AT&T began selling the iPhone 4 on a first come, first served basis Tuesday after suspending pre-orders for the eagerly-desired handset. When pre-orders began June 15, the exclusive U.S. iPhone carrier announced they experienced their busiest online sales day.

Although the carrier provided iPhone 4s June 24 to customers who had initially pre-ordered the device, today is the first day AT&T will sell the handset to those who were not able to place a pre-order. Once inventory is depleted, buyers will be given the option to have the iPhone 4 delivered to their home, business or an AT&T store.

If you’re going to steal an iPad, try not to target an Apple employee.

Case in point: two thieves had the bad luck to swipe a pair of iPads from the home of an Apple employee in San Jose.

The 31-year-old employee had already installed Apple’s Find my iPhone app, a free service to MobileMe paying subscribers that launched days just days earlier.

He called the police, then fired up the service from his iPhone. When the police arrived, they tracked the iPad and radioed in the location of the getaway car.

“He’s heading north; he just made a left,” the officers told the dispatcher.

Since they couldn’t pinpoint the exact car, they had to wait, watching the little icon move across a map of the city until it arrived in a cul-de-sac in a residential area where police could make their move.

By the end of the day, officers had returned all of the stolen equipment, identified by serial numbers, to the manager.

Two thieves in their early 30s had ransacked the Apple employees’ house for a total of $20,000 in computer equipment and other electronics including two iPads, an iBook, three laptops and an old PC, according to police reports.

Despite Apple’s earlier statements that it was “all over” the issue of a recent spate of suicides at a Chinese plant manufacturing iPhones, that interest apparently has limits. The Cupertino, Calif. company is “reluctant” to go along with a plan to pay some Foxconn workers $300 per month to build the iPods and iPhones, according to a Monday report.

Apple was hesitant about the plan, which included building a plant for up to 300,000 new workers outside the main Foxconn site in Shenzen, because it might affect production, the Financial Times reports. However, Apple now seems to be onboard. Although Foxconn makes devices for other electronics companies, Apple is the plant’s largest customer, giving it a large say in decisions.

Cult of Mac reader Ryan proves that Trix are not just for kids with this quick iPad stand made from an empty cereal box.

“I got the idea when i first got my iPhone 3G two years ago… At the time I made a stand out of a paper Starbucks cup for my iPhone. I was reminded of that this morning after scouring the Internet for a practical and affordable stand. My cousin finished a box of Trix and as she was making her way to the recycling bin, I decided to do a little recycling of my own.”

The finished stand should support your iPad in either portrait or landscape, plugged in or running on battery.

He’s reckons the project took about 10 minutes — here’s a complete how-to on his blog — and if you’ve got on how to improve his design, let him know.

Hold the phone — and don’t bother holding it “correctly” — law firm Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff, LLP is looking for  iPhone 4 owners for a possible class action lawsuit.

They are looking for people who “recently purchased the new iPhone and have experienced poor reception quality, dropped calls and weak signals.”

It’s a tough call for many cult of mac-ers: if you ordered ahead, waited in line and found the iPhone 4 drops reception faster than Britney Spear’s panties, you’re probably not happy about it. They’re banking that enough of the 1,700,000 iPhone 4s sold in just the first three days of the device’s release have enough unhappy owners to warrant a class-action suit.

They are not the only ones demanding Apple give customers some satisfaction: Gizmodo has stomped its sour grapes into a petition demanding the Cupertino company give up some free cases that may help fix the faulty phones.

Do you put faith in Steve Jobs’ claims that the slight snafu will be soon fixed or would you be willing to talk to the lawyers about it?

Via Valleywag

Perhaps you’ve seen a few XtraNormal text-to-video movies already. It says here you’ll be seeing more in the not-too-distant future.

Perhaps you’ve even seen this one already, but no matter, it’s funny enough to be worth watching again and again and again. Definitely NSFW for strong language, esp toward the end.

[via TechCrunch]

[polldaddy poll=”3404954″]

Details, details. Seems the EXIF data pushed to photographs taken with iPhone 4’s nifty new 5MP camera report the photographs as having been taken with a 3G, according to a discussion thread over at Flickr Help. One intrepid Flickr Pro user has crafted a script to handle the problem and even Flickr staff are admitting to having to use “a little hack and a script” to get the proper EXIF data displayed for iPhone 4 images.

Looks like there’s another to-do on the iOS4 patch everyone’s looking for any day now to fix that non-existent antenna problem.

Many of you waited about 5 hours in line just to get your hands on the latest and greatest installment of the Apple consumer electronics dominance: the iPhone 4. You also had to sign your life away for another 2 year contract with AT&T, unless you’ve got the big bucks and paid for one without the contract. Apple is nice enough to cover the iPhones for a fairly hassle-free 1 year manufacturers warranty, but we all know that a lot of issues come up in the year after that and AppleCare doesn’t cover your phone for accidental issues. A lot of you have probably ALREADY dropped your iPhone or spilled beer on it. SquareTrade is a quality third-party warranty company that offers extended warranties for just about every consumer electronic you can think of! We got your back when it comes to taking care of your precious iPhone, and SquareTrade has offered to give away 4 FREE Extended Warranty plans for the iPhone 4 to four of our lucky Cult of Mac readers! SquareTrade is a legit independent warranty company. They’ve been around since 1999, and it’s the only warranty that’s consistently been rated 5 stars! Their iPhone warranties are valued at $99 and they cover your phone from drops, spills, and normal use defects for 2 years! Click here for more details about the warranty. Here’s how to be entered into the giveaway:

1. Follow us on Twitter! (This is essential, because if you aren’t following you, we can’t DM you to let you know that you’re a winner)
2. “Like” the SquareTrade Facebook page.
3. Tweet the message below:

I love @CultofMac and @SquareTrade because they got my back with my new #iPhone4 #cultofmac

Make sure you include the #cultofmac hash tag or we won’t be able to see if you tweeted the special message. Good luck!

Giveaway Terms: You must be 18 years old to enter. Giveaway is only open to people living in the United States. No purchase is necessary to enter the giveaway. This giveaway is void where prohibited. Giveaway will end at 12am PST tonight. We will not accept any entries after that time. Winners will be notified tomorrow, June 29th through Twitter.

If you haven’t already played Giana Sisters, you’re missing out! It’s one of the best platform games on the iPhone & iPod Touch and I highly recommend you try it. If you share my love of Giana Sisters, you too will be pleased to hear that a HD version is making its way to the iPad soon, according to Touch Arcade.

Originally released in 1987, The Great Giana Sisters was first developed for the Amiga, Atari, Commodore 64 and other consoles of the era. It was quickly pulled, however, after running in to legal trouble with Nintendo due to its similarity with Super Mario Bros. The game was reborn in 2005 when it was renamed simply Giana Sisters, and made its way on to mobile phones, and a few years later, the Nintendo DS.

Today, 5 years on, Giana Sisters is one of the best platform games in the App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and Touch Arcade have reported today that its developers, Bad Monkey, have sent them a bunch of screenshots for their upcoming HD version of the game. You can check them out and find out more info here, or read Touch Arcade’s review of the current game here.

If you can’t wait until the iPad release on 9th July, you can find the iPhone & iPod Touch version in the App Store here.

When a buddy of mine suggested (insisted, actually) I try using HeyTell, my first feeling was that using it was like having a ridiculously slow-mo phone conversation: short staccato bursts of talking interspersed by long, frustrating periods of having to wait for a response.

Well, that feeling lasted all of about 10 minutes; the more I played with it, the more I realized that — besides the fact that I could already call, text, tweet, email, IM and use Facebook — yep, here’s another method I’ll use semi-regularly to blab with.

We start off another week with Apple’s annual back-to-school sale. This time, you can get a free 8GB iPod touch whenever you purchase an iMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro or MacBook Air computer. Other highlighted deals include an 8GB iPod nano for $99 and a clear acrylic case for the iPhone 4 – perhaps to solve any problems you’re experiencing with the external antenna.

We’ll also check out the latest batch of App Store freebies, including the fishing simulator game “Paper Fish,” and several cases for your iPhone 3G or 3GS. As usual, details on these and many others items are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

In an intriguing move, Amazon has updated its Kindle software application for the iPhone and iPad with features not available on the company’s e-reader hardware. Users of Apple’s iOS-based devices can now read Kindle e-books with audio and video.

Examples of Kindle editions already available with audio and video feature a cake-making video and audio clips of bird songs. Other expanded editions available on Amazon include “Les Miserables”, “Rick Steves’ London” and “Knitting for Dummies.”

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Although usually the model of reasonableness and imperturbability, Downfall’s Adolf Hitler is none too happy with the iPhone 4’s reception problems. It’s enough to make a Nazi an Android fanboy!

The iPhone 4 was selling like the proverbial hotcakes during the first days the iconic handset was available to consumers, one analyst told investors Monday. Indeed, on June 24, when the new phone went on sale, 60 percent of Apple Stores and all participating retailers had no stock left by the end of the day.

“We believe initial weekend volumes were 1 million plus,” Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore wrote Monday. “But shipments could have been dramatically higher if there was more supply,” he added. Apple announced Monday it sold more than 1.7 million iPhone 3 units between Thursday and the end of Saturday, June 26.

As they are wont to do, the guys over at iSuppli have ripped apart their pretty new iPhone 4s, done some math and figured out how much it cost to make.

What’s the damage to Apple? The 16GB iPhone 4 costs $187.51 to put together in hardware costs alone, with the fancy new Retina Display costing $28.50 per unit, the A4 CPU costing $10.75 and the new gyroscope only coming in at around $2.60./

Needless to say, there’s a lot more money spent on every iPhone 4, including marketing, design and manufacturing, so this isn’t a complete view of how much profit Apple is looking at per device, but I still always find this stuff fascinating, like taking my dental records down to a pawn shop and seeing how much I could get for my fillings.

Steve Jobs just can’t seem to make up his mind. Just a few days after he tersely told a customer that people experiencing rampant reception issues with their iPhone 4 that people were “holding it wrong,” Steve Jobs has written to another Apple customer, saying “There is no reception issue [with the iPhone 4]. Stay tuned.”

Isn’t that a bit of a contradiction? Even if a forthcoming iOS 4.0.1 update does fix the reception issues, that still implies there wasan issue. Plus, why do we need to hold it in a specific way if there’s no issue whatsoever?

More interestingly, what are we “staying tuned” for if there’s no issue with the iPhone 4’s reception at all? A placebo? If you want one of those to work, Steve, you’re not supposed to tell the patient.

We’ve talked about the iPad suit, the iPad Pants and the iPad dress.

Cult of Mac reader Angela says all of this dedicated clothing design for the iPad is superfluous: “If you think iPad’s an overpriced iPhone/iPod touch that won’t fit in your pocket, you’re wearing the wrong pants.”

Here she is, wearing what she describes as a “fairly normal pair of pants (well, they look big on me, but they’d look normal on a guy) that fit an iPad into a side pocket.”

What do you think — time to put the cargo back into those cargo pants or not?

More than 1.7 million iPhone 4s were sold from Thursday, June 24 through Saturday, June 26, Apple announced Monday. CEO Steve Jobs called the new iPhone “the most successful product launch in Apple’s history.”

Jobs also apologized for the long lines some people encountered while waiting to purchase the device. “We apologize to those customers who were turned away because we did not have enough supply,” he said by statement.

Apple’s taken to list making with their latest addition to the App Store, Awesome iOS 4 Apps. It seems a strange and disparate bunch of apps to highlight, and while many of these are awesome apps indeed, the vast majority of these apps don’t take particular advantage of iOS 4 except through Apple’s new built-in save stating option. Still, it’s always interesting to see which apps in particular Apple has their eyes on.

In order to demonstrate “Two of mankind’s greatest inventions, together at last, “iPad owner Jesse Rosten create this fantastic little video which is as much a paean to Apple’s tablet as it is to that wonderful element, Velcro. In fact, the video’s so good that Apple themselves have chosen to highlight it on the official iPad webpage… although you’d think they’d be less cavalier about people strapping their expensive tablet computers onto objects like a wall or motorcycle.

The mouse has once again darted around the cat. Just a few days after the official release of the iPhone 4, userland has once again managed to find its way around Apple’s updated security measures to jailbreak the handset and get root access to the device.

Don’t expect to do this yourself for now: because the exploit uses remnants of Apple’s own code, it can’t be released to the public just yet, and it’s possible the forthcoming iOS 4.0.1 update might put a kibosh on this particular jailbreaking strategy.

But if you’ve got dreams of high-res Cydia apps dancing in your head, be patient and keep waiting for Dev Team Christmas.

Read more at Redmond Pie

Jonathan Mann once wrote a tune about Paul Krugman that went wildly viral and landed him on the Rachel Maddow Show. Now he’s written one about Steve Jobs and it remains to be seen where this one might take him, but it’s at least a pretty good song by our reckoning: “he’s the best at what he does though I hardly can define/what it is and what he has and that kinda blows my mind.”

Mann is a busy, creative guy who’s led a very interesting and adventurous life so far, which you can hear more about on his YouTube site. He has been writing a song and making a video a day since January 1, 2009 and while he admits he wants to be a star, he also cops to simply “trying to make my way through life.”

In addition to Steve Jobs’ Head (song #541), he recently posted song number #543, Let’s Get Along, which he shot and edited on his new iPhone 4. A dedicated Apple fan, Mann also uses a Mac Pro and a Macbook Pro to record his material.

How come no one ever uses Windows gear to write songs about Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates?

[thanks to Derek for the tip]

The category of computing represented by the iPad has gone by many names: tablets, slates, oversized iPod touches. But not one of them has really stuck. Partially, it’s because we haven’t had a hit until this year. Unsurprisingly, people are now calling them iPads, and the competitors “iPad-killers”. That’s because people are far more attracted to a product success than they are to a form-factor or technical specifications. It’s worth remembering that virtually no one ever talked about the emerging class of graphical user interface computers in the 1980s. They talked about Macs, and then they talked about Windows. No one is particularly happy with the name “tablet” because it doesn’t actually capture anything interesting about the device except for its size and shape.

My colleague and collaborator from Jump, Conrad Wai, has an interesting hypothesis about what might stick as a name: “kneetop.” Conrad notes at Something Ventured that every computer ever used by consumers has ultimately been defined by where you use it, from the desktop to the oft-ill-advised “laptop.” Heck, even “mobile phones”. And that might need to happen here for the tablet category to take off.

Desktop, laptop, and mobile all speak to where you use it. But what about tablet? That’s a form factor — and we don’t call a laptop a “hinged screen with keyboard.” The tablet doesn’t yet have a context of use baked in. What’s the use scenario? Where are you going to use it? How are you going to position it relative to your body? Until we resolve these questions, tablets, pads, slates — whatever — will just be a cool technology. It’s something app developers and would-be iPad slayers should keep in mind as they develop their products.

…

To be honest, I think things will turn out a bit differently. My take is that “tablets” as a term will hang around, but that they’ll usher in the era of “casual computing.” Put another way, to be successful, tablets will have to be a transition point when we stop thinking about “using a computer” when we grab one. To me, that’s what people have in mind when they talk of having several tablets just lying around.

So what say you, iPad owners? Is it all about resting it on your knees while you browse? Or do you have a better name?

Well, that didn’t take long. Within days of the iPhone 4’s public launch savvy entrepreneurs are already jumping on the device’s video chat capability to expand their offerings — and opportunities — in the sexual services industry.

With promises of a free iPhone 4 and a “very competitive salary” to women who want to participate, an online interactive pornography firm in New York has an ad up on Craigslist with a job description including “talk to potential clients and chat with them and perform various acts as desired by clients.”

The firm is requesting information and pictures – and hopes to launch before 9/1/2010.

[via Business Insider]