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We’d like to ask our Canadian readers for help with a story we’re working on about the iPhone 4.

The iPhone 4 just launched in Canada on Friday, and Canadian buyers are able to buy the device unlocked (if it’s bought from Apple rather than a carrier).

We’re looking for readers who are getting an unlocked iPhone 4 and can test it on Wind Mobile’s network to see if it can support 3G data speeds.

Why do we want to test the iPhone 4 on Wind Mobile’s network?

Wind Mobile is an up-and-coming carrier that uses the same GSM network technology as T-Mobile in the United States.

The iPhone is rumored to be coming to T-Mobile USA in the fall, breaking Apple’s exclusive deal with AT&T. However, it’s not clear whether the iPhone 4 has the right radio hardware to support T-Mobile’s 3G data network.

We’re told Wind Mobile in Canada has the same network infrastructure. If it works on Wind Mobile’s network, it should work on T-Mobile’s.

T-Mobile’s 3G data network operates on the 1700/2100 MHz bands. According to Apple’s specs, the iPhone 4 works on the 2100 UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA band, but not the 1700 band, which has led some to conclude that it is incompatible with T-Mobile’s 3G network.

However, there is some debate whether Apple simply didn’t list the 1700 band, which seems to be the convention when listing such specs. And no one has yet tested the iPhone 4 on T-Mobile’s network in the U.S. Despite the efforts of the Dev Team, there isn’t yet a publicly available unlock for the iPhone 4.

This is why we’d like help testing an unlocked iPhone 4 on Wind Mobile in Canada.

If you can help out, please email us at news (AT) cultofmac.com. In return, we’ll send you some goodies in the mail.

UPDATE: In the comments below, reader @Qorax tried a Wind Mobile SIM in a brand new, unlocked iPhone 4 he purchased over the weekend. Unfortunately, the SIM card didn’t work at all: no voice or data. We would have predicted he would have at least got voice. iPhone users here in the U.S. who unlock their phones and use T-Mobile SIM cards get voice and data — but Edge only.

PS: @Qorax’s comment is worth reading to see how he beat the gigantic line for the iPhone 4 at his local Apple Store. Tricky!

The iPad is a fantastic kitchen computer, no question, but consider me skeptical of the FridgePad, a £49 magnet-backed aluminum iPad case meant to allow you to easily slap your Apple tablet to the side of your Fridgidaire.

You know how sometimes you’ll put something heavy under a weak fridge magnet and it’ll slowly slide down the door until it smacks onto the floor? Yeah, that, except with an easily splinterable 1.6 slab of glass.

The iPhone and iPod Touch would make great universal remotes, except for their sad lack of built-in infrared functionality. There’s more than a few third-parties who will add the functionality to your iOS device for a price, but these usually involve bulky cases or easy-to-lose dongles.

That’s why I like GEAR4’s solution so much. Called the Unity Remote, it’s an infrared hub that talks to your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad via Bluetooth through a free to download app. You place it anywhere, and when you send it a command from your device, it uses five infrared emitters to blast out the appropriate signals to any home theater device within its 360 degree line of site.

Very cool. It will be available in October, and it looks like it’ll sell for $99.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave Apple a left-handed compliment Thursday, telling analysts the Cupertino, Calif company has “sold more than I’d like them to sell. We think about that.”

But Ballmer, who in 2009 infamously described Apple increasing Mac sales as a “rounding error” implied there is room for more players in the tablet market. Referring to the iPad, the Microsoft executive said “I don’t think there is one size fits all,” according to a transcript by Business Insider. “I’ve been to too many meetings with journalists who spent the first 10 minutes of the meetings setting up iPad to look like a laptop,” he added.

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Although he’s still a Blackberry man on the mobile front, President Obama is a MacBook Pro user when it comes to his day-to-day work, as this video demonstrating the new healthcare.gov site makes abundantly clear. I particularly like the sitcom-style sticker slapped on the back of the 17-inch MacBook Pro, obfuscating its glowing Apple emblem. It’s clearly a MacBook, but the White House is still being coy, lest the fact that President Obama uses an Apple laptop somehow be misconstrued as, you know, an actual endorsement of the best computer brand on Earth.

MacWorld’s latest cover isn’t really special in that it features an iPhone 4 recursively shot by photographer Peter Belanger on another iPhone 4. Although that wouldn’t have been possible on previous iPhones due to resolution issues, lighting’s ultimately the most important aspect of professional photography, not megapixels or the lens. In ideal lighting conditions, getting a professional level shot from pretty any digicam isn’t all tha hard.

What I find more intriguing is that Belanger also did all of the post-photographic processing on the iPhone 4. Specifically, he used the $3 PhotoForge app to remove a green cast from the resulting image, and the $1 Resize-Photo to boost the DPI for publishing. That’s a little bit of a fudge, but all is forgiven: the resulting cover looks great.

We scan the globe for news about the iPhone 4. Today we visit Australia and France, two countries bringing Cupertino a mixed message about its latest handset. In the land down under, a large newspaper gives the iPhone 4 a big ‘thumbs-up’ while France’s carrier SFR warned iPhone 3GS owners the iOS4 update could slow them down.

“The iPhone 4 is not just a slight improvement over the iPhone 3GS, it is a massive jump,” writes Stephen French, a technology columnist for Australia’s The Daily Telegraph. Although French managed to lower his reception quality by employing the “death grip,” he wrote calls were still unaffected. “I even managed to watch a YouTube video over 3G while in the ‘death grip,’ he told readers.

Wisely, Apple has always been adverse to using other people’s technology to drive its business, so with competitor Google supplying the tech for so many Apple services, it’s only common sense that Cupertino’s interested in taking the reins back.

Back in April, Apple managed to do just that, replacing its previous location service partners Google and Skyhook in favor of their own location databases… but only on iOS 3.2 or above.

If the 2010 Worldwide Developers Conference was centered on the iPhone and iPad, could next year’s gathering by Apple focus on the Mac? That’s the implication made Friday by one report. Apple is now seeking help to build “a revolutionary new feature” within the core of Mac OS X, the Cupertino, Calif. company writes in a job posting.

While the Mac OS X was mostly overlooked at this year’s WWDC in San Francisco, that could change next year as Apple continues to battle Google for the consumer tech spotlight.

The iPad can be a handy to have on your next vacation, whether you need to research flights for a quick escape from your cousin’s wedding, keep the kids entertained on the plane or figure out which road is the least congested in a strange city.

Here are five free iPad apps we wouldn’t leave home without.

Kayak Explore + Flight Search
Kayak is the Ferrari of cheap flight search info — and a lot of users (including me) think the search engine works better in the iPad version than it does online. One thing is certain: the roomy iPad screen makes it easy to search for your flight, drilling down results by airline, number of connections, airport, times and price.
And, in the latest version, if you’re trying to figure out just how many miles you can put between you and your ex with the cash wadded up in your pocket, there’s a handy budget/distance calculator that will tell you just that. The caveats: hotels and car rental info is provided through Safari and you can’t book flights directly from the app.

It only makes sense that the company who brought us the first mouse would try to re-invent the way desktop computers are used. Apple is attempting to bring multi-touch to the masses with its new Magic Trackpad. While this might seem like just a trackpad, this could be a sneak peek on how Apple plans to implement iOS onto OS X. Regardless of their intentions, this is the most exciting input device since the Magic Mouse. Read the rest after the break.

In the wake of the flood of Apple toys launched earlier this week, we missed the launch yesterday of the The $500 HDC-SDX1 by Panasonic, which they’re calling the world’s lightest 1080i HD camcorder.

Besides a dry weight of 185 grams — about the same weight as the first iPod — the camcorder can be attached to a Mac and used as a webcam (albeit an expensive one). And like the much-less expensive HM-TA1 we mentioned yesterday, the SDX1 supports Apple’s iFrame format introduced last October.

Other stuff worth noting includes a 35.8mm wide-angle lens, 23x zoom and a new optical-electrical hybrid image-stabilization system.

Here’s one more trick exclusive to the iPhone 4: Launch new app You Gotta See This, pan the camera over a large subject and the app will create a panograph — a collage of still photographs that together form a larger image — using the series of still images just captured while you were waving your iPhone around. The key to this wizardry is the 4’s gyroscope, which helps the app place the images exactly where they should be — which is why the app won’t work on any iPhone but the 4.

Once created, masterpieces can be saved, emailed or shared via Twitter or Facebook.

You Gotta See This is $2; hopefully the developers will use some of the profits to buy the app a better name.

Mothers possess skills varied and wide, and recent research shows Moms are particularly adept at using their iPhones.  The Huffington Post has developed a list of Top iPhone Apps for Moms, By Moms:

Never underestimate a mom with an iPhone.  Research from Greystripe [PDF] show that moms love iPhone apps, and are downloading apps in various categories from games to productivity.

While most mobile developers are men, a growing number of opportunistic women are venturing into app development to create apps catered to other women. And many of these women are part of a group called Moms with Apps, a collaborative group of family-friendly developers who share best practices on making and marketing mobile apps.

HuffPo’s list includes some nicely done iPhone and iPod touch apps that deal with emergency infant medical care, learning sign language, communicating with autistic children, and – helpful for Moms, Dads and chauffeurs of all kinds – roadtrip bingo.

Oh, the days when mobile phone veteran Motorola was hawking the slim Razr while competitors had bricks. Darn these young whipper-snappers like Apple and their iPhone doo-hickeys. Motorola, maker of the Verizon Droid, now finds itself being outsold by Apple. The Cupertino, Calif. company sold 8.4 million iPhones compared to 8.3 million handsets for the Schaumburg, Il.-based Motorola during the second quarter.

Is your voice mail password now the property of some Chinese hacker? Millions of Android users who downloaded an innocuous wallpaper app from Google’s Android Market may be nodding their heads ‘yes.’ Turns out, that wallpaper app was sending voice mail passwords and many other bits of personal data to someone in Shenzhen, China, according to one report.

The exploit was downloaded “anywhere from 1.1 million to 4.6 million times,” reports Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat. The application grabs your browsing history, text messages, phone’s SIM card number and subscriber ID and sends it all to the www.imnet.us website, according to the report.

Our favorite Mac vivisectors over at iFixit have torn down the Magic Trackpad, cutting it apart for access to its hidden hardware secrets.

Unfortunately, there really weren’t many, short of the news that the Magic Trackpad uses the same touchscreen controller trip as the iPhone and the same Bluetooth chip found in the Magic Mouse. It’s something of a Frankenstein device, but that’s a good thing: it’s just more proof about how good Apple has become in making its products from the same parts.

It was just yesterday that we saw an intriguing case for jailbroken iPod Touches that promised to give it the ability to make phone calls and send text messages.

Who knew Sprint was planning something similar? It’s a case called the ZTE Peel 3200, and as near as anyone can figure out, it’s a mobile hotspot that would wrap around an iPod Touch and give it constant access over WiFi to Sprint’s 3G network.

Pretty swank. Combine this with Skype and iOS 4.0’s background VoIP abilities and there’s not a lot missing. If the price is right, this case might end up proving preferable to a two-year AT&T contract.

From the consumer end, the hold-up on the white iPhone 4 has been pretty inexplicable. Exactly how hard can it be for Apple to get the white iPhone 4 right? They release multi-colored gadgets all the time, with no problem whatsoever. What’s the difference here?

Over at the Street, there’s an unconfirmed explanation being floated that actually makes a good deal of sense.

Because both the front and back of the iPhone 4 is made of glass, Apple has to be very careful about light leaking out of the seams and through the backplate of the handset, since they can’t just slap another layer of coating to fill the gaps. On the black iPhone 4, this isn’t as big of a problem, but the white iPhone 4’s back is naturally more transparent than the black’s. Hence the delay.

I’m no engineer, but that seems to grok. It certainly makes more sense to me than the other theory: that Apple had delayed the white iPhone 4 to secretly fix the antenna design.

Listen up, iPhone 4 owners: get thee to a strong AT&T cell. That’s the advice of Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg on Apple’s latest handset.

Mossberg said the iPhone 4 works best in areas with “average or strong AT&T coverage”, however, he said the iPhone 3GS is a better choice for users living, working or traveling in spots with weak coverage by Apple’s exclusive U.S. carrier partner. AT&T “operates a network that has trouble connecting and maintaining calls in many cities,” he told readers.

Hope for iPhone 3G users running iOS4: after weeks of suffering under the radar, the Wall Street Journal blog Digits reports today that Apple is aware of the performance issues plaguing 3G users running the latest update:

Apple is investigating reports that the latest iPhone operating system causes problems for users of the iPhone 3G, after a series of complaints on Apple support forums and technology blogs. Apple is aware of the reports and is looking into the matter, a spokeswoman told Digits.

iOS4 performance on an iPhone 3G can be a painful experience – sluggish performance, poor battery life, many more reboots, along with vastly increased levels of user angst.  We’ve covered this issue before, as have many other websites, and Apple’s own support forums are buzzing on the topic.

We’ve received multiple reports from readers that their free iPhone 4 Bumper cases are already in the mail, despite initial delivery dates in August or September.

I just got an email from Apple saying my own free Bumper case is winging its way to San Francisco. It is due to be delivered August 3, according to the tracking data. Apple initially said the free case would be delivered in September.

Good work Apple: Underpromise and overdeliver.

Apple has released Safari 5.0.1, the latest version of its browser that adds support for the Safari Extensions Gallery and it includes a patch for the recently discovered Address Book bug.

According to Software Update on my Mac the update includes these new features:

If you haven’t upgraded to iOS4, VolumeButtonExtender available on Cydia is worth checking out.  While the iPhone offers a couple of ways to control your music, you need use the screen to do it, not a great solution if you’re jogging, using it in the car or otherwise need to turn adjust the volume or skip tracks quickly with just one hand and minimal attention.

VolumeButtonExtender gives you quick access to the music controls, even in standby mode, using just the volume buttons. Available on Cydia, the handy utility also helps extend your battery life. Here’s Cult of Mac’s guide to help get you started.

With Office for Mac 2011 launching later this year, Microsoft is giving a sneak peek of the productivity suite.

Above is the first in a series of highlight videos, showing off several new features, including Outlook for Mac (with Conversation View and Spotlight integration), a new Template Gallery and the Ribbon UI nav scheme.

Mactopia: Office for Mac 2011 Behind-the-Scenes: Conversations, Templates and more!