Although a ruling on Apple’s patent-infringement complaints against HTC and Nokia won’t be announced until August, we already know the Washington, DC-based U.S. International Trade Commission staff is recommended coming down on the side of the two handset makers. The non-binding staff opinion became public at the start of the ITC trial.

Apple’s dispute with HTC and Nokia would be the first patent court battle involving Android-based handsets, prompting greater interest. In opening comments comments before ITC Administrative Law Judge Carl Charneski, Apple charged its not what you see, “but what’s under the hood” that makes the Cupertino, Calif. company’s products so successful.

Good news If you’ve got a Sonos music system and an Apple AirPort Express: a free software update will make your multi-room Sonos system AirPlay compatible.

Available today as a free download, Sonos System Software 3.4 adds AirPlay compatibility to a multi-room Sonos music system. You do need an Apple AirPort Express though, which when plugged into any ZonePlayer’s line-in can be played across multiple systems across the house — so-called Party Mode.

Crackle is one of the fastest-growing digital entertainment networks, offering hundreds of high quality Hollywood movies and TV series from Columbia Pictures, Tri-Star, Screen Gems, Sony Pictures Classics and more.

Fans of the service couldn’t previously enjoy this content on their iOS device due to its Flash-based website, however, the official Crackle application is now available to download in the App Store.

The application is free and supports all iOS devices, while the content is ad-supported and free to watch. It lets you enjoy high quality content over Wi-Fi and 3G and build your own queue of content for viewing online or on your iOS device.

Crackle currently features movies such as The Da Vinci Code, Big Daddy, Ghostbusters, and Snatch, while its TV series collection boasts Seinfeld, Spider-Man, Married With Children, and The Three Stooges, amongst hundreds of other great titles.

For some time yesterday, UK carrier Three gave customers the opportunity to purchase the white iPhone 4 through its website for delivery on Wednesday, April 20th. The carrier later removed the listing as news spread over the web, but was this simply an error, or did Three just reveal the device’s launch date?

Well, recent reports have suggested that the device is now in production, and will launch by the end of April. Although Apple is yet to give customers an official date, it may have provided this information to carriers.

Having said that, we still think someone at Three made a slight cock up, and that this listing means nothing. It’s not the first time the carrier has listed the device on its website either; back in January the white iPhone 4 appeared on Three’s website, thought it was listed as “out of stock.”

[via 9to5 Mac]

Sudden changes to App Store rankings for both free and paid games and applications has led to speculation that Apple has changed its App Store ranking algorithm. The App Store’s bestselling chart was previously based purely on the number of times an app was downloaded; now it seems like application usage is also taken into account when iOS apps are ranked.

One of the most noticeable shifts for an application was to the official Facebook app, which jumped straight to the number 1 spot in the free chart after hovering between 10th and 20th for the last year. Other popular apps, such as Netflix and Pandora, also jumped up the chart after the adjustment.

In an internal memo to its employees, Apple has announced the end of its iWork and MobileMe rebate programs with effect from close of business on April 18th. The rebate programs allowed customers to save $30 on MobileMe when purchasing a new Mac or iPad, and $30 on iWork when purchasing a new Mac.

The termination of these programs follows reports that Apple is set to revamp its MobileMe service over the coming months. A new MobileMe service, said to feature a digital “music locker” for streaming content from the cloud to Apple devices – as well as the “Media Stream” and “Find my Friends” features – is rumored to launch either later this month or at WWDC in June.

Though it’s not clear why iWork was also cut from the rebate program, it’s believed this is simply due to the release of iWork 2011 later this year. I think the the Mac App Store could also play a part in this: if Apple has decided to offer future iWork releases exclusively through the App Store as separate purchases, there may be a new way for customers to claim rebates – such as promo codes – or no rebates at all.

[via 9to5 Mac]

Just 4 days after iOS 4.3.2 was released, redsn0w has been updated. It was initially said that iOS 4.3.2 fixed @i0n1c‘s untether exploit, but was later said that it did not patch his vulnerability. Today, redsn0w was updated to 0.9.6RC14 for both Mac OS X and Windows. Stefan Esser (aka @i0n1c) needed to slightly update his untether exploit. No, this update doesn’t support the iPad 2. More information and download links after the break!

Apple released iTunes 10.2.2 today and the new version of iTunes contains a number of important bug fixes. According to Apple these fixes include:

• Addresses an issue where iTunes may become unresponsive when syncing an iPad.
• Resolves an issue which may cause syncing photos with iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to take longer than necessary.
• Fixes a problem where video previews on the iTunes Store may skip while playing.
• Addresses other issues that improve stability and performance.

iTunes 10.2 came with several new features and improvements, including:

• Sync with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iOS 4.3.

• Improved Home Sharing. Browse and play from your iTunes libraries with Home Sharing on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iOS 4.3.

For information on the security content of this update, please visit: support.apple.com/kb/HT1222

Get your copy now via Software Update or download a copy to install the software manually yourself later.

Since Apple’s moving towards touch-based media players, have you ever missed using a good old click-wheel iPod? If all you have is your iPhone or iPod Touch, then iClassic is the next best thing.

Available for $2.00 in the Cydia Store, this nice little novelty will allow you to access your iPod library to play and control your music while using a click-wheel interface. 

Look. Summer’s right around the corner, and odds are, you’re still wearing some swag-tee you got at Macworld circa ’00, no? Why not wrap your torso in this super-soft “Mac I’d Like to Friend” Cult of Mac (CoM) tee, instead? They’re limited edition, hipster-approved, and guaranteed to get you unexpected high-fives from dodgy-looking street strangers.

Our new CoM tees are 100% cotton, and 100% designed, forged, and hewn in the fires of Mount U.S.A. They’re also available now over at MightTees.com, creators of fine indie-art inspired graphic tees.

Apple is suing Samsung for copying the look and feel of its iPhone and iPad, reports the Wall Street Journal.

The lawsuit claims several of Samsung’s smartphones and tablet — the Galaxy S 4G, Epic 4G, Nexus S and the Galaxy Tab — copy Apple’s intellectual property. The suit, filed last week in Northern California, claims:

“Rather than innovate and develop its own technology and a unique Samsung style for its smart phone products and computer tablets, Samsung chose to copy Apple’s technology, user interface and innovative style in these infringing products,” the lawsuit said.

Of course, Samsung makes a lot of components for Apple’s products, from RAM used in MacBooks to flash memory used in the iPhone and iPad. It aslo manufactures the A4 and A5 processors for Apple.

Update: An Apple spokesperson elaborated on the charges for Mobilized:

“It’s no coincidence that Samsung’s latest products look a lot like the iPhone and iPad, from the shape of the hardware to the user interface and even the packaging. This kind of blatant copying is wrong, and we need to protect Apple’s intellectual property when companies steal our ideas.”

It’s a little admitted secret, but one of the biggest reasons people like Network Attached Storage drives is for Torrent downloads. They’re the easiest ways to download obscure British TV shows, for example, that can’t be easily had here in the U.S. After downloading a couple of shows, users watch them via WiFi streaming on their MacBooks or iPads.

Trouble is, Torrent downloads slow everything on the home network to a crawl. Everyone complains when the network is clogged with Torrents of Shameless or The Killing. Well, not any more. You can set up one of Iomega’s new Home Media Network Hard Drive, Cloud Edition at work and use the office’s net connection to download Torrents at night. Then you stream them over the net to your home.

I’ve been testing one of the Home Media Drives for several weeks. There’s a been a few glitches, but on the whole, it works well. Now I’ve got my own little Amazon S3 system, with none of the monthly fees.

Classic Mac collectors are a creative bunch. Where others see digital trash, we see potential. Steve Abbott, curator of MacAbbott’s Mac Museum in Charlotte NC, has just created an innovative coffee table using those five-flavored candy-colored original iMacs in the style of Apple’s iconic Yum advertisement.

Steve stripped the guts out of five systems – blueberry, grape, tangerine, lime, and strawberry – added opaque white paper and light fixtures inside, then fashioned a table around them with a glass top and birch base. Reminds me of the kids tables inside Apple retail stores, with the retro glow of high tech lifesavers. The Yum coffee table is one-of-a-kind and for sale, bids start at $5,000; contact MacAbbott for details.

We start the week with three hardware deals: First up is a number of Mac Pro Xeon workstations from the Apple Store. The deals start at $2,039 for a quad-core 2.66GHz machine. Next is an 8GB iPod touch (4th-gen) for $185. Finally, there is the Kensington PowerLift iPhone Dock with Battery that both props up your iPhone and recharges its battery.

Along the way, we’ll also check other items, including more Xservers, an iPhone 4 case and software for your Mac. As usual, details on these and many other bargains can be found on the CoM “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

“To the cloud!” is becoming a well-worn phrase. Although Apple has a $1 billion data center in North Carolina which most suspect will be used to create a cloud-based iTunes service, almost everyone and their grandmother are beating the Cupertino, Calif.-based tech giant to the punch. First came Amazon, now HP seems ready to use cloud-based storage to get more attention for its TouchPad iPad rival.

In a slide describing the TouchPad, the PC maker mentions a music service permitting song storage that then streams back to HP devices, ala Apple’s MobileMe.

Samsung makes some great ARM-based smartphone chips… and even fabricate Apple’s in-house-designed A5 CPU, so when Samsung talks about the future of chips, they’re talking in part the future of the iPhone.

And what is that future? According to a Samsung rep, Samsung is “planning to release a 2GHz dual-core CPU-equipped smartphone by next year” that will have “the data processing capacities of a regular PCs.”

That’s a huge leap in the clock speed of the current A5 SoC, which maxes out at 1GHz per core. It does not appear that Samsung intends on keeping these chips to themselves, though: Samsung apparently hopes to sell the compontents to other manufacturers as well.

Could Apple be one of them? Maybe not, but it seems obvious that Apple will have a chip with similar capabilities available around the same time. If that’s right, then next year’s A6 CPU might boast 2GHz clock speeds per core. Just imagine demoing Infinity Blade on that.

With early morning lines outside the Apple Store still 50 man deep, it’s pretty clear that Apple’s had a hard time supplying the demand for the iPad 2… but a new manufacturer joining the iPad 2 supply change might soon help matters.

According to Digitimes, Apple is now testing a new LED backlight maker called Everlight Electronics in order to expand their component supply for the iPad 2.

Presumably, the LED backlights in questions are the companie’s 2,000 millicandela backlights, which the company has been shipping to other Taiwan-based tablet makers for the last month.

Will the new Everlight Electronics LED backlight, will the iPad 2 get any less scarce… and will it be any less prone to the bleeding issues of previous backlights? Time will tell.

Apple is scheduled to release its official numbers for the fiscal second quarter later this week. A review of analyst expectations appears to again set the stage for the Cupertino, Calif. company producing a blow-out quarter with both professionals and bloggers predicting higher revenue and sales.

In January, Apple’s finance chief Peter Oppenheimer guided $22 billion quarterly revenue, slightly lower than the Street consensus of $23.27 billion, but quite lower than blogger-analysts who predict revenue of $25.30 billion. As we’ve reported, the events in Japan could temporarily hurt Apple, bringing its usually artificially-low revenue guidance more in line with reality. Also, what do the pros and and amateurs expect for product sales? We’ll get into that after the jump.

Back in January, Don Lee introduced the Nomad Brush, a paintbrush with bristles made of capacitive fibers that can be picked up by an iPad’s display. Now comes the Flow, a nearly identical product trying to get off the ground over at Kickstarter.

It seems like a great idea at first blush, but then the problems occur. The iPad’s touch display can only register ten touch points at once, which means that if your brush has more than ten bristles, you’ll be losing a lot of granularity and detail. Consequently, a lot of the feel and look of painting with a brush will be lost, especially since the iPad’s display doesn’t register pressure. With a capacitive brush, then, you’re still trusting whatever art software you’re using to emulate the bristles… just not the brush stroke.

To be fair to Anthony and Russ, the creators of Flow, they seem to acknowledge in their Kickstarter video that the Flow won’t allow for the same precision as a real brush with real paint: instead, the Flow is all about eliminating friction, maximizing precision and using a drawing accessory you’re most comfortable with. For $20, that’s the kind of cheery logic that makes sense.

Apple’s iPhone 4 could soon be the most popular camera used to upload photos to Flickr, overtaking the Nikon D90 DSLR. The iPhone still has a little way to go before it reaches the top spot, but if the current trend continues it will overtake the D90 in around one month.

Although the iPhone 4 only launched just under a year ago, it is considerably less expensive than the Nikon D90 – which has been on the market for around three years and costs over a thousand dollars. Its smaller form factor, and the fact that everyone carries their iPhone everywhere, is believed to be one of the reasons why the device is proving to be more popular than a traditional camera.

Whether it comes in June or it comes in September as the latest rumors suggest, people aren’t really expecting the hardware to be a shock. It’ll definitely pack Apple’s new A5 SoC as boasted by the iPad 2; it might boast a Qualcomm baseband allowing the same hardware to run on both CDMA and GSM networks; it will probably have a revised antenna design to mitigate the chances of Antennagate II. These are no-brainers.

Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo’s of Concord Securities supports this view of the next hardware, with a twist: she says that the iPhone 5 will be announced in September and start production that same month, but not be released until October.

Kuo’s got a pretty good record here. In the past, he successfully forecast the quality (or lack thereof) of the iPad 2’s cameras, as well as predicted that the white iPhone 4 wouldn’t be released until April of this year. Hardly Criswellian soothsaying, but not bad.

Kuo also claims that when the iPhone 5 is released, it will boast an 8MP camera sensor. We’re guessing he’s talking about this one, which not only will allow the iPhone to shoot in 1080p video, but will also improve image quality by affording the smartphone 35% better low light sensitivity.

Great news for all you Angry Birds addicts; Seasons has just been updated for Easter, delivering 15 brand new levels of bird throwing fun, suitably themed for the Easter holiday with plenty of eggs and pigs wearing bunny ears.

In addition to the new levels, there are also new Game Centre achievements and some new golden eggs for you to discover.

The update is free to those who have already purchased Angry Birds Seasons for the iPhone or iPad, or $0.99 and $1.99 respectively for those who haven’t.

Check out Rovio’s gameplay trailer for the Easter update below:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OagPEBfmMw0

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7wzffgw9Xc

The new 2Phone case for the iPhone 4 from Rebelsimcard.com features a SIM card slot that enables you to install and use an additional SIM card with your device. Both SIMs will work simultaneously, so there’s no need to switch back and forth – enabling you to make and receive calls on 2 different lines, with two different carriers.

The $250 2Phone case actually looks pretty good, and also features a 800mAH rechargeable battery that provides your iPhone with some extra juice when you need it.

Moshi’s Muse is a nice iPad-sized sleeve case that works with or without a Smartcover on your iPad 2. It looks great and feels good. Moshi made good use of thick microfiber fabrics when they designed the Muse along with the excellent tailoring and stitching. As a result the Muse feels great in your hands.

According to Moshi the Terahedron microfiber inner lining protects and cleans your iPad. It cleans your iPad’s screen and body as you insert and remove it from the Muse. During my tests the Muse was like most products that make claims about cleaning — it sort of worked, but not that well. I still prefer a microfiber cloth and some elbow grease.

Just as expected, Toys ‘R’ Us has now joined the growing list of U.S. retailers to offer the iPad 2. The toy giant began advertising the second-generation tablet on Sunday, which is now available for purchase in selected stores. (If you can find stock.)

There is a list of stores now offering the iPad 2 available on the Toys ‘R’ Us website, and a leaked product sheet indicates the retailer will also offer the Smart Covers, Camera Connection Kit, and VGA Connector to accompany the device.

Toys ‘R’ Us joins Best Buy, Walmart, Target, AT&T and Verizon on the list of third-party stores to offer the iPad 2 as Apple’s retail expansion for the device continues to grow in the U.S.

Despite this, the device seems to be no easier to obtain – with stores continuing to sell out the day they receive their stock.

[via AppleInsider]