You just have to love the TurtleCell. First there’s the name, which conjures up images of hard-to-empty bowels. Then there’s the website, which manages to pack in plenty of Standard Infomercial Tropes: the cheesy, grinning model (usually either a family member or just the most photogenic person on the team, but never, ever a professional model), the overplayed example of the problem the product solves (in this case, an absurdly-tangled pair of earbuds) and even – yes, really – a sunglasses-wearing animal mascot in the product video.

It’s almost deliberately ridiculous. Oh, and the product is an iPhone case with built-in headphones.

You might not know the name, but you definitely know the work. If you have seen Star Wars, or Robocop, or Jurassic Park[1], you’ve seen Phil Tippet’s stop-motion (and go-motion) animation. Tauntaun? Tippet. ED–209? Tippet again.

And now you can buy 3-D character animations by the Tippett Creature Shop right inside a new storefront in the Efexio iPad app.

Briefly gets the award for most-appropriately-named app of the week. It lets you create neat little videos from your photos, and it does it really, really briefly.

PowerCycle is a hip-flask-shaped USB battery pack which is designed to be charged by your bike. You’ll need to be running a dynamo hub with an electrical output to actually charge it, so this is more a bike-friendly design than a bike-only one.

Talking of taking your iPhone to the beach, here’s another way to keep it safe from harm: don’t take it at all. Instead of Instagramming the topless ladies down at your local sea’n’sand pit, you could roll your own analog Instagram. No, not a Polaroid, but disposable cameras, dicked with to make them take even worse photos than they already do.

I hate the beach: It’s full of dirty sand, sweaty half-naked men and polluted with the sound of bad radio stations. It’s exactly like your average building site in fact, and we don’t go and lie in the sun on those.

But in July in Barcelona, the beach is one of the few places you can go to cool down and feel a breeze. It’s also just about the most dangerous place to take your electronic gadgets.

And that’s where these Cloudcover weatherproof cases come in.

Take it with a grain of salt, but Digitimes is reporting that Apple is looking to make a deal with either LG or Sharp to manufacture 55- and/or 65-inch Ultra HD TV panels for a future Apple TV set. “Apple is still testing the technology and has yet to finalize its orders with LG,” according to the report.

Source: Digitimes

Reaction to this ruggedized, clamshell Bluetooth keyboard case for the iPad mini must surely qualify as a “what the…?!” moment. Not because the New Trent Airbender Mini is ruggedized, and a keyboard, and a case, and a stand; but because it combines each of those sought-after elements for $40.

“What the…?!”

Flowboard. Flipboard. Look too similar? The people behind the Flipboard app certainly think so.

Brent Brookler, CEO of Treemo and creator of e-publishing iPad app Flowboard, says Flipboard has been threatening him with legal action since shortly after his app launched back in April, asking him to change the name of his app. Flipboard also wants the logo changed, which they say is also too similar to its own logo.

As the fifth and penultimate game in the indie-darling Bit.Trip series, Bit.Trip Fate has a lot to live up to. Originally released on Nintendo’s WiiWare platform and still part of Bit.Trip collections on the Wii and the 3DS, Bit.Trip Fate has finally, err, tripped its way over to the Mac App Store to join the other four games in the series already there on our favorite platform.

And we’re pretty darn happy about that.

Ogio’s new Gambit backpack is the kind of pack I’d want to haul my gear in while wandering the radioactive desert wasteland of Fallout: New Vegas with. Heck, it’s even equipped with a padded, crushproof pocket called a “Tech Vault.”

Apple and some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies have been under heavy fire ever since info on the National Security Administration’s PRISM program leaked to the public last month.

In response to the public’s outcry that tech companies are working with the NSA to pilfer personal info on targets of interest, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter and others have formed a broad alliance with civil liberties groups that will tomorrow demand for increased transparency regarding the U.S. government’s spy programs on citizens.

All Things D reports that the alliance will publish a letter Thursday, demanding President Obama and Congress allow tech companies to provide reports on information requests related to national security.

Social weather iPhone app Weathermob has just seen a big, fat update, which Weathermob‘s PR people describe as “a deeper, more delightful and safer understanding of weather.”

With new activity-based (surfing, hiking, golfing, gardening) channels and additional detail added to the realtime weather trends aggregated from its users, this is social weather, and unlike anything else available at the app store.

An extreme departure from the look and feel of its first iOS game, Lili, BitMonster’s upcoming Gunner Z is a gritty, scary delight. The developer just released a launch trailer with a stunningly gorgeous bit of the old ultraviolence in this scifi-themed shooter, soon to release on iOS.

The trailer is dark, gritty, and full of awesome night vision battle scenes, showing off the amazing scenery, the scary undead armies, and a host of armored vehicles ready to take on the hordes.

Try misspelling “abortion” in iOS. Does Apple help you spellcheck it like most of your mistakes? Nope.

It turns out that there’s a huge collection of controversial lingo and not-so-controversial-lingo that Apple takes a hands-off approach to with spellcheck.

Apple’s CEO wants to sell more iPhones, but only in his stores. The iPhone is Apple’s cash cow with its high profit margins, and it creates a “halo effect” that causes customers to buy other Apple products.

Less than 20% of iPhones are currently sold in Apple Stores, and Cook won’t stand for it. Despite the fact that 80% of customers buy their iPhones elsewhere, 50% bring them into the Apple Store to get serviced. If Cook wants the sales/repairs ratio to improve, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done.

Name Your Own Price bundles have been very popular at Cult of Mac Deals, so we’re back with another one for you to enjoy. That’s right. We’ve partnered with 6 fun game developers to bring you The Crack The Case Gamer Bundle!

A keen eye and a quick mind are what you need with this bundle. Five out of the six games are in some way, shape, or form linked to solving a puzzle or mystery in order to succeed. You pay what you want for two games that will keep you gaming for hours – Nightmares From The Deep and Dark Arcana: The Carnival. And if you pay more than the average price, you’ll also receive Star Defender 4, Golden Trails: The New Western Rush, Cradle of Rome 2: Premium Edition, and Abyss: The Wraiths of Eden.

New accessibility options about in iOS 7 beta, helping folks of all abilities access and use their iOS devices more effectively and efficiently. The Physical & Motor section of the accessibility options now allow folks with motor and other physical disabilities to use a switch for visual and auditory scanning options, emulate various gestures with assistive touch (introduced in iOS 6), adjust the Home click speed, and, as the headline above notes, set where the incoming calls are sent.

Want to have your incoming calls go automatically to a headset or speaker? It’s relatively easy in iOS 7 beta.

Potluck, a link-sharing service made by the same people behind Branch, announced today that its bringing its social network to the iPhone today with a brand new iOS app.

Rather than focusing on likes and retweets, Potluck is trying to position itself as a casual social network in hopes of drawing out the “lurkers” who usually sit back and read everyone else’s posts rather than engaging.

The central experience of Potluck is built around sharing and discussing links between a small number of friends, kind of like a more intimate version mix of Twitter and Digg. A desktop version has been available for the past two months, but the company says it sees Potluck as truly mobile experience and plans to release an Android app as well.

Here are the full release notes:

Google has released version 28 (yes, 28) of Chrome for iOS in the App Store. The universal app now has “improved interoperability with many other Google Apps” and a host of other improvements.

Here’s the full list of changes:

This is a review of a camera case. And not just any old multi-user camera case: this one only fits two specific cameras – the Fujifilm X100 and the X100S. However, I’m reviewing it anyway because when I was buying one I couldn’t find any useful information about it. Also, there are builders in my apartment and everything is sealed down behind plastic sheeting, so I couldn’t review anything else even if I wanted to (I promise the Lumopro LP180 review will be ready on Friday).

The case is Fujifilm’s own LC-X100S.

As a response to T-Mobile’s new Jump plan that allows customers to upgrade their smartphone once a year for free, AT&T announced Next two days ago, which offers similar perks as Jump but at a much higher cost.

T-Mobile’s CEO, John Legere has already launched an AT&T Next bashing campaign to go along with the anti-AT&T rant filled keynote he delivered on July 10th. According to an email exchange with CNET, Legere views AT&T Next as just “a poor copycat” of Jump that’s designed to ripoff consumers more than ever:

After refreshing its iPad lineup in the fall last year, rather than summer, Apple set itself up to go through a June quarter without a new iPad launch for the first time since it was introduced in 2010.

With Apple’s Q3 2013 quickly approaching on July 23rd, analysts have already begun to make their iPad sales estimates, and to no one’s surprise, YOY growth has slowed to a crawl in Q3 2013.

I’m on the verge of giving up on using my iPad as my main photo machine, but one brand new app is keeping me from switching back to the Mac. It’s called Photospector, it lets you organize and edit your pictures, and it’s pretty much the iPad photos app Apple should have made all along.

According to Apple, the Apple TV is “just a hobby.” According to a new report, though, it’s way more than a hobby: it’s the dominant force in video streaming.