We start out another week with some deals on desktops and portable power. First up is an iMac powered by an Intel Core i3 processor running at 3.06GHz. The machine included a 22-inch screen for $979. Next is a number of MacBook Pro laptops, starting at $899 for a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo-powered machine. We wrap up the day’s spotlight with the JumpStart battery pack from Philips. The gadget attaches to an iPod or iPhone via a sync cable.

Along the way, we also check out several cases for the iPad 2, as well as a video iPod and software for your Mac. As usual, details on these and many other bargains can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

While Apple is unlikely to release a 4G iPad until 2012 or even 2013, due to their issues with the power hungriness of current LTE modems chipsets, never underestimate Cupertino’s competitors — or their desperation to beat the iPad — to adopt an underdeveloped new technology before its time.

Meet, then, the HTC Puccini, a 10-inch LTE tablet set to debut in June. Not much is known about it, although it’s likely to be a Honeycomb tablet and support HTC’s Scribe capacitive stylus.

Otherwise, the most interesting aspect about the Puccini is that it is one of the first devices that will support AT&T’s forthcoming “true 4G” LTE network. That’s interesting not because of the Puccini, but because of what it means for Apple. When AT&T’s LTE network debuts, Apple will finally be able to support the two largest mobile providers in the country in their 4G pursuits using the same chipset.

Who wants to sift through all this text crap when you could just watch a video? If your answer to that question sounds something along the lines of “not me,” you should probably download Showyou onto your iDevice during your next coffee break — just don’t blame us if your boss fires you because you spend the next five hours watching clips on it.

The app elegantly aggregates all the videos that your contacts on Facebook or Twitter have posted, and also from its own Showyou network that can be joined via the app. Sharing clips looks just as elegant and effortless.

Showyou looks good on the iPhone, but gets drool-worthy on an iPad with videos from feeds laid out in a seamlessly swipeable checkerboard. Bonus: It plays nice with an Apple TV.

Should Apple bailout Intel? That’s the thinking of one analyst who suggests the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant help the chip giant leap from aging PCs to the future of smartphones and tablets. Apple, which already uses Intel Core 2 Duo, i5 and i7 cores in laptops and desktops, could adopt Intel’s Atom core.

“In our view, Intel would pick up Apple’s volume, driving revenue growth at good (not great) gross margin,” Piper Jaffray analyst Gus Richard tells investors Monday morning. Meanwhile, “Intel would also benefit from becoming a key supplier in smartphones and tablets and drive growth,” he adds. But what’s in it for Apple, which reportedly is looking for an alternative to the Intel chips in its laptop and desktops?

A new resource called ‘Cydia Search’ lets you browse the Cydia’s huge collection of jailbreak tweaks and applications from the convenience of your desktop. Finding the packages you’re looking for in Cydia can sometimes be a slow and unpleasant process, but thanks to Planet-iPhones, you can now find them from your web browser.

Cydia Search checks all of Cydia’s default repositories – as well as 7 others – for new and updated packages once every hour. You can browse packages by repository and category; by top rated, newest, and updated packages; or you can search the collection for a range of things like package names, descriptions, and authors. You can also subscribe to the newest and updated packages RSS feeds so that you never miss a Cydia release.

We’ve seen our fair share of sleeves and cases in the past meant to graft new functionality onto an existing iDevice, the most obvious example being the Peel 520, which transformed any iPod Touch into a 2G iPhone 4.

It was only a matter of time, then, before we could expect accessory makers to make a go of transforming the iPhone 4 into the iPhone 4G. Now they’d made a go of it, but sadly, it’s South Korea only right now… but expect it in the United States soon.

The Sun, that last bastion of journalistic excellence, reports that Queen Elizabeth II has shuttled off one of her liveried manservants to the Regent Street Apple Store to buy her an iPad 2. Explanation, please!

Everyone who owns an Apple TV loves AirPlay – it’s a fantastic way of streaming your moves and music straight to your TV that was previously a luxury only iOS and iTunes users could enjoy. However, thanks to the doubleTwist software, users can now send content to the Apple TV from their Android smartphones.

The doubleTwist software for Mac & PC advertises itself as “the iTunes for Android” and allows you to wirelessly sync your iTunes playlists, photos and videos to your Android phone with the accompanying Android application. Its most recent update introduced the ability to stream all of this content to the Apple TV over AirPlay.

Although Apple’s own Game Center once threatened to topple it from its perch as iOS’s most popular gaming social network, OpenFeint is still going strong, largely thanks to an open, cross-platform approach that allows iOS and Android devices to play with one another on equal social footing.

But that’s not to say that OpenFeint hasn’t had its missteps. Last month, a security researcher discovered that OpenFeint commonly linked iOS devices’ unique device identifiers (or UDIDs) to the phone owner’s Facebook profile. The result? A list of names for 75 million registered OpenFeint users, linked to their iOS devices and Facebook accounts.

OpenFeint has since closed the security hole in their system, but as security researcher Aldo Cortesi tells Wired, if a network as big as OpenFeint managed to link UDIDs with specific user accounts across games as popular as TinyWings, Pocket God, Robot Unicorn Attack and Fruit Ninja, there are probably a lot more apps out there flying under the App Store Approval Team’s radar. And those app developers could, even now, be selling your information to advertisers.

Last week it was Hearst Corp. Today, Condé Naste, publisher of magazines such as the New Yorker, announced an iPad subscription deal with Apple. The agreements appear to mark the end of a stalemate which devalued publishers’ iPad applications while also keeping some of the most popular periodicals from the best-selling tablet.

Readers of the New Yorker can now pay $5.99 per month for the iPad version, instead of $4.99 per issue. Most importantly, subscribers to the print magazine now get the iPad app for free. Previously, print subscribers were required to pay extra for each issue available on the iPad.

A sex offender was recently put behind bars for 20 years after engaging in sexually explicit chats and exchanging photos with two young teens. 

The 35-year-old man used a social media app called Whoshere on his iPhone to instant message the girls who used it via iPod Touch.

Social networking-cum-hook-up opps like Grindr have occasionally been in the news in sex assault cases involving minors. An iPod Touch was recently taken as evidence by police in a sex blackmailing case involving an 11-year old girl said to be chatting via an app with a person she thought was a 12-year-old boy.

Cult of Mac talked to Stephen S. Smith, co-founder myRete, the makers of Whoshere about the case involving his app and why perps and pervs should think twice when they use it.

The iPhone comes with a pre-installed weather application that takes its data from The Weather Channel. While it looks okay, it isn’t exactly crammed with features, it doesn’t go into any detail, it doesn’t come with the iPad, and I find its weather forecast to be far from accurate.

That being the case, over the years I’ve been trying out all sorts of third-party weather apps that do a far better job – here’s my list of the App Store’s best weather apps.

Apple. The brand is worth $153 billion and this year tops uber brandname Google, according to a new survey. The Mountain View, Calif. company, which topped the list in 2010, slipped to second place to $111 billion.

“Apple earned an 84 percent increase in brand value with successful iterations of existing products like the iPhone, creation of the tablet category with iPad, and anticipation of a broadened strategy making the brand a trifecta of cloud computing, software, and innovative, well-designed devices,” announced Branz, a subsidiary of advertising giant WPP.

Apple has invested a considerable amount of time and money on iOS, the mobile version of Mac OS X, that powers the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, and Apple TV. So it just makes sense that Apple would re-invest iOS technology into the Mac version of OS X. Steve Jobs has pretty much said so himself and we’ll start to see this happen with the release of Mac OS X 10.7 bearing the code name Lion.

First of all it is no secret that Apple plans on bringing a number of features to the Mac from iOS. These features include the following:

Resuming Applications

Mac OS X will allow applications to remember open windows, etc. similar to resuming apps when launched on iOS. Automatically saving application documents will also be an integrated feature similar to what happens on iOS when you suspend or quit an app.

Everyone’s favorite former Apple co-founder, Woz, gave a speech to Michigan State University grads last week, declaring: “Every time we invent a computer to do something else, it’s doing our work for us, making ourselves less relevant.”

He went on: “How does a computer ever create art, for example, if it can’t sense things that a human understands, like the wind on a beach. Well, our computers have gotten hearing and seeing, they’ve got feeling, touch sensitive; they can sense motion, just like our inner ear. Pretty soon we’re going to have holograms, which are much better than what you call 3D television. We’ve created a new species; no question. We’re creators and, like I said, we’re making ourselves less relevant.”

I, for one, welcome our new more-relevant computer overlords. They can do all the dull stuff to do with managing finances and designed sewage systems, and while we irrelevant humans go to the beach with a good book.

In the history of technology, most successful formats go from a nascent birth phase to market popularity with the assistance of a Killer App. A major program, activity or use for a new technology that drives rapid adoption of the medium.

The Apple II had VisiCalc. The IBM PC had Lotus 1-2-3. With the Macintosh came PageMaker and desktop publishing. Arcade Games had Space Invaders. Xbox had Halo. VHS had porn.

Many technologies have benefited from porn, actually. It’s a pre-internet fad.

But there is no one Killer App for the iPad. There are dozens of categories of uses, thousands of apps. The iPad started out popular, then became a phenomenon. But nobody can agree on what it’s best used for.

Cloud Player, the recently launched online storage service from Amazon, now works on iOS devices through the Safari web browser. When it first went live, the service – which offers 5GB of storage for free – was only accessible from Flash-supported browsers and Android devices.

When you first navigate to Cloud Player on your iOS device, you are greeted by a warning that tells you your browser isn’t supported. You can just ignore that and proceed into your music collection. Once there, you can use Cloud Player flawlessly: it will pause when you receive push notifications and incoming calls, you’ll get the blue “playing” icon in your device’s status bar, and you can control playback from the buttons in the multitasking tray.

If you’ve got iEverything Else in your home, perhaps it’s time you announced the fact to your visitors, by declaring your love for Apple products in doormat form.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bNI1R1RAa8&feature=related

Rovio’s Angry Birds is one of most successful iOS games of all time and it seems like everyone who’s ever used an iOS device has played it. But it’s not just humans who enjoy catapulting birds into pigs: OptoFidelity has created a robot with the sole purpose of playing Angry Birds.

The Finnish company uses its robots for touch panel testing and performance testing for mobile devices using video and optical measuring systems, so they already had the components required, and say it wasn’t hard to build a system for “this particular need.” The difficulty was getting the robot to play through every level of the game and achieve a three-star rating for each one.

Microsoft’s latest attempt at persuading customers to buy a Windows PC rather than a Mac is an advertising campaign that compares the price of Apple machines with computers from Asus, Dell, HP, Sony, and others; and then asks buyers to “do the math” and look at the money they could save – which they could then spend on a trip to Hawaii.

For example, compare Apple’s MacBook Air with a selection of Windows netbooks and straight away you’ll notice the difference in price – with the MacBook Air listed at $1,049 compared to netbooks for as little as $299. We’ll ignore the fact that Microsoft has classed the MacBook Air as a netbook and move on to specifications.

A few months ago, we reported that AT&T is starting to crack down on iPhone tethering usage. Jailbroken users are able to tether without subscribing to an extra plan. Some new information has emerged regarding how AT&T determines who’s tethering.

One of the most interesting revelations of the Fortune piece “Inside Apple” that’s making headlines this weekend is how Steve Jobs thinks Apple will be OK without him.

Fortune reporter Adam Lashinsky writes:

“Jobs himself believes he has set Apple on a course to survive in his absence. He has created a culture that, while not particularly jolly, has internalized his ways.”

Kicking off this week’s selection of must-have iOS games is a brand new soccer game from X2 Games – the team behind the award-winning X2 Soccer titles. First Touch Soccer promises to be the true next-generation of soccer on iOS, offering the “most complete, realistic and addictive soccer sim available.”

Spider Jack is the latest puzzle release from Chillingo and I’m betting this game will be the next iOS game craze. Inspired by Cut the Rope, this game features a similar gameplay mechanic and all the ingredients needed to be a fantastic iOS puzzler.

Frisbee Forever is a whole new way to play frisbee and the only official frisbee game for iOS. It boasts super crisp 3D graphics and a frisbee experience like no other!

Find out more about the games above and check out Pulse: Volume One – this week’s final must-have – after the break!

GeekTool is a neat little System Preferences add-on that  lets you expand the usability of your desktop. Whether it be adding the time, date, weather, or even your Twitter feed, GeekTool can change your desktop from a boring backdrop to a useful information center. This video will show you how to setup GeekTool to fit your needs, as well as where to find many useful add-ons for it.

My wife and I sat down at a nice restaurant last week. Our table was right next to a larger party of four adults and two young children — both girls under the age of 7 years old or so.

Each of the girls had her own iPad, and each iPad had some high-end noise-cancellation headphones plugged in. One girl was engrossed in a children’s movie, and the other was enjoying a series of apps designed for kids.

So of course I whipped out MY iPad and blogged about it.

Granted, this scene took place in Silicon Valley, where there’s no such thing as an inappropriate social context for consumer technology and, in fact, in the very town where Steve Wozniak lives (Los Gatos). Still, it was a remarkable scene, and one that will be repeated across the nation as the iPad phenomenon spreads.

Letting kids use or own iPads is controversial. Parents, teachers and others aren’t so sure about letting kids get sucked into yet another electronic diversion. Pilot programs at a few schools around the country to experiment with iPad-based learning tools are often met with criticism by parents and teachers alike.

Everybody’s asking: Are iPads healthy for children?

I’m here to tell you: That’s the wrong question.