Apple released iOS 4.3 Beta 2 to developers this afternoon. The update includes a new firmware update for the new Apple TV, iPad, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS as well as the 3rd and 4th generation iPod touch.

Registered iOS developers can download these updates as well as a new SDK from developer.apple.com.

Let us know if you find anything interesting in the new beta by leaving a comment.

Precorder (on sale now for $1) from Airship Software constantly buffers a few seconds of video before you hit the record button, effectively eliminating “shutter lag.” It’s a brilliant idea that the developers say they borrowed from the Planet Earth team — who used it to film this amazing spectacle of great whites breaching (note: Your results may vary. A lot).

Remember last week, when we reported on Freecom’s 10mm external drive, the thinnest in the world? Turns out Seagate is planning to release their own super-slim USB hard drive that beats Freecom’s by one millimeter. Seagate’s drive will be part of their modular GoFlex system — which means it’ll mesh with USB 2.0, 3.0 and Firewire. Looks like it’ll also be plenty zippy at 7200 rpm, and cost about $100 for 320MB 320GB. Release date? Seagate says later this year.

This week’s photographic obsession is Dominik Seibold’s Hough Transform Camera, which I can explain in two different ways: the simple way, and the science way.

We start off the day with two deals from the iPhone App Store. First is a number of free applications, including “Taxi Check,” a new way to check prices on taxi rides. Next is a new crop of price cuts on iPhone apps, including “I Just Forgot,” a Little Critter children’s book. We round out today’s spotlight with a deal on Apple’s Remote Desktop 2 software – just $70.

Along the way, we’ll also check out some Xserve servers and some Adobe Photoshop software utilities for your Mac. As usual, you can find details at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak didn’t see Steve Jobs’ sudden leave of absence coming, according to an email he wrote to CNET.

“The news actually frightened me because I did not expect it,” Wozniak said, before trying to look more brightly at the news as perhaps a personal choice on Jobs’ part to downplay his day-to-day involvement with Apple.

“If Steve is tired and wants a bit more normal life, more power to him,” he said.

At the time of writing CNET on Monday, Woz said he had not yet contacted Jobs, but in an email statement to Cult of Mac the Apple co-founder said that he had since reached out to Jobs directly with his best wishes of rapid recovery.

A game developed by a 14-year-old has knocked Angry Birds from its perch as the top free game in iTunes.

The game, called Bubble Ball, is a physics puzzler developed by Utah teen Robert Nay. Nay wrote the 4,000 lines of code using Corona SDK. He did have had a little help from his mom, Kari, who lent a hand with the graphics. Although he’s only in the 8th grade, Nay has been programming for six years and currently codes in languages including HTML, PHP, AJAX and Java Script.

Bubble Ball launched December 29, shortly after iTunes announced that Rovio’s Angry Birds ruled the roost as the top paid and free game.

Nay’s game has had some three million downloads since launch.

What’s it like?

Players try to move  a bubble from point A to point B. To keep things moving along, players use  geometric shapes to create ramps, platforms and catapults to send the bubble to its destination.

Simple, but perhaps that is what catapulted it to the top of the crowded gaming heap on iTunes.

I haven’t played it yet, but looking forward to checking it out: I’ve got three versions of Angry Birds on my phone already.

Source: IB Times

Steve Jobs’ latest medical leave of absence was announced one day before Apple scheduled their fiscal Q1 earnings result… which in and of itself had been scheduled during a strange period, given the scheduling history of such calls.

That was no accident, of course, but an interesting post by Andy Zaky over at the Seeking Alpha blog reveals not only the reason behind the timing, but shows that Apple and Steve Jobs had been planning this for well over a month, if not longer.

What’s worse: someone steals your car – or they steal your car with an iPad in it?

A man in Paterson, New Jersey managed to track down his stolen car thanks to the Find My iPhone app installed on his iPad.

The man reportedly left his 003 BMW X5 in a Costco parking lot at 11:30 a.m. and returned about 40 minutes later to find the car missing.

I quite like the look of Kensington’s new combination dock, stand and battery charger for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Called the PowerLift, the dock packs in its own battery to provide an additional boost of power for when you just can’t get to the mains.

It’s not a piddling battery either. The PowerLift actually will give your iPhone jolt enough to power it for another 3.5 hours of talk time, 1.5 hours of FaceTime, 5 hours of video and 20 hours of music. That’s a respectable amount of juice for when you just can’t get to the mains.

Of course, the PowerLift’s larger battery means it doesn’t have the most streamlined design in the world, but if you look at it as a travel dock that just happens to also be an external battery, there’s a lot to love here.

The Kensington PowerLift is available now for pre-order on Amazon for $50.

Verizon may have dropped its “New Every Two” promotion before the advent of the Verizon iPhone, but that’s not to say they don’t want to help some of their existing customers along with an upgrade.

AirView is a free new app that allows you to send video wirelessly between your iOS devices, as well as from iTunes to your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad.

As perhaps is obvious from the app’s name, AirView taps into the AirPlay functionality in iOS 4.2 which allows you to beam video from your iPhone or iPad to a compatible device like an AppleTV. However, AirPlay doesn’t let you beam video from iTunes to your iPhone, or from your iPhone to your iPad.

AirView remedies that. Just open it on any iOS device and it will show up on your WiFi network as a new destination for video, just as if it were an AirPort Express or AppleTV.

Pretty neat, but grab it now: who knows how this might fall afoul of Apple’s sometimes inscrutable whims.

[via Gadget Lab]

Much of the Apple blogosphere consensus is that now that the Verizon iPhone is a real product, we should see a mass migration of Verizon users ditching their Android phones in favor of an iPhone 4. The rationale goes that the only reason Verizon has sold so many Android handsets is because it was the only thing close to the iPhone every Verizon subscriber really wanted.

That was always a perspective too black-and-white to be true, and now a new study has come out from Zokem, finding that while iPhone owners are most loyal to their existing smartphone, Android owners are the more likely to upgrade to a new Android phone than even iPhone customers.

Reader Adam from Cape Town thinks Apple should call the next iPad the “iPad 2x.” Here’s his reasoning:

Calling the next iPad the iPad 2x makes a lot of sense. It can be used effectively in their marketing messages, to differentiate it from the current iPad, and also to set it apart from its competitors.

It’s the iPad 2, twice as good as the original iPad, with:

2x resolution per axis (even if the camera will take smaller resolution pics).
2x the speed, with dual core processing.
2x the RAM, to achieve the above.
2x cameras. And if one of the cameras were 8.3MP, it would by 2x full HD…
One could add even more to the list.

I’m pretty sure they won’t get 2x docks, but it would be a nice! Similarly, I doubt they’ll squeeze 2x battery life out of the new iPad.

Of course, the one thing that’s difficult to market is 2x as thin and/or light, makes more sense to say half as thin and/or heavy…

What do you guys think? Anyone got a better name?

Here at Cult of Mac, I’ve posted time and time again why I don’t think the iPad 2 will have a Retina Display, even though Apple definitely wants to give it one. It’s all about economic feasibility, and the bottom line is that an iPad packing nearly the same amount of pixels as a 27-inch iMac isn’t going to come in at a sub-$500 or even sub-$600 price range.

It appears that Daring Fireball’s John Gruber agrees. His sources, which are usually impeccable, tell him that the iPad 2 simply does not have a Retina Display, and will still run at a 1024 x 768 resolution.

Although much of Apple’s public exposure is in the U.S. and Western Europe, Asia – particularly China – has recently grown in prominence. Indeed, Tuesday, Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook said the tech giant earned $2.6 billion in China during the last financial quarter.

The figure encompassing mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan is a four-times increase from just a year ago and almost what the tech giant earned in the area for the entire fiscal 2010.

In the early days of the browser wars, Microsoft CEO and co-founder Bill Gates infamously is credited with instructing executives to ‘cut-off the breathing’ of upstart Netscape. Could long-time rival Apple be following Microsoft’s advice when it comes to another nascent computing technology, tablets? After slamming Android-based tablets as “bizarre” and their second-generation as vaporware, Apple quietly signed a $3.9 billion deal to ensure a smooth flow of components to its products.

Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook, filling in for CEO Steve Jobs while on medical leave, described a 2005 $1 billion deal to ensure flash memory for its iPods, iPhones and other memory-intensive devices, as “an absolutely fantastic use” of its growing cash bankroll. The Cupertino, Calif. company has been criticized for letting $59.7 billion in cash accumulate without either making investments or rewarding investors with stock dividends. Tuesday, Cook said Apple had made another deal with suppliers of unspecified strategic components.

Well we finally got to see the Verizon version of the iPhone 4 (big yawn) and I know many iPhone 4 users on AT&T are excited about a chance to own an iPhone that won’t drop calls (Note my iPhone 4 rarely drops calls and I really mean rarely). Although the iPhone 4 on Verizon isn’t actually here just yet it won’t hurt to get prepared for when it finally gets here.

So considering all the above — what’s the most important thing to know about a cellular carrier?

Coverage and now there’s an app for that, but unfortunately you might have better luck checking a carriers site for coverage versus using this app.

Hugh Hefner, founder of the Grandaddy of all girlie mags, Playboy, tweeted Tuesday evening that an “uncensored” Playboy is coming to iPad.

Given that the Playboy website’s metadata “description” reads: “Nude girls, hot girls, naked women and sexy pics with nude girls as well as videos of hot girls posing nude or in sexy positions celebrating girls and women …” — Hef’s tweet would appear to be in direct contradiction of Apple’s prohibition against sexually provocative material in apps designed to run on iOS devices.

Maybe Hef knows something we don’t know; perhaps he’s just hoping to take advantage of Steve Jobs being on medical leave. Or maybe Hef is just a little more hip to the buzz generating capabilities of Twitter than an 84 year-old guy ought to be.

This render is supposed to be Hewlett-Packard/Palm’s upcoming web tablet — or rather, two tablets.

According to Engadget, HP/Palm is working on a pair of tablets for launch February 9 and available later this year, likely September.

There’s a 9-inch webOS tablet codenamed Topaz and a 7-inch model named Opal, which will be pitched as an e-reader.

They feature a front-facing camera, micro USB port and a Touchstone back for wireless charging. There may be versions for different carriers: WiFi-only, AT&T 3G, and Verizon LTE in September; AT&T LTE in July 2012.

Most interestingly, the tabs are buttonless. There’s no Home button. The Home button is something that Apple is also interested in doing away with — and Apple has just introduced system-wide multitouch gestures in the latest iOS beta.

Although stock prices were still down 2% upon the news that Steve Jobs was taking another, this time open-ended medical leave of absence from Apple, the Wall Street analysts taking part in Apple’s Q1 2011 earnings call exhibited a remarkable lack of curiosity about the CEO’s health, or the company’s near future without him.

In fact, of nearly a dozen analysts asking twice as many questions during the Q&A section of the call, not a single one made even a passing reference to CEO Steve Jobs and his health.

Apple’s blowout holiday quarter included the sale of more than 16 million iPhones.

That may seem like a lot, but look at the chart above from The Atlantic: it looks like Apple’s just getting started.

In the last two quarters, Apple sold 30 million iPhones — half of what it sold in the previous three years (60 million units). In other words, iPhone sales are starting to seriously kick up.

Some analysts predict 100 million iPhones sold next year. Yeah, that’s right: One. Hundred. Million.

That’s a big frickin’ number.

Asked at today’s earnings call whether or not he feared that the success of the iPad and the rise in popularity of tablets would cannibalize Mac sales, Tim Cook not only said Apple was not afraid of cannibalization and hadn’t seen it occurring, but even if it did happen, they weren’t worried about it. In fact, Apple welcomed it.

“Last quarter, the Mac grew at eight times the PC market rate of growth, so as far as we can see, there’s no cannibalization on Mac sales by the iPad,” said Cook.

“In fact, there’s the opposite: a Halo Effect from Apple product to Apple product.”

“If this is cannibalization, it feels pretty good,” Cook laughed.

What if the tablet market does cannibalize PC sales, though? Cook downplayed the threat.

“One thing to keep in mind if the iPad and tablets do start cannibalizing, the Mac has a relatively low share in the PC market, so we actually have a lot more to win because of that, while our competitors have a lot more to lose.”

During today’s Q1 2011 earnings call, one consistent strain ran throughout: Apple could not be happier with the success of the iPad, and could not be more contemptuous of the competition.

Apple just concluded their Q1 2011 earnings call, and while Steve Jobs may be taking a leave of absence, he’s leaving his company in good shape: Apple has just had their best quarter ever, racking in over $26.7 billion in revenue, a number which blows away even the most optimistic Wall Street projections.

In Q1 2011, Apple managed to sell 16.24 million iPhones, which was a new record for the company. Even more impressively, they sold 7.33 million iPads over the holiday period, which was over 3 million more than the previous quarter.

On the Mac side, Apple sold 4.13 million Macs, a strong growth of 23 percent year-over-year, largely buoyed by the runaway success of the new MacBook Air. iPod sales, on the other hand, were down 7 percent year-over-year, continuing a steady decline.

Steve Jobs did not appear during the conference call, nor was his health referenced. However, he did provide a quote for the press release, saying: ““We had a phenomenal holiday quarter with record Mac, iPhone and iPad sales. We are firing on all cylinders and we’ve got some exciting things in the pipeline for this year including iPhone 4 on Verizon which customers can’t wait to get their hands on.”

Apple projects $22 billion in revenue for next quarter, as well as earnings per share of $4.90. Given Apple’s history surprising its shareholders, it’s probably going to be a lot more.