[Update] Thanks to everyone who subscribed and commented, tons of really great comments, I had a fun time reading them all! The two winners are below, if you’re one of them, I’ll be contacting you via Youtube. Stay tuned for another great giveaway next Tuesday!

Winners:

• AGreatDane123, against all odds, you got the first qualified comment in. I applaud you sir, you are a winner. Congrats!
• Anthonypeter, it is for pity that I choose you, for no one should go through life not having won anything. Congrats!

Still rollerskating around in your short-shorts with tunes blaring on the headphones that came with your original Walkman? Tsk tsk… Everyone knows that’s a look that won’t be hip again for at least another 5 years.

It’s no secret that the iPad 2 should open the floodgates of the augmented reality experience — and here’s another example of what the iPad 2 can do with AR.

No doubt in anticipation of Yuri’s Night, Vito Technology has just released an AR-equipped version of their venerable star-watching iPad app, Star Walk ($5). Just hold the screen up to the sky and the app will superimpose constellations and all sorts of other info onto a realtime image of the sky being viewed through the iPad 2’s camera. And that’s on top of all the other cool features, like a satellite tracker, night mode and a time-machine function that lets you see what the sky looks like on any given day or time.

Still saving for an iPad 2? That’s ok, the iPhone version has the same features (but not the awesomeness of the iPad’s giant screen), and it’s on sale for a buck till April 12 — which, not coincidentally,  is Yuri’s Night.

Just like Pogoplug and ZumoCast (the latter currently MIA from the app store), Tonido is a service that’ll let users stream media and access files on a computer from a mobile device. It sort of combines features from both — it’s completely free, works via a mobile app that connects to server software (free download from Tonido) running the user’s computer and allows access to music, videos, photos and even plain ‘ol documents. In fact, pretty much everything on a connected hard drive is accessable.

The big difference with Tonido though, is that virtually nothing is stored in a cloud — not even your account password (“think of the Tonido server like a giant router” says co-founder Venkat Ramasay). Don’t want to use your computer as the server? Tonido sells a remarkably-Pogoplug-looking NAS device for $99 that you can plug an external HDD or USB stick into. Ramasay says the software footprint is also very small, and that’s it’s also intended to run on home routers.  The next version will also support Airplay.

The interface seems a little rough around the edges — I wasn’t able to stream music because I couldn’t figure out a way to simply select music to play, for instance — but it’s free, so worth taking a look at.

We close out another week with three hardware deals. First up are nine iMacs from the Apple Store, starting at $1,019 for an i3 powered iMac running at 3.06GHz. The desktop machine also has a 22-inch screen. Next is a luxury iPad convertible flip case. The final spotlight item is a USB turntable from Numark which converts your vinyl to MP3 and then ships them to your iPod with a built-in dock.

Along the way, we also check out other deals on iPad cases, as well as software and accessory bargains. As always, details on these and many other products can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Earlier today, we brought you a report from CrunchGear about a Best Buy employee who had revealed that the retail giant was deliberately saving stock of the iPad 2 once it had met its sales quotas each day – a technique that apparently didn’t sit too well with Apple.

Since then, Best Buy has denied rumors that it has fallen out with the Cupertino company, and declared it was holding stock of the iPad 2 for an “upcoming promotion.”

In an official statement sent to Boy Genius Report, Best Buy said:

Best Buy continues to receive iPad 2 inventory from Apple on a regular basis. As we’ve said previously, we are fulfilling customer reservations first.

Our stores have been asked to temporarily hold non-reserved iPad 2 inventory for an upcoming promotion. This is a customary practice for us when there are supply constraints. Best Buy enjoys a great partnership with Apple, and we’re delighted by customer response to iPad 2.

While Best Buy seem to have clarified the issue of holding stock, it did not comment on a claim that its employees were lying to customers by informing them they had no stock of the second generation device, when in fact its stock rooms could be littered with them.

Selling itself as the first app to help hunters find their prey, iHunt Journal may also be on target for controversy.

iHunt Journal, approved by Apple for use by anyone over the age four because it contains no objectionable material, calls itself the “ultimate all-in-one hunting app:”

Whether your focus is on planning your next hunt based on weather and solunar periods, keeping a trophy gallery and hunting journal, or statistics and research of your past hunts, this is the application you need.

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If you’ve jailbroken your device for the first time this week (thanks to the iOS 4.3.1 untethered jailbreak being released), chances are that you may not know where to begin. There are thousands of neat things that you can do once jailbroken.

This post will cover just 6 of them, all of which I personally consider “must-have” tweaks for anybody who has recently joined the jailbreak scene.

This weekend sees the final of the 2011 Masters Golf Tournament, and as a way of celebrating, EA has reduced some of its most popular iPhone and iPod touch games by up to 67%. Of course, the brand new Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12 is the one you’ll want most during the Masters commercial breaks.

There are 10 great games featured in the sale, including Dead Space, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, The Sims 3, and The Simpsons Arcade. Check out the full list after the break!

You may have read Thursday a report Apple has purchased equipment to store 12 petabytes (around 12,000 terabytes) of data, prompting some to suggest the deal targets the Cupertino, Calif. company’s expected cloud-based services. Friday, one Wall Street analyst said such huge amounts of data “dovetail nicely” with a ‘Cloud Tunes,’ an online version of Apple’s popular iTunes.

“We believe that Apple will release a new cloud strategy by the fall, likely integrating its MobileMe services and taking advantage of its significant investments in its North Carolina data center,” writes Ben Reitzes of Barclays Capital.

It’s been shown that tots take to iPads like ducks to water. One school district in Maine will hand them out to 5-year-olds in the hopes of boosting reading skills.

An iPad pilot program in Auburn, Maine will put them in the hands of kids in certain classrooms in May and all six elementary schools in the district next fall.

Officials hope to improve literacy rates from 62 percent to 90 percent in two years with the iPad scheme. The school committee recently approved spending of about $200,000 for 285 iPads for both students and teachers.

There are plenty of photo apps that do pixellation effects, but Pixel Face grabbed my attention because of the way it embraces the whole 8-bit world of pixels.

It’s not just the photos that look colorful and retro, it’s the app itself. The buttons are cheerfully bright, the sounds are like something your games console used to do back in the 1980s.

Here’s a shocker: Apple is playing its cards close to the vest about a product launch. That’s the opinion of one analyst who tells investors Friday he is “suspicious” of all the talk the Cupertino, Calif. company may delay the iPhone 5 until later this year.

“We are increasingly becoming suspicious around continued reports of a delayed iPhone 5 launch into September/October versus the typical June/July time frame,” writes Brian White of Ticonderoga Securities. Why the suspicion?

ChuChu Rocket! is packed with over 500 puzzles and frantic 4 player multiplayer action, and the Sega Dreamcast classic, which has proven to be a massive iOS hit in the App Store, has gone completely free for one day only.

10 years ago, a cute group of ChuChu’s invaded the hearts and minds of gamers as they looked for an escape plane away from the evil KapuKapus into their cozy rocket ships. now, you get to re-live the glory days of frantic puzzle fun on your iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad!

ChuChu Rocket! features four different difficulty levels to maximise its replay value; in addition to a free-for-all and team battle multiplayer mode with support for up to 4 players. Battle it out over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi across 25 intense multiplayer levels.

As one of the most popular puzzle games in the App Store, ChuChu Rocket! is a surefire way to cure your weekend boredom. Grab it now while it’s free!

Motorola’s Xoom is fast becoming a retailing slug. The slowness to catch-on with consumers (the Xoom sold only a fifth as many units during its first week compared to Apple) may not be totally the fault of the Android-based tablet, but partly retailers. A Friday report suggests big box tech giants and others are lumping the Xoom into the me-too iPad alternative category.

Best Buy, for instance, tells consumers they offer tablets, showing an iPad, then a Xoom under the generic “Tablet” label. At some Verizon Wireless stores, the iPad and iPad 2 are highlighted, with Samsung the obvious alternative. Meanwhile, the $599 Xoom is beside the $199 Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Now that the Verizon iPad is here, the once mythical device has turned out to be just as much of a slab of aluminum and glass as every other iPad out there… and just as prone to its own small but annoying problems.

The latest? A growing nunber of Verizon iPad 2 owners are reporting issues with the CDMA 3G modem… namely, that after turning 3G off, Verizon iPad owners need to reboot their tablets to get a connection again.

This overarticulated mech claw? It’s an iPhone stand, meant to grip your fragile handset with T-800-style menace. And it costs only slightly less than the original T-800 hand, locked somewhere in a vault deep within the belly of Cyberdyne Systems.

Called the Rokform Rokstand, the stand is machined from aluminum with an anodized finish and features six angles of adjustment boasting “precision high speed bearing and cam adjustment.”

Of course, a 50 cent business card holder will prop up your iPhone equally well, so these are just marketing phrases to distract you from the price of $169. Of course, now that you’ve heard that price, with your eyes just dangling from your sockets like that and the taste of vomit in your mouth… how much more distracted could you be?

The Rokstand comes in pink and chocolate brown too, if that makes things better.

Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs, tend to be deviously complex, and Valve Software‘s latest is now exception: they are sending out a series of elaborate glyphs embedded in images to multiple gaming sites.

The point of ARGs is to crowdsource their solving, joining in with a bunch of other fanatics to make a story out of the cryptic, and Valve is a master at this, so if you have any taste for these events, you may want to head over to the Wiki and get cracking on the clues.

The most likely explanation so far is that this ARG is to promote Valve’s much-anticipated physics and teleportation-based FPS, Portal 2, which is due out on Tuesday, April 19th and is the first Valve game to launch simultaneously on the PC and Mac.

The image above is about 8/9ths of the image puzzle that has been solved so far, and looks much like one of GlaDOS’s personality cores rom the original Portal.

Apple has a vested interested in getting as many iPad 2s into customer hands as possible, as quickly as possible. It’s not only about mere volume of unit sales. It’s also about trying to slacken the crazy demand that the iPad 2 has generated before customers actively start resenting Apple for it and, in their impatience, are literally driven out of their minds (a state diagnosable by purchasing a Xoom).

So imagine how absolutely ticked off Apple must have been when they heard that Best Buy has been refusing to sell all of its stock of iPad 2s to customers, because they’ve already reached their sales quotas for that day. Actually, no need to imagine, because according to a Best Buy employee speaking to Crunchgear, the answer is “very.”

Earlier this week, popular iOS game developer PopCap – the team behind Bejeweled 2, Plants vs. Zombies and Chuzzle – announced that they were launching a sister studio called ‘4th & Battery‘. They also revealed that its first game, Unpleasant Horse, was going to hit the App Store imminently, but it seems Apple may have spoiled their party by rejecting the game due to its “mature content.”

4th & Battery declared their displeasure at Apple’s decision on Twitter, but their tweets disappeared shortly afterwards. Fortunately, Joystiq managed to grab a screenshot of the tweets, one of which read: “WTF? Apple rejected Unpleasant Horse cuz of “mature content?” We thought horses dying in meat grinders was wholesome family entertainment!”

Another day, another deal. Today we have deals for the iPad, iPhone and Mac. First up is another batch of iPads, starting at $529 for a 64GB Wi-Fi and 3G tablet from AT&T.Next is a carbon skin for the iPhone 4. We wrap-up the spotlight with the ModBook, a modified 2.13GHz MacBook with 13.3-inch widescreen to behave like a tablet – just 1,949.

Along the way, we also take a look at music and digital editing software for your Mac. As usual, details on these and many more items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

We’ve written about how iPads are used in schools and pilot training, but it’s fascinating to see how they are changing the plays on the basketball court.

From playbooks to bus schedules, a number of NBA teams are making sure players don’t miss a beat by using iPads, according to a detailed piece in slamonline.

“We use it for everything. We put our whole playbook and rulebook on it,” said Washington Wizards assistant coach Ryan Saunders, whose father, head coach Flip Saunders, unofficially made the team the first known NBA franchise to use iPads for team operations. “Our whole calender is mapped out. Guys can know when buses are leaving, when planes are leaving.”

A new application called iKeyGuard is the first key logger for the iPhone, and is now available to jailbroken devices through Cydia. The application runs discretely in the background and keeps a record of every single key pressed on the device.

iKeyGuard is $9.99 and is simple to install; just download the package from Cydia and it will start working as soon as it’s installed. The application’s main menu is accessed through Safari in order to be discrete, and this is where you can access your archive of key logs. You can also have them emailed to you at different intervals.

Its developer advertises iKeyGuard as a way of ensuring your employees are keeping your data safe, but we’re sure its main use will be to spy on kids and spouses.

If you want to be a little creepy, you can access the package from the BigBoss repo, which is installed with Cydia as default. Let us know what you think in the comments.

[via iPhone Download Blog]

When’s the iPhone 5 arriving? How is the iPad selling? What about the iPod? These are all immaterial questions, one Wall Street expert argues Thursday. Forget about the products and keep your eye on the platform. “Products last maybe a year, ‘platforms’ last decades,” he tells investors.

“We believe the single biggest change in Apple over the past few years is that it has moved from being something of a ‘hit product’ movie studio dependent on each new release back to being a better-than-ever ‘platform’ company, where its iOS plus hardware plus apps ecosystem … are what truly matters and drive longevity,” writes Caris & Co. analyst Robert Cihra.

Italians use the same word – filibustiere – for long-winded attempts to slow down legislative sessions, now they are using the iPad to combat boredom at work.

These pics were snapped during what was apparently an endless session about shortening trials.

Android-based smartphones will become the most popular option by the end of 2011, with the Google-powered handsets accounting for 49 percent of the world market by 2012. That’s the word from one research firm, which also announced Thursday Apple’s iOS platform will remain No. 2 because the Cupertino, Calif. firm prefers margin over market share.

Although Android devices will push the average smartphone price to $300 or less, “Apple will be interested in maintaining margins rather than pursuing market share by changing its pricing strategy,” Gartner said. Apple’s iOS will peak in 2011 with growth in the U.S. and Western Europe. Sales to emerging markets will be limited, the researcher predicts.