod touch, noticed that his iAd fill rates had dropped and emailed Apple’s iAd Support Team for an explanation:

As promised, Apple sent V.P. Guy Tribble to Washington to address Senator Al Franken and other stuffy politicians about the so-called LocationGate scandal.

Cupertino’s message? Same as it ever was: we don’t track user locations. Period.

“We do not share customer information with third parties without our customers’ explicit consent. Apple does not track users’ locations. Apple has never done so and has no plans to do so,” said Tribble.

Curiously, while Apple may not track users’ locations, the United States Department of Justice would like mobile providers to start, allowing the Department of Justice to attain records that would “enable law enforcement to identify a suspect’s smartphone based on the IP addresses collected by Web sites that the suspect visited.”

What’s good for the goose isn’t necessarily what’s good for the gander. Apparently, it’s only okay for the government to keep track of what you do with your smartphone, not Apple.

A digital game manual discovered on Steam for the upcoming Duke Nukem Forever release features some information regarding Apple’s App Store that suggests the title could be headed to iOS devices.

Starjimstar from the Touch Arcade forums found that at the bottom of all the legal text in the game’s documentation, there’s some “Apple App Store Additional License Terms.”

A new jailbreak tweak that’s just hit Cydia allows users to upload photos to Facebook directly from the photo library on their iOS device without having to use a dedicated application. Native FB Upload allows you to select your photo and send it to Facebook just as easily as you can to MobileMe.

While the App Store is full of Facebook applications that allow you to upload photos, this $1.99 tweak from Tyler Nettleton (@InfectionX) cuts out the middle man. Once installed you can select a photo in your camera roll, or any other photo album, and tap the ‘export’ button in the bottom left that you’d usually use to send an image via MMS, email, or to MobileMe. You’ll have a new option to upload to Facebook.

Seems practically everyone has cottoned on to the idea that the iPhone makes for a stellar cycling computer — because hardware that turns the iPhone into a feature-packed riding companion keeps popping up. The latest is Velocomp’s iBike Dash series of app-enhanced hardware stashed inside their waterproof Phone Booth case that work with its free iBike app.

The unit starts out at $200 for the waterproof case with built-in ANT+ receiver and a speed sensor for your bike; $329 will bag you the Deluxe kit that adds a heart-rate strap, cadence sensor and supplemental battery for the iPhone. Velocomp also sells the Phone Booth case only — without the ANT+ electronics in it — for $50.

The waterproof case looks pretty rugged, but pricing strikes us as a tad steep compared with other kits out there from Wahoo, Digifit and New Potato Technologies (even though we were less-than-enthusiastic about the latter).