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First revealed back in January at CES, the L5 Remote is a useful little dongle that supplements the iPhone or iPod Touch’s already incredible remote abilities by turning your iDevice into a fully functional infrared universal remotes.

All you do is slap the infrared sensor into your iPhone and load the free L5 remote app. The app comes with presets for many popular devices, but failing that, it’s easy to program your iPhone with your existing remote by bumping them nose to nose and pushing the button on your existing remote you want to program in.

Conceptually, I love the idea of using my iPhone as a truly universal remote, but if you think losing a remote is an irritatingly commonplace occurrence, imagine losing a tiny dongle between the couch cushions. Worse, the L5 remote costs $50: way too expensive when a cheap universal remote can be picked up at Best Buy for half the price.

Until iPhones and iPod Touches come with a built-in IR receiver, I don’t really see the iPhone to squeeze existing universal remotes out of the market.

Thanks to its inexplicable lack of a custom dictionary, the iPhone’s always been a frustrating filter on the gutter-mouthed obscenity enthusiast and the serial sexter alike.

It’s frustrating. More than once, the iPhone has automatically cleaned up some of my most romantic text messages to refer, time and time again, to an earnest plea for me and my girlfriend to go on a “duck hunt…” the most euphemistic description possible of the activity I was actually trying to type.

According to Gizmodo, though, it looks like our frustrations are at an end: he latest iPhone OS 4.0 beta contains a custom dictionary under keyboard settings.

It’s a bit counterintuitive to set up: you apparently need to change the network settings to see the new tethering option before the functionality is revealed. Once you do, though, you’ll be rattling off obscenity-laced Tweets, emails and Facebook status updates with the best of them. You’re welcome!

Although the iPad won’t be released internationally until tomorrow, Apple has already gotten ready for the flood of new devices by flicking the ON switch for the International iPad App Store. For right now, this will only be useful to you if you have imported an iPad from the States but want to use a local iTunes account; wait until next week, though, and you’ll be able to slurp up iPad ads as soon as your local mail constabulary delivers your iPad to your door.

Given AT&T’s almost universal bad press when it comes to the reliability of their 3G network, you’d think the prospect of a Verizon iPhone would have Ma Bell trembling at the prospect of a mass diaspora of unsatisfied users.

With typical arrogance, though, AT&T head Ralph de la Vega laughed at the idea that AT&T had anything to worry about if the iPhone comes to Verizon at the JPMorgan tech conference.

Of course, Vega’s not banking on AT&T’s excellent service to keep customers around. Instead, de la Vega cited the near impossibility of getting out of AT&T’s contracts as the reason why they had little to fear.

With their usual alacrity, the dissection fiends over at iFixIt have again donned their Kruger-like gloves tipped with T6 Torx screwdrivers and gutted a freshly speed bumped plastic unibody MacBook.

Not surprisingly, there’s not a lot of new information: since only the CPU, GPU and battery have changed since the last MacBook refresh, there’s not much new going on in the innards.

However, there was, at least, one pleasant surprise: the new plastic MacBook’s 10 hour battery is an easy swap into older unibody plastic MacBooks. While dropping a new MacBook battery into an old machine isn’t likely to get you the full 10 hours of battery life you’d expect from the newer models, it should still get you some extra oomph…. a nice bonus if you happen to get your existing MacBook’s battery replaced under warranty, and Apple efficiently drops one of the higher-capacity batteries instead.

The latest iPhone HD leak comes not from Vietnam, as we’ve come to expect, but good old Taiwan. Ready for a bombshell? Better pop a Lipitor: it looks like the iPhone HD may very well come in white.

We admit, snark aside, that’s not very exciting. iPhones have come in white before. What is interesting here, though, is that these are pictures of a white iPhone front panel. Traditionally, white iPhones are “white” only on the black plastic backing.

Whether these images turn out to be legitimate remains to be seen: the front panel’s a pretty easy thing to fake. Still, given the pedestrian nature of the revelation and Apple’s own history giving a white option on iPhones, don’t be surprised to see a white iPhone floating around at WWDC.

In just a few weeks of iPad ownership, I’ve all but retired my MacBook. I thought I needed a laptop for work, but really, I don’t. I have not looked back since.

I own an Apple consulting company here in Florida, Max Your Macs. As members of the Apple Consultants Network, we support a wide range of clients all over the state ranging from individual home users with basic needs right up through corporate, medical, legal and creative environments with much more demanding settings.

Before iPad was released, I had been plotting and planning how to use this amazing machine onsite. I was longing for the day when I could slim down from carrying a large Swiss Gear pack with my MacBook Pro or MacBook Air to a small, light sling pack – but I was skeptical the iPad could fill the requirements.

And it does. Here’s how I use the iPad in the field:

Until the iPad has wide availability outside the U.S., Apple’s taking even more paranoid precautions than typical. Notably, everyone is still limited to buying no more than two of the devices, and, until today, no one was allowed to buy an iPad with cash. That policy was allegedly in place to prevent exporting by creating a credit card trail for each device.

But the policy’s silliness was revealed rather dramatically when Diane Campbell, a disabled woman living in Silicon Valley on a fixed income, attempted to use $600 cash to buy herself an iPad. She was turned down at the Palo Alto Apple Store, and went home, dejected, ultimately writing Steve Jobs a rather delightfully pointed e-mail.

“Come on Mr. Jobs, give a sister a break, okay. I’m not going to go sell my iPad.”

That message quickly hit, and earlier this evening, Apple reversed the policy, and Diane went home as a proud iPad owner. She intends to fill it with guitar song instructions. One thing that’s unclear is if the policy reversal also applies to iPhones, which similarly require a credit or debit card to purchase. I would assume not, as they require two-year service contracts, and a line of credit is usually required to secure that.

Nice to see Apple step up on what’s just a ridiculously common sense decision. And this makes me want to roll up to the Apple Store in the middle of next week with a big bag of penny rolls. Who’s with me?

Via ABC 7 On Your Side

Ever since the master strategists in Cupertino bought and (predictably) killed off the only genuine competitor to ever rise against iTunes, the question has hung like a pall over the online digital music marketplace: what will replace Lala?

Perhaps Jobsian worker bees are buzzing about as we speak, crafting an iTunes portal to allow users access to their digital music libraries from anywhere on the Internet, one which will sell them web-only versions of their favorite music for as little as one thin dime per cut.

Until that happy day dawns, or until some other independent outfit comes along to offer something as interesting and valuable as Lala was, one might consider checking out a newish Facebook mashup called Friends and Music.

Just days after crowing about giving people “Freedom from porn,” Steve Jobs must be cursing the gods of prurience with the news that YouPorn (NSFW) is busily encoding its entire library of films into HTML5 format.

Soon iPad owners the world over will be able to view vids of hairless young things in flagrante delicto to their hearts’ content.

And while YouPorn may be leading the pack, who can doubt the rest of the Adult Entertainment industry can be far behind in adopting HTML5’s video codec? In many things web-related, purveyors of porn have long been in the vanguard of trends that eventually go mainstream.

Steve Jobs may be wrong about Apple’s ability to “give” people freedom from porn, but it looks like he may be backing the right horse in the Flash vs. HTML5 showdown.

If you’re interested in keeping abreast of Steve Job’s new hobby of personally answering customer emails (though some of us here at Cult of Mac still maintain it’s a Robin-type assistant or robo-prototype), check out sent by Steve.

It’s a growing, searchable collection of emails Steve sends with just the copy of the exchange, plus links to the source.

Hat tip: Johnny Makkar

The next time you try to explain how your invention is the greatest thing since sliced bread, you may want to use the iPhone as comparison, instead. Turns out the iPhone ranks No. 8 in a UK consumer survey of the 100 most important inventions, far outdistancing sliced bread at No. 70.

The iPhone, which has been around just since 2007, beat out even everyday conveniences as the flushing toilet, painkillers and cars. Penicillin slipped in just ahead of Apple’s handset with the wheel, the airplane and the light bulb deemed the three best inventions. The Cupertino, Calif. company should take comfort that the Android cell phone operating system didn’t make the list and Internet giant Google ranks No. 25, behind toilet paper, vacuum cleaners and trains.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kY46zm98Ng

The iPod is a multi-function device and using it to rap your order at McDonalds is not a crime.

A Salt Lake City judge cleared Spenser Dauwalder, 18, of disorderly conduct for ordering at a McDonald’s by singing along to a rap song playing on his iPod. Dauwalder and his three 17-year-old friends in the car faced $750 fines.

The teen was imitating the Mickey D rap in the YouTube video above, which, translated into lay speak asks for fries, a double cheeseburger, a 10-piece chicken dinner and two Dr Peppers.

As we count down to Apple possibly announcing Verizon as a U.S. iPhone carrier and debate what such a move might mean to the current exclusive iPhone carrier AT&T, the head of that carrier weighed in on why a Verizon iPhone deal isn’t keeping him awake at night. CEO Ralph de la Vega told analysts at Wednesday’s JP Morgan tech conference that many iPhone owners likely will find it too difficult to switch to Verizon.

According to de la Vega, 70 percent of AT&T customers are tied to a family plan, which could make it exceedingly difficult to jump ship. Another segment of customers — those on corporate discount plans — account for 40 percent of AT&T subscribers.

In a world where smartphones are increasingly more popular than standard cell phones, Apple and Android appear to be the names most on the move, new research indicates. Apple’s OS now powers 15.4 percent of global smartphones, while Google’s Android has 9.6 percent of the market, overtaking Microsoft Windows Mobile while increasing from last year’s 1.6 percent of smartphone operating systems used.

According to Gartner, global iPhone sales rose 112 percent for the first quarter of 2010, compared to 10.5 percent for the same period in 2009. Even in the larger cell phone market, the Cupertino, Calif. company places No.7 with 2.7 percent, behind Motorola by just three-tenths of one percent.

Apple’s factory leak is just getting bigger, and Vietnam continues to be the undiscovered country of Apple leaks, this time with exclusive photos of the new iPod Touch… this time sporting the long rumored 2MP camera we’ve been waiting for for the past years.

Vietnamese site Tinhte’s photos show a 64GB iPod Touch that looks remarkably similar to the current model, except for the addition of the camera sensor (which, surprisingly, is center-mounted on the back… I thought for sure the rubber foot on the left corner was where the iPod Touch’s camera would inevitably end up).

The biggest surprise here is that the fourth-generation iPod Touch isn’t sporting the same design as the iPhone, but is sticking with the current unibody, reflective unibody casing. And it looks like my wet dream of a microSIM slot in the iPod Touch was just that.

No matter, though: I’ve been waiting for a camera on the Touch for so long, this is easily a day one purchase for me. We’ll know for sure when we can pick one up at WWDC in June, although an early September release is historically the most likely bet.

I’m not sure this vinyl Joker sticker could possibly work better, especially for just $16. After all, who needs a glasgow smile when they have an iPad? Why so serious?

The original Prince of Persia, first released for the Apple II back in 1989, is now coming to the iPhone according to Ubisoft’s website.

Called Prince of Persia Retro, there’s not many details available about the port, except that it will be a universary binary for the iPad and (obviously) support touch controls.

Thanks to references in both Apple’s fifth generation iPod Nano and the Nike+ iPod user guides, we’ve known for a while now that it was likely that Nike had a Nike+ heart rate monitor in the works.

Now, it looks like we’ve got a release date. According to a post on the Nike+ support forums, the heart rate monitor will be released to the U.S. market on June 1st, 2010, with Canada getting it later in the months and international customers getting it sometime in the summer.

Otherwise, there’s no details available, so we’ll have to see what Nike and Apple have in store. At the very least, I hope that when it’s released, there’s functionality to adjust the tempo of your music or even switch playlists according to how hard your heart is pumping. Sometimes, you just need a little audiophonic push to get you over that hill.

[via TUAW]

Sennheiser’s long been a name I trust when it comes to piping my iPod’s audio down into my cochleas, but I’ve never tried any of their Bluetooth headsets. That might change, though, with their new EZX 60, a sleek, light-weight Bluetooth headset featuring digital noise and echo cancellation.

I’ve long been frustrated by Bluetooth headsets’ tendency to amplify background noise and echo my voice, due to the close proximity of the microphone to the speaker, and I’ve found competing manufacturers’ echo-cancellation software to be a bit spotty. Sennheiser, though, rarely steers too far off the mark: I think they’ve probably done it right here.

Otherwise, the EZX 60 is a pretty standard headset, albeit more attractive than most. It features one-hand operation, a soft ear hook that flips and rotates for left ear use, up to 7.5 hours of talk and 300 hours of standby time. You can buy it now for just $80.

Soused and slurring, I know I’ve certainly made the regrettable Facebook status update or Tweet on my iPhone in my time, and if the latest Retrevo survey is anything to go by, it looks like I’m not alone: they claim iPhone users are twice as likely to regret making a Facebook status update as people without smartphones.

Even amongst smartphone users, in fact, iPhone users have a slight lead when it comes to the average Blackberry or Android users when it comes to making an unwise post on Facebook.

Unfortunately, these errant status updates aren’t all worth giggling about: an amazing one-third of the people who told Retrevo they regretted a post claimed it either ruined their marriage or caused strife in their home life. I’ve certainly fallen foul of the latter: it turns out girlfriends don’t appreciate it when you publicly broadcast their gastronomic failings and your own resulting gastrointestinal distress.

What about you, oh Cultists of Mac? Surely, some of our droogs must have some darkly humorous iPhone text, Tweet or Facebook mishaps to relate. The comments are as good a place as any for them!

Back in 2003, Steve Jobs decided to cancel his “nearly worthless” stock options at Apple in exchange for $75 million.

If he had kept them? They’d be worth $10.3 billion dollars in profits today.

In the biggest iPhone OS news since Apple unveiled the fourth iteration of the phone’s OS — and as a possible result of the rumored, forthcoming pitched battle between AT&T and Verizon for the souls of iPhone users — it looks as though the iPhone will now gain the ability to tether.

The screencaps above, which floated up in a developer’s forum, are clear evidence that Internet tethering through the iPhone will likely now be supported with the release of OS 4.0.

I’ll eat any old crap — and I mean, any; even hot dogs from an NYC hotdog stand.

But not everyone is as cavalier about what they put in their mouths. Try being vegetarian for a bit, or eating only food that is halal — Islamic law that describes how food must be prepared — and things get significantly more complicated (but yeah, accepting that NYC hotdog stand visits are a no-no is probably a good place to start). So an Auckland, New Zealand-based developer created two slightly different apps that’ll make life easier in both cases.

Think of it as Craigslist — but on steroids that give it super-speed and spidey-senses, and without the alarming hey-why-is-hair-growing-there side effects.

Just like Craigslist, users can trade goods or services; but Anttenna (no, that’s not a typo) also leverages phone tech like geotagging to create local micro-marketplaces based on the location of users, and then connects them through social-network tool Twitter — which the app is built on — for more immediate buyer-seller communication than Craigslist’s increasingly snail-paced-seeming email system.

It doesn’t yet have the massive throng of participants that makes Craigslist such a powerhouse, and its sophistication may actually hurt it, as one of the appeals of Craigslist is its simplicity. But who knows; a year or two from now, we may all be hearing things like “so hey, did you ant your old MacBook already?”