The era of the big box retailer is kaput. One the one hand, you’ve got online colossi like Amazon crushing brick-and-mortar retailers; on the other, you’ve got the juggernaut of Apple’s Retail Stores, showing everyone else how selling things in meatspace is done.

A couple years ago, the writing was on the wall when Circuit City went out of business. Now, it looks like it’s Best Buy’s turn. After posting a $1.7 billion quarterly loss last quarter, Best Buy is closing 50 stores and $800 million in costs.

2012 Mobile Game of the Year, The Dark Meadow, received a pretty major update on iOS today. Aside from all of the new features, the game has also gone freemium. The freemium version, entitled Dark Meadow: The Pact is a separate download on the App Store and as far as I can tell is exactly the same as the original paid version. The decision to go freemium may benefit the developers over the long term and is the reasoning for the jump. Although it is only available on iOS at the moment, it is scheduled to hit Android next month.

This iPhone 4 money clip is either the best or the stupidest solution to the wallet/iPhone carrying problem that I have ever seen. The trouble is, I can’t quite work out which it is.

Quick, what makes more money for Google: iOS or its own Android operating system? If you didn’t know anything about what a farce Android has become, you’d assume that Google was making more advertising revenue out of its own platform and ecosystem, but you’d be wrong: the search giant makes up to four times more off of iOS. Ouch.

Do you have an old film SLR lying around that you promise yourself you will one day load up with film and take out shooting? Well, forget about that — it’s just taking up space and picking up dust. You should instead do what Etsy-er Roberto Altieri does, and turn it into a dock for the camera you actually use every day: Your iPhone.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=tN6jFuuQFVY

You might look pretty dorky these days if you make a frame from your fingers and start sizing up the world around you. But it’s actually a surprisingly good way to separate out parts of the landscape, especially for artists using pencils or paint who may not be carrying a camera.

But what about combining the two? That’s just what the nerds have done down at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences in Japan. The Ubi-Camera is a tiny digicam which uses your fingers as the viewfinder, and even allows you to zoom.

Most presentations are boring.

Whether it’s because the slides themselves are not exactly inspiring or the person delivering them isn’t exactly…well…inspiring, you’re bound to run into more mediocre ones than excellent ones. Now what if you have to give one? Are you prepared? Do you have the tools on hand to make the process as painless and powerful as possible? Well, with Slidevana you will — and you’ll save time in the process.

But this Cult of Mac Deals offer is almost done. And when it does go, so do the 50% savings!

New on the App Store is Paper for iPad, made by the team at 53. It’s a gorgeous, simple digital notebook that deliberately ditches features in a bid to keep things simple.

The result is something that’s unusually elegant, and a delight to use.

Smartphones are close to becoming the primary type of mobile phones sold in the U.S. for the first time. Market research giant Neilsen’s latest analysis of the mobile industry shows that about half of all mobile phone owners in the country now own a smartphone – up significantly from this time last year.

In addition to smartphones gaining major traction, the company also released its data on the makeup of the U.S. smartphone market that shows gains by Apple’s iPhone and significant losses for RIM’s BlackBerry. Android, however, still manages to hold the biggest share of the market overall.

Back when I first moved back from Germany to the United States, one of the things I initially missed most about my previously Euro-centric digital lifestyle was, of course, Spotify. Depressed that the streaming music service hadn’t launched yet in the United States, I tried Rdio, a U.S. only analog.

Over the last year and a half, I’ve completely come around to Rdio as the superior service. It’s got a better interface — one that doesn’t look like it was designed as a Winamp skin circa 1997 — and really makes sharing and music discovery easy. It also, unlike Spotify, has a native iPad app.

The only problem with Rdio was that it was a fantastic music streaming service that I couldn’t recommend to my European friends. But now that’s all changed, or at least in the process of changing, because Rdio is coming to Europe.

The concept of employees bringing their own devices to the office has seen a meteoric rise in popularity over the past couple of years. When the term BYOD first entered the IT lexicon, most CIOs and systems administrators tended to shrug off the suggestion that their company might consider such a non-traditional approach. Today, surveys show more than fifty percent of organizations are considering or have already adopted BYOD policies.

While the concept of BYOD is pretty easy to grasp (companies actively support user-owned devices and may even encourage employees to bring their iPhones, iPads, and other devices into the office), exactly what BYOD translates to in the real world can vary widely.

During the whole ‘antennagate’ debacle back in 2010, Apple attempted to appease iPhone 4 adopters by offering them one of its bumpers, or another case from a third-party manufacturer for free. Those who didn’t think a free $30 bumper was good enough can now claim $15 compensation.

This is the Galileo, a tilting, spinning 360˚ camera mount for your iPhone. It can pan, enable cool moving time-lapses, or even just work as a powered iPhone dock (it comes with a USB cable and a lithium-polymer battery).

But when you see the video below, with its wonderful a-ha moment, you’ll want one right away.

Instapaper has just been bumped from v4.1 to 4.1.1, But despite this tiny numerical increment, there are a few big changes worth writing about.

Marco Arment, the coffee-slurping, BMW-driving playboy developer of the iPad’s best read-later app, has fixed a few bugs introduced in the Retina-ready v4.1 released last week. These include some odd rendering problems for the new default font, Elena, and some speeding up to the page animations which were slowed down by some weird iPad 3 oddities.

But there are also a few new features, and one reversion that should please the luddites who hate the cool cell-table layout of the article list.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=T_P5H3XZ1-Y

I shoot a bunch of video these days. It’s so easy, as everything from my iPod to my iPad to even my camera shoots HD video. And editing it is a blast using iMovie on iOS. But what I don’t like, and what keeps me from editing much of the video I shoot, is dragging through the footage to find the good parts.

Enter Highlight Hunter, a Mac (and PC) app which runs tirelessly through any amount of video and separates out the highlights into discrete 30-second clips, ready for further editing.

Mac OS X hides files in many ways. One way, a holdover from its Unix legacy, is with dot-files. In other words, if a file is named with a period before the file name (.Hiddenfile), that file will not show up in the Finder. One way to show these files is with a Terminal command like this:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

This works all well and fine, but requires a second trip to the Terminal to reverse it (by changing the YES to NO, natch). Today, we’re going to tip you off to an app that does something similar, yet without the need to hop into Terminal.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been spending some time in China this week, meeting with officials and even posing with fans at the company Xidan Joy City retail store. He also paid a visit to Foxconn’s new plant in Zhengzhou, where the company employs around 120,000 employs, some of whom are assembling Apple’s iPhone.

Ubisoft has confirmed that its future iOS games will store your save data in the cloud, allowing you to sync your progress across multiple devices. That means you can beat missions and levels on your iPhone in your lunch break, then continue your game right where you left off on your iPad when you get home.

It’s a feature that almost every game — especially those build for both the iPhone and the iPad — should not be without.

Apple has seeded a second beta of its OS X Lion 10.7.4 update to registered developers today, almost two weeks after it issued the initial release. This version contains “no known issues,” but Apple has asked developers to focus on the Mac App Store, graphics, iCal, Mail, and QuickTime. If you’re looking for an easy way to access Apple’s beta software, you can check out the Apple Seed app download to get started.

Apple is set to begin mass producing its next-generation MacBook Pros next month, according to sources in its supply chain — just in time to receive Intel’s latest Ivy Bridge processors. The 15-inch model will be first to hit the production line in April, with the 13-inch model, which is claimed to be the most popular, following in June.

According to an HTC patent filed back in 2011 and a new device design discovered by Patent Bolt, it appears HTC is working on a handheld PMP device to rival the ever dominant iPod Touch. With companies like Philips, Sony, and Samsung all failing to chip away at the iPod Touch’s domination, I guess it couldn’t hurt to give HTC a chance. This new device combined with the new Google Play model could give this HTC device a fighting chance but I wouldn’t put my money on it.

Announced at CES 2012 in January, Verizon’s Jetpack MiFi 4620L is finally launching on April 12th, Verizon announced today. The Jetpack MiFi 4620L packs 4G LTE and 3G and will be available for $50 with a two-year contract, after a $50 mail-in-rebate. If you don’t yet have a Verizon LTE enable iPad, this will be a nice way to get Verizon’s blazing fast 4G speeds on all of your devices. 

Most analysts have seemed to agree that Apple’s new Apple TV set, dubbed the “iTV,” is going to launch sometime during 2012. However, Asian research group CLSA has released a note today saying that Apple won’t release the product until 2013, with Sharp providing the display panels.

Apple has just released iTunes 10.6.1 with a number of small bug fixes. iTunes 10.6 was released on March 7th, which brought support for iOS 5.1 and a few other enhancements. Today’s iTunes update fixes a few bugs, like unexpected crashes and more.

News media conglomerate Gannett is making a big push for mobile reporting and they’ve decided that the iPhone 4S is the perfect tool to start with for journalists across the country. To that end, the company has equipped 1,000 print and broadcast reporters with new iPhones to use for on the spot reporting, editing, and broadcasting.

The initiative was announced in December and will eventually include iPads as well as iPhones, but it is just now rolling out after the company put journalists getting the handsets through intensive training in the use of the iPhone and of the handful of apps that Gannett has chosen for reporters to use.