TwelveSouth is a company as known for their fantastic innovations (for example, the PlugBug) as their curiosities (the BookBook case). The SurfacePad for MacBook doesn’t fall in either category: it’s a strictly utilitarian accessory, a thin leather sticker for the keyboard of your MacBook Air that makes it feel more pleasant to type on by putting an almost imperceptibly thin layer of dyed cow flesh between your palms and the cold unibody aluminum.

My favorite gadget is most certainly my iPhone… or my iPad. I have a tough time choosing between the two, but it’s definitely one of those devices. And I’m sure many of you feel the same way about your smartphone or tablet, after all, we use things every single day for all kinds of tasks.

But for Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, it isn’t either of these things. His favorite gadget is his aging transistor radio, which was given to him by his parents when he was eight years old.

Street View is fantastic. You can check out a hotel’s façade before you even book a room, you can walk down a street where you remember there was this awesome store, only you can’t remember its name, or you can wander through far-off cities.

Now, you can make your own Street Views, with this camera and software kit from DIY Streetview.

Apple offers a number of search engines for iOS users, including Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Bing. According to a new report today, Apple will be adding Baidu search engine support for iPhone owners in China as early as next week. The feature will likely be announced alongside other iOS 6 announcements at WWDC.

Baidu is basically the Google of China, owning 80% of the market there while Google only owns 17%. It’s not surprising that Apple would want to support the largest search engine in the iPhone and iPad’s fastest growing market. Not to mention that this is another move that pushes a certain company farther away from iOS.

If the actual Alien Sky app is as good as this awesome teaser video, then it deserves to be a sell-out success. Who doesn’t love pictures of planets married to dramatic, movie-score music?

Sadly, it might end up just being a little tacky. Like a nightclub after the house lights are switched on, take away the spectacular soundtrack and all you’re left with is an app that lets you add planets, more planets, planets with rings and lens flare to your photos — it’ll get old and tawdry pretty fast.

I do like the lens-flare aspect, though. And for this, I would probably download the Alien Sky developer’s existing app, aptly named LensFlare.

Via: iPhoneography

Earlier this week, we did the math and declared prepaid carrier Cricket Mobile to be the best iPhone deal around, but today’s announcement that Sprint’s Virgin Mobile will also be offering the iPhone 4S starting on June 24th changes the math substantially, and Cricket’s no longer looking like such a good deal.

Virgin Mobile’s iPhone deal requires you to purchase a completely unsubsidized iPhone from them up front at $649, $150 more expensive than Cricket. But that initial money spent up front can really pay off over time, depending on which plan you sign up for.

How much? You can save over $1000 over the course of two-years on Virgin Mobile compared to AT&T, Verizon or Sprint.

Chances are if you do any kind of writing on your Mac, you’ll need a definition of a word from time to time, whether you’re writing for your job or writing for pleasure, writing an email or an anti-corporate screed for your blog.

There are many ways to get a word’s definition on your Mac, including the built-in dictionary app, using a site like Dictionary.com, or the like. Did you know, however, that the file index and search app, Spotlight, also allows you to find a definition super quick?

Virgin Mobile has this morning confirmed that it will be the second prepaid carrier to offer the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S, beginning June 29. The devices will be priced at $549 and $649 respectively, but users can enjoy the fact that there’s no commitment and no activation fees. Otherwise, Virgin Mobile iPhone users will enjoy standard Beyond Talk contract-free plans, which go for between $30-$50 a month.

SoundHound has updated its popular music searching and discovery app for iOS today, introducing a whole host of new features. Version 5.0 makes SoundHound faster than ever before, according to the release notes, and brings high-resolution album art and images, an improved user interface, a new SoundHound Player with LiveLyrics, and lots more.

Oh, man. With WWDC just around the corner, the rumors are rising high enough to choke us. This latest comes from “a source in China” by way of our friends over at ZooGue cases, Tim Angel and Graham Smith. It’s an “iPad nano,” and it may or not have “fake” written all over it.

FourSquare, everybody’s favorite not-owned-by-Facebook check-in service, just got a huge update rendering it prettier, less confusing and much less annoying when blown up for the iPad. There really aren’t many new features – unless you count a complete redesign as a feature.

We’re all itching to see what iOS 6 has in store for our iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches, and we’re expecting Apple’s keynote address at WWDC next week to provide the first look at the new update. But the software could already be out in the wild. One YouTuber has published a three-minute video in which a purported iOS 6 beta is shown off for the first time.

Some of its features include new “iStore” and Dictionary apps, improvements to Spotlight search and the Maps app, enhancements to multitasking, and more.

Many of you will have read the above headline and thought “Meh. Whatever.” And yet here you are, still reading. Well, if you got this far, here’s the reward. Office2 HD, the MS Office-compatible suite for the iPad, has just gotten support for Track Changes and comments. This is big because there is no other software on the iPad that does this. Not even Apple’s own Pages.

There’s a dusty old Macintosh Classic sitting in my bedroom closet that has gone neglected for years now. It used to be fun to turn it on every and play Oregon Trail just for nostalgia’s sake, but I outgrew that phase after a few weeks. How much time does one really want to spend on an old beat up machine when you have the most beautiful desktop computer in the world resting inches away? Well, if you’re craving to have some retro-Mac goodness in your life but don’t want to bootup a machine whose operating system hasn’t been supported in two decades, this cool mod might be just what you’re looking for.

We’ve seen a good number of images claiming to be the sixth-generation iPhone’s rear panel in recent weeks, all of which feature identical designs. But what isn’t entirely clear from these images is just how different these leaked panels are when compared to those that feature on our iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S.

However, thanks to this video from parts supplier ETrade Supply, it’s easy to see the changes Apple has made to its next iPhone (assuming this is indeed a genuine part, of course). And there are a lot of them.

Sennheiser’s VMX 200 is one kostspielig little Bluetooth headset. Its $150 MSRP is higher than the other guys’ flagship mobile-phone headsets, like the Motorola CommandOne, Jabra Supreme and BlueAnt Q2, all of which are good-to-stellar performers, and stuffed to the gills with features.

Taking the pricing into consideration, one might expect the VMX 200 to have near-perfect manners, and at least as many bells and whistles as its competitors, if not more. Right?

Rogue Amoeba’s AirFoil Speakers Touch app was recently pulled from the App Store by Apple without any notice. Before getting yanked, the app was updated with an “Enhanced Audio Receiving” feature that essentially turned an iOS device into an AirPlay audio receiver. Apple didn’t like Rogue Amoeba’s use of receiving audio through AirPlay, and the company released a short comment saying “Apps that use non-public APIs will be rejected.” That was it.

The good news is that AirFoil Speakers Touch is back in the App Store after a back and forth with Apple. The bad news is that the newest app version is missing the aforementioned AirPlay audio feature. According to Rogue Amoeba, Apple reps admitted that the whole situation was “poorly handled” on their end.

Yesterday we told you that Apple is getting ready to breathe life into the Mac Pro at WWDC next week, and today more specs for the upcoming machine have been allegedly revealed. It’s been nearly two years since Apple introduced a new Mac Pro, and there are plenty of internal upgrades that need to be made for it to be considered a computer that meets professional standards.

Apple will finally bring its Thunderbolt I/O architecture to the Mac Pro this year, as well as some other major improvements.

Chipset maker Qualcomm today announced its plans for a universal LTE chip that would be perfect for a truly 4G iPhone. Apple’s next iPhone is rumored to feature 4G LTE networking, and Qualcomm’s upcoming chip would allow the device to operate on AT&T and Verizon’s 700 MHz 4G LTE bands. Phones haven’t been able to support multiple blocks of spectrum on the 700 MHz band, but Qualcomm’s upcoming chip would allow a smartphone to take full advantage of LTE speeds on multiple carriers.

Available exclusively at the Apple store starting today are these stylish new snap cases for iPhone 4S forged from a partnership between LA’s Incase and New York fashion house Marc by Marc Jacobs.

The Marc by Marc Jacobs Snap Case series is the first such design collaboration between these two leading internationally renowned brands. What they’ve done is couple the tough protectiveness of Incase’s hardshell snap-on cases with Marc by Marc Jacobs’ eye-catching feminine graphics.

Chances are, if you have an iOS device of some sort, you have apps. And if you have apps, chances are that you have too many of them. They start to get lost in the crowd. I find that, for myself, once I get past the first couple of app pages, I might as well tap at random for all I can find the app I need.

There are ways to launch the app you want, of course. You can bring up the multitasking bar with a double tap on the Home button, and swipe through a list of the most recently running apps. If you haven’t used the app you’re looking for in a while, though, it may not be there.

You can also use the Spotlight search function. When on the first page of apps, either swipe left or tap the Home button once. Type the name of the app you’re searching for into the field there and you’ll see that hidden app. Tap on it to launch. But you’ll have to do that every time. Spotlight won’t tell you WHERE that app resides.

With pens, there are really only a few designs — fountain pens with nibs, ballpoints and felt-tipped markers. Anything else is pretty much just a variation on those. But with iPad styluses, pen designers seem to be going crazy with brand new ideas. One of these is the GoSmart Stylus, and at first look it seems like a terrible idea. Pick it up and use it, though, and you’ll be hooked.

At this point, the consensus of everyone from the smallest Apple blogs to the venerable Wall Street Journal is that Apple will dump Google as its Maps provider in iOS 6 in favor of its own, in-house technology that will bring, among other enhancements, 3D mapping to the mix.

Apple’s move has caught Google not just off-guard, it’s put the search giant into a total panic. Need proof? Look no further than Google’s debacle of an emergency announcement today, in which they unveiled “the next dimension of Google Maps.”

During this announcement, Google coincidentally announced their own 3D Maps solution… coincidentally enough, just five days before Apple’s expected to unveil theirs. Oh, and they showed it working on an iPad instead of an Android tablet… and their app was so hacked together it crashed numerous times during the presentation.

Can anyone say “rushed?”

If you’re considering developing an ad-support mobile app or if you’re an advertiser looking to get the most bang from your mobile advertising buck, you’re likely to find that iOS devices deliver a significantly bigger ad return than most Android phones or tablets regardless of the screen size of the device(s) in question.

That news comes Jumptap, a company that specializes in targeted mobile advertising which uncovered some interesting and information for mobile app developers and companies looking to develop a mobile ad campaign.

At today’s Google Maps event, Google revealed a few planned features for not only Google Maps for Android (no mention of iOS), but also Google Earth for Android and iOS. The Google Maps announcement was simply offline support, and something that users have been after for years. In Google Earth news, Google announced stunning new 3D images and a new UI would be coming soon to both Android and iOS platforms.