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One of the things Apple really gets right is the streamlined names. Other companies add a bunch of confusing prefixes and suffixes to each incremental product change, but with Apple a MacBook Pro is simply called a MacBook Pro, and not a MacBook Pro 15XRCT. It cuts down on the confusion for some of us simpletons.

So if that’s the case, you might be wondering: what the heck is all this talk of the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5? Are they the same device? If not, how are they different from each other? What does it all mean?

Well, it’s not as confusing as you think. Here’s the scoop on what all this talk about the iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S is really about.

So after months of hype, it looks like Amazon’s finally ready to unveil its 7-inch, $250 Kindle tablet, built upon a custom Android fork and leveraging all of Amazon’s media stores, including the Amazon Appstore, Amazon On Demand, Amazon Kindle and Amazon MP3.

It won’t be official until it launches, but we’ve been hearing rumors of the device for a while now, and have been told Amazon expects to sell 2M of the devices by the end of the year. Now they are sending out invites to an uncharacteristic press conferenmce scheduled for September 28th at 10:00AM.

Can’t wait to see if this is a viable iPad competitor, or just another crap tablet. I have to say, I’m intrigued. If Amazon can do a better job of an entry-level Android tablet than the Nook Color, they might really have something here.

[via This Is My Next]

Android-based tablets have become the technology equivalent of Charlie Brown, constantly warning Apple to ‘wait’ll next year’ following disappointing showing after depressing headline. Now research giant Gartner has weighed in on the issue and their advice: keep waiting. Apple’s iPad will be the most popular tablet through 2015, the research firm announced.

When iOS 5 ships this fall with iMessage support, it could revolutionize the way we look at text messaging, from the de facto way of quickly pinging a person on our phones to an expensive way we reach out to our friends who inexplicably don’t have iPhones.

But could iMessage have a big competitor in Facebook? It’s increasingly looking like it, as inside sources inside Facebook are now claiming that the social networking giant are working on integrating free text messaging to any number into Facebook chat.

Have you checked out If This, Then That yet?

It’s a very cool new web service designed to make connections between all sorts of online services, and automate the way they work together. It’s a bit like Automator on your Mac, but for the web.

Samsung is asking a Dutch court to force Apple to pay patent licensing fees or impose a ban on iPhone and iPad sales. The lawsuit announced Friday comes on the heels of the South Korean company warning it will be more aggressive with the tech giant.

Here’s an interesting little detail from the latest version of Xcode: it supports Marvell’s quad-core, ARM compliant Armada XP processor. Could Apple be preparing to ditch its own A-Series of systems-on-chip and go instead with Marvell for future iPhones and iPads?

Samsung, once regarded as a “frenemey” of Apple, is quickly turning into just an enemy. The South Korean chipmaker who also competes with the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant’s iPhone and iPad is now threatening to get medieval on Apple.

If there’s one thing that seems to go hand-in-hand with struggling tablets, it’s generous price cuts. As Apple’s iPad continues to gain overwhelming popularity, tablets that attempt to fight the beast are falling short, and manufactures are being forced to drop their prices to shift their stock.

Unless you go for a boring old transparent hard case for your iPhone 4, you’re going to cover up that Apple logo on the back of your device when you slap a case on it. However, like those stick-on decals that you can buy for your MacBook, these iTattoo Snap cases compliment your Apple logo beautifully.

The iPhone is the equivalent of fly-paper when it comes to keeping customers. The Apple smartphone has at least an 89 percent allegiance, twice that of the closest Android handset, according to a Wall Street survey announced Friday.

The option to purchase additional content within iOS applications seems to have been plagued by an error for at least 10 hours now, with in-app purchases “failing in a big way,” according to one report. iOS developers who rely on the income they receive from in-app purchases are beginning to lose their patience with Apple.

Despite recent rumors that suggest there will not be an iPhone 5 this October — just the iPhone 4S instead — DigiTimes reports that there are issues currently affecting the supply of iPhone 5 touch panels, which will plague the initial shipments of the device.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has revealed that both Apple and Dropbox have joined the Digital Due Process coalition — a group whose mission is to pressure Congress into updating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

It’s been a long-standing rumor that Apple will introduce Nuance speech-to-text capabilities in the public release of iOS 5. Apple partnered with the vocal technology giant known as Nuance months ago, and the two have supposedly been meeting behind closed doors to get Android-like speech-to-text integrated into iOS 5.

While this Nuance technology has yet to reveal itself in the public beta of iOS 5, a well-known App Store app is already showcasing the feature blatantly to the public.

Most of us work, right? Because Apple makes great stuff, but most of it isn’t free. Which means you need money, and that means you’ll need to get paid for your time. That’s where HoursTracker Lite, and its iPad equivalent, HoursTracker HD Lite, come in handy.

Here’s a Blast from the Past, a Best Buy flier from 1996 advertising sale prices on Hewlett-Packard, Packard Bell, and Macintosh Multimedia Computers. These are start-of-the-art systems approaching 200MHz speeds! A 133MHz HP Pentium package goes for $1899, while a blazing fast 180MHz PowerPC-based Mac will set you back $2399 – monitor sold separately.

Regent Seven Seas Cruises 700-passenger ship, whose routes include a Caribbean Escapade and Land of Towering Glaciers trip, now serves up iPads for the luxury suites.

To lure budget-weary U.S. lawmakers to into a session about saving federal research, organizers titled it “Deconstructing the iPad: How Federally Supported Research Leads to Game-Changing Innovation.”

Congressional sponsors of the forum, a trio of Republicans —  U.S. Randy Hultgren (R-Il.), Michael McCaul (R-Texas) and Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.) — must have known they had their work cut out for them.

33-year-old Jason Daniel Goodman left his iPod Touch behind at an Oregon gas station almost a year ago. Employees figured something that valuable would be claimed, so they waited five months.

We’re back with another round of Cult of Mac readers and their Apple gadgets. We had some great submissions for round one, and round two has proven to be just as great.

Western Digital has revamped its popular “My Passport” series of portable hardrives with next generation editions for the Mac.

The My Passport Studio and My Passport for Mac hardrives feature slimmer, all-metal designs and come in a variety of storage capacities.

Historically, AT&T has tended to hand out early upgrades to the next iPhone to qualifying customers around the time a new iPhone is announced. Which makes the above image very interesting, as it says that AT&T is already handing out early iPhone upgrades to existing customers, coinciding with a mid-October release.

If you need even more proof that Sprint is getting the iPhone next month, here’s another careless move on the part of the nation’s third largest cell carrier: in a move prettty obviously suggestive of a major new smartphone incoming next month, Sprint will cap its data tethering plans to 5GB starting October 2nd… two days before the next iPhone is rumored to be unveiled.

Apple has seeded OS X 10.7.2 Build 11C62 to developers with areas of focused testing for iCloud. As we near Apple’s next media event, developers are putting the finishing touches on iCloud integration.

Apple has promised that iCloud will go live alongside iOS 5 to the public sometime “this Fall,” with the event estimated to take place on October 4th.