Following a last minute Friday release of developer beta 5, Apple has officially released the final iOS 6.1 for all compatible devices… which, of course, opens the door to the imminent iOS 6.1 Jailbreak.

The headlining new feature of iOS 6.1 is that it adds LTE support to 36 iPhone carriers and 23 iPad carriers around the world. You can also purchase movie tickets through Siri now, and the Apple TV gets new Bluetooth functionality, iTunes 11’s Up Next functionality, and iTunes in the Cloud support. There’s also a host of new bug fixes.

Most excitingly? The official release of iOS 6.1 heralds the long delayed availability of an untethered iOS 6 jailbreak for all devices short of the Apple TV 3.

iOS 6.1 final is the same as iOS 6.1 Beta 5, so if you downloaded that over the weekend, you won’t have to install anything more. Press release and direct download links are after the jump.

When it comes to buying a smartphone right now, there are pretty much only two choices – Android or iPhone. Yeah, you could go buy a Windows Phone or a BlackBerry if you really want to, but no one else is.

Both the iPhone and Android ecosystems are growing so fast that competitors can’t catch up. According to the latest figures from Strategy Analytics, 92% of all global smartphone shipments in Q4 of 2012 where either an iPhone or Android.

By Andy Patrizio

ANAHEIM, Calif. – Jammit has been here at the NAMM show before, showing off its educational app to teach people how to play the guitar, bass, drum and vocal tracks of popular songs.

What’s new this year is the company has teamed with Line 6, makers of effect-laden amplifiers, to give iOS devices a genuine guitar sound. So if you are playing along to Nirvana or Sublime or Rush, the Line 6 connector will make you sound like those songs, and you don’t have to worry about fiddling with your guitar to get Kurt Cobain or Alex Lifeson’s unique tone.

Jammit lets you play along to your favorite songs, removing the instrument you are playing so you don’t have to play over it. You can isolate the parts, loop them to learn them, and even record yourself playing with the band. The app is free on the App Store, but songs, licensed from the artists, cost $2.99 and up. The Jammit song store has more than 1,200 titles.

You should never steal an iPhone while wearing pink shoes. It doesn’t sound like a piece of vital information, but in the hard streets of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park it is, because those pink little things are going to get you caught.

One thief learned that lesson the hard way, after he stole an iPhone from a girl, and then the iPhone he stole was stolen, and then both of them got busted. It’s a crazy story, but it goes something like this:

Following up on their earlier reports about the cheaper iPhone, iLounge’s Jeremy Horowitz has followed up with details about what the rumored “budget” iPhone would look like: basically, just like an iPhone 5, but with a largely plastic casing and the rounded corners of an iPod classic.

By Andy Patrizio

ANAHEIM, Calif. – IK Multimedia has a number of Apple devices for musicians and is expanding some of them to other iOS devices. One example is iRig HD for iPad, a high definition audio recorder that makes quality recordings of vocals or acoustic audio.

iRig HD does a 24-bit A/D conversion for a signal free of background noise or crosstalk. An onboard gain control allows you to find the idea distance for the microphone to get the cleanest recording at the best audio levels.

iRig is already available for iPhone, iPod Touch and Mac. Pricing for the HD model is not available yet.

Jailbreaking your iPhone gives you the ability to tweak and customize nearly every facet of iOS, but new jailbreaks are few and far between these days. For example, there still hasn’t been a full jailbreak for iOS 6 from last summer, although one is on the distant horizon.

People jailbreak their iPhones for all sorts of reasons, whether it be free tethering, themes, or quick access to settings. The most common reason to jailbreak is actually more of a philosophy. There are millions of iPhone owners out there who want to be able to have greater control over their iOS experience. What if you want to hide stock apps you don’t use, or even just get rid of your carrier logo?

Fortunately, you can actually do those last two things on a non-jailbroken iPhone with relative ease, and here’s how:

Even though many people idolize Steve Jobs and the role he played in the tech industry, his dietary habits are not for the faint of heart.

While preparing to play Steve Jobs in his new movie JOBS, Ashton Kutcher decided he should try to walk, talk and even eat like Steve Jobs to fully embrace the role. It sounds like a good idea, except following Steve Jobs’ diet gave Kutcher’s pancreas all sorts of problems and he wound up in the hospital two days before the movie started.

The City of Shanghai has just confirmed via the Municipal Commission of Commerce that Apple will be opening a research and development center this summer.

We’ve been waiting a long time for an iOS 6 jailbreak to be released, and hopefully we won’t have to wait much longer. The iOS 6.1 jailbreak sounds like it’s going to be awesome because almost everyone will be able to use it, and it will be an untethered jailbreak which is always nice.

Making things even better, Evad3rs, the team behind the upcoming jailbreak, let it be known today that the upcoming iOS 6.1 untethered jailbreak will work on every device that can run iOS 6.1. That’s a whopping 22 devices in total, and maybe even 23 if the Apple TV 2 update is out in time.

This is pretty much the best thing ever: a tiny Lego model of the original Mac, as put together by Flickr-er Chris McVeigh.

Fed up with waiting to get yourself one of Apple’s new, super-slim iMacs? It looks like Apple’s finally making them faster, and supply constraints will soon be easing up accordingly.

This is fantastic. The block-based building game Minecraft has been used to recreate pretty much everything under the sun, from the U.S.S. Enterprise to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, but for the Apple fan, this is the best one yet: a complete recreation of Apple’s Infinite Loop campus put together by Reddit user Sam Schwab for his Discrete Mathematics class.

On our recent Cult of Mac outing CES in Las Vegas, I introduced a few of your favorite writers to TripIt the fantastic trip organizing app/service. But sometimes you just need to know a little bit about your flights, your hotel, or where to eat. Enter Travel Essentials, an iPhone app that does just that, and does it beautifully.

The Option key is a powerful ally in the transition from new, beginner user of OS X to the power user that you want to be. There are a ton of hidden features in the Finder alone that are hidden behind the underrated and unassuming Option key.

Here are some of the more useful ones.

Reviews of the new JOBS movie starring Ashton Kutcher are mixed, but Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s sentiments about the film are certainly not. After the first clip of JOBS surfaced, Woz was quick to say that the scene portrayed never actually happened. That isn’t a surprise considering how Hollywood reconstructs history for narrative’s sake, but Woz’s also said that the portrayed personalities were “very wrong.”

Now it has been revealed that the makers of JOBS approached Woz to help with the project in its early stages, but he turned them down because the script was total “crap.”

Cult of Mac Deals offers up killer deals each and every week, and this past week has been no exception. While you can find all of our deals going on over at the Cult of Mac Deals page right now, we’ve got three in particular from the past week that we’d like showcase for you.

Steve Jobs Threatened Patent Litigation To Enforce ‘No Hire’ Emails

Apple’s Record-Breaking Q1 2013 At A Glance [Charts]

Back To The Future: 15 Years Of Apple Web Design Seen Through A Time Machine

How Apple Will (And Won’t) Colorize The iPhone 5S

Remote Control Your Mac At Home Using Only An iOS Text Editor [How-To]

Nose Jobs: The Story Behind The Most Incredible Steve Jobs Photo You’ve Never Seen

Apple has released its fifth beta for iOS 6.1 to registered developers. Since the fourth beta was set to expire Monday, we were expecting Apple to seed a new release yesterday or Monday. Instead, the company has uncharacteristically seeded the new software on a Saturday. iOS 6.1 beta 4 was seeded on December 17th, 2012.

Everyone has been expecting the final iOS 6.1 GM build to arrive any day now, but Apple is still obviously pushing out betas. When the GM version does come out for devs, then a public release is not far behind.

A beta version of iOS has never gone past 7 beta revisions in years, and each version is usually about a month apart. That would put 6.1 on track for hitting beta 7 sometime around March, which happens to be around the time that Apple usually holds a press event.

Thanks: Sentry

Back in 2011, an app called iMAME surfaced in the App Store that allowed you to run thousands of classic arcade titles by sideloading the games onto an iOS device. Apple has never really allowed emulators in the App Store, and iMAME was swiftly pulled.

Now another app has crept into the App Store that allows you to emulate old games. It likely won’t be in the App Store long, so get it while you can!

Buck’s of Woodside doesn’t just serve eggs or coffee or toast. It serves you biomechanical sharks and surfing crocodiles. Sometimes, it even serves you up a photograph of Steve Jobs so incredible, so deserved of being considered iconic, that you simply can’t believe that no one has ever even heard of it. But for twenty-three years, no one has.

Sometimes you see product concepts that straight blow your mind or make you scratch your head. The UpperCup does both.

This iPhone case comes from Amsterdam-based company Natwerk, and the creators are trying to raise $25,000 on Indiegogo to begin production. It will retail for $35, and backers get $5 off.

Source: UpperCup

The first movie made about Steve Jobs after his death, JOBS starring Ashton Kutcher, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last night. The movie has been generating a lot of buzz for the past several months, and a teaser clip was aired earlier this week. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak quickly called the clip out for its historical inaccuracy.

Anything that closely examines Steve Jobs’s life is bound to be controversial, and this movie has had a storm of anticipation swirling about it for quite some time. Does Kutcher give Steve Jobs a portrayal that’s engaging, and more importantly, believable?

Actor Ashton Kutcher tweeted out this photo from Sundance, where his new JOBS biopic is premiering. It’s a montage of Kutcher and the iconic picture of the older Steve Jobs. It’s an uncanny picture.

Reviews from Sundance are sharing mixed opinions about the movie, but they all seem to agree that Kutcher portrays Jobs well.

Everything is amazing and nobody is happy.

When comedian Louis C.K. famously expressed that notion on Conan, he was making a commentary on the public’s instantly acquired sense of entitlement when confronted with new technology.

His observations are also applicable to the assumptions underlying nearly all the stuff you read about consumer electronics by bloggers, journalists and financial analysts.

The gnashing of teeth and ripping of hair over with everything Apple these days is a perfect example.