A lawsuit filed by Mirror Worlds LLC related to patents which they claim Apple infringes in Cover Flow has been successfully appealed. On Monday a federal judge overturned a jury’s verdict and ruled that Apple was not guilty of patent infringement, which could have cost the Cupertino company $625.5 million.

U.S District Judge Leonard Davis said that the evidence wasn’t enough to support the damage award:

“Mirror Worlds may have painted an appealing picture for the jury, but it failed to lay a solid foundation sufficient to support important elements it was required to establish under the law. The evidentiary record is insufficient to support the jury’s damage awards.”

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If you’re on holiday in Madrid, Spain, and missing your iOS device, a new service developed by PadInTheCity means you can rent an iPad to use on your trip. For €39 (around $55) per day, visitors can rent a 3G iPad, with unlimited data access, and nearly 30 pre-installed tourism and business apps to help them make the most of their trip.

One of the big questions everyone’s asking about the iPhone at the moment is whether or not a fifth generation device will launch this summer. According to a new report from Korean site ETNews.co.kr, Apple is planning to release the iPhone 5 during the 4th week of June, with Korean carriers SK Telecom and KT among the first providers to offer the device:

iPhone 5, the next model of iPhone 4, will be released on the coming 4th week of June. In the midst of the iPhone 5 postponement rumors, Apple has confirmed that iPhone 5 will be released as planned and it will be released simultaneously in Korea through SK Telecom and KT.

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A couple of screenshots have just leaked of Microsoft’s Windows 8 tablet user interface.

Currently in pre-beta, Windows 8 is Microsoft’s shot at building a UI that’s suitable for both tablets and PCs. Windows 7 is not being ported to tablets. Early versions of Windows 8 have reportedly been shipped to Microsoft’s hardware OEM partners. So far, the UI hasn’t been seen, but two new screenshots indicate it is based on tiles, very much like Windows Phone 7.

The screenshot above shows the home screen, which features Microsoft’s Bing search engine front and center. Underneath are big tiles for shortcuts to Web apps or Web pages. Each app opens in a full-screen version of Internet Explorer, according to Within Windows, which first published the screenshots (The site is currently down. The screenshots have been republished at WinRumors)

The screenshot below shows a new e-reader app that includes built-in support for Adobe’s PDF format. Looking at the diagrams in the screenshot, it will include page scrubbing (to quickly scrub through a document) and multi-touch pinching and zooming. Apple may not like that.

Microsoft appears to be pushing a new file format called AppX (.appx), which will reportedly allow Windows Phone 7 developers to repackage apps in AppX and offer them through an app store that will be built into Windows 8. Sound familiar?

Our take? It looks OK. The tiled interface is pretty good on Windows Phone 7, but why are there still scrollbars if the interface is full-screen?

Since its refresh in October 2010, the popularity of Apple’s MacBook Air has been rapidly increasing according to new research by J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz. Sales of the device have seen a 333% year-over-year rise, with a projected annual revenue of a whopping $2.2 billion.

Moskowitz said in his research note:

“We believe that the growth rate of the MacBook Air stands to moderate, but we expect the product to exhibit increasing contribution to the overall Mac business,” Moskowitz wrote. “(The fourth quarter of calendar 2010) was the first quarter in which the MacBook Air accounted for greater than 10% of total Apple Mac units. More importantly, the MacBook Air accounted for 15% of total notebook sales during the quarter, versus 5% in the prior year.”

The latest refresh to the MacBook Air line introduced an ultraportable 11.6-inch model – a perfect alternative to users looking for the portability of a netbook but with the stability of a Mac. When the device first launched back in January of 2008, a 13-inch machine was the only option, with a starting price of $1,799. Now there are two machines to choose from, both of which come equipped with SSD hard drives as standard, starting at just $999.

It’s believed that the lower starting price and a choice of two notebooks are the main reasons behind the growth in popularity of the MacBook Air.

[via MacRumors]

The official Facebook application for the iPhone has been updated today, introducing new features that allow you to view your friends’ Places check ins in map view, check into events you’re attending, and ‘unfriend’ people directly from your device. The update also makes improvements to the news feed and the notifications UI.

In case there’s any doubt about whether the iPad has ushered in a post-PC era in mobile computing, Zen Viewer is one app to consider on your path to enlightenment.

Made by the Skins Factory, Zen Viewer is a feast for the eyes, drawing on iPad’s generous screen real estate and graphics capabilities to make document management on Apple’s flagship iOS device a nearly sublime experience.

Choose from a half dozen customizable themes to suit your prevailing technical chakras and let Zen Viewer organize and balance the files on your device with its fully searchable file system, document reader, image viewer, audio and video playback device and audio recorder.

The app is fast and responsive, a wonderful showcase for the iOS touch navigation platform, with its colors and graphic elements lending a rich gravitas to the otherwise mundane realm of file management. Audio and video playback are flawless and the recording feature should be a boon to anyone still having trouble with the touch keyboard.

Some bugs and glitchy performance with WiFi transfer look like they need some polishing, which Skins Factory support says is being addressed, but for $2.99 and such an early version release (1.6.6 is the latest, updated 3/29), Zen Viewer has great potential.

[xrr rating = 4/5]

Earlier today, two men and a woman tried to rob the Apple Store in Otay Ranch Town Center, Chula Vista, San Diego. They failed, and after a shootout with a security guard on duty, one of the men is dead.

Shipping times for the iPad 2 from the Apple online store have dropped today, with new orders now facing a wait of 2-3 weeks down from the previous 3-4 weeks. The new shipping times aren’t just U.S. specific either – they apply to every country in which the iPad 2 is currently available.

A reduction in the shipping delay of the second generation iPad is a sign Apple is clearly dealing with the overwhelming demand of the device’s international launch.

We start another week of deals with an assortment of bargains, ranging from accessories for your iPad, software for your Mac and add-ons for whatever device you use. First up is the PadShell, a polycarbonate case with a matt-finish screen protector. Next is a Powerline USB adapter from Belkin that uses your home’s internal wiring as a network via the Powerline protocol.

Along the way, we’ll also check out a number of other items, details of which are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

If you’re lucky enough to posses an iPhone 4 and haven’t already downloaded freebie Ball Pit, do it now and play around with it a little. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Pretty cool, right? For those of you at work or still saving for an iPhone 4, the game is basically a first-person shooter set in the middle of a what looks like a holodeck from the later Star Trek shows, with the objective of shooting down the spheres that happen to be floating around in the big room with you.

The new MacBook Air is set to come a reliable $2.2 billion revenue stream for Apple as strong demand for the lightweight laptop continues. The Cupertino, Calif. company shipped 420,000 of the laptops in the fourth quarter of 2010, amounting to a 333 percent year-over-year growth – three times the MacBook Air’s previous quarter high-mark.

After borrowing many features from the iPad – such as its light weight and instant-on capability – one analyst Monday termed the MacBook Air a “quasi-tablet.”

Gift Plan – (Free for today – usually $0.99) iPhone – Productivity

Gift Plan is a fantastic little application for the iPhone that could save you a lot of trouble. Usually $0.99 – but free for 24 hours – it will remind you of special occasions and ensure you never miss a birthday or anniversary again.

Bad news for fans of lesser-known Mac browser Camino: a big chunk of the code it depends on to display web pages is being officially retired by developers at Mozilla who maintain it.

As a result, “the future is unclear,” wrote Stuart Morgan on the Camino blog.

On Sunday an untethered jailbreak for devices running iOS 4.3.1 was finally released by the Dev-Team in the shape of PwnageTool and redsn0w. However, early jailbreakers are reporting that the exploit is causing issues with Wi-Fi on their devices.

I0n1c – aka Stefan Esser – is the brains behind the jailbreak, and confirmed the problem in a tweet earlier today. However, it seems users are only experiencing the issue with certain routers.

A registered sex offender was sentenced to two decades in prison after engaging in sexually explicit chats and exchanging photos with a 12-year-old and a 13-year old girl.

Franklin DeCapua, who was living in Rochester, New York, found the girls in Nebraska by using a popular social networking app called Whoshere on his iPhone.

The girls, who are neighbors, were using it on the iPod Touch. The trio sent each other sexy pics and chatted about meeting for a sexual encounter. DeCapua was arrested before the planned meet-up.

TrapCall is an application by Tel Tech Systems that enables an iPhone user to find out who’s calling them from blocked or private telephone numbers. It just arrived in the App Store, but the developers submitted the application to Apple months ago – waiting a staggering 201 days for their app to be approved.

By using the TrapCall service and accompanying iPhone application, users who receive calls from a blocked number can tap the sleep button twice to decline it and pass it over toTrapCall. Almost instantly, the service will then send the user a text message with the name, telephone number and address of their caller.

The iPad is Apple’s strongest answer to the Android platform. That’s the word from a firm looking over the web analytics results of some 4 million online users. Although the Google platform has a sharp lead over the iPhone 4, “iPad is outgrowing the entire Android ecosystem so significantly [that] it more than makes up for the iPhone deficiency plus some,” a search engine expert reports.

As for Android’s lead over the iPhone, it is slight and requires the full resources of the Google mobile operating system – both smartphones and tablets – to pull ahead of just one Apple iOS product. “Android has never come close to passing iOS as a whole,” according to Jeff Trimble of ROI365.

During the annual Qingming Festival, Chinese residents honor their dead ancestors by burning fake luxury items and money, sending them into the beyond for the spirits to enjoy.

In Malaysia, there’s an entire cottage industry of fake items that springs up during the festival, allowing Confucian practitioners to buy all sorts of simulated luxuries expressly for burning.

This year, what’s the hottest fake gadget being burned during Qingming? Fake papercraft models of Apple’s iPad 2, of course.

It can be expensive to upgrade your iPhone before your 2 year contract is up. You’re largely paying off your iPhone through a two year subsidy, after all, which means that if you want the iPhone 5 after you just got the iPhone 4, AT&T — while delighted to extend your contract — needs some dosh to not come out behind in the deal.

No one debates that. What people do debate, though, is how much money it should cost an end user to upgrade their iPhones early. Currently, it can cost up to $499 to upgrade to a 32GB iPhone 4 before the end of your two year contract… even if you’re in your last months of the existing contract.

Well, guess what? It’s about to get worse. Starting yesterday, new pricing for iPhone Early Upgrade Pricing went into effect, bumping the price of an early upgrade another $50 across the spectrum of AT&T iPhone models.

While GarageBand for iPad is a neat little acoustic sandbox for even we tone deaf plebs, it was of particular interest to musicians who were already heavily invested in GarageBand for Mac. With the iPad version, these musicians hoped they’d be able to put together a few bars of a ditty on the subway or during a flight, flesh it out a bit, then import it into their Mac at home for a polish; alternatively, they hoped they could take their current GarageBand projects on the road with them.

Unfortunately, when GarageBand for iPad actually ended up hitting, it actually was quite difficult to do any of the above. That wasn’t intentional, though, and over the weekend, Apple pushed the 6.0.2 update of GarageBand for Mac out through the usual channels, bringing support for opening projects imported from GarageBand for iPad.

By not bother sweating about the contracts with the labels until after the service was live and leveraging their massive Amazon S2 cloud server cluster for quick rollout, Amazon was able to leap-frog Apple and Google into the cloud with Cloud Locker, a stream-anywhere digital locker for multimedia files.

Now it looks like Amazon wants to try to do it again, this time with mobile payments, and while they may not beat Google and Apple to the punch on NFC, they’ve already got all the rest of the infrastructure in place to use the competition’s NFC chips when they finally start rolling out to handsets.

If you love your music, you’ve probably encountered this situation: you’re streaming songs from the web via one of your favorite sites, and the phone rings, so you need to hit pause. Or your Most Hated Song Ever comes on, and you just want to skip it as fast as possible.

But wait, you have 67 tabs open. And that’s just in the browser window that’s visible. There’s two more windows full of tabs minimised in your Dock. Where’s the music, the pause button, the skip controls? Gah.

Factotum is a tiny utility that solves the problem. It works in Safari and Chrome, and lets you attach your Mac’s built-in media control keys (aka F7, F8 and F9) to a long list of web streaming services (the full list is Rdio, Grooveshark, Hype Machine, Pandora, Last.fm, Napster, Playlist.com, Live365, BBC iPlayer, Songza, Jango, We Are Hunted, Deezer, thesixtyone, and Blip).

Want it? Go here. It’s four bucks in the Mac App Store.

(Via OneThingWell)

Finally! Possibly the most anticipated jailbreak has finally been released. The iPhone-Dev Team came through once again, and has released updated version of both redsn0w (version 0.9.6rc9 for both Windows & Mac OS X) as well as PwnageTool 4.3 for Mac OS X. While it doesn’t work for the iPad 2 (no jailbreak is available for it yet), it still works for every other device. Download links and more information after the break!

The Apple iPad turns one year old today. The first day the iPad was available was April 3, 2010. That was the day that I had  the Wi-Fi only model in my hands. It wasn’t until near the end of April 2010 that I finally got a hold of the Wi-Fi + 3G model. My life and the life of countless others hasn’t been the same since.

The iPad was met with some skepticism when it was announced in early 2010. The “magical and revolutionary” device was ridiculed, laughed about, and even mocked. People cried about it and the impact it would have on their businesses and Adobe cried about it. However, all that ended when people and developers got one in their hands.

Initial reviews like the one from Cult of Mac’s very own Leander Kahney were very positive and even first impressions were good. People loved it so much one of them even wrapped it in chocolate — only to give it away again to someone they loved.

The iPad proved itself again and again finding niche and mainstream applications for it at home and at work. The iPad may very well be the most popular Apple computing device in this decade. Although the iPhone may give it a run for its money. We’ll see. Maybe there will be a tie for that title.

The introduction of the iPad 2 last month will keep the iPad juggernaut moving along well into the 21st century. Frankly I cannot wait to see what Apple comes up with next!

Happy Birthday iPad! Congrats Apple.