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LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – The forthcoming iPad 3 will be thinner than the iPad 2, Cult of Mac has exclusively learned at the Consumer Electronics Show from a well-placed source.

With competitors already starting to anticipate Apple’s entrance into the TV market, Samsung has felt the need to clarify its confidence and throw Apple under the bus at the same time.

Philip Newton, Director of Audiovisual for Samsung Australia, told The Sydney Morning Herald that Steve Jobs’s revelation to biographer Walter Isaacson about “finally cracking” the iTV is “nothing new.”

Skype has released a new beta for Mac users today that brings an enhanced call UI and more features. Call quality and stabilization improvements have also been introduced.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 — Our very British Editor Leander and I were invited to sit in with Leo Laporte, Sarah Lane, and Alex Lindsay for Tuesday’s live episode of Macbreak Weekly. We had a hoot ‘n hollerin’ good time playing with new gadgets from the show floor, talking about this year’s trends in tech, and pondering how Microsoft just might be becoming the next Apple.

The full video is almost 80 minutes long, so feel free to skip around to all the good parts where it’s just me talking.

The iPhone 4S is set to finally launch in China tomorrow, but that hasn’t stopped the locals from lining up early to secure access to the coveted handset. The line for Apple’s flagship store in Beijing has gotten so out of control that Apple may have to cancel the launch there altogether.

Reports are coming in that Beijing SWAT teams have already been called in to handle thousands of angry scalpers and potential customers. There have reportedly been fights in the streets between gangs of professional scalpers that buy Apple devices in bulk to then resell at a higher price.

Mercury News is reporting that Apple is renting thousands of square feet for its employees near Cupertino in Sunnyvale, California. According to Colliers International, Apple is ready to move into the 215,000-square-foot Sunnyvale Research Center.

Located 7 miles from the company’s current headquarters in Cupertino, the four-building complex in Sunnyvale isn’t the only nearby location that Apple is renovating. There are also two more buildings in Sunnyvale that will help temporarily house up to 1,300 corporate employees.

End-User License Agreements (or EULAs) are the very bane of our existence here at Cult of Mac, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t helpful information to be gleaned from the jargon we typically ignore while installing software.

There happens to be a particularly interesting tidbit of information nestled in the 17,697-word iTunes Terms and Conditions EULA.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – When Steve Jobs unveiled the sixth generation iPod nano in September of 2010, he coyly said, “You can even wear it as a watch!” Overnight, the “iWatch” was coined and a whole new industry was born, as accessory makers flocked to deliver iPod nano watchbands.

Over the last year, Apple’s added a variety of new graphical watchfaces to the iPod nano, further emphasizing the nano’s suitability as a watch replacement. But that’s not nearly enough. The iPod nano’s inherent iWatchiness is a quality that Apple is still seriously under-exploiting.

Want to know how good a real iWatch could be? Look no further than Sony’s SmartWatch, on display this week at CES.

What’s this? Android news on Cult of Mac? Who cares? Maybe you don’t, maybe you do. Point is: these are a few of the popular topics going on in the Android world today. Maybe you’d like to know what the competition is up to, or perhaps your aunt received a Kindle Fire she needs to update. Regardless of the reason, having a resource such as Cult of Android allows you to learn more about what’s going on with the competition. You know what they say: the best way to beat the enemy is to know which way they’re moving!/em>

Nik Software has released its Snapseed photo editor in the Mac App Store. We told you a couple days ago from CES that Snapseed was headed to the Mac, and the app is now available for $19.99.

Snapseed has been an incredibly popular photo editing app on the iOS platform, so much so that it even won an Apple “App of the Year” award recently. The beautiful design and robust set of features we’ve come to expect from Nik Software is now available on the Mac.

Tim Cook is one of the world’s top CEOs, but you wouldn’t know that by where he lays his head at night. The recently appointed head of Apple Inc. lives in a 2,400-square-foot, relatively modest home in Palo Alto, California.

The four-bedroom condo boasts a tiny yard and small adjunct section of real estate in the back. Not much for a man who was recently awarded a $378 million stock incentive.

You think your users are hard to please? Try cops, says Travis Taniguchi.

He’s a police criminologist for the Redlands Police Department in California, and one of the driving forces behind an iPhone and iPad app-friendly police department. Cops are not only skeptical, but armed.

“You want to talk hostile customers or end users? You don’t get more hostile than a cop,” Taniguchi joked.”They do that lean back thing, then they put a hand on their gun. It’s not easy.”

As the only “suit” on an Appnation Enterprise Summit panel about upstarts – he was gently ribbed by other panelists about not following the casual jeans-and-blazer mandate – he gave some interesting insights about how police departments can implement mobile apps.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 — Four times bigger than last year, and now filling about half the massive north hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center, the iLounge is home to an enormous plethora of iDevice accessories. I weaved and wandered through lanes of the iLounge pondering the products I was seeing, and out of all of what I found filling the massive space, these were the trends that stood out.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – Or maybe it’s that they’re pretending even less. The amount of bling at the Monster “booth” — it was actually more of a compound, complete with a super-secret inner sanctum — would make Snooki (who was at the show) blush. Their three newly released headphones seemed far more focused on fashion than sound; even Monster founder Nole Lee’s Segway (was it a Segway?) rolled around on gold-rimmed wheels. Then there were the booth fashion shows…

Intel wants to be friends with Apple — or more specifically, Apple’s hoard of cash. As the PC industry craters and mobile devices seem to be the future, the chipmaker wants the tech giant to buy its Medfield design. Although Intel if talking, is Apple listening?

Consumers have another reason besides low-cost designer collaborations to mob their favorite retailer. Target confirmed 25 of its largest U.S. stores will offer an expanded line of Apple gear later this year. The stores join Best Buy in catering to crowds of Apple fans looking to buy more than iPods at their local retailer.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 — I hate having three different cameras to address various situations in life – iPhone for when I’m lazy, DSLR when I want to pretend I know how to take pretty pictures, and a GoPro for when I’m doing something adventurous. Thankfully it looks like I’m going to be able to discard at least one of those cameras from my bag now that the MiVue is in existence.

For a company not officially at the Las Vegas-based CES, Apple sure does have a huge presence. Not only is the tech giant molding the smartphone and gadget exhibits, but the Cupertino, Calif. firm also overshadows video vendors. Indeed, Apple’s planned entry into the TV business is ‘the elephant in the room’ at the massive technology trade show.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – Not only does Sin City’s newest quickie-wedding chapel look like an Apple store, but the vows are read off an iPad.

For the moment, the chapel is offering only pretend weddings. It’s not yet licensed to perform legally-binding unions. So what happens in Vegas can really stay here. You can “marry” that hottie you met at the club, but you don’t have to give them half your earnings when things inevitably go sour.

Readdle has issued an update to its popular Calendars app for iOS today, introducing an awesome new interface and a whole host of new features that allow you to add events quicker than ever before, sync even faster with Google Calendars, and use special keyboards for snappier calendar entries.

There are still nearly 12 hours to go before Apple’s iPhone 4S makes it debut in China, but hundreds are already lining up outside of five Apple retail stores in the hope that they will be one of the first to get their hands on the fifth-generation device.

If you’re after a new iPhone but you find the new iPhone 4S is just too expensive, and the older iPhone 4 with just 8GB simply isn’t enough, then you might want to head down to your local RadioShack before you settle for something different.

The retailer is still offering the iPhone 4 with 16GB of storage for just $99.99 with a two-year contract, but only while supplies last.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 — There are a lot of iPad- and iPhone-connected devices at CES, but OhMiBod’s line of iPad-powered personal massagers are some of the most unusual.

No one was actually trying these out on the CES show floor, but we got some first impressions:

If you’re an iOS gamer, there’s no better accessory for your iPhone than a game controller that allows you to use physical controls within your favorite games. And there’s no better game controller than this one, inspired by the retro gamepad from the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Foxconn workers at an Xbox plant in China threatened a mass suicide earlier this month after the manufacturer reportedly refused to pay compensation it had promised earlier. Today, Microsoft and Foxconn have announced that the dispute has now been resolved.