We start another week of deals with bargains for the iPod touch, iPad 2 and iPhone 3G. First in the spotlight is an 8GB iPod touch for just $199 from the Apple Store. Next is silicone and TPU cases for Apple’s latest iPad 2, starting at $5.99. Last in the spotlight is a 16GB unlocked iPhone 3G for $338.

Along the way, we also check out a sliding bluetooth keyboard case for your iPhone 4, a case for your iPod touch, and software for your Mac. As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Check out this video of the iPad 2 playing Chair Entertainment’s Infinity Blade on a 50-inch LG HDTV running at 1080p, thanks to the new iPad HDMI adapter. That’s a ten-dollar game looking just as lurid and beautiful in high-definition as a $60 Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 game.

If you’ve ever used and loved the “Archive” function in Gmail or MobileMe, then found yourself missing it while using Apple’s own Mail application, this simple free plugin is a dream come true.

It’s an Archive button for Mail, and you can guess what it does. Instead of having to mess around with filing messages into folders, a single click will throw them into the archive. It even comes with its own ready-made keyboard shortcut (Command+Option+S), to make archiving even faster and easier.

When you need to find something specific, use Mail’s own search, which is quite up to the task of hunting through enormous archives (I’ve used Mail in this way, as a backup for my Gmail account, for years now).

If you need Mail to be a little more flexible, try Mail Act-On, which we mentioned back in number 8 in this series.

(You’re reading the 33rd post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more, or grab the RSS feed.)

Speaking to Jim Dalrymple over at The Loop, Apple spokesperson Trudy Muller says that demand for the iPad 2 has been “amazing.”

How amazing? Amazing enough that they’re admitting that there are supply shortages and they can’t produce them fast enough… at least by implication.

“We are working hard to get iPad 2 into the hands of every customer who wants one as quickly as possible,” said Muller.

Analysts are saying that Apple could have sold as many as a million iPad 2s over the weekend, based upon estimated shipping times online and the long lines outside Apple Stores for the iPad 2s launch.

This isn’t the first time Apple has admitted that they just can’t make iPads fast enough to satisfy demand: at Apple’s EOY earnings call in February, Apple COO Tim Cook admitted that he thought they could have sold even more iPads in 2010 if they’d been able to build more them.

Still trying to get an iPad 2, but unwilling to wait the current four weeks wait by orering online? Reports suggest you’ll have a chance to buy an iPad 2 tomorrow morning, if you get to an Apple Store early.

In line with AT&T, Verizon is also making calls and texts to Japan free.

Verizon said texts, wireless and wireline calls to Japan will be free through April 10.

AT&T is offering free calls and texts to Japan through March 31st.

Verizon also provided instructions on how to donate money via text to Japanese relief efforts.

Details in the press releases:

A new  iPad app for Cosmopolitan magazine, expected to debut later this week, drops the pretense that women read it for the articles: it features an interactive sex quiz with men groaning and lots of pics of shirtless guys.

Fashion bible Women’s Wear Daily got their hands on the magazine app featuring hot hunks and steamy sex advice to find that the $2.99 new app, called “The Showcase Edition,” contained only two articles.

Instead, there’s an interactive feature, already a favorite with magazine staffers, called “Decode His Bedroom Sounds,” which promises to help women understand what a “load moaner” really means — and whether she’s got one — by emitting what was described as “unholy sounds.”

AT&T customers can call and text Japan for free through March 31st, the company said on Monday.

The offer extends to customers in the United States and Puerto Rico, and is in reponse to last week’s earthquake and tsunami.

AT&T also said wireless customers will not be charged for international long distance calls or texts to Japan that were placed after March 11th.

And AT&T landline customers can apply for 60 minutes of credit for calls to Japan from March 11th to March 31st.

Here’s the details from AT&T’s press release:

The consensus on Wall Street is that Apple had a gangbuster weekend, some estimating the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant sold up to three times as many iPad 2 units as the first-generation tablet.

“We would not be surprised to see Apple sell closer to 1 million iPad 2s in the opening weekend,” Wedbush Securitities’ analyst Scott Sutherland (no relation to this reporter) told Reuters Monday morning. Sunday, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster estimated between 400,000 to 500,000 of the new tablets were sold by Sunday night.

Want to grab an iPad 2 but didn’t manage to get one over the weekend? Word on the street has it that Apple will be opening its Retail Stores one hour early on Tuesday to sell people a new shipment of iPad 2s.

The report comes from Apple Bitch, who says:

While no official announcement has been forthcoming from Apple, anecdotal reports from shoppers across the country trying get an iPad 2 this morning, say they were told by retail staff that even if the Apple Stores were re-stocked today, the iPad 2 would not be sold until tomorrow and for this reason, the Stores would open early for dedicated iPad 2 sales.  We have confirmed this with three retail stores.

In other words, if you want an iPad 2, it sounds like it’s a fool’s errand to spend a lot of time running back and forth between Apple Stores today, looking for a new shipment. Instead, prepare to wait in line first thing tomorrow morning. Could we have a mini repeat tomorrow morning of the long lines we saw on Friday?

The iPad 2 might cost the same as the first-gen tablet… but several components used to make it have actually increased in price: most notably, the price of the iPad 2’s touch display and the cost of manufacturing its new, dual-core A5 SoC.

The biggest component cost increase is for the touch display, which shot up almost $32 in price to $127, compared to the first-gen iPad’s $95 touch display.

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball said something recently that made a lot of Apple’s more seemingly incredible business decisions make sense to me: Apple wants to cut out the middle men by becoming the only middle man anyone using an iOS device needs to go through.

If you keep that in mind, it makes today’s latest news about Apple’s NFC ambitions make more sense. Reportedly, Apple has told carriers that the iPhone 5 won’t have NFC, as Apple is reportedly “concerned about a lack of a clear [NFC] standard.”

If you are a recent Mac switcher and were a fan of Aero Peek on Windows 7, you way be concerned that you are going to be missing out on some handy features in OS X. Well, fear not. Mac OS X has a easy to use feature as well, called Exposé. Exposé brings many of the features you may know from Aero Peek, and integrates them with Mac OS X. In this video, I’ll show you how to use Exposé.

Vito Technology, developers of the wildly successful iOS astronomy app Star Walk celebrates the company’s 10th birthday this week with an update to its more recently released geography app, Geo Walk 3D World Factboook — and especially for Cult of Mac readers — an iPad2 giveaway.

Geo Walk is one of those apps that, while engaging and interesting enough on the smaller iPhone screen, finds new life and greater dimensions of engagement when used on an iPad.

Just marvel at the engineering behind the iPad 2’s Smart Covers. Between them, the iPad 2 and its Smart Cover contain an incredible 31 magnets.

Apple has made extensive use of magnets in the past – to hold a remote control to the iMac, for example, or keep the lid of a MacBook closed. But it has never used so many magnets in a product, or so elegantly.

The 31 magnets in the iPad 2 and the Smart Cover:

• clip the Smart Cover to the side of the iPad
• Keep the Smart Cover attached to the screen when closed
• ensure the Smart Cover retains its triangular shape when folded into a stand
• instantly wake the iPad and put it to sleep when opened and closed

It’s really quite mind-boggling. iFixit has the details.

Did you get an iPad 2 after waiting in line Friday and Saturday? A prominent Apple analyst reported Sunday night New York City and Minneapolis Apple fans found only empty shelves. For those Apple tablets sold, the majority – 70 percent – went to new iPad owners.

“We believe this shows Apple is expanding its base of iPad users, which is critical to maintaining its early lead in the growing tablet market,” Piper Jaffrey analyst Gene Munster said. Munster, who directed surveys of 236 line-waiters, estimates Apple sold 400,000 to 500,000 iPad 2 units – almost all in one day. That compares with the 300,000 first-generation iPads sold over its first weekend in 2010.

A common complaint by Android users is that iOS isn’t customizable. Well, jailbreaking removes that “issue,” and opens up a whole new world. Once jailbroken, users get access to thousands upon thousands of beautifully designed themes, a lot of which are being converted to an “HD” version for retina display support. A lot of recent themes feature HTML5 lockscreen animations, which are really quite spectacular. Hit the jump to check out 15 really cool themes.

One of the first things I wanted to try out on the iPad 2 was the cameras. I found them to be nice to have for convenience and Facetime calls, but less than adequate for photography. Let’s face it they suck at photography when compared to my iPhone 4 and Canon G12.  The iPad 2 won’t be replacing either of these anytime soon. I think that is okay, because I don’t see myself wandering around trying to catch that special moment in time wielding an iPad 2. After all it is kind of big, right?

However, the cameras are there and I might as well make the best use out of them that I can. So I launched iTunes and I looked at the iPhone and iPod touch camera apps within my app library and installed some of them onto my iPad to test.

Here are the results.

Well that was fast! Just 2 days ago, the iPad 2 was released, and it’s now jailbroken. In the picture above, you can see a white Verizon WiFi+3G iPad 2 running Cydia. The jailbreak itself comes courtesy of @comex, the man behind JailbreakMe.com. Continue reading for more information!

Everyone out there that wants a white iPhone it looks like you can keep all your hopes and dreams alive, because Phil Schiller from Apple, Inc. says that you’ll be able to get one soon.

Eric Anderson, asked Phil, via Twitter about how he could obtain a white iPhone and Phil replied, “The white iPhone will be available this spring (and it is a beauty!). ”

What kind of iPhone? iPhone 4? iPhone 5? Will it work on GSM or CDMA networks?

It seems peculiar that Apple would release a white iPhone 4 model with the iPhone 5 allegedly around the corner. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Are you going to buy one?

[via Twitter]

Couldn’t get an iPad 2 this Friday? Don’t want to wait 3-4 weeks for shipping? Money not an object? A black 16GB WiFi iPad 2 is currently – and honestly – listed on eBay as “the world’s most expensive iPad 2” for a mere $199,999.99 (with Free Shipping). Best offers accepted. Better act fast!

A quick search on eBay revealed that more common upper end end prices for the newest iWonder seem to be between $2,000-4,000. Similar models are available on craigslist in Boston and New York with prices topping out at between $1,500-2,000.

Less exorbitant resale prices are also available, so be sure to shop around. If you do spend several orders of magnitude more on your iPad than it’s worth, be sure to get a Swarovski Crystal iPad Case to match!

If you’re like me, and want to keep your Apple investments protected, then this early iPad 2 case by Griffin is just for you. It’s similar to the original and official Apple iPad case in terms of functionality, but it’s made of some pretty decent leather with a suede inner lining. It retails for $39.99, and it’s a perfect buy (considering the iPad 2 was only launched just yesterday). Continue reading to check it out!

If you have an iPad (any model) running iOS 4.3 then you can easily add additional four or five-finger multi-touch gestures to your iPad. It will take only a few minutes and you don’t have to jailbreak your iPad to get them.

The only requirement is that you’ll need a copy of Xcode 4 and if you don’t already have a copy you can purchase it for $4.99 in the Mac OS X App Store. Registered Mac OS X or iOS developers in the paid development programs for either operating system can download a copy of Xcode 4 at developer.apple.com after logging in with their developer credentials.

However, you don’t need a developer account to activate these gestures either — at least for the time being. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple changes this later.

If you are using Windows you are out of luck that is unless you can find a friend with a Mac to help you out. Xcode doesn’t run on Windows.

Here are the steps.

Keyboard shortcuts are a handy thing to know when working on your Mac. They can save a ton of time and make your workflow much smoother. If you are used to using a PC and have recently switched to a Mac, you will have probably noticed that none of the keyboard shortcuts are the same. If you are confused, look no further. In this video, I show you the top Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts.

It looks as though early iPad 2 adopters are being hit by a previous problem with Apple displays on the iPhone 4  that had yellow tinting appearing on the LCD or backlight bleed through.

These problems are being reported on various news sites and I’ve experienced one of them myself. My own iPad 2 Wi-Fi-3G 64GB AT&T model is displaying some LCD anomalies on the portion of the display closest to the Home button.

It looks like the Apple Japan store has posted a message about the earthquake  — if you can help us translate it (they’ve posted it as an image, so there’s no way to copy and paste it for a robot-translation) we’d be much obliged.

Here’s a translation sent in by Cult of Mac readers @nick_gmit,  @Sugarless_GiRL_ , @Ignignokt:

“To those who have been affected by the earthquake and tsunami, we send sympathies from our heart – In this deep …sadness, we are praying for the victims and their families.”

While we’re on topic,  Apple also set up donations through iTunes for the Red Cross to help victims of the earthquake and tsunami, as it did after the earthquake in Haiti.

Apple has waived their usual 30% cut and donations start in increments of $5.