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After being invited by Apple to perform an audit at Foxconn, the Fair Labor Association released its findings today in a report. The findings were a bit mixed, saying they found wide scale issues primarily around amount of overtime worked, compensation, and safety. Apple and Foxconn agreed to improve on the FLA’s findings by 2013.

Labor group Human Rights First has reacted this evening, saying that Apple and Foxconn’s changes will help reform supply chains as a whole and will be a turning point for the industry. But primarily, the changes will be “life-changing” for the workers.

After months of denying and downplaying its problems, RIM seems to finally be waking up from its delusional fantasy world and accepting that it’s in extremely dire straights. That was the big take away from the company’s quarterly financial call Thursday evening.

The call was the first headed by the company’s new CEO Thorsten Heins, who took over earlier this year after the resignation of co-CEOS Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis. Heins made it clear that he understands the challenges facing RIM (as well as the delusional thinking that created many of them) and that he cannot guarantee the company’s success as it struggles realign itself to the current mobile market.

IBM, once known as on of the most straight-laced companies in the world, has jumped on the BYOD bandwagon with a level of enthusiasm rarely seen in such large and established enterprises. The company has big plans for BYOD – rolling out a program out that covers all 440,000 employees worldwide.

That’s a big challenge and one that Big Blue has yet achieve. However, the company currently has mobility solutions deployed to about a quarter of its workforce (120,000 users) two thirds of whom (80,000)  are supplying their own devices and service plans. The company, which had been a predominantly BlackBerry shop, began to shift gears as iPhones and other devices began showing up in its offices.

While not a model for every company, IBM’s BYOD policies can serve as a great starting point.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has long said that “no one in our industry is driving improvements for workers the way Apple is today,” and to put the company’s money where its mouth was, Cupertino invited the Fair Labor Association to do a thorough audit of working conditions at Foxconn.

Now the results are in, and there’s good news and bad news.

The bad news is that the Fair Labor Association found wide scale violations of Chinese labor laws, including the amount of overtime worked, the compensation received for overtime, and numerous health and safety risks, as well as “crucial communication gaps that have led to a widespread sense of unsafe working conditions among workers.”

The good news? Apple and Foxconn are fully on board fixing the issues. That’s why they agreed to the audit, and that’s why they’re committing to being compliant with all of the FLA’s guidelines by 2013. Oh, and they’re going to hire a lot more staff and workers to help even the load.

A mall war has broken out in China, as one mall is upset at another for working to open the world’s largest Apple Store. Yesterday, Apple put up posters advertising its new Store in the massive Parkland Mall in Dailan China. Neighboring mall Dalian Department Store quickly became concerned and sent its security team to knock the signs over. As you can see in the video below, havoc quickly ensued.

Have you ever wished that there was an easier way to check your data usage on the iPhone? For those of us that aren’t lucky enough to have a grandfathered unlimited plan, bits are precious. It can be too easy to blow through a 1GB data plan in a month’s time.

If your iPhone is jailbroken, you have access to a great tweak called Data Usage Monitor. Once installed, your usage will be shown unobtrusively in your iPhone’s status bar. The beauty is that it will only appear whenever you are using data.

If you like keeping your Apple TV jailbroken, bad news. While it’s not outright impossible that a jailbreak will be found for the third-generation, 1080p Apple TV, it’s going to be a lot more complicated than the one that was exploited for the second-gen version.

Earlier today, we reported on the variability in how companies can define BYOD programs. For some companies BYOD can mean access to just email while in others it can include a range of customer internal apps along with company-purchased selections for the App Store. The exact mix of allowed or supported functionality reflects the IT and management culture of an organization but it can be guided by what users feel they need most.

Email may be the lowest common denominator when it comes to BYOD because it is the most common use of mobile devices in the workplace. That statistic stands out in a new report on how businesses and employees are using mobile technology and how businesses are addressing BYOD as a trend.

Looking for a great deal on the tablet that proved to manufacturers that price matters? Amazon is offering up certified refurbished Kindle Fires at a ridiculous price of $139. It’s a limited time, limited quantity deal, so you’ll want to act fast. The Amazon Kindle Fire blazed into the tablet market with its perfect price and treasure trove of content. It was the first tablet to successfully steal a sliver of the market away from tablet titan Apple. At $199 it opened the door for budget conscious consumers to experience digital content in a new and exciting way. It was a good deal then and at $139, it’s a great deal now!

The era of the big box retailer is kaput. One the one hand, you’ve got online colossi like Amazon crushing brick-and-mortar retailers; on the other, you’ve got the juggernaut of Apple’s Retail Stores, showing everyone else how selling things in meatspace is done.

A couple years ago, the writing was on the wall when Circuit City went out of business. Now, it looks like it’s Best Buy’s turn. After posting a $1.7 billion quarterly loss last quarter, Best Buy is closing 50 stores and $800 million in costs.

2012 Mobile Game of the Year, The Dark Meadow, received a pretty major update on iOS today. Aside from all of the new features, the game has also gone freemium. The freemium version, entitled Dark Meadow: The Pact is a separate download on the App Store and as far as I can tell is exactly the same as the original paid version. The decision to go freemium may benefit the developers over the long term and is the reasoning for the jump. Although it is only available on iOS at the moment, it is scheduled to hit Android next month.

This iPhone 4 money clip is either the best or the stupidest solution to the wallet/iPhone carrying problem that I have ever seen. The trouble is, I can’t quite work out which it is.

Quick, what makes more money for Google: iOS or its own Android operating system? If you didn’t know anything about what a farce Android has become, you’d assume that Google was making more advertising revenue out of its own platform and ecosystem, but you’d be wrong: the search giant makes up to four times more off of iOS. Ouch.

Do you have an old film SLR lying around that you promise yourself you will one day load up with film and take out shooting? Well, forget about that — it’s just taking up space and picking up dust. You should instead do what Etsy-er Roberto Altieri does, and turn it into a dock for the camera you actually use every day: Your iPhone.

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You might look pretty dorky these days if you make a frame from your fingers and start sizing up the world around you. But it’s actually a surprisingly good way to separate out parts of the landscape, especially for artists using pencils or paint who may not be carrying a camera.

But what about combining the two? That’s just what the nerds have done down at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences in Japan. The Ubi-Camera is a tiny digicam which uses your fingers as the viewfinder, and even allows you to zoom.

Smartphones are close to becoming the primary type of mobile phones sold in the U.S. for the first time. Market research giant Neilsen’s latest analysis of the mobile industry shows that about half of all mobile phone owners in the country now own a smartphone – up significantly from this time last year.

In addition to smartphones gaining major traction, the company also released its data on the makeup of the U.S. smartphone market that shows gains by Apple’s iPhone and significant losses for RIM’s BlackBerry. Android, however, still manages to hold the biggest share of the market overall.

Back when I first moved back from Germany to the United States, one of the things I initially missed most about my previously Euro-centric digital lifestyle was, of course, Spotify. Depressed that the streaming music service hadn’t launched yet in the United States, I tried Rdio, a U.S. only analog.

Over the last year and a half, I’ve completely come around to Rdio as the superior service. It’s got a better interface — one that doesn’t look like it was designed as a Winamp skin circa 1997 — and really makes sharing and music discovery easy. It also, unlike Spotify, has a native iPad app.

The only problem with Rdio was that it was a fantastic music streaming service that I couldn’t recommend to my European friends. But now that’s all changed, or at least in the process of changing, because Rdio is coming to Europe.

The concept of employees bringing their own devices to the office has seen a meteoric rise in popularity over the past couple of years. When the term BYOD first entered the IT lexicon, most CIOs and systems administrators tended to shrug off the suggestion that their company might consider such a non-traditional approach. Today, surveys show more than fifty percent of organizations are considering or have already adopted BYOD policies.

While the concept of BYOD is pretty easy to grasp (companies actively support user-owned devices and may even encourage employees to bring their iPhones, iPads, and other devices into the office), exactly what BYOD translates to in the real world can vary widely.

During the whole ‘antennagate’ debacle back in 2010, Apple attempted to appease iPhone 4 adopters by offering them one of its bumpers, or another case from a third-party manufacturer for free. Those who didn’t think a free $30 bumper was good enough can now claim $15 compensation.

This is the Galileo, a tilting, spinning 360˚ camera mount for your iPhone. It can pan, enable cool moving time-lapses, or even just work as a powered iPhone dock (it comes with a USB cable and a lithium-polymer battery).

But when you see the video below, with its wonderful a-ha moment, you’ll want one right away.

Instapaper has just been bumped from v4.1 to 4.1.1, But despite this tiny numerical increment, there are a few big changes worth writing about.

Marco Arment, the coffee-slurping, BMW-driving playboy developer of the iPad’s best read-later app, has fixed a few bugs introduced in the Retina-ready v4.1 released last week. These include some odd rendering problems for the new default font, Elena, and some speeding up to the page animations which were slowed down by some weird iPad 3 oddities.

But there are also a few new features, and one reversion that should please the luddites who hate the cool cell-table layout of the article list.

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I shoot a bunch of video these days. It’s so easy, as everything from my iPod to my iPad to even my camera shoots HD video. And editing it is a blast using iMovie on iOS. But what I don’t like, and what keeps me from editing much of the video I shoot, is dragging through the footage to find the good parts.

Enter Highlight Hunter, a Mac (and PC) app which runs tirelessly through any amount of video and separates out the highlights into discrete 30-second clips, ready for further editing.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been spending some time in China this week, meeting with officials and even posing with fans at the company Xidan Joy City retail store. He also paid a visit to Foxconn’s new plant in Zhengzhou, where the company employs around 120,000 employs, some of whom are assembling Apple’s iPhone.

Ubisoft has confirmed that its future iOS games will store your save data in the cloud, allowing you to sync your progress across multiple devices. That means you can beat missions and levels on your iPhone in your lunch break, then continue your game right where you left off on your iPad when you get home.

It’s a feature that almost every game — especially those build for both the iPhone and the iPad — should not be without.

Apple has seeded a second beta of its OS X Lion 10.7.4 update to registered developers today, almost two weeks after it issued the initial release. This version contains “no known issues,” but Apple has asked developers to focus on the Mac App Store, graphics, iCal, Mail, and QuickTime. If you’re looking for an easy way to access Apple’s beta software, you can check out the Apple Seed app download to get started.