We’re huge fans of TwelveSouth’s BookBook cases here at Cult of Mac. Like everyone else, we’ve been anticipating a BookBook for the iPhone 5. Today we got word that TwelveSouth has an updated BookBook for Apple’s newest iPhone in the pipeline, and the case will be available next month!

BookBook is unique because it doubles as wallet, making it easy to carry your cards and ID with your iPhone. Not only will BookBook for iPhone 5 come in two colors, but TwelveSouth has redesigned the case to include… drum roll please… a hole for the rear-facing camera!

I despise iOS 6 Maps. Despite writing some initially favorable early impressions that now seem like they were written by a slathering moron demon who temporarily possessed my soul, ever since iOS 6 has been released, I have been frustrated by a fail rate on iOS 6 Maps that hovers somewhere around 70%. Not only can I most of the time not get iOS 6 Maps to give me a correct answer to a search query, I usually can’t get it to give me the same wrong answer twice in a row.

I realize a lot of people think iOS 6 Maps is just fine. Some of these are people I respect. I have a hard time reconciling their views on the matter with my reality. I have my suspicions that people who think iOS 6 Maps is just fine commute everywhere in their cars, and have a set pattern of destinations that rarely change: point A to point B to point C. I bike everywhere, I’m constantly going to new addresses, and for me, iOS 6 is just an utter disaster.

I yearn for the return of Google Maps to iOS 6, but I find their web app to be wanting, and most of the maps competition to be slow, ugly and just as bad as iOS 6 Maps when it comes to walking and biking instructions. Up until now, Mapquest (!) was the best app I found for getting me where I’m going.

That’s all changed, now that I’ve discovered Maps+. It’s based off of Google Maps, so it’s accurate. It uses the same tileset as iOS 5 Maps, so it’s pretty and familiar. It’s super fast, and it’s free.

One of the biggest annoyances of using Instagram is when I have a friend who also uses Twitter and I want to mention them in a photo that I’m about to post to Twitter, except their Instagram and Twitter usernames are completely different.

It’s not a huge inconvenience, but it’d just be easier if everything was the same. Instagram says they just solved that problem and now Instagram names will magically be translated to their proper Twitter handle when posted on Twitter.

When the folks at Griffin were choosing a mythical creature for which to name their company¹, they might have gone with Janus instead, to better reflect the schizophrenic nature of its offering: serious computer accessories vs. frivolous toys.

That’s not to say that the toys are bad. On the contrary, Griffin’s iOS-controlled choppers look amazing. And now they’re joined by these remote-controlled monster trucks.

MapMyWalk is one of a range of apps from the people at MapMyFitness. It’s not a pretty app, but mapping walks doesn’t have to be pretty to be functional. And it is functional. Mostly.

Most people will download almost any iOS game, no matter how silly it looks, as long as it’s free. They just won’t stick around for more than one day. A new study on user engagement in free-to-play social games discovered that 85% of new players in the U.S. never go back to the game after the first day.

There are reasons why you should always understand how technology works before taking scandalous pictures of yourself and sending them to your lover. You don’t know where those pictures are going to end up. You might snap a naughty picture with your iPhone that then gets sent to your iCloud Photostream that is then synced with your school’s iPad. Then your students might be playing around on that school iPad, find the pic of you lookin’ saucy, and then all hell breaks loose.

That’s exactly what happened to one middle school teacher. The weird twist to the story is that the teacher didn’t get fired or suspended for having nearly pornographic photos of herself on a school device. The students that found it go suspended instead.

Reuters’ new iPad app is called The Wider Image, and it’s dedicated to showing off the news agency’s photographs. It’s free, and if you want to spend the next few hours lost in amazing photojournalism from around the world, whilst learning a bit about that same world, then go download it now.

For all intents and purposes the latest, 7th generation iPod nano is nothing new. We’ve seen it all before: the widescreen form factor, the touchscreen display. What is new is that we’ve never seen these features in this configuration.

That’s what paradoxically makes the 2012 iPod nano the best one yet: it’s an agglomeration of the best features of the nanos that came before.

It is as though the best features of all previous generations of this protean device are refined and combined into this latest “Lucky Seventh” iteration. Now the iPod nano is the right height, the right shape, the right screen size, the right colors, and perfectly simple. It is what the iPod nano was always meant to be — a good-looking, on-the-go music player.

To be honest, I’m writing about DrBlinky for two reasons, both of them frivolous. One is the name: DrBlinky. Who couldn’t love a name like that?

The other is the Indiegogo pitch video, a triumph of cheesiness and amateur earnestness, but in a (very) good way. Put it this way — if Will Ferrell and Ricky Gervais ever teamed up to do a parody Kickstarter-style promo, it would look like this.

No one uses iTunes anymore. iTunes is like that one cool guy from high school who used to be a lot of fun to hang out with, but then everyone grew up and he’s still out there prowling the streets of your hometown, getting drunk, attending local football games and hanging out with high school kids. He just failed to grow up like everyone else, and that’s kind of what’s happened to iTunes. It’s antiquated and bloated. People dread using it and even though iTunes 11 is supposed to drop this month, we don’t think that’s going to change much.

What can Apple do to fix iTunes? Is there even a way to do it?  It’s an ugly and slow app but it’s still important, so it’s not like Apple can just nuke it altogether and start over. Should Apple divy up the functionality of iTunes to other OS X apps the same way they do with iOS? We haven’t played with iTunes 11, but the demo at last month’s keynote didn’t make us too hopeful. We’d love to hear your thoughts on what Apple should do to fix iTunes.

Click here to go to the Cult of Mac Forum and tell us what you would do to make iTunes useable again.

The iPad mini will be announced next October 23rd, but when’s it actually going on sale? Common sense and looking at what Apple has done in the past would dictate November 2nd, which is what previous internet rumor suggested. Now we’re hearing confirmation of that date from loftier sources.

If it’s anything like the other products in the ever-burgeoning Beats franchise, the Beats Pill is likely a triumph of pricing over quality. It comes in at a Jamboxian $200, stands just two inches high, and works like any other portable speaker — via Bluetooth.

The iPhone 5 has been a sell-out since it went on sale on September 21, and it’s still incredibly difficult to get hold of in some markets even a month later. With five million units sold, it’s the fastest-selling iPhone to date, so it’s no surprise one analyst is predicting that iPhone sales could be even better than originally expected.

One of the consequences of the iPhone 5’s streamlined, ultra-thin design is that you can no longer just pop off the backplate of the device and replace it. That means no more Don-Draper-esque teak backs or glowing Apple logos or anything else that you could do to deeply personalize your iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S.

So what do you do if you want to customize your iPhone 5 without having to slap a bulky case on it? You skin it. And RAW out of Brooklyn is making some of the best custom skins for the iPhone 5 around out of quality leather and wood grain to give your handset a classier look.

If you have any idea what an ollie is, or a 50:50 grind, or a heel-flip (or — if you grew up in the 1980s, an acid drop or boneless), then you should buy True Skate right this minute. Seriously. I’ll wait.

Why? Because — despite some v1 limitations — True Skate is the closest you’re going to get to a dead-on skateboarding sim in 2012. The only things missing are the security guards to come and harass you, and bad fast food.

Microsoft claims its new Surface RT tablet, which begins shipping later this month, has a display that’s superior to the Retina display in the third-generation iPad. But according to DisplayMate CEO Dr. Raymond M. Soneira, that may not be the case. After some basic comparisons, Soneira found the Surface tablet’s display is “significantly less sharp” than the new iPad’s.

The first thing you notice about the 2012 fifth-generation iPod touch is how beautifully it’s made. Crazy thin, ridiculously light, yet sturdy as a slab of slate.

The fit and finish are extraordinary. There are no seams, screws, gaps, cracks or openings. It’s literally seamless. The buttons look like they’re part of the iPod’s case, not nubbins that poke through. Who makes stuff this good? Oh yeah, Apple.

Other reviews have complained about the price (it starts at $300) and some reviewers seem unimpressed by the touch. Who is it for, they wonder? Especially if you already have an iPhone.

Well, it’s for the kids. It’s a kids’ computer. Their first computer, if you like. It’s a relatively cheap, highly portable, extremely capable little handheld computer for children. It plays games, music and movies; surfs the net; communicates via text and Facebook; and hosts a bazillion apps for entertainment or homework. It also displays e-books, though let’s be honest: reading is the last thing it’ll be used for.

But $300 is a lot of money to spend on a kid. Is it worth it?

Lomo has launched yet another gorgeous new film camera, and this one looks as lame as all the rest. It’s called the Belair X 6-12, and it’s medium format.

Apple has begun work on the first phase of its Prineville data center, which will include clearing and flattening the land for one of two 330,000 square-foot buildings. Each building is said to be more than twice the size of a typical Costco store, and this initial phase of construction alone is expected to cost Apple $68 million.

Safari 6, the web browser that comes with OS X Mountain Lion, added a ton of new features when it launched a while back, and Reading List is one of the cool ones. Reading List will let you save articles without having to bookmark them, thus avoiding all the hassles of organizing and/or synchronizing bookmarks. It’s a similar system to something like Instapaper or Pocket (formerly) Read It Later, but baked right in to your Safari browser.

One thing’s clear: the iPhone 5 isn’t going to be a cakewalk to jailbreak. It’s based upon an all-new chip and an all-new operating system, and so far, the Dev Team has been stumped as to how to get a jailbreak out to the masses. But now Planetbeing, a member of the Chronic Dev Team, has given iPhone 5 owners a ray of hope: he says he’s almost figured out a full tethered jailbreak for the iPhone 5, and from there, an untethered jailbreak is on the horizon. But there’s a big catch: it can only be run from a developer account.

Earlier this week, Stainless Games brought the 1997 reckless driving sensation that is Carmageddon to iOS, and I haven’t been able to put it down since — it’s as good today as it was 15 years ago on the Dreamcast. However, it does have one issue holding it back: a save game bug that could wipe all your progress.

New, mini iPads; new, thinner iMacs; 13-inch Macbook Pros with Retina displays; you could wait till Tuesday to discover all the great products Apple’s about to unleash into the world, but that’s what grandpas do. Join us on our newest CultCast, and find out everything we know and expect from next week’s big media event right now. And, um, no offense to actual grandpas, cause I love grandpas, they’re the best.

Plus: 3rd-party lightening adapters and cables—they’d make great stocking stuffers, am-i-right? We’ll tell you when you can finally expect to see them in stores.

All that and more on our newest CultCast! Subscribe now on iTunes, or easily stream The CultCast via Apple’s free Podcasts App.

Read on for the show notes!

Here’s a nifty little tweak that’ll help you write new emails a little quicker: It’s called SpotMail, and it lets you create new emails from directly within Spotlight on your jailbreak iOS device. All you have to do is type in the recipient’s email address and hit search.