Not much is known about Apple’s upcoming event on Thursday, January 19th. The entire industry seems to agree that Apple is ready to lead the way into a new frontier of digital textbooks through the iBookstore. Others suggest that the announcement will focus on making the world of digital publishing more attractive to authors — think “GarageBand for eBooks.”

Apple has reportedly been working with multiple publishers for months in preparation for its top secret event this week. Publishing house McGraw-Hill is expected to be one of the publishing houses present at the announcement at the Guggenheim museum in New York City.

Android may not be every Mac user’s cup of tea, but it’s the biggest mobile operating system in the world, and it’s important to know what’s going on with Android — what it’s doing right, and what it’s doing wrong. Here’s the best stories that hit today over at our sister site, Cult of Android.

Holy guacamole, we won! To be perfectly honest, I have no idea how this happened. Wired is bigger than Cult of Mac in almost every measurable aspect (except sex appeal, obviously), and their magazine is cool as hell. But somehow, we went off like Tom Brady and managed to melt their faces off with our awesomeness during our “Insta-gram Challenge.”

Even though we were slightly somewhat heavily inebriated at the Wired Party in Las Vegas when we challenged them, you guys managed to pull it off for us. First off we owe a big thank you to our readers for making this momentous feat possible. Secondly, Wired deserves some credit for playing along with us and being good sports even if they obviously aren’t the better Instagramers. Thirdly, I guess we’re obligated to thank ourselves in that prototypical KanYe West fashion. I heard whispering around the office today that CoM’s John Brownlee credits the “Kobe System” for helping him come up with hilarious tweets and pictures during CES.

What’s next? Don’t worry, our Instgram feed isn’t going dormant until the next CES. We’ll be pumping out more Cult of Mac pictures for your entertainment because we realize that taking down Wired is cool and all, but who we really want to beat is The Biebs. We’re coming after you’re next Justin!

Have you ever wondered what kind of data speeds you get on your iPhone with a full 3G signal, or how fast your internet is on your home Wi-Fi network? With the free iOS app from Speedtest.net, you can perform a quick and simple test that will tell you your download and your upload speeds on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.

We’re only about two or three months away from the iPad 3 dropping and blowing our socks off. Right now, we can tell you a lot about what the iPad 3 will probably be like. It’ll feature Apple’s new, quad-core A6 CPU. It’ll feature a 2048 x 1536 resolution Retina Display. It may — but probably won’t — be the first iOS device to ship with LTE support.

But what about Siri, Apple’s amazing new voice control technology prominently featured in the iPhone 4S? Surely, that’s a lock for all future Apple devices starting with the iPad 3, right?

Well, hold on. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.

We don’t have to tell you that there are a ton of amazing apps on the App Store, but how much profit do those apps make? We all know Angry Birds is raking in the money, but what about the others guys? Take Camera+ for instance. 18 months ago TapTapTap released Camera+ and have been enjoying consistent success ever since. On average, a copy of Camera+ is sold approximately every 3 seconds. Recent sales numbers released by the company show that the app has earned a grand total of $5,125,844 to date….that’s after Apple got their 30% cut.

There’s no shortage of waterproof coating coming to market that Apple could potentially slather future iPhones in, making water damage all but a thing of the past.

After CES, though, if you wanted to take bets about which company would end up landing the deal, money would rest on HzO, who not only claim that their WaterBlock superhydrophobic coating is better than the competition’s… but Apple’s interested.

It seems the refurbishment to Apple’s Fifth Avenue retail store in New York City may have been a practice run for something a little more elaborate. Take a look at the picture above; that’s a new Apple retail store that’s coming to France and it’ll be almost entirely transparent.

Rumors have pegged the iPhone 5 as having a larger 4-inch display since summer of last year, but in order to put a 4-inch display into the iPhone, Apple’s going to have to radically change the design of the device.

They have two choices. Apple can either make the entire device physically bigger… or they can lose the iconic home button. But if Apple does, how would anyone control their device?

Namco’s classic arcade fighter SoulCalibur is finally making its way to the App Store this week. Having been announced way back in October, we’ve been itching to get our hands on it for three months now, and we’ll be one of the first to grab it when it arrives on Thursday, January 19.

We started an Instagram account a few days ago and have had a blast posting pics of what life at Cult of Mac looks like. Interacting with readers in this new way has been one of the funnest projects we’ve started. Wired.com had the same idea as us a few days ago but we’ve already amassed more followers than them. We threw down the gauntlet to them last night to see who can get to 3000 followers first and they’ve haughtily accepted. We need your help to kick their ass.

If you haven’t started following us on Instagram we’d love for you to open up your app right now, search for “cultofmac” and follow us.

What will you get from following us on Instagram? Here’s some samples of our awesome feed –

Gotta alotta fonts installed on your Mac, but never know which you’d like to actually use in a document? Most apps show font previews on the formatting menu, but with Microsoft Word and some other apps many people turn off this feature because it massively increases start-up times. The solution is to create (and print off, if you wish) a font sample document that you can refer to whenever you want. This is very easily done on your Mac, as follows.

Apple made a number of changes to internal components in OS X Lion, including not installing Java by default and changing it’s SMB (Samba) Windows networking code. These changes have broken some previously working setups but fortunately there are workarounds:

I recently upgraded to OSX Lion, little did I know that samba was removed. Now I cant get on to my DNS 323 and my laptop is piling up with junk. I’ve seen on the net that there are way to install samba but all of them are out of my expertise. Can you help me and put it plain english steps?

Alon

Fed up of seeing updates in the App Store for apps that you do not want to update? Unfortunately most of us just have to put up with them, but if you’ve got a jailbroken device, you can use the Update Hider for iOS 5 tweak to hide them away.

The entire jailbreaking community has its eyes on Pod2g and his “Dream Team” of fellow hackers right now, anticipating their exploit for Apple’s A5-powered devices. The team recently revealed that the it was just “a matter of days” away from public release, and today we have a video of a jailbroken iPhone 4S in action.

There are hundreds of thousands of cases out there that promise to protect your beloved iPhone, but the ‘Nissan Scratch Shield’ case is the only one that will self-heal itself when you scratch it thanks to the Japanese company’s pioneering paint technology.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – There are some really awesome products on the showroom floor of CES this year, but we think we’ve found the greatest Microsoft product of all time. OF ALL TIME! Microsoft lipbalm. Admit it. You’re jealous that you don’t have your own stick yet aren’t you?

To make up for your absence at CES, we’re going to have a caption contest, and the winner gets a bag of CES swag that we got from the floor today.

To enter the contest, just comment on this article with your caption for the Microsoft Chapstick picture. Funniest caption wins and we’ll announce the winner on Friday, Jan. 13th at 12pm PST. Good luck.

My colleagues here at Cult of Mac, PR reps completely unrelated to Fuji or anything photographic, random showgoers whose snippets of conversation I intercepted — everyone seemed to be talking about it. Even the very air at CES seemed to be pulsating with the word “Fuji.” Of course, they were all talking about the enigmatic, neo-retro Fuji X-Pro1.

Apple’s most direct competitor in the future won’t be Microsoft or Google, but Amazon.com.

With the release of the Amazon Kindle Fire, Amazon.com declared war directly on Apple’s core business model, which is to sell integrated solutions for the consumption and creation of digital content.

Starting Thursday, Apple strikes back.

Laaaaaaaaaaadies and Gentlemen, welcome to Friday Night Fights, a new series of weekly deathmatches between two no-mercy brawlers who will fight to the death — or at least agree to disagree — about which is better: Apple or Google, iOS or Android?

After this week’s topic, someone’s going to be spitting teeth. Our question: What’s Better? The iPhone’s 3.5-Inch Display, or Android’s 4+ Inch Superphones?

In one corner, we have the 900 pound gorilla, Cult of Mac; in the opposite corner, wearing the green trunks, we have the plucky upstart, Cult of Android!

Place your bets, gentlemen! This is going be a bloody one.

What’s this? Android news on Cult of Mac? Who cares? Maybe you don’t, maybe you do. Point is: these are a few of the popular topics going on in the Android world today. Maybe you’d like to know what the competition is up to, or perhaps your aunt received a Kindle Fire she needs to update. Regardless of the reason, having a resource such as Cult of Android allows you to learn more about what’s going on with the competition. You know what they say: the best way to beat the enemy is to know which way they’re moving!

Apple has added a handy feature for finding apps and videos in the desktop version of iTunes. When searching for App Store apps, a new info button is available in the bottom right of each app icon.

Clicking this “i” button will open a preview of the desired app. From here you can quickly see the price, average rating, description, and screenshots.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – The Consumer Electronics Show is winding down, ending today. It was an exhausting three days of navigating the jam-packed halls for Mac related items. We saw a lot of stuff. Some crap, some cool. Here it is.

Above: PhotoStitch can turn any scanned image into an embroidered work of art with a sewing machine. It’s like printing but with thread. Here’s a sample design of Steve Jobs. A Mac version will be available later this year.

The Fair Labor Association (FLA) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the civil rights and living conditions of factory workers around the world. Following the string of scandals and suicides throughout Apple’s supply chain, the Cupertino company has joined the FLA as a Participating Company.

Apple is the first technology company to join the FLA, and this will hopefully prompt many other industry leaders to do the same. The FLA will closely monitor Apple’s supply chain environments and help protect the rights of the workers that make the products we use every day.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – For Christmas, I bought my kids the immensely popular board game Settlers of Catan. We haven’t played it though, because no one can be bothered to learn the rules.

iPad versions of popular board games solve this problem, as I learned talking to the makers of Ticket To Ride.