Here’s how a subsidy on your smartphone is supposed to work: in exchange for a shorter upfront price, you agree to a two year contract for cellular services. Baked into your mobile bill is a certain amount of surcharge that helps pay off the full price of your phone, but after twenty four months, you own that phone entirely, and should be able to bring it to any network you care to, because after 24 months, you’ve paid it off.

As you probably know, though, this is not a position on mobile phone subsidies that is likely to get you a lot of sympathy at AT&T. In fact, there’s no official way to unlock an AT&T iPhone once your 24 month contract is over: even though you now own that smartphone, it’s still locked to AT&T’s service.

Honestly, that’s crap, and has driven a lot of American iPhone owners down the road to jailbreak. Canadians, though, seem to have it a lot easier: if you’ve gotten your iPhone from Rogers, a $50 fee at the end of your contract is enough to have the network unlock your phone to work on a competitors’ network.

Thursday was a big day in insider trading busts, as four new arrests were made by the Securities and Exchange Commission cracking down on insider trading.

One of those arrests, though, is particularly interesting to Apple enthusiasts: Walter Shimoon, an executive for Flextronics (an Apple supplier), was one of those busted on Thursday, and as it turns out, one of his violations was to pass on information about both an iPhone update and the iPad before they were official.

Way out, man. That might encapsulate the Thursday remarks by a Research In Motion executive on whether the Waterloo, Ontario-based company’s upcoming PlayBook can compete with Apple’s iPad. “I think the PlayBook redefines what a tablet should do,” RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie said in what some members of the media termed “a several minute rant”.

The tablet market will move away from “a proprietary SDK and unnecessary apps,” Balsillie said in response to a question from JP Morgan analyst Rod Hall. The comment, aimed at Apple, was RIM’s latest attack on the Cupertino, Calif. company’s grip on the nascent tablet market.

Apple’s iTunes continues to dominate digital music sales, gaining three percent compared to last year and comprising 66 percent of the market, according to news reports. Amazon, Apple’s closest competitor, with just 13 percent of digital music purchases, tied Walmart, which relinquished first place to the Cupertino, Calif. firm in 2008.

The week-to-week struggle for digital music domination is even more cut-throat, according to the Wall Street Journal. Record label insiders told the newspaper Amazon holds on to just six to 10 percent of digital sales each week with Apple cruising along at near 90 percent of the market.

Word Lens is the app making jaws drop all over the internet this morning, thanks to this appropriately jaw-dropping demo video:

The video says it all, but you might be left wondering: is it a hoax? Can it really be as good as that?

Etch-a-Sketch, our childhood friend, returns again (in spirit) with this adorable case for the iPhone 4. Joining existing models available for the iPad and older iPhones, the slide-on hard case has cutouts for home button, cameras and microphone. $25 from Headcase.

Now you can relive those moments playing in front of the living room TV – or waiting in the dentist office…

[via iPhoneSavior]

Let’s face it, fanboys and girls love getting Apple related gifts for the holidays. But if you are lucky enough to have an Apple nerd in your family, you have by now realized that most Apple inspired gifts are usually boring or total crap. Fear not, though, friends, I present to thee 10 gifts that are guaranteed to make your Apple obsessed loved one squeal in glee.

Most Apple gifts out there have been made in this decade. But for the diehard Apple fan, vintage gifts are sure to please. This genuine Apple projector pen hides a special power—an Apple logo projector! I’m not quite sure what if any utility this might have, but I think we can all agree it’s a surefire way to impress the ladies.

FaceTime. Email. Text Messaging. Twitter.  Your iPhone is your personal communicator, allowing you to keep in contact with friends, family and your social network.  The web, the internet – gateways to information and productivity.

But technology has a downside, and anyone who’s battled internet addiction or just taken a weekend off from being plugged-in understands the need for balance.  My colleague Professor Sherry Turkle, Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, has been studying this phenomenon for decades and researched how relentless connection can lead to a new solitude:

Thirty years ago we asked what we would use computers for? Now, the question is what don’t we use them for? Technology promises to let us do anything from anywhere with anyone. But it also drains us as we try to do everything everywhere.

With the CultofMac so chock full of bike geeks, it’s no wonder we pretty excited to see the arrival a few months back of one of the first gadgets that fall into the app-enhanced category — a gadget/app mashup that manufacturer New Potato Tech cleverly calls an “appcessory.” In this case, the $99 LiveRider combo of an iPhone bicycle mount and sensor/receiver package with its own dedicated app turns the iPhone into a flexible, jumbo-screened bike computer.

It’s not the only sensor/app combo on the market; Enki Sports offers a more complete and expensive solution, and newcomer Wahoo Fitness recently arrived with a flexible, modular approach (with sensors that look remarkably similar to Enki’s). But we figured New Potato’s kit would provide a simple, relatively inexpensive setup for intermediate-ish cyclists wanting their data fix. We were mistaken.

According to a recent Houston Chronicle story an iPhone has once again saved the day and solved a crime. This particular iPhone was stolen from a female jogger, who was jogging with a friend, during an armed robbery that occurred in the 700 block of Brittmore on the west side of Houston, Texas.

The alleged robbers exited a pickup truck and confronted the two women according to Houston Police Department (HPD) spokesman John Cannon.  An Apple iPhone was turned over to the robbers by one of the women and fortunately neither of them was hurt.

The kitchen computer is a wonderful, wonderful prospect — recipes to be references, emails to be responded to over cooking — except for the prospects of smoke and steam and spatters of hot grease. Doubly so the prospect of cooking with an iPad, which is simply too beautiful, too pure a device to put near an open flame.

Enter various rack solutions, none of which have caught our eye for their permanence, but this is pretty ingenious: The Original Kitchen iPad Rack, an acrylic rack that temporarily hooks into an installed mount on the underside of your hood or cabinet for when you need it. Otherwise, you just slot it off and take it away.

Works for iPad quite well, natch, but it also works on other recipe-accessing tablets, including the Kindle and Galaxy Tab. For only $29.99, this may well make a good last minute stocking stuffer.

Oh, sweet Bacchus. Forget those other iPod Nano watchbands we’ve seen: here’s the only one that matters. Called the “Richard Tracy Nano Watch Strap,” this project — kicked off via Kickstarter, only to ignominiously fail to raise its funding,– is not only one of the first Nano watch bands to have a high quality leather strap, as opposed to some plastic nonsense… the frame even contains a built-in beer opener, perfect for helping to remove the childproof cap from some brews, thus medicating your delirium tremens.

Like we said, this failed to get a following over at Kickstarter, so you can’t actually buy it. Maybe spreading the word, however belatedly, will inspire them to give it another go.

ACHTUNG: Creator Jason Hilbourne says that these are, indeed, for sale… just at Think Geek. Only $49.99!

We’re pretty up on the iPhone’s Bing app; its ability to combine the useful functions of several different stand-alone apps earned it a spot on our 23 Essential Apps list for the iPhone earlier this year.

But Microsoft is apparently even more ambitious: they’ve just updated Bing with some new abilities — including location-based reminders, a Google Maps Street View-like feature and more — to the point where it seems as if Microsoft is trying to turn Bing into some kind of uber-app. The whole thing’s also been given a facelift, and the results pages are less cluttered (even though the front page still needs work). It’s worth a download, even if, at the very least, just to gawk at its application of technology. Here’s a list of all the new stuff:

Google’s Marissa Mayer (and the rest of us plebs) must be disappointed to hear that Steve Jobs has not been awarded Time Magazine’s 2010 “Person of the Year” award. Instead, it was awarded to Mark Zuckerberg, the translucently pale lizard man who created Facebook pictured on above.

Steve didn’t totally get the short shift, though. He was declared one of Time Magazine’s “People Who Matter.”

“With each passing year Steve Jobs and his sleek Apple products not only succeed in impressing the techiest of tech addicts, they also manage to create a whole new batch of gadget enthusiasts,” the magazine noted, pointing to the iPad and the redesign of the MacBook Air as examples.

They also noted that this year, under Jobs’ leadership, Apple became the largest technology company in the world.

This isn’t the first time Jobs has been denied the “Person of the Year” award by a thin margin: in 2009, Jobs was one of the top seven finalists. He’ll make it one of these years.

Bargain-hunting just got more interesting — Metaio has added yet another augmented-reality channel to their AR iPhone app, Junaio. This time they’ve partnered with eBay and created a channel that lets users scan their surroundings for deals in eBay Classifieds, itself a newish, local version of eBay.

It works just like any other Junaio channel; looking around through the iPhone with the eBay channel switched on will, in this case, display local eBay Classifieds listings — apartment buildings will show unit listings superimposed, shops might show discounted stuff available, etc. The channel is also searchable by keyword.

What goes around comes around: one of the disc jockeys busted with running a six-figure iTunes scam has admitted his role.

Lamar Johnson, 19, admitted he was involved in this modern take on chart rigging, pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud in court.
Nine British djs are charged with using 1,500 stolen or cloned credit cards to buy their own tracks to the tune of £500,000 (about USD $780,000). They were paid £185,000 (USD $288,000) in royalties before getting caught.

Apple reportedly has added two more iPad 2 touchscreen suppliers, making five the total number of firms churning out displays for the Cupertino, Calif. firm. Apple expects its iPad 2, believed to appear in early 2011, to sell six million units per quarter, compared to four million quarterly shipments of the current tablet.

Chimei Innolux and Cando have been added to the suppliers list, which already contains Wintek, Sintek Phototronics and TPK Touch Solutions, according to a Taiwan-based industry publication. The new suppliers reportedly will begin shipping touchscreens for the iPad 2 in January or February of next year.

Should your six-year-old have an iPad? At least one educator says yes.

“Think of devices like the iPad, and its little brother, the new camera-equipped iPod Touch, as the bicycle of the digital age,” said Warren Buckleitner, editor of Children’s Technology Review and an educator, education researcher and parent. “These devices are at the center of a modern child’s play. They capture and manage information.”

Buckleitner made the statement in response to a parent who wonders whether fulfilling the request from her Montessori-educated first grader for “an iPad like her daddy has” is a good idea.

At the beginning of the month, Adobe put Flash Player 10.2 up for download, which added a new feature called “Stage Video” to the mix which Adobe claimed would allow for high-performance video playback while using “just over 0 percent CPU usage.” How? Basically, it offloaded the whole video rendering pipeline to your Mac’s GPU.

Sounds like a step up from the current status quo, but there was only one problem: it wasn’t backwards compatible, so sites across the Net would be required to update to the new code to take advantage of Stage Video.

Now Adobe says that many of the bigger players in Flash Video — most notably YouTube — have updated their Flash Player to take advantage of the speed increase.

Nice to hear, of course, but we’ll stick to HTML5 for the moment, until we see some power efficiency benchmarks come down the pipeline. In the meantime, enjoy the video above, in which an Adobe engineer wears a vintage Starfleet shirt that is comically too small.

Are you a developer who wishes your game could look good as Infinity Blade? Great news: Epic is publicly releasing their Unreal Development Kit for iOS today, which should vastly simplify the creation of a games’ graphics and animation. Best, it’s free… within limits.

Having sound issues with your 27-inch LED Cinema Display? Apple’s just pumped a fix down the pipe to deal with occasional audio loss experienced by some users.

Previously, Apple’s own tech note explained that some users were noticing that sound from an LED Cinema Display connected to a Mac would intermittently drop sound, and that users may have to unplug the display or even reboot to get the audio working again.

Seems like a big gaffe, but apparently, the new update will fix these issues. That said, it’s a rather unique update by Apple’s standard, so remember to follow the instructions included in the updater application to letter, to minimize accidental explosions, implosions and trans-dimensional vortices.

[via 9to5Mac]

The iPad is rocking the corporate world. So much so, one analyst describes pent-up demand for tablets in the boardroom as a “corporate explosion.” Apple is the main beneficiary, with more than eight out of 10 tablets used by business bearing the Cupertino, Calif. firm’s logo.

What’s more, interest by corporations in tablets is set to double in the first quarter of 2011, according to a November IT buying survey by ChangeWave Research. The survey found 7 percent of corporations now use tablets, but 14 percent say they will use tablets in the next quarter. As for the iPad, the numbers held good news for Apple versus competitors.

Around this time every year we ask you, our lovely Cult readers, to tell us which new OS X desktop applications have caught your eye over the last 12 months.

Last year’s winners (by a hair) were Google Chrome and OmmWriter.

What do we mean by “new”? Ideally, we mean brand new applications that were launched for the first time this year. But we’re prepared to be flexible, so “new” can also mean major updates to existing apps. And don’t forget, we’re talking OS X desktop apps here, not iOS apps.

A few suggestions to get you started: Scrivener 2, Postbox, Office 2011, iLife 11, iTunes 10, Reeder, Kiwi, Transmit 4, Lightroom 3… the list is long.

The comments box is yours. Tell us what new software you loved most in 2010. The application with the most mentions is declared the winner, and will be featured in a follow-up post next week.

Ever wondered what Apple hardware and software pro bloggers use?

Peter Sciretta is a professional blogger/journalist specializing in film and entertainment. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Slashfilm.com (stylized as /Film), which has won numerous awards and recognition from the mainstream media. Last year, Total Film named him one of the “100 Most Influential People in Movies.”

Sciretta began his career on a Windows PC, but soon thereafter saw the value of switching to the Mac. “Nowadays everything I have in my home office is Apple-based,” he says.

In this post, adapted from a recent interview, Sciretta reveals what hardware, software, and mobile apps he can’t live without — both personally and professionally.

Although Cupertino never tips its hand ahead of time, past experience indicates you can set your watch (at least by the month) for their product refreshes, so no shock here: it’s now being reported that Apple will launch new MacBook Pros in the first half of 2011, which probably equates to a April 2011 timescale, along with new iMacs, which were last updated back in January.