When Apple announced the original iPhone back in 2007, Google’s first Android handset wasn’t too far behind. The search giant got a compelling iOS alternative out of the gate before anyone else, and it’s been a head-to-head battle between the two platforms ever since. But how was Android able to follow the iPhone so quickly?

Well, that’s fairly obvious to most. You see, Google chairman Eric Schmidt was an Apple board member when the Cupertino company was developing the iPhone, and so he got an inside look at the device before anyone else. Little did Apple know that Schmidt would use what he saw inside Apple’s headquarters to create the iPhone’s biggest competitor.

With the iPad, however, it was a different story. That was years ahead of everything else, and not even Google had a slate ready to do battle when the iPad launched in 2010. Why? Because Steve Jobs made sure Schmidt knew nothing about the iPad before its debut.

After unveiling its latest Kindle lineup last week, Amazon has updated its Kindle app for Mac OS X to introduce support for new books that employ the Kindle 8 format. It also adds OS X Lion gestures and a number of improvements.

According to Enderle Group analyst Rob Enderle, Apple might walk out a celebrity during the iPhone 5 event on September 12.

Why? First of all, because Enderle thinks that so many details about the iPhone 5 have already leaked out that no one’s going to bother watching the event.

Do you wish that Spotify had a free web version like Pandora? Your wish may soon be granted.

According to multiple reports, popular music streaming service Spotify is gearing up to unleash a full web app for paid and free customers.

Remember the giant ‘Retina’ in Apple’s huge event banner for the third-gen iPad? If you thought that was a subtle hint, then get ready, cause it’s even better this time around. We showed you the colorful signage Apple put up at the Yerba Buena Center over the weekend, and it sadly looked like there were no immediate iPhone 5 hints in the banner’s design. Think again.

Believe it or not, the banner currently hanging from Yerba Buena in San Francisco points to the rumored 4-inch display for the iPhone 5.

If you have one of the new touch-screen iPod nanos, then you know one of the cooler things you can do with it is to wear it as a watch. I mean all it needs is a front-facing camera and you have a Dick Tracy watch!

Of course one of the problems I’ve seen with iPod nano bands (remember I worked for an Apple retailer for a while and I saw lots and lots of samples) is that they just look…terrible. Most of the time the band is just a pop in-pop out kind of system that makes the watch band more of a wrist-mounted carry strap than a real watch band. This Paradox watch kit seems to be a horse of a different color. A kit that gives you the power of your nano in the sleekness of a watch. Hmm.

A great new photography app, which allows you to add more than 100 stunning effects to your images, is kicking off this week’s must-have apps roundup. It’s accompanied by Giftly, a clever app for sending all kinds of gifts; a new note-taking app called Scrapnote; and a great new update to Adobe Photoshop Touch for iPad.

We already know that the iPhone 5 will support faster 4G LTE networking, but details surrounding international availability have remained scarce. While it’s assumed that the iPhone 5 will support LTE speeds on U.S. carriers like AT&T and Verizon, accessing LTE on carriers in other continents is a whole other issue.

According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, the next iPhone will indeed support LTE on certain networks in Europe and Asia:

The wristwatch has fallen out of fashion. Sure, a few geezers still wear watches out of habit. Hipsters wear them ironically. Geeks wear them defiantly. And the fashionable wear them decoratively.

But these people are the minority. Bare wrists are the norm now.

People think the wristwatch is dead because our phones tell time, so they’re redundant. But that’s not why.

The reason most reject wristwatches is the same reason most rejected tablets until Apple shipped the iPad in 2010: The available selection is too bloated, clunky, expensive and poorly suited to how people really live and work.

In other words, the right kind of watch would get everyone wearing them again.

Apple mainstreamed tablets by re-imagining what a tablet is, by making it touch and with app and at low cost with a compelling user interface.

Will they do the same for the wristwatch? I think they will. 

I don’t know about where you live, but here in British Columbia holding your cell phone in your hand to talk or text while driving is a no-no. The “I was just answering my kids, officer.” doesn’t hold water either. Now hands free options are everywhere. I made sure my wife has a car mount in her car. So she can see who is calling or keep directions up on screen. We’ve gone through several options and you know they all break. Why? Because they can’t adapt to the fact that people keep their iPhones in cases.

I think we have a solution to that problem with the NKMOS Universal car mount.

Kicking off this week’s must-have games roundup is Wild Blood, Gameloft’s first game to be built upon the impressive Unreal Engine, which lets you live out the story of Sir Lancelot. There’s also a new title from Marvel, the awesome sequel to VS. Racing, and Square Enix’s latest Final Fantasy title.

On Friday Apple started preparing the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, California for the long-awaited iPhone 5 event that will be taking place this Wednesday. Journalists will pile into the venue to watch Tim Cook and company unveil the next iPhone and other surprises. Per tradition, Apple has begun putting up larger banners outside of Yerba Buena the weekend before the event.

We stopped by Yerba Buena to get a look at the signage Apple is putting up. Check out more on-location shots from Yerba Buena in our gallery below.

Cheaper e-books would be great, right? According to industry executives, that may just happen in the next one to three months after a federal judge entered an approval of an antitrust settlement between several e-book publishers and the Justice Department itself.

In the final settlement today, publishers Lagardere, Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins have the next 10 days to notify e-book retailers like Amazon that any previous agreements regarding e-book pricing are no longer valid. The deal gave publishers only seven days to notify Apple, interestingly enough.

According to the report in the Wall Street Journal, one executive, who asked to not be identified, said, “It could be pretty fast.”

The publishers have to let retailers out of any agreements that prevent discounting, and the retailers are also able to terminate said contracts within 30 days.

This last weekend at the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX), I spent time with the developers at Wizards of the Coast, the creators of Magic: The Gathering, to talk about their latest Magic: The Gathering expansion, due out on iOS, PC, and console, Return To Ravnica. They sat me down in the nice room behind the Magic and Dungeons and Dragons booth for some hands-on time with the expansion, which takes players to a new plane in the Magic: The Gathering Universe, Ravnica.

The expansion comes with new single player opponents, each with their own deck and playstyle. As in the original iOS version of Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013, once you beat one of the computer enemies, you unlock their card deck to play in your own battles with the online multiplayer.

Let’s face it: we Apple fanatics have a certain stereotype. We all love our Apple devices, and it shows. Sometimes too much.

If there has ever been a video parody perfectly suited for the Cult of Mac, it’s this one. Behold part 1 and 2 of “Sh*#t Apple Fanatics Say:”

If you’ve been itching for an unlock on your iPhone, then you may be able to score a free factory unlock from AT&T. The way it typically works is that a U.S. carrier will unlock an iPhone after its two-year contract is up, but it looks like AT&T is offering unlocks for free to certain on-contract iPhones.

Requesting an unlock through AT&T’s web form has produced good results for multiple iPhone owners. If you’d like an unlock to use your iPhone on any GSM carrier worldwide, then it’s worth a shot.

Following this morning’s enigmatic shots of the inside of the lobby, news shots of what is happening outside the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts ahead of September 12th’s iPhone 5 event have emerged, showing the first stages of what will become the public-facing banners of what will undoubtedly prove to be Apple’s biggest event yet.

The banners are going up right now, but we’ve got our own photographer heading down, hopefully to capture more. In the past, the banners that hang outside of the Yerba Buena Center Of The Arts have tended to make some reference to an unannounced new product or service, so hopefully, we’ll soon have an inkling of what Apple’s set to announce.

More images at MacStories below.

Source: MacStories

For someone who uses their iPhone a lot (and I mean a LOT), it’s funny how many little things I just don’t know about. iOS is a brilliant and complex thing, and finding all the hidden features is pretty tricky. Take today’s tip, for example – I rarely use my iPhone as a phone, really, so it’s with that in mind that I want to point out how easy it actually is to create a conference call with Apple’s magical device.

iTunes is terrible. I do my best and try to never ever ever open it up, even though I got about 150GB of music crammed in there. A new report from the Wall Street Journal though says that Apple is looking to fix iTunes and build their very own streaming service that works kind of like Pandora.

Apple has the most extensive digital music library on the planet, so it might be really cool. At the same time, I already have Rdio that I use every day, and Pandora doesn’t even let me choose which songs I get to listen to. So even though an iTunes streaming service sounds like a dream, I don’t know if I’d actually use it. But what do you guys think? Would you actually use an iTunes streaming service? Or would you stick with Spotify and Rdio?

Click here to tell us what you think about the iTunes streaming service at the Cult of Mac forums

Most Bluetooth headphones are ugly. Most Bluetooth headphones are junk. Most Bluetooth headphones make you long for a cord. They are distorted, bass heavy, low-quality piece of junk.

For the most part, not so Harman / Kardon’s over-the-ear Bluetooth headphones. These are Bluetooth headphones worthy in both sound quality and design of the iconic company that not only helped create Hi-Fi, but is, in many non-trivial ways, the Apple of sound.

$9. Nine lousy dollars. With nine bucks, there’s no way you could make an iPhone stand this good, even buying parts from the cheapest of hardware stores. Hell, the only way to make a functional iPhone holder with $9 is to head to the bank, buy a roll of quarters and sit the iPhone up on top.

Which is hardly as elegant as this very practical-looking Pi Mount.

Have you ever had to say that you’re terrible at something just so you can get some preferential treatment, even though you’re really not as bad as you claim? It’s silly, but sometimes it works.

That’s what happened to Samsung today. In order to not get their products banned from the Netherlands, Samsung had to tell the court today that their multitouch software is really terrible in comparison to Apple’s.

Here are two things that are probably true: you don’t smoke, and you own an old, disused iPhone dock. Here are some things which are almost guaranteed to be true: You own a dock connector cable and a 3.5 mm jack cable

And if you live in the U.S, and you haven’t yet achieved enlightenment and switched to a bike, then you almost certainly have a car. Put these things together and what do you get? Jalopnik’s neat DIY in-car iPhone dock.

A web site called Australian Business Traveler reports that a reader checked in for a Virgin Australia flight today using the airline’s mobile web site on his iPhone, and Passbook popped up. He’s running iOS 6.

According to the site, iOS 6 noticed his mobile check-in, and offered to save his boarding pass into his Passbook account. He grabbed this screenshot.

Read the whole story.

Over the past few years we’ve seen hundreds of fake iPhone mockups, some have been bizarre, while others looked so good we wished they were real. What’s been most surprising is that some of the weirdest looking concepts are actually fairly similar to prototypes Apple was working on in their labs.

Thanks to the evidence in the Apple vs Samsung trial, we got to see the different iPhone prototypes Apple was working on, so we’ve gone back and found 7 artists mockups that look a lot like prototypes Apple was working on.