Cult of Mac

And it’s here! Steve Jobs has just announced the latest iPhone, the biggest jump in core technology yet since the original: the iPhone 4. It’s the Gizmodo one.

“Some of you have already seen this,” he quips.

iPhone 4 will include over a hundred new features. Jobs claims it is extremely thin at just 9.3mm thick, 24% thinner than the 3GS, making it the thinnest smartphone on the planet.

Jobs claims it’s the most precise and beautiful thing Apple’s ever made, more akin to a beautiful old camera (?) than a smartphone of today. It’s a gorgeous amalgam stainless steel for strength and glass for optical quality and scratch resistance

The iPhone 4 has a micro-SIM on the side, with a camera and LED flash on the back. On the bottom, it boasts a microphone, a 30 pin connector, and a speaker. On the top, a headset, a second microphone and a sleep/wake button.

The biggest detail? There’s a stainless steel band that runs around the edge of the phone, which is integrated with the band system to give superior reception for BlueTooth, WiFi, GPS, 3G and all the other radio stuff.

Next up, the next “big thing” about the iPhone 4.

[images vias Ars[

We start out the week with some freebies for the iPhone and the iPad. For handset owners, the App Store has several free items, including “Zombie Parade,” a tower defense game. For iPad owners, try your hand at “MakePanic,” described as a “panic-inducing game.” We round out our top deals with a new t-shirt. If your “I went drinking with Gray Powell and All I Got Was This Lousy iPhone Prototype” tee getting a little frayed? Take a look at the “Slide to Unlock” baby doll t-shirt for women.

Along the way, we’ll check out a solar charger for your iPhone, some deals on used Macs, plus plenty of software for your favorite device. As always, details on these and many other items are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Back on stage after showing off three new iPhone apps, Steve Jobs gets into the meat of why we’re here — the iPhone — with a few statistics.

As of today, over five billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store, with over a billion dollars paid to developers to date.

It is one of the greatest things we get to do. And that’s what makes the App Store the most vibrant app community on the planet. 5 Billion downloads and a healthy ecosystem! We’re thrilled with it.”

Who can blame Apple? The App Store is revolutionary.

[image via GDGT]

Eliciting a resounding “What the f***!” from a member of the WWDC audience, Zynga just took the stage and announced that the irritating Facebook phenomenon Farmville played by 35 million users a day is now coming to the iPhone.

It makes sense, actually: recent updates to Facebooks’ privacy settings, making it harder for apps to spam you, has seen Farmville lose millions of users in a month. It also makes sense because We Rule already proved how strong the concept of a Farmville clone on the App Store could be, at least as far as making money off of micro-transactions to hurry things along are concerned.

Oh, and say goodbye to withering crops! Push notification is fully supported.

[image via GDGT]

As many of you know, the Steve Jobs keynote speech at the WWDC is going on right now. If you’re following along with our updates and updates from other sites, go join us on our Facebook page in the discussion section and post your thoughts, reactions, and comments about what he reveals today.

First, become a fan of the page, then join the discussion!

Here’s the link directly to our discussion forum on our Facebook page: Steve Jobs at the WWDC

Netflix is already available on the iPad, but as the recent revelation that the iPad executable was a universal binary implies, it’s coming to the iPhone too.

The iPhone version uses adaptive vidfeo playback, and allows for seamless switching between 3G and WiFi networks. It’s coming this summer, and it’ll be free.

I guess they got around the performance issues, at least on the next-gen iPhone.

[image via GDGT]

Apple wants people to know they’ve gotten a lot better about App Store approval, and Steve Jobs has just given some numbers to prove it.

About 15,000 apps are submitted every week in thirty different languages. Jobs claims that an astonishing 95% of these apps are now approved within seven days.

What about the apps that aren’t? Jobs doesn’t want us thinking censorship: rather, the more common reason is that it doesn’t function as advertised, with the second most common reason that it is pulling from private APIs.

The third most frequent reason? “They crash. If you were in our shoes, you’d be rejecting apps for the exact same reasons.”

The point of this section of the keynote is clearly to make sure people don’t think Apple’s censoring. “Sometimes when you read some of these articles, you may think other stuff is going on,” Steve notes. True enough!

I wonder how much of that 5% is made up of jiggling boob apps, though.

Apple has just announced the initial figures of iBooks at this year’s WWDC, and in addition, they’ve got some great new iBooks features in the pipe.

In the first 65 days, users have also downloaded over 5 million books, or about two and a half per iPad… and five out of six big publishers in the United States claim that the share of eBooks going through the iBookstore is about 22 percent.

Next, some enhancements to iBooks. They’ve just added the ability to take notes to iBooks, as well as the ability to view and read PDFs. For PDFs, you get a whole new bookshelf.

That’s some good additional functionality that should make iBooks more interesting to people who live and breathe PDFs.

Image via GDGT

The iPad has been a huge success for Apple, and it was the first thing Jobs wanted an iPad-obsessed audience to know at this year’s WWDC.

To date, Apple confirms they’ve sold over 2 million iPads, which is one every three seconds. It is now shipping in over ten countries, and Apple wants to prove that they’ve got a revolution on their hands by showing the WWDC audience a video reel of the great coverage the iPad has gotten worldwide.

Additionally, there are now over 8,500 native iPad apps in the App Store. Apps account for 35 million downloads in two months, or about 17 apps per iPad sold. The guys behind Wolfram Associates’ Elements says he made more on the app in the first day of the iPad launch than five years of Google Ads.

Image via Ars

Taking the stage at this year’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, Steve Jobs has just taken the stage, and with an “It’s great to be here,” we’re off to a running start with some WWDC specs.

This year, the WWDC sold out in 8 daysm with over 5,200 attendees from 57 countries. There will be over 120 hands on labs with over 1,000 Apple engineers.

It’s going to be a big one. What will the next two hours reveal?

Image via Ars Technica

In response to the slate of employee suicides which has rocked Foxconn over the last six months, it is now being reported that the electronics manufacturing giant is now offering a 66% performance-based pay rise to their workers… built on top of the previous thirty percent pay increase.

Of course, being a performance-based pay raise, that gives Foxconn license to skimp. To be eligible, workers must pass a three month performance review. That gives Foxconn the ability to arbitrarily hold it back from the majority of workers.

Still, if Foxconn does go through with the move, and awards the pay raise fairly, it’ll be a huge improvement that will see the salary of the average Foxconn employee jump from $132 to $292 a month.

AT&T is reportedly easing upgrade restrictions on when customers can upgrade their handset, a move reportedly in anticipation of Apple announcing a new version of its iPhone. The changes allow iPhone customers — who may not have been eligible — to upgrade without paying early termination fees.

Customers of the carrier can go to the AT&T website and click on “Check Upgrade Options.”

According to French blog Mac Generation, we can all expect Safari 5 to be unveiled at WWDC in just a handful of hours.

Rumor? Sure. But they’ve got a convincing looking changelog, boasting a 25% improvement in JavaScript performance, a new Safari RSS Reader which will probably be too simplistic for serious feed junkies, more than twelve new HTML5 features, hardware acceleration in Windows and the option to add Bing as your default Search engine. It also looks like Apple is changing Safari’s address field to function more like Firefox’s Awesome Bar.

I have been using OS 4 for a couple of months now. It’s amazing how subtle changes can affect the way the whole operating system feels. From the unified inbox to the portrait mode lock, Apple really has taken their time with improving the iPhone experience.  I have been using OS 4 on my everyday iPhone 3GS (not recommended) and it’s been quite a bumpy ride (especially when I lost my camera functionality) but using OS 4 everyday has been awesome.

At today’s WWDC, the next iPhone might not be the only things we see: Engadget has photos of what looks to be an entirely new input device: a Magic Trackpad.

The Magic Trackpad is essentially a giant, Bluetooth-connected multitouch trackpad for Macs, and will not only support all of the functionality of a MacBook Pro touchpad or Magic Mouse, but apparently handwriting recognition to boot. If that’s the case, I imagine it could function pretty handily in Photoshop as well.

I’ll grab this in a heart beat if the price is reasonable. For most of my desktop work on my iMac, I find the Magic Mouse wanting compared to my MacBook Pro’s excellent trackpad, and it’s atrocious for gaming. With the Magic Trackpad, I could finally have the big trackpad I’ve always wanted for my desktop, transforming it when needed into a mousepad and supplementing it with an excellent third-party gaming mouse.

Apple retail sales in the UK jumped 31 percent to around $894 million through September 24, reports said Monday. The increase came from MacBook, iPhone add-ons and the iPod touch.

Despite operating at a net loss, Apple’s UK arm opened three retail locations during the timespan with plans to create two more, according to papers filed with the UK’s Companies House, a government registry of businesses operating in Britain. The Cupertino, Calif. firm has 27 stores operating in the UK.

Apple might have overtaken Microsoft in terms of market cap, but Windows remains the world’s most popular operating system by a long way. That means there’s a lot of Windows-friendly stuff out there on the web that won’t necessarily play nicely with your Mac.

Not unless you have Flip4Mac WMV Player installed.

On the eve of WWDC, a speculative story on mp3newswire.net suggests some interesting possibilities for Apple in the video and media space given the explosive adoption of iDevices:

In 1959 5,749,000 television sets were sold in the US, bringing the cumulative total of sets sold since 1950 to 63,542,128 units. This number supported, through advertising, three national television networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS (a fourth, Dumont, folded in 1956) and numerous local independent stations. Television was big business by the start of the 1960’s.

Now here are another set of numbers. As of April this year Apple sold 75 million iPhone and iPod touch units, devices capable of delivering video via Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. Add to that figure 2 million iPads and counting. By the end of the year Apple should have about 90 million smart mobile devices in the wild.

With the announcement of the leaked next-generation iPhone coming tomorrow morning at WWDC, the rumor mill is in even higher overdrive than usual. The photo above, from Pursuitist, is an alleged photo taken “inside” the Moscone West center in San Francisco that purports to reveal the all-new iPhone HD. It’s also a transparent fake, as the colored iPhones are an amateur mock-up that 9to5mac posted almost a month ago. I find it hard to believe that Apple would conclude that a fan’s creative would be the ideal way to launch their latest and greatest phone.

Also notable: The word “iPhone” and the 64GB capacity aren’t well-centered on the back of the device, another dead giveaway. You can head over to Pursuitist to see more fake photos if you wish, or wait until about 11 a.m. Pacific tomorrow to see the real thing.

via TUAW

It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

This time, we review 10 Pin Shuffle Lite, Air Video, Air Video Free, Cliffed, Dubble, Escape Board (iPad), Giana Sisters, Instapaper Pro, Iron Horse, Racecar (iPad), Sky Force, and Sky Force Reloaded.

Confused by which combination of keypresses triggers your favorite shortcut? What about trying to remember which arcane spell of glyphs describes that shortcut in Mac terminology?

There’s a site for that… or, at least, there will be, when its owner gets finished with it. Keyonary is an online directory of keyboard shortcuts . Using the search bar, you simply type in the shortcut you’d like to find and Keyonary will return it to you.

To be honest, the site’s pretty rough right now, and while the presentation is slick, the owner’s entering all these shortcuts in by hand… which means that while Photoshop and OS X are fairly well covered by Keyonary, there’s a lot of shortcuts for other popular Mac apps still to be filled.

Still, we wanted to point Keyonary out… not because of what it is now, but what we hope a little encouragement will allow it to become: an I Use This for user-submitted shortcuts to all your favorite Mac applications.

We close out a Memorial Day-shortened week with more hardware deals. First up is a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro for $1,098 from Expercom. Next is a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo Mac mini for $799 from the Apple Store. (Apple may introduce a refreshed model of the desktop machine during next week’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Calif.) We round out or top bargains with a MacBook Core 2 Duo running at 2.4GHz for $999 from the Apple Store.

Along the way, we also check out speakers from Macally and Sony, a clock radio for your iPhone or iPod, and the latest batch of App Store freebies, including “Word Droppings,” a word-base action game.

As always, details on these and many other bargains are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

An upscale Manhattan tailor has designed a $600 suit jacket with an iPad pocket.

Mohan’s custom tailors, founded in the 70s before men needed gadget pockets, said the somewhat gimmicky-looking iPad suit is the result of customer requests.

You don’t have to be very sartorially savvy to wonder how the jacket — pictured either flat or with the model holding it — could stand carrying a 1.5 pound device on one side without deforming the fabric or giving you a lopsided look. Mohan’s says it has “several dozen” appointments scheduled for fittings.

As invites roll in for extracurricular activities for WWDC next week, only one so far offers something besides drinks and the same folks you’ve seen all day: a museum-style look at working Apple technology dating back to 1976 — including an original Apple I.

The aptly-named iNSpired tour is sponsored by BoxTone, Mobile Service Management software provider and you’ll get to ogle 25 years of Apple’s insanely great tech as you hobnob with community members over drinks and food. (They promise a “hands-on” experience but keep your potato-chip grease off the keyboards, thanks.)

Apple employee #16, Wendell Sander, aka father of the Apple III, is coming to the party, he’s bringing the Apple I.

Entrance is free for WWDC attendees, spaces are limited, tell them you’re with us (promo code: CultofMacFan) when you register and you’ll be entered in a drawing to win an iPad and a VIP pass.

See you there?

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzWa9gDoQUg&feature=player_embedded

The classic German board game Carcassone has finally come to the iPhone with an official port including original artwork, eight different AI players, a cool looking solitaire mode and Internet multiplayer with push notifications.

From the App Store description: “Build a medieval landscape, tile by tile, claim landmarks with your followers and score points. As a winner of the prestigious “Spiel des Jahres” award in 2001, the game allows for a plethora of play styles and strategies.”

The game’s iPhone-only for now, but a universal iPad version is imminent.

I’ve never played Carcassone but it is a game much beloved by my board-gaming friends. I’ve been eager to get my teeth into this one.

Carcassone can be purchased on the App Store now for just $4.99