Was AT&T’s recent decision to drop its unlimited data plan for iPhone customers a signal the carrier prefers RIM’s BlackBerry over Apple’s handset? The move could turn the tide against the iPhone and in favor of BlackBerry customers comfortable with operating using fewer network resources, one analyst said Wednesday.

“In Canada and Europe, price-sensitive smartphone customers already do more on BlackBerry under data caps,” RBC Capital Markets’ Mike Abramsky told investors. At just 50MB per month, BlackBerry users require one-tenth of the resources of iPhone owners, who can consume between 250-500 MB per month, Abramsky said.

According to Apple Insider, Apple has started to cull programs on the App Store that offer Dashboard-like widgets to the user.

The most tangible evidence of the purge comes from Developer Russell Ivanovic, whose MyFrame app was removed by Apple for including widget support.

Going straight to Steve Jobs, Ivanovic received this reply: “”We are not allowing apps that create their own desktops. Sorry.”

Apple Insider speculates that this might be preparation work for Apple to introduce their own widgets in iPhone OS 4.0, although surely we’d have seen some evidence of that in beta form by now.

An equally valid reason Apple may be shutting dashboard apps down is because of their strict ban against interpretive code, which is essentially what a widget is.

When you write an email to Steve Jobs, he’ll sometimes write you back a letter with the answers to your questions. “>Write a letter to AT&T CEO Randall L. Stephenson, though, and what do you get? A threat of a cease-and-desist, as Girogio Galante found out.

The exchange was prompted by a slightly miffed but non-threatening email to Stephenson in regards to AT&T’s new data rates, in which Galante threatened to leave AT&T for Sprint. His email closed with the line: “Please don’t have one of your $12/hour “Executive Relations” college students call me – I’ve found them to be generally poorly informed… and they have little  authority to do anything sensible.”

Yet it was one of those very same “$12/Hour ‘Executive Relations’ college students” who called Giorgio. His name was Brent, and after calling Giorgio to “thank him” for the feedback, but while this “college student” may not have been authorized to do anything “sensible,” he was apparently authorized to threaten Galante with legal action if he ever dared to email AT&T’s CEO again.

Could anything better exemplify AT&T’s total contempt for their customers? If you write Steve Jobs, you might have a heated exchange with him, but at least he’s listening. Just attempting to communicate with AT&T, though, is enough to get you potentially sued. What dicks.

In one of the more mysterious statements of the day, HP chief Mark Hurd claims that his company didn’t buy Palm and its webOS operating system to enter the smartphone business, but rather to drive “small form factor web-connected devices.” You know. Tablets and MIDs.

Hurd claimed that HP had no interest in spending “billions of dolllars” trying to get into the smartphone business. “That doesn’t in any way make any sense.”

Uh, really? As Apple has amply proven with the iPhone and iPad, the future of computing is mobile. Whoever controls most of the operating system space in the mobile arena is going to profit big time: this is exactly the reason why Google is licensing their Android operating system for free.

But in actuality, the reason mobile computing is the future isn’t because you can make telephone calls or text messages on mobile devices: that’s just the reason that gets them initially into people’s pockets. It’s mobile internet that’s the future, and someday, our smartphones are probably going to be just tiny, 3G-capable tablets with VoIP capabilities that we keep in our pockets.

While Apple and Google battle it out in the smartphone arena, perhaps HP is playing it smart after all, and trying to position itself to be ready to pounce in the post-smartphone future which iPhone and Android create.

Artist johannes-p-osterhoff pwned the squeaky clean iPad advert in a Berlin subway station by putting porn in right before the device launched in Germany.

The attention gained from his protest over the “porn-free device” crashed his server, so osterhoff (who prefers to go all lowercase) got back to us just now on how he did it, sending Cult of Mac exclusive photos of his guerilla art operation at the Rosenthaler Platz stop in Berlin’s subway.

A few of our especially astute readers thought the osterhoff’s Photoshop skills could use work, but as you can see in the above pic, his protest over the allegedly porn-free iPad was an old school cut-and-paste operation.

Less than a week after its long overdue update allowing VoIP calls over the iPhone’s 3G connection, nearly five million people have already downloaded the latest update to the popular Skype App from iTunes.

Of course, that’s five million people who are going to go absolutely bonkers when Skype starts inexplicably charging for 3G calls at the beginning of next year.

According to Skype, they are charging to make sure they can maintain quality on Skype-to-Skype calls, but I can’t help but wonder if the long delay in bringing 3G calls to Skype was a roadblock placed by AT&T, who — rightly — see a 3G capable Skype as a threat ti their minutes business… especially once iPhone OS 4.0 comes around and enables VoIP multi-trasking.

This is a guest commentary by Shawn Ahmed, a anti-poverty campaigner. It was originally published here.

Last week, Apple surpassed Microsoft to become the world’s biggest tech company. As someone who used to spell Microsoft with a dollar sign, I can’t believe what I’m about to say: this is a bad thing for the world.

Verizon spokesman John Johnson says the company will not have the iPhone any time soon.

“No plans to carry the iPhone in the immediate future,” he told Beet.TV. Instead, Johnson makes a plug for “incredible Android devices.”

The news has got to come as a disappointment to Verizon customers hoping to get their hands on Apple’s gear, as well as AT&T customers hoping to switch to what’s considered the best network in the U.S.

Verizon has been long rumored to get the iPhone, but those rumors now look like wishful thinking. Unless, of course, Verizon has taken to Apple’s tactic of denying interest in a product right up until they launch it.

Via 9to5Mac.

Sonos’ popular S5 music player is now available in black.

The $400 all-in-one S5 system is controlled by an innovative iPhone app, and is a good way to build a multi-room music system.

See Adam Rosen’s How To Setup Affordable Multi-Room Audio Using iTunes [MacRx].

Information management application Yojimbo was updated today, and version 2.2 adds an interesting new feature called “Sidekick”.

Sidekick creates a kind of “Yojimbo-to-go” export of all your notes (or a subset of them if you prefer). This is done by turning the notes into a self-contained mini website that you can put anywhere on your Mac or your network.

The iPhonePortugal website has posted two videos taking a closer look at the chassis of the new 4G iPhone. There are no surprises, but it is interesting to see how closely the industrial design of the iPhone 4G matches the iPad and new MacBook Pros.

Like the white iPhone case showcased by PowerBook Medic, these seem to be spare parts, purchased in China. iPhonePortugal is at pains to point out the parts were obtained legally:

These parts were purchased in China by one of our readers (weren’t stolen or found) then delivered to us. We will not reveal the price.

Are those parts genuine? We can not know but we can tell for sure those parts are perfect, have no defects, not faulty at all, there is not even one single difference between the 2 copies we have.

Exclusivo – Chassis do iPhone 4G

Rumors of a white 4G iPhone are long in the tooth, but here’s what appears to be proof that Apple will offer a white version of the next iPhone — photos of a white case that were sent to PowerbookMedic.

These are pictures of what appear to be spare parts –PowerbookMedic is a repair shop — but don’t appear to be the final versions. The text on the back is placeholder text. As well as the back case, PowerbookMedic also has images of a white front panel and some chassis parts.

The 4G iPhone is likely to be introduced at next week’s WWDC.

Anyone think white is becoming passé?

Today is a MacBook and MacBook Pro bonanza. Our top three picks include new MacBook Pros, starting at $1,099, along with a $759 2.26GHz MacBook and a 2.88GHz MacBook Pro for $1,899.

We’ll also check out a $929 unibody MacBook Pro, the latest crop of App Store freebies (including the multiplayer action game “Finger vs. Finger”) and deals on iPod shuffles and others.

As always, details on these and many other items are at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page, which starts right after the jump.

If you believe iPads are not just for keeping the offspring entertained during car trips, there are numbers to back that up.

Half of the top ten paid iPad apps are “productivity tools,” in other words, apps that grown-ups use for work.

According to Distimo, a start-up that analyzes app stats, the top two paid iPad apps in April are word processor Pages and Goodreader, a large-file PDF enabler.

Pinball HD is the only game in the top five paid apps at spot no. 3, followed by note taker app Penultimate and presentation app Keynote.  (You can download the full report here.)

iMaria is a virtual girlfriend app billed as your very own English play pal. But the developers struggled with the “hot Brit chick,”  concept seeing as the virtual girl is in fact embodied by Playboy model Maria Eriksson, who is Croatian. (More at her NSFW site.)

So, well, at least she’s great to look at, right? Sure, but a come-hither look and perma-tousled hair is about as far as you’ll get with iTunes enforced no-porn rules.

She’s been iDubbed to have a “cute English accent,” and your interaction with her hinges around some pretty banal activities: should she cook for you? Or should you take her out? You can then choose what you eat, too. She does look pretty suggestive peeling those potatoes for your English stay-at-home meals but is that’s about it.

Apple TV remains just a hobby, the Cupertino, Calif. company’s chief executive said in a Tuesday interview. The problem: the cable industry.

Cable operators “give everybody a set-top box for free, or for $10 per month,” Steve Jobs told an audience at the All Things Digital conference. “That pretty much squashes any opportunity for innovation, because nobody’s willing to buy a set-top box,” he said.

“My God, we can build a phone with this.” That was Apple CEO Steve Jobs reaction when a designer at the Cupertino, Calif. firm turned an early version of the iPad into what later became the iPhone. “So we put the tablet aside and we went to work on the iPhone,” Jobs said, recalling the moment in an interview Tuesday during Wall Street Journal’s D8 technology gathering.

Jobs initially had the idea of a glass display permitting people to to type with their fingers. Within six months, Apple engineers created the display. In an ironic twist, the iPad outsold the iPhone’s debut, when the tablet device was finally introduced in April. Apple sold one million iPads in 28 days, a milestone that took the iPhone 74 days to reach, the company announced in early May. (The Cupertino, Calif. company recently announced it sold more than 2 million iPads in less than 60 days.)

We all know what Steve Jobs thinks about Flash, and the steps he’s taken to keep it well away from his mobile devices.

But Flash is a fact of life on the web, and avoiding it on your desktop computer isn’t quite so easy. But not impossible.

If you like to power your way round the web, you’re probably in the habit of opening lots of links as background tabs to read later. If those tabs contain Flash content, things can quickly get annoying. Either stuff starts playing automatically and you can’t find the right tab to stop it, or too much stuff loads and your computer’s fans start whirring as if their lives depended on it.

Iomega has just released a new slate of eGo portable external hard drives, and at least a couple happily have support for Apple’s own Firewire standard.

The first Mac-friendly eGo is the 1TB eGo BlackBelt Mac Edition, which has both FireWire 400.800 and USB 2.0 connections, as well as Iomega Drop Guard protection and a Power Grip band around the casing which will protect your data against falls of up to seven feet. It’s a pricy drive, though, at $229.99.

Iomega’s second Mac-happy eGo is the Mac Edition eGo Desktop Hard drive, which comes in flavors between 1TB and 2TB, and again comes with FireWire 400/800 and USB 2.0 support. It costs between $149.99 and $229.99.

Additionally, all drives come with a complimentary 12 month subscription to Trend Micro Smart Surfing software for Mac, Iomega QuikProtect backup software, EMC Retrospect Express backup software and MozyHome Online Backup service. That’s a pretty impressive list of software extras.

You should be able to find both drives at Apple stores later this month.

Looking for a display just as big and gorgeous as the iMac’s 27-inch screen for your MacPro? HP has just announced a new 30-inch monitor that will finally give your beautiful machine the LCD it deserves.

The HP ZR30w boasts a resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels in a 16:10 aspect ratio, and — according to HP — achieves more than 64 times the colors available on mainstream LCD, with 100 percent accuracy in sRGB colors and 99 percent accuracy in Adobe RGBs. The end result is red, blues and greens that are visibly more lurid.

The new display comes with DisplayPort and DVI-D inputs, as well as an integrated 4-port USB hub and a 6-way adjustable stand. It all comes in dark but decidedly un-Mac-like brushed aluminum.

It’s a gorgeous, albeit slightly beefy display, make no mistake. Unfortunately, the big issue here is the price: the HP ZR30w is a lot of monitor, and it costs a lot of money. $1,299, to be exact. Consider the price of the 27-inch iMac, which is only $400 more expensive: it really is like Cupertino just sold people a top of the line display and threw an amazing Mac in there as a heavily discounted bargain.

Although Steve Jobs seems to think the Foxconn suicides are being overblown, Apple’s “all over” the problem, a new email exchange reveals.

Responding to an Apple fan who forwarded Jobs an e-mail campaign protesting the way Foxconn workers are being treated in China, Steve responded:

“Although every suicide is tragic, Foxconn’s suicide rate is well below the China average. We are all over this.”

Our good friend Graham Bower likes to occasionally send some of his gorgeous Apple product mock-ups our way. His latest creation is a direct response to the recent rumor that the next Apple TV will be a $99 iPhone OS device that streams media to your television set, and answers the question: how do you control a multitouch operating system without a touchscreen?

The answer: make the remote a touchscreen. Graham’s idea is that Apple would ship the new Apple TV with a remote similar to the Magic Mouse, along with a built-in accelerometer.

I’ve mulled over this idea for the Apple TV’s remote before. On first blush, it seems like a great solution, but here’s the problem: the only way a device like this can work is if it introduces some sort of pointer to iPhone OS. For multitouch to work on a display divorced from the actual input device (ie: for multitouch to work when you’re not directly touching the screen on which graphical elements are displayed), you need some sort of icon to show you where your “fingers” are.

Patents are usually dry, dull affairs, but this latest Apple patent has an elegant beauty to it that is more than a little bit breathtaking.

Yes, it’s for a solar-powered iPhone, but Apple being Apple, they’ve got a better solution to solar-charging than just a bunch of ugly panels stuck to the back of the device: the energy collection cells are actually hidden underneath the display. The iPhone itself would look no different, but lay it out in the sun and it will juice itself up.

After just two months of (perhaps overconfidently) offering a $29.99 unlimited, month-by-month data plan to purchasers of the iPad, Ma Bell has already killed it off… and are now replacing it with a vastly inferior and more pricy plan.

The new plan — called DataPro — offers 2GB of data per month for $25. Go over 2GB in a month and you’re charged another $25, with your 30 day window to use that 2GB resetting itself.

Think that’s bad? It gets worse. AT&T is also canceling unlimited data for the iPhone. Current subscribers get to keep their $30 all-you-can-eat plans, but when you new customers or contract renewers will now only get 2GB of data.

The positive side? After over a year of waffling on it, AT&T are finally bringing tethering to the table with iPhone OS 4.0. But you have to pay an additional $20 a month for it, and you’re still only limited to 2GB. To put this in perspective, this is twice as much as Verizon charges for 5GB of tethering data on a $29.99 unlimited monthly data plan.

Our succinct thoughts on the matter, after the jump.

The Chinese are always quick-on-the-draw with their knockoffs, but this may be the first time we’ve seen a iPhone doppelganger before the handset its emulating is even officially announced.

It’s called the GPS iPhone, and it looks pretty convincing. You know, except for the telescoping television antenna. Somehow, I think Ive would choose to do that a little bit differently. You could gouge your eye out on that thing.