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.

With an estimated 2.5 million users, MapMyFitness is almost certainly one of the top fitness-tracking services on the web and the iPhone;  which means last week’s announcement that their apps now fully integrate with the Wahoo Fisica dongle should make a lot of people happy.

The MMF website and apps, most of which are free, are already chock-full of features like a deep library of user-generated maps, mapping functions (like route elevation profile generation) and their new nutrition-tracking feature; adding the ability to record sensor data should catapult the system to the top of the heap. The integration with the ANT+ Fisica sensor dongle doesn’t quite extend across MapMyFitness’s whole suite of apps, but hits the major ones, like MapMyRun, MapMyRide and MapMyFitness (all three of which are really almost identical).

Apple launched its new ad campaign for the iPad 2 Saturday based on its founding philosophy of bringing technology to the masses.

If you are a recent Mac switcher, there is a good chance that there are some Windows applications that you still may want to use. If so, Virtual Box is a great application to let you do this. In this video, you will se how to get virtual box, install an operating system, and run Windows apps side by side with your OS X apps.

Skobbler, makers of Forever Map, a cool 99¢ navigation app for iOS devices is giving away an iPad2 on Monday so you have a small window of time to squeek through and snag your chance.

All you have to do is “Like” Skobbler’s Facebook page and “Like” one of its daily status updates between March 29 and April 4 to be entered in their drawing.

The rules are unclear whether that means you have to “Like” a daily status update for each day between 3/29-4/4 or if it’s OK to “Like” just a single status update during that timeframe, but it couldn’t hurt to get happy with the “Like” buttons. The folks at Facebook seem to enjoy and how else are you going to get an iPad2 these days?

A part purported to be destined for a forthcoming iPod nano suggests that the seventh generation device could bring back a camera and video recording capabilities to the second smallest iPod, whilst retaining its current tiny form factor.

The picture above was sent to Apple.pro two days ago, and on previous occasions the Tiawanese site has been relatively accurate with its leaks of upcoming parts and devices. The site recently leaked plans of the revised iPhone 4 built for CDMA and Verizon before its launch, and prior to that it published pictures of a miniature touch screen that later arrived in the current iPod nano.

It’s hard to recall now, but the number-one complaint about the iPhone when it first came out was the on-screen keyboard.

Engadget’s Ryan Block asked: “Will the iPhone be undone by its keyboard?” People talked about how on-screen typing would destroy the iPhone in the same way that the hand-writing recognition system helped kill the Newton.

Even more incredibly, one of the main iPad criticisms when it first came out was the visibility of finger smudges on the screen when you turn the power off.

These concerns seem quaint now, textbook examples of the limited human-ape mind trying to grapple with novelty. It’s like people complaining about their new “motor car” a hundred years ago by saying the infernal contraption fails to slow down when they say, “whoa, Nellie!” and won’t speed up when they whip the fender with a riding crop. “It’ll never catch on!”

Many annoying tech pundits (including and especially Yours Truly) bitched and moaned about Apple’s global ban on the sale of third-party physical keyboard and refusal to create one of their own.

I believe Apple deliberately used its red-hot iPhone product to force the world to accept and learn to appreciate on-screen keyboards, and break them of their physical keyboard habit. When Apple released the iPad a year ago, it was usable with two Apple keyboards (the standard Bluetooth keyboard and a new cradle keyboard). But no matter. The on-screen keyboard idea had already been accepted by a critical mass of users.

Despite widespread acceptance, people are still divided on whether on-screen keyboards are good or bad, and most still prefer a physical keyboard. But let’s look at the big picture.

You want your computer to be as secure as possible, right? Here’s one thing that newcomers to OS X might want to change pretty soon after getting their hands on their first Mac.

The OS X web browser, Safari, is a pretty good browser in almost every respect. But it has one default option that, personally speaking, I’ve never felt very comfortable about leaving switched on.

We received these cryptic press releases from two fairly well-known developers today, and we just thought we’d share them with you — especially since one of them was marked confidential and requested we not reveal anything till Monday; as if! We’re revealing it NOW! (Yes, we’re horribly easy to manipulate).

We close out another week with three hardware deals in the spotlight. First up is a number of unibody MacBook Pro machines from the Apple Store, starting at $929 for a 2.4GHz 13.3-inch model. Next is a 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook with 13.3-inch screen for just $500. Finally, another round of Mac minis, starting at $599 for a 2.4GHz version. All are April Fool’s-free deals.

Along the way, we check out an eMac G4 PowerPC desktop for $100, a 2GB iPod shuffle for $34 and a leather case for your iPad. As usual, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.