If you’ve recently purchased an iPhone 4, you’ll be wanting to protect your shiny new device from scratches, scuffs and bumps. Now that it’s been around for a few months, there are a lot of cases on the market that claim to do just that, but how do you know which one’s right for you? I’ve lost count of the number of cases I purchased for my previous iPhones that, after using for a week or so, I decided weren’t suitable for a number of reasons.

This is where the iPhone 4 Case Review comes in; it’s a weekly review of a variety of iPhone 4 cases which aims to give you some advice and guidance on protecting your beloved new gadget. We’ll test out a range of cases so that you don’t have to, and hope to help you decide which case is best for you. We’ll try out snap cases, sleeves, protectors, pouches and anything else we can find!

Our first review is of Incipio’s Feather case. I chose this one first for one reason; out of all of the cases I purchased for my 3GS, the Feather was the one I used most and the one I was most impressed with, although it did have one flaw. Check out the review after the break.

Ever feel like Steve Jobs is messing with you just for fun? That’s what I thought when I opened up iTunes 10 and saw the minimize, maximize, & close buttons on the left hand side of the window, instead of aligned at the top.

Moving the buttons over there goes against everything OS X design is about. It’s an uncharacteristic move by Apple, unless they plan to move the buttons to the side for all of their applications, which doesn’t seem likely. Don’t worry though, there’s a super simple fix for this weird quirk if you want to bring uniformity back to OS X.

Why does Apple dominate all aspects of the digital music market — hardware, software and content deals? For example, more than two-thirds of every media player sold in the world is an Apple product.

That’s amazing when you consider the company’s reputation as one that doesn’t listen to customers. Come to think of it, Google Search, Facebook and Twitter are all dominant products created without customer input.

Is ignoring customers Apple’s secret to success in consumer technology?

Read more on Datamation.

Apple’s mobile platform, iOS, is the third most-popular on the Internet, behind only Windows and Mac OS, one Internet usage research firm announced. The news is just the latest indication of the growing trend toward mobile computing.

While Windows had 91.3 percent of Internet usage, with Mac OS claiming five percent, iOS – which includes the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad – accounted for 1.1 percent of devices accessing the Internet in August, according to Net Applications. The figure put iOS ahead of both Android and Linux.

In the latest in a long string of murders over iPods, a 16-year-old in Salt Lake City is now being charged as an adult after the alleged stabbing of a classmate over an Apple device.

Jonatan Bustos is in jail charged with criminal homicide-murder after a tussle with classmate 15-year-old Taylor Pankow over a stolen iPod.

How many years could Bustos get?

Killing for Apple’s must-have device has earned perps a wide range of sentences — from under 10 years to life in prison.

Talk of iPad shortages may be history if reports of Apple’s new marching orders for suppliers are true. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, after doubling iPads built to 2 million, recently ordered 3 million iPads for the fourth quarter of 2010, according to one analyst.

The figure puts Apple on track to ship 36 million iPads in calendar year 20111, just shy of the 40 million iPads expected to be purchased next year, according to Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty.

First Google launched a rival smart phone, now the Mountain View, Calif. Internet giant reportedly plans to assault Apple’s other revenue pillar – iTunes. The Google Vice President behind Android plans to launch an online music service by Christmas, a vision being warmly received by music executives, according to Reuters.

Music executives, while “grateful” to Apple for raising awareness of digital music, are now described as enthusiastic and hopeful Google can take on iTunes, which sells 70 percent of digital music in the United States.

LaCie’s latest, the MosKeyTo thumb drive — get it? Har. — is a product that manages to pull off the nearly miraculous: it’s not only just 20mm long, or about the same size as the nanoreceiver of some wireless mice, but it’s actually garnered our interest enough to break our oath and yet again hit the keyboard to write something about the most boring species of gadget on earth: the USB storage dongle.

It’s not the specs, which are standard. It’s not the price: 4GB for $17.99, or 8GB for $27.99. It’s not even the drive’s tininess. No, we’re writing about it to call attention to the official product image above, featuring a giant mosquito wildly fornicating with its namesake on the lid of a MacBook Pro.

Congrats on catching our attention, LaCie! Time to give someone in your art department a raise.

With the announcement of Apple TV it’s never been more apparent that physical format is dying and your collection of DVDs is becoming more obsolete by the day. However, that doesn’t mean you have to purchase all your favorite movies again just so you can enjoy streaming them to your iOS devices. Here we’re going to show you how to take your encrypted DVDs and rip them onto your Mac.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bBv1WkMUFs&feature=player_embedded

Valve Software’s transcendent physics and teleportation puzzler Portal already runs sublimely through Steam for Mac… as long as you have a modern MacBook Pro or iMac. But what if Portal wasn’t a modern game, but a classic Macintosh text adventure? This brilliant mock ad re-imagines Portal as a lost game rediscovered through a lost Saturday morning advertisement, complete with an appearance by a badly puppeted GlaDOS. Brilliant… although that green text really looks more at place on an Apple II, don’t you think?

There are a lot of iPod docks on the market, but not a lot of them have docking trays big enough to accommodate the iPad without snapping it in half over your knee first… a tact which has some obvious repercussions on the resulting music’s audio quality.

Phillips’ latest dock changes that with a docking tray wide enough to accommodate the iPad’s chunky width. Called the Fidelio, the dock also features Bluetooth so that your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch doesn’t even need to be plugged in to avail itself of a nicer, room-filling speaker.

The Fidelio is also portable, with a battery that allows you to play music up to five hours per charge. Unfortunately, the Fidelio’s price and release date has yet to be announced.

[via, image Slashgear]

Tired of having to keep that browser tab open to Facebook just so you can keep chatting with your friends? It only takes five Quick Steps to integrate iChat with Facebook’s web-chat client and because Facebook uses the Jabber protocol it’s incredibly easy to set up and use.

Apple’s fastest Mac is the 12-Core Mac Pro, featuring two 2.93 GHz Xeon processors. Configure it with 25GB of DDR3 ECC SDRAM, and Apple’s fastest Mac will cost you $8,749.00.

Yowza. That’s an extraordinary amount of money. If you don’t mind dropping an extra $300, though, you might be interested in Macintouch’s guide to building not Apple’s fastest Mac, but the world’s fastest Mac yourself.

Yup, according to Macintouch’s tests, their Hackintoshed monstrosity — a total beast of a machine running two 3.33GHz hexacore Westmere processors overclocked to 4.2GHz each and supplemented with 24GB of DDR3 RAM — melted the Mac Pro’s face off.

Of course, there’s a lot of drawbacks to this approach, including compatibility issues and a much louder system than the Mac Pro, as well as a desktop footprint that makes the Pro look compact. But as of right now, it seems that a Hackintosh is the fastest Mac in the world. God help us.

[via Hardmac]

Apple’s Automator is a fantastic way to manage your iTunes tracks… but with Apple’s iTunes 10 update, many iTunes-specific Automator workflows have simply stopped working.

According to upset users in Apple’s discussion forums, the vast majority of iTunes Automator actions go missing when you install iTunes 10. Try to run a previously created iTunes workflow and you will ironically be prompted to install iTunes 4.6 or higher. Ugh.

The good news here is that none of the functionality has disappeared from AppleScript, so it should be able to replicate the functionality if you change gears. Still, the sudden absence of iTunes functionality in Automator is mysterious: did Apple purposely drop the functionality, or is this a bug? If the former, what was Apple’s rationale?

It’s official: the iPhone has joined the ranks of iFurniture.  Yesterday brought news of another iPhone coffee table, which joins a proud history of Apple-inspired furniture throughout the years.  In another Geek Trend, some members of the Cult of Apple can now kick their feet up both with and on their iDevices while lounging at home.

When Steve Jobs announced the new palm-sized AppleTV on Wednesday, replete with AirPlay-streaming functionality from your computer’s iTunes library, 720p high-def video and Netflix capability, many of us wondered if Cupertino would (or even be able) to extend the new functionality back down the line to the older, drive-based model.

Nope, says Ars Technica. An Apple spokesperson confirmed to them that there will be no software updates to bring the new AppleTV functionality to the last generation model.

To be honest, I wasn’t suspecting anything different. According to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, even though the AppleTV doesn’t look like it is running iOS, it is… an assertion supported by the new AppleTV’s A4 CPU. The new software probably doesn’t even work on old AppleTVs, and rolling out a major software update for the obsolete model would essentially require coding the functionality from scratch.

Still, it’s disappointing. I, like many AppleTV owners, gave Apple my money for their “hobbyist” device, supporting and defending it for years even while Apple ignored it. Now that they are taking the device seriously and finally bringing the AppleTV brand up to spec, though, Apple’s quick to abandon us.

[via 9to5Mac]

All across Europe, iPhone exclusivity deals have already toppled, but here in Germany, T-Mobile still remains standing as the sole carrier of the iPhone 4. The foundations are wobbly, though, as numerous other carriers in the country have begun selling the iPhone 3GS, marking the first time more than one company has offered the iPhone… even if one of those iPhone’s is markedly superior.

It now looks like T-Mobile’s exclusivity deal is finally about to collapse entirely though. According to the Wall Street Journal, Deutsche Telekom is preparing for the loss of the iPhone 4 exclusive in time for the holiday shopping season… while Vodafone and O2 are similarly preparing to carry it.

It’s in Apple’s best interest to sell the iPhone 4 on as many networks as possible, and every country that has seen an exclusivity deal end has seen iPhone sales and profits meteorically rise.

Note the timing here as well: T-Mobile is losing the iPhone 4 exclusive by the end of the year. Meanwhile, here in the States, it is heavily rumored that Verizon will get a special CDMA version of the iPhone 4 in January.

It looks like Apple is just letting all of its existing contracts lapse. Now that T-Mobile looks set to lose its exclusivity contract for the German market, can AT&T be far behind?

Twitter for iPhone — née Tweetie — is a wonderful first-party client with almost any functionality you could care to name, but one area in which it loses to some of its competitors is in its lack of support for push notifications.

No worries, though, because along with yesterday’s triumphant debut of Twitter for iPad, the iOS team are also working on integrating push for iOS 4.1.

Says Twitter:

We’ve been testing push notifications internally. When we launched Twitter for iPad, there was a configuration error that caused us to offer push messages to a small set of users. We’ve stopped sending push messages, but users may see an option to turn on push until we release an updated version of the app. So, push isn’t ready yet but we look forward to rolling this out soon.

As Twitter notes, you may be able to turn push notification on under settings even if you aren’t on iOS 4.1 Gold Master, although we’ve heard reports that it may require uninstalling and reinstalling the app to get working.

Perhaps not so coincidentally, push notification service Boxcar — which does a healthy bit of business in the tweet pushing market — has just gone free for all Twitter notifications.

Apple started teasing us today when the company posted its iOS 4.2 for iPad “Coming Soon” software update webpage. That webpage serves as a little reminder to us about the exciting new features coming in the next version of iOS for the iPad.

If you haven’t been paying attention to the news lately you’ll be happy to know that Apple is bringing Apple’s Game Center, a unified inbox to Mail, AirPlay (streaming audio/video), folders, wireless document printing, text searches in Safari, and best of all — multitasking to the iPad. There’s even a little hint of something more.

If you want more detailed information about this much-anticipated iOS update then check out Apple’s webpage for yourself or view a video of the Apple Event held last Wednesday and watch Steve Jobs demonstrate iOS 4.2 on an iPad.

That’s all you’ll get for now, since Apple isn’t going to release iOS 4.2 until sometime in November.

With all the Apple hoopla yesterday, we missed the fact that Epson announced a new all-in-one printer it says is the “fastest in its class.”

The wifi-equipped all-in-one Epson Stylus NX625 printer will run at a blazing 15 pages/minute in black (but only 7.2 in color) — compare that with the Artisan 710 we tested late last year which clocked in at 9.5 ppm in black and 9 in color.

The NX625 will retail for $150 and should be available later this month. See the press release for all the details we omitted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPfCZC4VHnE

Its name suggests it might be a ’70s-era diet soda laced with LSD, but the Galaxy Tab is actually the latest iPad challenger from Samsung — a 7-inch tablet unveiled today at Germany’s version of CES.

Seems Samsung’s stuffed the Android-powered Galaxy Tab (giggle) with enough hardware to make it a worthy challenger: a bright 1024×600 WSVGA screen, a fast processor and 3G (GSM), wifi and Bluetooth 3.0 connectivity. But it also includes stuff that might make  iPad owners envious — like a all the whiz-bang sensors of the iPhone 4 (including the gyroscope), a front-facing and a rear-facing camera, and a micro-SD card slot for memory upgrades.

Samsung says it’ll hit the UK first “in the coming months.” No word on pricing or a Stateside launch.

[via Engadget]

Today is all hardware on the daily deal showcase. First up is Apple’s new nano, smaller and with a touchscreen. The 8GB and 16GB versions also come with new prices for pre-orders. Next is the Apple’s new touch iPod, complete with the high-def Retina Display, iOS 4.1 and front- and rear-facing cameras. Finally is the revamped Apple TV complete with a smaller footprint, smaller price tag but many new features, including Netflix support and streaming 99-cent TV episodes from ABC and FOX.

Along the way, we’ll also check out deals on iPhone and iPad gear, as well as applications from iTunes. As usual, details on these and many other items are at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

Choices, choices. The latest in Apple-related furniture is a custom made iPhone 4 table. Details on it are scant (OK, it seems the Internets aren’t yielding much of anything other than the photo), but it is a slick piece of design that wouldn’t look out of place in many a living room.

In terms of a conversation piece, though, it perhaps looks too much like a normal table and less like one of Apple’s iconic devices. (It has been suggested you jazz it up with iPhone icon coasters, but for some that may be overkill).

The iPod Table made by Italian graphic and industrial designer Mirko Ginepro, still one of our favorites, looks much more like a pop-art nod to the real thing, just giant and made from Corian.

Which one would you rather have to receive your guests?

Sales of Sony’s MP3 Walkman briefly outsold iPods in Japan again, but that was before the iPod Nano “wristwatch” hit the scene.

This small victory also happened at the same time last year in Japan, during the not-so-retailing frenzied month of August.

Survey results from Tokyo-based BCN (Google translated version here) show that 2010 August sales figures have the Walkman grabbing 47.8 percent share of the portable music player market, while Apple captured 44 percent.

If that seems like a slender victory, in 2009 Sony squeaked by Apple MP3 player sales by just 43 percent, creeping above Apple’s 42.1 percent.

BCN says that the two electronics titans currently hold 90 percent of the market and that the slight edge Sony had during the August selling slump may not hold out with the refreshed Apple iPod lineup.

The most popular Sony Walkman was the Sony NW-E042, a 2GB shuffle-like device launched in May that retails for about $80 or 8,000 yen.

Will Japan go gadget-crazy over the new iPods?

Via CNET

Possibly attempting to steal some thunder from Apple’ Wednesday announcement of 99-cent TV episode rentals, rival Amazon.com launched episodes for sale at 99-cents each. The Internet bookseller and Kindle maker said it would offer shows from ABC, Fox and the BBC “to own.”

While Amazon’s Video on Demand service streams such shows as “Glee,” “Bones” and “Lost” to Macs, as well as PCs and set-top boxes, the Seattle-based company noted the shows downloaded “cannot be transferred to iPods.”