As Christmas draws ever nearer, we have a trio of app deals for your favorite Apple device. First up is a new crop of price cuts on iPad applications from the iPad App Store, including “SuperBadminton 2010” for just $0.99 – a $4 price reduction. We also have new freebies from the iPhone App Store, including the seasonally-themed “Snowing Screensaver.” We wrap up our deal spotlight with “SoundHound,” a free music-recognition application for your iPhone.

Along the way, we’ll also check out some hardware deals, such as various iPads reduced by $100, and a 2.53GHz Core 2 Dup Mac mini for just $589. Also on tap is a variety of cases, screensavers and other items perfect for your i-product. As always, details on these and much more can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQmy3ZbqTY8

You may remember seeing the iGlo LED set from my review a couple of weeks ago.  Bruce Seymour, one of MEA’s directors has posted a video showing us how to use the lighting set on your Christmas tree. It’s a fun video and well worth checking out!

Apple and Android have consumed much of the ink used to describe the tablet wars. Now HP is attempting to grab some of the spotlight; it’s first move, an interview dissing Google’s mobile operating system as “backward looking” and preparing to take on Apple’s iPad with a Franken-tablet: part Palm and part revamped Slate.

HP’s Jon Rubinstein, who helped create the iMac and iPod when at Apple, has gone onto an executive position at Palm, which was then acquired by HP. Rubinstein, in a Wall Street Journal interview, talks about competition and the remade Slate tablet, now named the PalmPad, ahead of the upcoming CES.

If you want to watch Flash on your iPad despite Steve Jobs’ own cogent arguments against doing just that, you haven’t had a lot of options until now… but SkyFire — the neat Flash-to-HTML5 iOS conversion service — has just launched Skyfire for iPad, a neat native client that gives even more bang for the buck than the iPhone version. It’s available for download now for just $4.99.

You might not be able to watch a Blu-Ray DVD on your Mac, but Pioneer’s just unveiled a new line of 3D Blu-Ray players which not only feature DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD surround as well as 1080p video upscaling… but come with a new app called iControlAV that will allow you to control your new Pioneer player from the comfort of your iDevice. If you want one, it’ll cost you somewhere between $299 and $499.

What’s better than that horrific, buck-toothed, Tiny-Tim-loving Porifera Spongebob SquarePants perched atop a birthday cake lovingly baked and frosted in the shape of an iPhone? That horrific, buck-toothed, Tiny-Tim-loving Porifera Spongebob SquarePants perched atop a birthday cake containing a real-life iPhone.

Meanwhile, for my last birthday, I got a pie that contained nothing but rhubarb, and I was damn lucky to get it.

In defiance of Apple’s will, you can already stream AirPlay media to your Mac and Ubuntu… and now, if you’re on a Windows machine, the trifecta is complete.

We haven’t played it yet, but we look forward to, because Papa Sangre for iOS devices has one of the most intriguing central conceits of any app we’ve seen to date: it’s a video game with no video.

I love my new MacBook Air, but I’m terrified of it being stolen. I’ve been bitten on this before with a top-of-the-line, 15-inch MacBook Pro that was stolen (as I discovered later, by a drug-addicted friend) a mere two months after I bought it. The new MacBook Air’s an even bigger worry, since it’s light weight and small form factor make it all the more a target for a quick snatch-and-run.

Apple doesn’t have a Mac-centric version of their “Find my iPhone” app, but I’ve been looking into Hidden, an OS X application that hides in the background processes of your Mac and only broadcasts your Mac’s location when you go to the official website and tell it to ping your laptop.

If that sounds up your alley, there’s now officially no reason to give Hidden a download: usually $20, the application is now free for the rest of the month. Just go here to sign up.

David Hocknet is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century and an important contributor to the 1960s’ Pop Art movement. He’s now doing paintings on his iPad. The only problem? Many commenters think they’re junk.

Steve Jobs has a number one fan in the most powerful man in the world. In a recent interview, President Obama cited the Apple CEO as a laudable example of wealth that Americans should be proud to call one of their own.

In response to a reporter’s question, President Obama referred to Jobs as an example of the “American dream” and said his success should be celebrated, not derided.

When we talk about the iPad 2, we already know at least some of what to expect when Apple officially unveils their newest tablet in April: FaceTime support, an iPhone 4 like gyroscope and maybe a higher-resolution (but not Retina) display. Those are all pretty much lock-ins.

When it comes to iOS devices, though, Apple has a tendency to rejigger the device’s physical design in the second gen — consider the aesthetic difference between the iPhone and the iPhone 3G, for example — so what does Ive and Co. plan to tweak in the iPad 2’s casing? A Japanese blog citing anonymous Chinese sources claims to have the answer, if we’re willing to believe them.

The one guy at Apple who programs their fantastic iOS Remote.app seems to have been busy before Christmas break: a new update was pushed live yesterday, adding AirPlay control on the AppleTV to the app’s already great list of features.

The new Remote.app is now at version 2.1 and, as usual, is available on the App Store as a free download. You can now use it to control iTunes on your Mac to stream videos directly to your new AppleTV, as well as play rented Movies and TV shows on your Mac without ever getting up from a supine position.

Internet Radio support is also new, and there are a slew of new stability and performance improvements as well, as well as some bug fixes for issues connecting to an iTunes library or Apple TV.

Grab the new Remote.app here

Earlier this year, Sanho — makers of the super useful Hypermac line of batteries — found themselves in a pot of hot water boiled by Apple’s legal team, who objected to Hypermac’s use of repurposed (and patented) MagSafe cable connectors to juice up hungry MacBooks.

You can’t keep a good product down, though. HyperMac has just relaunched the HyperMac line, this time working around their reliance upon old MagSafe cables so as not to draw Cupertino’s ire once more.

We start the day with more application for your iPhone and iPod touch. First up is “Gangstar,” the third-person sandbox game from Gameloft. Usually, the application is $5, but fans can now get the game for free. Also, we have a new crop of free iPhone apps, including “0.03 Seconds Pro,” the reaction time-based game. We close out our deal spotlight with “Dora’s Christmas Carol.” This educational children’s game is usually $1.99, but the application is now available for just $0.99.

Along the way, we’ll take a look at hardware deals (like Mac Pro Xeon workstations), cases for your iPad and iPhone, along with other hardware and software bargains. As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Boy those social networks are sticky: a pair of iPhone thieves were caught thanks to Facebook.

Brittany Busby, 19, and Todd Beede, 28, strolled into an AT&T store in downtown Montpelier, Vermont at around 2 p.m. and started checking out the phones.

They grabbed a $700 iPhone and ran off – but were caught because they couldn’t resist logging into Facebook on another phone in the store but forgot to sign off.

Yesterday we reported that Google’s DNS service might be to blame for AppleTV’s slow HD streaming speeds on some devices.

Here was the problem, as we summarized it at the time:

Basically, iTunes streaming content is hosted by Akamai, which uses different local servers to route downloaders to the fastest available connection. Services like Google DNS, or other generic DNS providers, are trying to route all users the same way… the equivalent of trying to cram a few thousand people through a single door at the same time.

OpenDNS has just reached out to us, though, to assure both Cult of Mac and its readers that users of their service that they can expect fast AppleTV streaming, all the time.

Laura Oppenheimer of Open DNS writes:

OpenDNS has arrangements with a number of CDNs that make this a non-issue for the vast majority of OpenDNS + Apple TV users. That said, with Akamai, especially internationally, it’s still suboptimal. It’s entirely workable, but not as optimal as it could be.

In general, North America isn’t really an issue since we have a sufficiently dense network topology. That said, we’re very open to working to improve end-user CDN routing with Akamai, just as we have with other large CDNs.

In short, if you’re having problems with your AppleTV and you live in North America, give OpenDNS a try. If you’re an international user, though, Apple’s Akamai hosting isn’t what it could be… and you might experience problems no matter what DNS provider you use.

Rare Vintage Apple items are popular these days. An Apple Lisa 1 put up for sale on eBay last week has sold for $15,000 after 11 bids! The unit, in working condition, belonged to a former member of the Lisa production team at Apple and was sold by his brother.  In an email received by Cult of Mac, the seller noted that the buyer intends to display the system in a museum in Italy.

Remember that supposed iPad Mini flaunted by famous Taiwanese racecar driver Jimmy Lin earlier today? We thought he was holding a fake, but we may have been more right than we knew: according to reader Greg Mills, it’s a Photoshop fake.

Square Enix just released a iOS port of one classic JRPG from the SNES era, Secret of Mana, and now it appears that they’re teasing another: Joystiq just sussed out a cryptic new teaser site for what appears to be a smartphone compatible (and hopefully iOS specific) port of Chrono Trigger, their famous 16-bit time travel RPG first released way back in 1995.

Chrono Trigger is still one of my favorite games. The site says “Spring 2011.” Oh please, oh please, oh please.

Need an external battery pack that doesn’t just dangle from the foot of your phone like a bulbous, electrically-charged bunion? The Octopus might be just what you’re looking for.

Taking its name from the suction cups of a cephalopod’s tentacles, the Octopus sits in your gadget bag until your iPhone runs out of juice, at which point it can be slapped onto the back of your device and connected to the Dock Connector thanks to a flexible cable.

If you allow the Octopus to fully charge your iOS device, you can expect your iPhone to comfortably juice to about half power, which should give you either ten hours of extra video or four hours of extra talk time.

Not a bad idea compared to some of the bulkier combo battery cases, and cheap to boot: the Octopus will only cost you $30

Greetings, Space Marine. You have been recruited by the StarCraft League to defend the Dominion against Zeratul and the Protoss Armada. If you’re too cheap to accept your mission, though, head on over to Blizzard‘s web site, where they’re now offering up for free download the long belated demo for StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, the latest iteration of their famed, Korea-rocking space warfare RTS.

Don’t feel like ordering direct from Apple? AT&T’s now ready to sell you an iPad 3G directly at the usual $629, $729 and $829 prices, with the same no contract deal as through Apple’s online store. But surely you want to give your money directly to Ma Bell out of sheer loyalty to the AT&T experience, right?

You probably know of Instagram, the hipster app du jour which allows you to easily apply a number of attractive, quasi-Polaroid-esque filters that spruce up your iPhone or iPod Touch pictures to give them a more artistic and sometimes twee look.

But you probably know more than of Instagram. You probably use it. After all, they just racked up one million users.

According to Instragram co-founder Kevin Systrom, Instagram started with just 80 users, and their ultimate “audacious goal” was just to let people share media in open community. The growth they’ve seen is phenomal, though: since mid-October, they’ve lured in over a million souls.

“We’ve just been amazed at the growth of the service,” Mr. Systrom said in a phone interview. “My partner and I had a bet the first day about how many downloads we would get and I was off by an order magnitude.”

How big is Instagram? Users are now collectively uploading three photos per second, to contribute to a library of almost ten million photos.

I may sound dismissive, but I’m not: Instagram undeniably allows users to take more interesting looking photos than the iPhone’s built-in sensor can natively produce. I guess I just wish that the iPhone and iPod Touch’s camera hardware was capable of taking interesting images without needing a filter app. It can’t, but that’s not Apple’s failure: it’s a limitation on the technology of digital sensors. Here’s hoping that changes.

Considering the depths that Apple fans will plump into a new version of iOS even before it’s released — let alone a month later — we’re amazed to hear that developers are still stumbling upon new features of iOS 4.2… especially when those features are as buzzworthy as augmented reality. Yet that’s just what Occipital has discovered lurking in the firmware of Apple’s latest iteration of its popular mobile operating system.