An iPhone app that works as a stethoscope may change the way doctors work in a heartbeat.

So far, some three million physicians have downloaded the $0.99 iStethoscope to be able to monitor the heart rates of patients on the go.

According to creator Peter Bentley, a researcher at University College London, “smartphones are capable of saving lives, saving money and improving health care in a dramatic fashion.”

Bentley hopes that in the future smartphones could become mobile vital sign monitors, “fully fledged integrated designs capable of taking ultra sound scanners or monitor a patient’s blood pressure.”

With some 80 percent of doctors say they expect to be using a smart phone by 2012, this inexpensive app definitely quickens the pace of many. Although the heart-monitor app is undoubtedly handy, it does sound slightly awkward to use without a bit of practice.

The Apple universe is all a twitter on the day before the Cupertino company makes its holiday product announcements. The folks at bookmaker.com are wagering that we’re most likely to see an iPhone 4 revision and a bigger, better iPod Nano. (Yep, that’s over 100%. For once, the fuzzy math isn’t mine, that’s how betting odds work).

These outcomes are slightly different from what CoM and most of you readers believe, if our reader poll is at all trustworthy — most expect the iPod but also something new for Apple TV and iWork.

Anybody willing to put their money where their mouth is?

The Oxford English Dictionary will not be printed again thanks in part to the iPad, Alastair Jamieson reports for The Telegraph:

Simon Winchester, author of ‘The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary’, said the switch towards online formats was “prescient”. He said: “Until six months ago I was clinging to the idea that printed books would likely last for ever. Since the arrival of the iPad I am now wholly convinced otherwise.”

Wow.

We start the day off with three hardware deals: the first is a 22-inch iMac powered by an Intel core i3 running at 3.06GHz for $1,049. Or, for the same amount, you can grab a MacBook Pro laptop. Finally, if you are seeking more horsepower, how about an 8-core Mac Pro Workstation with 16GB of memory for $3,879?

Along the way, we’ll also check out the latest crop of iPhone app freebies, as well as more cases for your Apple handset. As always, details on these and many more items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

Once upon a time, BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion could count on its corporate customers as a stable source of revenue. Not so much now, as the iPhone and Android-based handsets invade the once safe inner sanctum of big business. That change is so drastic, one analyst warns that RIM is “under a sizeable threat.”

Bernstein Research analyst Pierre Farragu Tuesday cut his target price for RIM stock to $40, down from $55 and reduced his earnings per share expectations for 2011 and 2012. This after Farragu found 200 U.K. and U.S. companies held “a scary outlook” for RIM’s corporate customer base.

If you are looking for one of Amazon’s lower-priced Kindle e-readers, you soon may only have to look as far as your neighborhood Staples retail location, the giant office supply company announced Tuesday. Staples’ 1,550 locations this fall will carry Amazon’s recently reduced-priced $139 Kindle, as well as the $189 Kindle 3G and $379 Kindle DX.

The Staples tie-up makes the second bricks-and-mortar retailer offering the Kindle. Earlier this year, Amazon announced its device would be sold by Target.

Remember KT, they recently announced pre-selling 130,000 iPhone 4s in 13 hours? Now they plan to sell a tablet, and it is not the iPad. The “Identity Tab” has a 7-inch screen and is powered by Android. The Apple partner says it is “definitely thinking of launching the iPad in Korea,” however. Apple was mum on this rather schizoid marketing strategy.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the “Identity Tab” is priced at $23 for a two-year KT contract or $411 without any ties. The Android-based tablet “is rather cheap” compared to the expected $600-$700 price tag for either the iPad or Samsung’s Galaxy Tab in Korea, an analyst told the newspaper.

I don’t know about you, but I’m used to being able to customize the operating systems that run on my gadgets. I like to be able to tweak a few things here and there on my Mac especially the things I have to look at all the time like my desktop background and screen saver. If I wasn’t able to do these things I think my Mac would be pretty boring. I used to think the same thing about my iPhone until now.

Apple’s release of iOS 4 introduced us to something people using jailbroken iPhones have been taking for granted for a long time — the ability to alter the wallpapers used on the iOS Springboard desktop and lock screen. Couple these iOS enhancements with the new iPhone 4 retina display and soon you’ll be feasting your eyes on some pretty amazing wallpapers.

So where do you go to find good wallpapers?

Fox Network – led by News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch – reportedly is the lone hold-out in what one report characterizes as nearly unanimous opposition to Apple’s proposition of selling TV episodes for 99 cents each. Murdoch, who also owns several high-profile newspapers – including the Wall Street Journal – apparently sees CEO Steve Jobs’ iPad as a way to save the floundering print news industry.

Murdoch, although he owns the Fox Network, has ink in his blood. He is pushing for a news network oriented toward the iPad and other tablet devices. “That makes the iPad a keystone in Murdoch’s ambition to launch a digital national news product this year,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

[]

Same but different. Each of the four musicians in the iPad Orchestra plays something different, but their instruments are identical: Apple’s iPad. In this video, the quartet — their separate parts identified only by the white letters on their black t-shirts — play a lovely rendition of Ilya Plauvonov’s Sweet Dream on a matching quartet of iPads.

It’s breathtakingly shot and edited, but be warned against watching this too early in the day: as the lullaby-like title of the song might imply, this is a very pretty and soothing composition that will get you ready for naptime.

If you want the excellent low-light performance and changeable lenses of an SLR in a form factor closer to the pocketability of a point-and-shoot, Olympus’ PEN series of mirrorless, Micro Four Thirds cameras have always been easy to recommend (See our review: Olympus PEN E-PL1 Camera Is Almost Perfect). Now they’ve expanded an already great camera line with a new model… as well as a couple of new lenses to fit onto it.

The Olympus PEN E-P2 is a black smart looking 12.3 megapixel mirrorless that comes with a matching M.ZUIKO Digital Ed 17mm pancake lens and a matching FL-14 flash. All together, the kit will cost $999.99 when it drops in October… although if you’d rather exchange the flash for a black VF-2 electronic viewfinder, you can opt for that and pay about $80 more.

In addition, Olympus has expanded its lens line-up with a pricy new 75-300MM zoom, which (at 35mm equivalency) Olympus proclaims to be the world’s smallest and lightest 600mm super telephoto lens. It’s priced at $800, but don’t expect spectacular low-light performance, since it is specced for an f-stop range between 4.8-6.7. It will drop in December.

As for the other lens, it’s a far cheaper 40-150MM (35mm equivalent is 80-300mm) affair rated at f4.0-5.6. It will cost just $299 when it is released in November.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2F4O0QIzC4&feature=player_embedded

Embedded in a long and informative (but badly Google-translated) link to a breakdown of Apple’s A4 CPU, we noticed this intriguing video of all four iPhones — the iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 — pitted head-to-head in a performance test.

There’s nothing really shocking about the results here: Apple has improved the performance of the iPhone with every single release. As each test app is launched — including Plants vs. Zombies, Google Earth, Seadragon and Safari — it always fully loads quickest on the most recent iPhone, with every preceding iPhone lagging incrementally behind. Reboot is the same.

That said, we found something rather soothing about watching this video in this last day before the calm of new Apple product announcements. Perhaps it’s the cheery, burbling music. Either way, it’s an interesting look not only at how far the iPhone has come over the last three years, but in actuality, what a great smartphone it was in the first place.

Miss the meaty mechanical kerchunk of slapping down your old Macintosh Plus Keyboard? Feel as if the Apple Wireless Keyboard’s soft and barely yielding keys barely convey the shaking gravity of your prose? Instructables has you covered, with an excellent guide on how to convert an old typewriter into a USB keyboard capable of being used with any Mac, bringing back to your computer the mighty hammering of the Underwoods of old.

Just don’t expect the project to be easy: according to Instructables contributor Jack Zylkin, the modification will take anywhere between five to ten hours to complete.

Valve has done a lot for Mac gamers in the last few months: first releasing the popular Steam digital delivery service for OS X, then following by quickly releasing native ports of most of their catalog for Mac gamers to play. In fact, Valve managed to squirt all of their Source-engine games (including Half-Life 2, its’ episodic add-on packs, Team Fortress 2 and Portal)out the door, before their release schedule stalled due to performance issues inherent to OS X, leaving their two most resource-hungry games — the team-based zombie shooters Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead II in limbo.

Come Halloween, you’ll be blowing away zombies with the rest of your buddies, though. Now that Apple has ironed out the kinks in OS X through a graphics update, it seems like Valve is now getting ready to finally release the Left 4 Dead series to Mac gamers. You can now expect to be able to download Left 4 Dead and its sequel through Steam for Mac by October, along with the upcoming DLC mission pack, The Sacrifice, which bridges the stories of both titles and is fully playable under either game.

At tomorrow’s iPod Event, many of us are expecting some sort of announcement about iTunes entering the cloud by offering media streaming functionality, but CNet is reporting a much more mundane development in iTunes’ likely streaming capabilities: they expect song preview samples to double in length come Wednesday.

The move is seen as an attempt to address criticisms that 30 seconds simply isn’t enough time to preview a song. That might seem rather silly — 30 seconds of a three minutes song is one-sixth its length — but the competition (YouTube) gives you the whole song to listen to for free, including the ability to buy the song on either iTunes

Doornail dead on the Mac for almost twenty years, Autodesk has just announced that they will finally be bringing their multi-dimension engineering and architectural design software AutoCAD back to Apple customers through a native OS X port.

Starting in October, Mac owners will again get to design their minds-eye mansions and skyscrapers without ever dropping to Boot Camp, while taking advantage of native Mac features like multitouch gestures. Of course, professional software like this isn’t cheap, and Mac-friendly architects can expect to drop $4000 for the trouble… but might be a small price to pay to migrate your architecture firm back to the Mac.

AutoDesk isn’t stopping there: they’re also reportedly working on an IOS version of AutoCAD called AutoCAD WS, a free download that will allow you to view (but not make major changes) on your iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone. Possibly a death blow to the profitable architecture paper roll and blue ink industry!

There are hundreds of decent iPad cases out there. Unfortunately, very few leave you room for anything other than the iPad itself. What about your stand, your wireless keyboard, your charger or your headphones? Carrying all the accoutrements needed to set your iPad up and use it more like a notebook may seem to defeat the purpose somewhat, but a lot of us use our tablets like that every day. If you like to carry your iPad fully loaded, the Incase Travel Kit Plus ($59.95) is a great solution.

Open source devotees, iPhone users and hedonists unite! News today that low cost, OpenBTS GSM cell phone service is being tested at Burning Man in a true trial-by-fire fashion:

Today I bring you a story that has it all: a solar-powered, low-cost, open source cellular network that’s revolutionizing coverage in underprivileged and off-grid spots. It uses VoIP yet works with existing cell phones. It has pedigreed founders. Best of all, it is part of the sex, drugs and art collectively known as Burning Man. Where do you want me to begin?

“We make GSM look like a wireless access point. We make it that simple,” describes one of the project’s three founders, Glenn Edens. [Network World]

The economic and environmental potential of the system is promising, particularly for remote and under-developed areas.

In the wake of work produced by the Stanford Laptop Orchestra and the many people worldwide using Smule applications on the iPhone, you knew this was coming: Four creative youngsters calling themselves the iPad Orchestra perform a nice piece of modern orchestral music here, using Seline HD, a new live performance and improvisation app optimized for the iPad.

Seline HD features an ergonomically designed playing surface called ioGrid, suitable for players of all hand sizes. It’s intended to support the playing of melodies with two hands, while keeping the iPad on the knees or on a table. A fully adjustable 16-note scale is divided into 2 parts (odd and even), which are then mapped to the left and right grids.

The app is capable of playing any melody but produces its own character and sound. A player can choose from 20 built-in factory voices (flutes, bowed strings, reeds, synth leads and more) and 9 drone voices. Drones (chorded synth pads) are generated on-the-fly, based on a complex analysis of the player’s melody line, courtesy of the app’s CrystalClarity HD sound engine, and provides an excellent background layer for melodies.

Seline HD player is also equipped with a full range of recording possibilities, including direct recording to .wav files, deleting, and doubling tracks. Overdubbing (layering tracks) is possible and encouraged as an excellent way to create complex orchestrations. Two available onboard effects – grand stereo reverb and dub delay – provide finishing touches to any composition.

Seline HD is available now in the iPad AppStore at the introductory price of $5.99.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxCNyR5NfmU

I’ve always thought time-lapse snapshots were a neat way to visually track change over time. Bay Area-based developer Redbot thinks so too, and they’ve created a Time Lapse Photo Journal for the iPhone that makes it easy to create time-lapse albums and share them with hapless victims your friends.

Use the app to resize and reposition each shot, set reminders to take shots of the subject and fine-tune the slideshows. The results can be shared via email, YouTube or on Facebook. No word on pricing, and the app isn’t available yet but should hit the App Store next week.

Blamed on everything from a software bug to greasy ear canals, the iPhone 4’s overly sensitive proximity sensor was supposed to get fixed with the release of iOS 4.1.

Don’t hold your breath, though, says Apple’s Australian mouthpiece Fiona Martin. According to Martin, the company has yet to fix the proximity sensor issue, with no other information given as to when we can expect the patch.

In our own tests, we found that iOS 4.1 Beta 2 fixed all of our proximity sensor issues, and Steve Jobs himself promised the fix next update. Either our own anecdotal experience with the 4.1 Beta fixing the proximity sensor was wrong and the nature of the issue remains unidentified to Apple or a hardware design flaw, or Miss Martin misspoke. Wednesday should tell all.

It may be somewhat hard to remember — what with sporadically poor call performance, lots of other hardware to play around with and all those apps — that the iPhone is more-or-less primarily a tool for voice communication. And there’s no better or cheaper way to use that tool than through the Skype app.

We start out the week with a deal on a skeleton – for your iPhone case. With a product sounding something like Old Blue Eyes, the Nubi Do To Do list manager has reduced its price. Finally, if you are looking for the perfect stationary to send that email missive, Mail Stationary 3 for the Mac might lend a hand.

Along the way, we’ll take a look at a variety of other gadgets. As always, details on these and many more items are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

The shipping delays we’ve reported on for the past few weeks seem to be working themselves out. The Apple Store is now telling iPad customers their tablets will ship within 24 hours of purchase. Earlier this month, analysts told investors iPad shipping had dropped to 3-5 days from a 7-10 day delay in early August.

The improved shipping schedule seems to indicate Apple is catching-up with iPad demand which the Cupertino, Calif. company acknowledged caught them off guard. The drop in shipping time also comes as Apple prepares for continued back-to-school sales, as well as the all-important holiday buying season.

Sending cutesy virtual crap to your friends on Facebook is so 2008: dial into the Bartab iPhone app instead and send them cheap, real drinks.

Picking up the tab has never been so painless. Download the free app or go to bartab.com. (Not all your pals have iPhones? There’s an Android version, too).

Pick the person who you want to offer a pint — or Pisco punch or shot of Peppermint Schapps — and the bar where you want to send it, pay a buck and pow: your friend shows their iPhone screen to the bartender at a participating water hole and gets a drink. They also have to pay a buck to redeem the drink coupon, it’s apparently due to some annoying state regulations.