Over the past few months, a number of different studies have shown the iPad (and to a lesser extent the iPhone) is a near-perfect advertising vehicle that enourages ad click-throughs, user engagement, and purchase decisions in ways that generally aren’t seen with other technologies.

A truly well-crafted marketing campaign aimed at iPad and iPhone users in, however, is more than just a series of ads. Instead it’s a series of interactions that build a relation with mobile customers. According to the marketing gurus at MarketingProfs, one key to building those relationships is using push notifications – and using them in the right ways.

Google’s official Gmail app has had a sordid history. It launched so broken it had to be pulled from the App Store, and when it relaunched, it came without push notifications… a pretty big oversight in an iOS email client. Gmail finally got push notifications, but the app overall still felt a little clunky.

Enter version 1.3. Google says the latest update to their official Gmail app for iOS makes a bunch of under the hood changes to improve animation, scrolling and responsiveness.

This thing is absolutely insane. That’s all we can think of when watching the video of this huge mech suit built by Suidobashi Heavy Industries. Not only is it gigantic, but it’s fully functional, with robotic arms, BB gatling guns, water bottle launchers, and a kick-ass cockpit that looks like something out of your favorite video game.

The Kuratas, is a 13-foot, 4.4-ton metal mech suit. The best part is that you can completely control it with your iPhone or jump in the cockpit and run around town terrorizing dogs, cats, and little old ladies. The only catch is that it costs a whopping $1.35million, so most of us will only be able to dream about it. But if you have a few extra mill to spare, Suidobashi made this handy operation instructions video about the Kuratas –

Not getting enough Olympic information to feed your habit? Are you obsessing over every event, every result, cheering your team to victory? Well, perhaps the official London 2012 Summer Olympics App from The London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Limited will fit the bill.

This app promises all the latest Olympic news, schedules, and result, letting you stay up to date with the latest happenings from all Olympic sports live while the games are happening. Here’s what it has.

Quite a bit of chatter has arisen over Apple’s newest “Genius” television ads. Some have called them “embarrassing.” Others? “Ehhh?” Even Ken Segall, one of Apple’s former advertising creative directors has given the ads a big thumbs down.

But are they really so terrible? If you take a look back, you’ll see rather quickly that Apple has produced much worse. In fact, I’d go as far to say that some of Apple’s previous ads make the new ones seem not just good, but absolutely amazing.

Don’t believe me? Check out this gallery I compiled of what I believe to be the top 10 worst Apple ads of all time. Watch out- some of them are pretty shocking.

Back in May we told you about FreedomPop’s 4G sled for the iPhone that came with 500MB of free data, and today a similar add-on has been announced for the iPod touch. FreedomPop’s $99 sled brings 3G/4G data to the third and fourth generation iPod touch, effectively turning the device into an iPhone without the phone.

The iPod touch add-on is identical to the iPhone model, the only difference is that the iPod touch version draws power from the device itself while the other relies on its own battery.

At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, the only thing I was hunting down more than free drinks and after-parties, was power outlets. Yes sir, I love my purdy white iPhone 4S, but on days of heavy use, I find I need to charge it two times or more before the day is through.

The Dual USB Power Bank from Verbatim (about $65), provides a a massive amount of portable power that should keep anyone from outlet-hunting in the inky-shadows of Vegas convention halls. But the question is, how does it perform while charging two connected devices or the power-hungry new iPad?

Since the release of Snow Leopard Server three years ago, Apple has been steering its server platform away from large enterprise deployments. Instead Apple has redesigned OS X Server to meet the needs of the small to mid-size business market as well as the needs of Apple-centric departments or workgroups in larger organizations. That focus is very clear if you download and install Mountain Lion Server or look through the Mountain Lion Server documentation from Apple.

One of the transitions that Apple began in Lion and Lion Server, which were released last summer, was a move away from the traditional Mac management architecture that Apple has provided in OS X Server since it launched the platform more than a decade ago. In its place, Apple has built a management system for Macs that is very similar to the mobile management features available in iOS.

Every time Apple holds a keynote or earning call they love to brag about how many apps are available in the App Store. Right now Apple’s boasting that there are 500,000 apps for the iPhone, which you know, sounds really freaking amazing when you’re thinking about buying and iPhone. Think of all the cool stuff you could with 500,000 different apps.

Yes, the App Store is awesome and it’s packed with some truly solid apps, but the truth is that most of the 500,000 apps that Apple brags about don’t ever get noticed. In fact, a recent analysis revealed that two-thirds of all apps in the App Store are “zombies,”  meaning they never get downloaded, are invisible to users, and have no ranking.

Mountain Lion’s version of the Safari browser brough many great things: a unified URL/search bar, iCloud tab syncing and some neat new gestures (try pinching when you have a few tabs open). What it also did was remove the RSS button, replacing it with the Reader button found in iOS. This – apparently – pissed off a lot of people.

So, for those of you who used this button daily, we’ve put together a list of alternatives. None of them will give you the same functionality, but all of them are great RSS readers which work in slightly different ways.

The times sure are a-changin’, and we’re now in an age where political leaders are announcing running mates via mobile apps. Much like Barack Obama’s decision to announce VP running mate Joe Biden via text message, Mitt Romney has decided to announce his VP via a mobile app entitled “Mitt’s VP.”

If you’ve never been to a Cracker Barrel restaurant, then I feel sorry for you. Where I live, Cracker Barrel is where you go for hearty, good ol’ fashioned, country cooking. Breakfast is always especially good.

The only times I ever played checkers growing up was at Cracker Barrel. While you wait for your food, there are boards set up around the restaurant with rocking chairs. There’s something about sitting down with a friend or loved one to just play a simple game of checkers. In the age of Xbox LIVE, Draw Something and Scrabble apps, face-to-face gameplay is sadly becoming a thing of the past.

A new iPad game called Checkers blends traditional board gaming with pixel-perfect digital charm.

Apple is one of the world’s only companies that isn’t content to push out a great product with a few flaws. They want everything to be perfect. It’s one of their biggest strengths, but it also prevents a lot of neat products and ideas from reaching production. It turns out that the iPhone was no different during its inception, and even after all the cool prototyping and public demand for a great smartphone, Apple nearly axed the iPhone before it was launched.

Apple’s chief designer, Jony Ive, stated in a recent interview that small design flaws with the iPhone nearly caused it to get shelved, because even though the iPhone was good, it wasn’t excellent until they figured out how to fix some fundamental problems, like the proximity sensor.

One of the best gifts I ever bought for my camera was a hand-made leather ever-ready case. These two-part cases not only look better the older they get, but they offer a whole lot of protection. I have dropped my Panasonic GF1 more times than I will ever admit to you, and it doesn’t even have a dent or scratch. Well, not from dropping it anyway.

But my handsome case looks like a piece of junk next to these gorgeous half-cases from Korea’s Gariz. You can pick up models to fit most high-end compacts and mirrorless cameras, but today we’ll take a look at a new addition for the Sony RX100.

By now, we should all know that texting while driving is a danger not only ourselves and our passengers, but to everyone we share the road with. With over 1 million new mobile users a week in the U.S., that makes for a scary number of possible distracted drivers. The temptation is there, especially in young drivers, but as AT&T has shown us, “It Can Wait.”

According to a new report this morning, Apple is considering a stock split that could add the company to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Sanford C. Bernstein & Co predicts that Apple’s decision to issue its first dividend in 17 years to shareholders makes now a perfect time for the stock split.

Apple is currently in the NASDAQ index, but given the incredible financial success the Cupertino company has seen over the past decade, it makes perfect sense to move to the Dow Jones.

Ever since Apple debuted their new Mac ad campaign during the Olympic Opening Ceremonies last week the internet has been buzzing like crazy with some people saying they’re good while many others think they’re terrible. Even Apple’s former ad-man Ken Segall came out yesterday and bashed the ads.

Apple’s definitely made some bad ads in the past, but are these the worst? What do you think about the ads? Do they make Mac users look like a bunch of Genius-dependent boneheads? Or do the ads appeal to people who might be afraid to use technology? We want to talk about it with you guys in the forums, so head on over and let us know what you think.

Click here to tell us what you think about the new Mac ads in the Cult of Mac Forums 

The search for the perfect iPad case is never ending, but that won’t stop me trying. And as you get further along in your quest, the differences between cases becomes smaller and smaller. At first glance, these two slimline cases from Lioncase look like any other slimline folios and Smart Covers, but close up they look much more compelling.

I gave up on Google Chrome for iOS about a day after it was released. Even though my iPhone is jailbroken and I can bypass iOS’s restrictions to set Chrome as my default browser, I missed Safari. Also, Chrome felt considerably slower than the iPhone’s default browser, and that was because Apple handicaps third-party apps by not allowing them to access the lightning-fast Nitro Javascript engine in iOS.

Does the lack of Nitro in your favorite third-party iOS browsers keep you awake at night? Me neither. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be cool to make an app like Google Chrome just as fast as Mobile Safari. For jailbreakers, there’s a new tweak out that makes it all possible.

One common assumption about iPads in business is that employees and executives are insisting on using their personal iPads at work or are demanding that the company provide them while CIOs and IT departments are fighting tooth and nail against the iPad. While that assumption certainly makes for good headlines and soundbites, it isn’t actually true – at least according to a new report from cloud and content management firm Alfresco.

In fact, Alfresco’s new report indicates that IT staffers are heavily involved in tablet adoption and may even be the driving force behind it. The report also provided a range of insights as to how iPads and other tablets are being used in the workplace and notes that tablets are offering new opportunities more than they are replacing either smartphones or PCs.

Even though Apple’s Pages app is a pretty solid word processing tool, a lot of Mac users still love to use Microsoft Word. If you’re one of them, that’s cool, we won’t judge you. The biggest problem with using Word on a new MacBook Pro with Retina display is that it looks pretty ugly because it hasn’t been updated to take advantage of the Retina display yet.

The great news for Word fans is there’s a really easy work around that will force your Microsoft Word app to use your MacBook Pro’s Retina display, which makes the app look a lot better. All you got to do is follow these quick steps and you’ll be on the path to more Retina goodness.

Hulu Plus has long been a curious omission on the Apple TV’s list of channels, but it now appears that Apple has quietly added it this morning to its supported steaming services. If you don’t see it, try rebooting your Apple TV. About time!

Source: Macrumors

When OS X Lion debuted, our old-friend Save As… had been sent packing for a new imposter, Duplicate. We tried to like this new one, but wow was it not the same. Luckily, Mountain Lion has brought Save As… back, only in a sneaky, less than obvious way.

We want to share how to see the Save As… command, of course, with a simple key press, but we’ll go even one step further, clueing you in on how to return good-old-Save As… to its former glory, in the exalted spot it used to reside in. Here’s how.

The 2012 Presidential Elections are fast closing in on us, with a little over three months left before Barack Obama and Mitt Romney enter the ring and, following the protocol laid out in the constitution by our forefathers, settle the question of who will become the next American president in front of a panel of judges in a Zoolander style walk-off.

Perhaps to prepare for this upcoming challenge, Prsident Obama’s re-election campaign is launching a new iOS app.

Just a reminder, friends: if you’ve ever used Apple’s iWork.com beta to share and collaborate on documents in the cloud, you need to download them to your computer today… otherwise, at the end of the day, Apple will press a big red button and your precious Pages, Keynote and Numbers documents will be ripped apart into a trillion trillion atoms and slowly dispersed throughout the universe.

First launched in 2009 as a service to let iWork users collaborate, edit and download documents online, iWork.com is being killed off having never left beta in favor of Apple’s newer and more full-featured cloud initiative, iCloud.

Source: iWork.com