If you’re looking for something to make those long holiday drives a little more interesting, the DriveGain iPhone App promises to cut your gas bill by about 15% through teaching you to drive more efficiently.

The app gives penny-pinching commuters and cost-conscious city drivers visual and audio feedback on what changes they can make to their driving style to help them save fuel. Developed in the UK and first launched for cars with manual transmissions only, the latest version works on automatics too.

DriveGain costs $6.99 on iTunes. The company also offers a scaled-down gratis version called CarEconomy.

Cult of Mac talked with DriveGain CEO Simon East on the challenges of testing it with his own ride — and why the app is not like having a nagging backseat driver.

It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.

The iPad is going to be very big in schools, predicts Professor Mark Warschauer, one of the world’s leading experts in technology and learning.

In an exclusive interview, Prof. Warschauer predicted that schools may soon start buying iPads in big numbers to replace not just desktops and laptops, but also textbooks and other reading materials.

“Until a couple of years ago, the majority of book reading — and a lot of magazine and newspaper reading — was done in print,” he said in a phone interview. “I think we’re going to see that change now.”

It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.

We are a culture on the go. We work, eat, play and study on the move, multitasking all the way. It doesn’t take an advanced degree to understand the appeal of Apple’s new mobile devices, particularly iPads and MacBooks, on college and grad school campuses everywhere.  Many schools are getting in on the act directly, and facilitating mobile computing by providing iPads and MacBooks to their incoming students.

“The trend in higher education computing is this concept of mobility” said Greg Smith, George Fox University’s chief information officer, “and this fits right in.”

[polldaddy poll=”4103500″]

With thousands of courses and resources available for free on iTunes U from some of the top universities around the world, we argued, only semi-facetiously,  that it’s better than brick-and-mortar college.

Have you ever downloaded an iTunes U course?

Let us know why or why not — and what you got out of that lecture on Drinking Games in Ancient Greece — in the comments.

Traditionally Black Friday takes place on the Friday immediately following Thanksgiving — November 26th this year. It is the official start of the holiday season when retailers generally open up very early and offer deep discounts on items geared towards drawing you into their stores. They hope you’ll buy more through impulse buying.

However, in recent years things are changing so start looking for deals – now. The holiday shopping season seems to start earlier every year, but actually practically after Halloween in the US. Best Buy, Target and Walmart are already offering pre-Black Friday deals on their websites and many other retailers are too.

If you are looking for the best Black Friday deals you’re in luck because you have Apple technology to help you find them. You need to use that technology to your advantage so you don’t miss out on some good deals. I will help you get started with this first post — a technology overview for all you avid shoppers out there.

Later this week and next week I’ll follow-up with more specific information on applying these technologies which I’ll summarize here. I hope all this information will turn you into a savvy Black Friday shopper.

It’s not too long before the official start of Christmas shopping on Black Friday — and, yes, there is an app for that. You can view lead and official ads on your iPhone, save your shopping list, go to store web sites and much, more. Are you looking for a good deal on an Intel-based Mac mini? We might have the deal for you. MacConnection.com has a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Mac mini desktop – and a HP all-in-one printer for just $600. We wrap up our deal spotlight with the latest crop of iPhone App Store price cuts, including “Need for Speed Shift.”

Along the way, we’ll also check out a number of cases for your iPad or iPhone, as well as MacBook Pros, a 24-inch LCD Cinema Display and a copy of Apple iLife ’11. As usual, details on these and many more items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

You don’t need fancy Bluetooth technology to make a good wireless headset: all you need to do is plug your iPod shuffle into the side-mounted 3.5mm jack on the side of the right can. Ingenious. $50 will get you a pair, in Japan at least, but we’ll have to wait for this set (or a knockoff) to cross the shores.

[via Gadget Lab]

Although Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash was a devastating opening salvo against Adobe’s bloated, buggy and insecure browser plugin, perhaps the most brutal attack in the war between Apple and Flash was Cupertino’s decision to exclude it from the software shipping on the MacBook Air… a move that has notably saved the Air two hours in battery life while simultaneously making Adobe look like a bunch of inept chumps.

Now Adobe CEO Shantau Narayan is commenting on the matter at this week’s Web 2.0 summit. Asked by Engadget about the MacBook Air’s battery life improvement without Flash installed, Narayan responded: “When we have access to hardware acceleration, we’ve proven that Flash has equal or better performance on every platform.”

Which is, of course, a besides-the-point response. Performance isn’t the issue: energy efficiency is.

However, it does seem like Adobe is ready to admit there may actually be an issue they can address, because Narayen followed that comment with an admission that Adobe was working in the labs to optimize a beta for the new Air. Not that you’d catch me dead installing it at this point, but your mileage may well vary.

We were skeptical of yesterday’s purportedly leaked shot of a new CDMA iPhone running on the Verizon network, but perhaps e’re wrong: a recent Tweet coming from Verizon’s own Verizon Careers Twitter account seems to suggest the iPhone is coming to the network soon.

The evidence is admittedly a bit ambiguous. The operator of Verizon Careers’ Twitter account pimped their recent addition of the iPad to their mobile line-up, and was then asked by Twitter user slink317 for an “iPhone hint?”

Verizon Career’s response accompanied a retweet of slinky123’s question: “yes that is the latest scoop.”

The wording’s pretty strange, but we’re not sure how else to read that besides as a quasi-official confirmation that the iPhone is coming to Verizon sometime soon. Lending some veracity to that interpretation, the Verizon Careers tweet in question has since been pulled.

What do you think? Is the Verizon coming to iPhone, or was this just some low-level drone paid to man a Twitter account making a mistake and openly speculating on Verizon’s iPhone future?

Apple has finally filled the board of directors seat vacated when Steve Jobs critic Jerome York died in March. Ron Sugar, a former Northrop Grumman CEO will chair the Audit and Finance Committee. Sugar “has been involved in the development of some very sophisticated technology,” the Cupertino, Calif. company announced Wednesday.

“I have always had enormous admiration for the people of Apple,” Sugar said in a statement. Not so for the late Jerome York, who once said he was “disgusted” by Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ concealment of his previous illness. Jobs hailed Sugar as “an engineer at heart, who then became a very successful business leader.”

There’s been a great hullabaloo very recently here in the United States over the U.S. Transportation Security Administration’s implementation of its so-called “Advanced Imaging Technology,” aka naked full body scans, and its equally unnerving intimate pat-down procedure.

One New York teenager was so put out by Apple’s endless delays in delivering the white iPhone 4 that he used gray market sources to build a $130,000 business selling them himself.

17 year old Fei Lam started whiteiPhone4now.com after production problems (namely, light leaking through the casing and onto the camera’s sensor) caused the first of the white iPhone 4’s delays.

Like many similar sites, whiteiPhone4now.com sells aftermarket conversion kits that allow iPhone 4 owners to mod their iPhone 4s to a white model themselves.

Unlike most of those other sites, though, Lam knows a guy who knows a guy who works at Foxconn, and was able to get Apple certified white iPhone 4 components shipped to him straight in Queens.

There’s a reason Amazon’s responding to Apple’s Beatles iTunes coup by slashing pricing on Fab Four CDs instead of undercutting the iTunes price in their own music service, Amazon MP3: Apple’s secured the online exclusive to Beatles tracks until sometime in 2011.

Ever since researchers announced Apple had passed RIM in handset sales, the CEO of the BlackBerry maker has been on the warpath. The latest battleground was the Web 2.0 Summit, where the leader of the Canadian company said the lead was just in Steve Jobs distorted mind.

“For those of us who live outside of Apple’s distortion field, we know that 7” tablets will actually be a big portion of the market and we know that Adobe Flash support actually matters to customers who want a real web experience,” Jim Balsille said at his blog site. The words were echoed in a Tuesday speech on Web 2.0 technology.

This a is a guest post by Jerry Halstead of Frontier Design Group, a small, independent app development company.

Not everyone’s app is going to be featured in a viral video. Maybe yours will be mentioned by a celebrity, used in an Apple commercial, featured in a blog or news story. Whatever the event, be prepared to act quickly and don’t be reluctant to try to capitalize on it.

Here’s how we capitalized on a viral video featuring our app, iShred.

It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.

Apple had traditionally enjoyed 50 percent of the educational market, however a tight economy coupled with lower PC prices led by netbooks until recently depressed the Cupertino, Calif. company’s classroom reach to just about 20 percent. While the iPad is credited with many advances, it also sparked a comeback for Apple, making the $500 tablet competitive with PCs in the secondary and higher education markets, according to Needham & Company’s Charlie Wolf earlier this year.

Wolf’s prediction, made before the iPad really hit the street, has been confirmed again and again.

It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.

Cedars School in Greenock, Scotland, has become the first school in the world to deploy an iPad to every child in the age groups it serves (roughly 5 to 16 year-olds). We’ve mentioned this effort before, so Cult of Mac decided to check in on the project again for our Education special and see how they’re doing.

“The iPad has become far more embedded in our school day than I ever thought it would become,” Fraser Speirs, the architect behind the project, wrote on his blog.

It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.

As part of Cult of Mac’s ‘Apple in Education’ week, we’ve trawled through the hundreds of thousands of app in the App Store and compiled a list of the best applications for your iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch, that we think will help you make the most of your device while studying.

The applications we’ve featured will help you to study for your exams, remind you of when your assignments are due, and make it easy for you to create and manage your notes in class. We also have 4 sections dedicated to different subjects, and a few applications designed to help you in these areas, including English, Math, History, and Science.

Remember those wildly popular, hideously happy “slap bracelets” born of the late ’80s that — like Oakley Iridium Frogskin sunglasses — adorned those young individuals who were blissfully devoid of any sense of fashion whatsoever? Well, Griffin thinks it’s time to bring them back — but this time, they’re making them cooler, by sticking iPod Nanos in them and turning the whole thing into a Swatch (another fashion gift from the ’80s) -ish watch.

A cool $25 will get you (or the giftee of your choice) one of Griffin’s silicon Slap Cases for the 6th-gen Nano, in one of several retina-destroying colors.

It seems like everyone except Steve Jobs was underwhelmed by the Beatles on iTunes announcement today.

The reaction here, on other blogs, and on Twitter was unanimous: Who cares?

Most Beatles fans have already bought the CDs and added them to iTunes. The music is 40-50 years old. Half the band is dead.

Perhaps Apple overplayed it a bit, announcing that this was a day we’d never forget. Then it turned over the homepage, iTunes and Ping to The Beatles. There’s even four TV ads. Overkill? Maybe.

But seen from Steve Jobs’ point of view it is gotta be a big deal. Symbolically, at least. This is the day iTunes triumphed over the old music industry. It marks the complete obsolecence of the old distribution system and the triumph of the new.

The Beatles catalog was one of the last trump cards held by the old music industry. Giving it up is an admission that iTunes has prevailed. Music is fully digital, and there’s no going back. The other holdouts — AC/DC, Led Zeppelin Garth Brooks (CNet has a list here) — must surely follow.

Jobs has been working on this for seven years or more. To him, it’s a massive validation. Like he says, a day that won’t be forgotten.

Ever since we posted about  Let’s Create Pottery HD last month, we’ve been wondering when the app — that lets users have a go at creating virtual pottery on the iPad — would be out (or even be practical) on the smaller screen of the iPhone/iPt.

Last week, developer Infinite Dreams released the iPhone version, then added further enticement to get our hands dirty by releasing a free, try-before-you-buy version of the app a few days later (Which is a good thing, because the paid version looks like it might be a little prone to crashing, judging by the comments).

Still, the lite version checks out pretty well, and the full version, with its expanded creative options, is on sale right now for just a buck.

Apple has finally approved the native Google Voice app after a 16 month delay.

Download it from iTunes here. It’s free, offers low-rate international calling and push notifications for new text or voicemail messages. It’s quicker than the HTML5 version, and has access to the iPhone’s contact list.

More info on Google Voice Blog.

Could this be a white iPhone 4 for Verizon? Note:

1. The lack of a SIM card slot (Verizon doesn’t use SIM cards)

2. A new external antenna design (Goodbye Antennagate)

3. The Verizon symbol in the upper left of the screen.

Wouldn’t it be great? But I call BS. The photo looks fake. It’s too good. Shots of prototypes are usually crappy. This looks too staged. I’ll bet it’s a Chinese knockoff.

Below is the full-size image.

Via CoveringWeb.

We start off with another deal on the MacBook Air, including a 1.4GHz version with a 12-inch screen for $969. Also, the Apple Store is offering several factory refurbished tablets, including a 16GB Wi-Fi model for just $449. We also have the latest crop of App Store freebies for your iPhone or iPod touch, including “Bear vs. Penguins,” a new take on the tower defense game.

Along the way, we’ll also check out some accessories for your iPad, some cases for your iPhone (as well as a deal on a iPhone 3GS), along with 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.

NVIDIA has just announced a mid-range upgrade graphics card for the Mac Pro: the Quadro 4000 For Mac.

Aimed at workstation applications (video, graphics, scientific data crunching), the Quadro 4000 falls in the middle of NVIDIA’s professional lineup. It features NVIDIA’s latest Fermi architecture, boasting 256 CUDA cores and 2GB of GDDR5 memory.

But for a mid-range card, it’s pretty pricey: $1,199 when it ships later this month. The PC-compatible card is about $700. It shouldn’t take long for GPU hackers to create a Mac-compatible ROM. We’ll keep an eye out.

Here’s NVIDIA’s full press release: