Today, we check out a new bevy of MacBook Pros, including a 13-inch, 2.4GHz unit for $1,125. We’ll also take a look at the latest batch of App Store price drops, including “Cartoon Rescue,” a game for the iPhone and iPod touch. We wrap up our top trio of deals with a portable solar cell phone charger that includes a 650mAh lithium-ion battery, iPhone connections and USB.

Along the way, we take a peak at the Logitech Squeezebox Radio System, software for the iPhone and Mac, as well as more hardware gadget bargains. As always, for details, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page which starts right after the jump.

Rally Up, the newish location based social networking app, released an update for iPad Thursday that immediately puts the upstart application ahead of the game for people who want to keep track of and interact with their friends on the iPad.

Taking full advantage of the iPad’s increased real estate, Rally Up’s unique map-based canvas gives the app a level of functionality and makes it interesting in ways that market leaders Foursquare and Gowalla have yet to achieve. By designing the app to take advantage of iPad’s support for popping info out and overlaying things on the same screen, Rally Up manages to let its users interact with the app in fewer taps and screen changes, allowing for more time to browse and interact with the content being constantly generated by users’ friends.

Because iPad usage patterns are likely to skew towards more time spent lingering over applications than the quick, get-in-and-get-out experience many desire from the iPhone, Rally Up’s focus on content — and the way it presents all of a user’s friends and their feeds in a single, map-based global view — makes using it a decidedly more immersive experience than other social networking apps can so far provide.

“The iPad really changes the experience of a [location based social app],” said Rally Up founder Sol Lipman. “It becomes less of a push app and more of a pull app, in my opinion. You want to sit and explore, not just wait until your friend tells you what they’re up to.”

A lot of bytes and ink have been spent on whether the iPad is good for anything but games or gently ushering your computer-phobic granny into the digital age.

Proof the device is good enough for real business, Norway’s prime minister Jens Stoltenberg reportedly ran his country from an iPad while stuck at the airport in New York yesterday.

While Stoltenberg was grounded due to volcanic eruptions in Iceland, his staff thought it best to let citizens know he was still busy with state affairs, sans tie and what looks to be a fairly regular airport lounge, by updating the state Flickr account with a photo titled “The Prime Minister is Working At the Airport.”

Even though everyday Norwegians won’t be able to buy an iPad in stores for at least another month, it’s nice to see the PM is an early adopter.

Via Flickr

The 3G version of the iPad will be released internationally in May, according to emails purported to come from Steve Jobs, CEO of the Cupertino, Calif. company.

In response to one developer’s email about whether both U.S. and International 3G iPads would be delayed until the end of April, Jobs succinctly answered “yes.” In another email, Jobs actually apologized to an international user about the delay for shipping both the WiFi and 3G versions of the tablet device.: “Both models will be released at the end of May. Sorry for the delay,” Jobs reportedly replied.

Israel has banned all iPad imports — yes, that means even bringing one on business or vacation — over concerns that higher-powered wireless receivers and transmitters in the device may disrupt national networks.

The iPad will be device non grata in Israel until authorities certify that the computers comply with local standards. About 10 unlucky iPad owners have had the devices confiscated so far. Visitors see their devices held in custody — racking up fines — until they depart the country.

“If you operate equipment in a frequency band which is different from the others that operate on that frequency band, then there will be interference,” Nati Schubert, a senior deputy director for the Communications Ministry told AP. “We don’t care where people buy their equipment … but without regulation, you would have chaos.”

Can online stores become more friendly, more like brick-and-mortar retailers that take personal note of customers? That’s the goal of a new Apple patent application aiming to blend Internet sales and social networking.

The patent, filed in mid-December of 2009 and revealed this week, titled “Enhancing Online Social Atmosphere,” describes online shopping as frequently “sterile and isolating” and not the optimum method for encouraging consumers to loosen their pursestrings. The Cupertino, Calif. company hopes to employ social networking to increase the “linger” factor and make shoppers more sensitive to the buying habits of others.

“We (are) working on integrating this technology into our latest apps,” says the Form Group.

Reader @Trott asks if this actually works. I just tried it out. Here’s the result:

Signs increasingly point to June as the timeframe Apple will announce its new iPhone. A Canadian mobile phone company announced Thursday it will receive Apple’s fourth-generation handset this summer. Wednesday, a report suggested the new iPhone would arrive around June 22, to coincide with the annual WWDC.

Along with news SaskTel’s one million users will have a 3G network up and running by July 1, President and CEO Robert Watson also said “The good news is that (Apple) is coming out with a new version of the iPhone in the June time-frame and they’re going to put us on that,” according to reports.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bvdYhlbjRc

Utterly fantastic. Joypad is an iPhone app that operates as a virtual, touch-controlled gaming pad for emulators on your Mac. All you do is run a free helper program under OS X, launch the iPhone app and you’re ready to crush some Koopas. It seems to work pretty well, and at $2, is cheaper than even the most remedial USB pad you can find. You may not be able to play emulated games on your iPhone, but that’s not to say you can’t control them.

[via Gadget Lab]

This week’s MacBook Pros were pretty much cutting-edge all over, but they were missing one major upgrade: USB 3.0 ports. After all, the transition is already under way, and the newest version of USB can move over 5GBps, over ten times faster than USB 2.0 and about six and a half times faster than Firewire 800.

Still, maybe Cupertino’s waiting to see how USB 3.0 now that Intel’s Light Peak standard (which is rumored to be Apple-inspired) is making its way to market. Intel Light Peak pundit Kevin Kahn has gone on record saying that he believes that the standard will be available in computers and laptops by 2011, and totally replace USB 3.0 over the course of the next few years.

“We view this as a logical future successor to USB 3.0,” Kahn said. “In some sense[s] we’d… like to build the last cable you’ll ever need.”

A noble goal. Considering USB 3.0 has barely been adopted yet, and given that Light Peak is twice as fast, it may very well behoove Apple to wait until 2011… then start shipping Light Peak capable machines that sync even the largest iTunes libraries in mere seconds.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7ksSDAc9ns

There’s no shortage of ways to kill zombies on the iPhone. Blast them in the head with a shotgun, gobble them up with a venus flytrap, or hit them with a car. Even so, Meridian Digital Entertainment’s Smash TV like, Alive 4-Ever, was one of the more satisfying ways to blow apart fetid corpse flesh around… and the upcoming sequel, Alive 4-Ever Returns, while out-stupiding the naming paradigm of its predecessor, looks even better with its new graphics engine, zombies, skills, power-ups, weapons and environmental effects. It should be available later this month.

It’s a sure thing that the iPad will get a camera in its second generation. After all, there’s already an empty, iSight-shaped slot in the iPad’s frame, and it’s pretty much a sure thing that both the next iPhone and iPod Touch will have a camera. It would be absurd if the iPad didn’t get one soon as well.

Apple must be thinking the same thing. Over at their official site, Apple has posted an employment opportunity for a performance QA engineer to work on still and video capture in the iPad Media department.

A recently chatty Steve Jobs has once again rattled off a personal email on his iPad, this time to an Apple fan worried that Cupertino was ignoring Final Cut Pro.

Customer Alex J wrote to Jobs:

Getting worried about Apple’s interest in Final Cut. Last updates were not stellar. I heard a bunch of engineers were dropped too – give us a sign you still care about Pro Video, not just the iPad.

Jobs typically terse but surprisingly good-natured response:

We certainly do. Folks who left were in support, not engineering. Next release will be awesome.

“Awesome?” That’s all well and good, Steve. Just assure us that the next Final Cut Pro will be bodacious, tubular and radical as well.

Mobile Safari’s method of handling multiple pages groks well with the iPhone’s small touchscreen, but on the iPad, it seems slow and cumbersome when there’s plenty of real estate for desktop Safari’s standard method of navigating between open websites: tabs.

Atomic Web Browser ($0.99, Free) brings tabs back to the iPhone OS. Better, it does so elegantly even on an iPhone or iPod Touch.

One of the major improvements of the latest MacBook Pros is in battery life: the 13-inch MacBook Pro is now boasting an impressive ten hour battery life, while even the more power hungry 15 and 17 inchers are promising eight to nine hours of mobile performance.

How’s Apple doing it? Dynamic graphics switching between the workhorse NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M and the low-power Intel HD GPUs. MacBook Pros have had the ability to switch between GPUs since last year, but it was a user preference that required a reboot. Now, the MacBook Pro handles the graphics switching automatically, without the user ever having to worry about it.

The icaseBelt from Austrian company Urban Tool is a modern version of the old-fashioned fanny pack, retooled for the iPhone/iPod age. It holds everything you might need for a day trip or jog, and includes built-in controls for your iPod.

Trouble is, the icaseBelt is way too cool for someone my age, but I like it anyway.

The tweet-world is in a tizzy after news last week that Twitter snapped up both the Tweetie desktop client and iPhone app, as a first step to re-releasing the $3 app as Twitter’s free, official iPhone client.

While iPhone twittaholics might be pretty pumped about the move — the Cult’s Pete Mortensen has said Tweetie 2 is not just the best Twitter app, but “the best iPhone app, period” — Twitter app developers are less jazzed.

In fact, Mashable says there seemed to be a lot of nervousness and uncertainty at an investment panel Wednesday during day one of Chirp, the first Twitter developers conference, in San Francisco — the problem being that Twitter has apparently been leaving developers in the dark with regard to its plans, as last week’s sudden and unexpected acquisition illustrates.

[via Mashable]

Apple sold an impressive 1.4 million Macs in the first quarter of 2010, says research firm Gartner, recording very healthy 34% year-on-year growth. The PC market as a whole grew about 25% — the biggest first quarter volume ever, Gartner says. Apple is the fifth-largest PC maker in the U.S. with an 8% share of the PC market. Gartner attributes the massive Mac sales to “hype” around the iPad, but it’s more likely the ever-popular MacBooks and new iMacs, which were refreshed before the holidays.

“Apple created major attention with its media tablet, the iPad, which launched in April. The hype around the iPad certainly added positive sentiment to the company as PC shipments. Early estimates showed that Apple grew 34 percent in the U.S. market.”

Meanwhile, rival research firm IDC released significantly different estimates. According to IDC, Mac shipments were 1.13 million units, earning Apple a 6.4% market share. IDC also pegs Apple as the fifth-largest U.S. PC maker, but estimates Apple’s year-over-year growth is just 8.3 percent, and market share is 7.2%. Both Gartner and IDC warn that their numbers are preliminary and final numbers will be “available soon to clients.”

The MacBook Air may be light but its reputation has been weighed down by overheating problems that Apple attempted to patch up with a fix in 2008.

This scorching photo comes from Sarah, who says her 1-year-old machine branded her:

I got this burn an hour into working Monday morning, after picking up my machine from the desk to walk it to a different room. I picked it up with my right hand, set it on my left hand and in the crook of my arm as I grabbed the cord, and almost immediately dropped it because it was so hot. So probably a few seconds of contact led to a burn mark that’s still there 3 days later.

Continue reading

Just a day after Apple approved it,  the Opera Mini Web Browser app is topping free downloads on iTunes stores around the world. At this writing, it is number one of the top ten free iTunes downloads in all 22 iTunes stores — from Japan to Sweden,  Australia to Austria.

In the 20 days it took to get a thumbs up from Apple, expectations were high, and as our reviewer Giles Turnbull discovered, mostly met: it’s a fast workhorse that plows through downloads even with spotty connections. On the downside, Giles found the zoom controls a little stiff and the overview display somewhat basic.

So, users of the Opera mini-browser: does it warrant the first-place spot or are the massive downloads just a fad?

We’ve reached midweek and we start with two deals on MacBook Pros, plus a peak inside the latest batch of freebies from the App Store. First up, is a MacBook Pro bundle that includes three-year AppleCare service, starting at $1,358. Next a some refurbished unibody MacBook Pros, starting at $929 for a 2.26GHz model. Finally, with the weather so changing and you’re not sure if it is going to rain, snow or haul off and shake the ground, a mobile weather station might come in handy. The App Store has something close — iWeather Lookup — and it is free.

Along the way, we’ll check out a new deal on iPhone 3Gs, the latest freebie from iTunes and some software to keep your PDF files safe. As always, details on these and many other bargains are available on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Two analysts Wednesday told investors Apple’s stock price could hit up to $300 over the next year, a mark helped by high-flying expectations for sales of the iPhone, Mac and iPad. Apple is scheduled to release its quarterly earnings report early next week on April 20.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster expects Apple shares to touch the $299 point within a year, upping his early projection of $287. Munster bases his new stock price on a slip-of-the-tongue by Apple, when the Cupertino, Calif. company announced it had shipped more than 50 million iPhones. That figure may mean Apple sold 7.8 million iPhones during the March quarter, higher than Munster’s expectation for 7.5 million iPhones sold during the first quarter of 2010.

Here’s a nice story from Victor Keegan, the Guardian’s recently-retired technology editor, about how he created his own iPhone poetry app.

This month I finally left the Guardian after nearly 47 years. At the end of last week I had my 70th birthday and today my first iPhone app came out. Life is full of surprises.

More info about Keegan’s City Poems app can be found here on Facebook.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ7_MOs9ffw

One of the great things about the App Store is how it’s leveled the game development playing field: for the first time since the late 80s, a single developer coding in his bedroom can be competitive both graphically and presentationally with larger developers.

Case in point: Brainphant’s Vertigo Rogue, an action game that literally came out of nowhere and is to helicopters what Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars was to cars. Not only does it feature intuitive controls, a huge, detailed 3D city and frenetic blow-em-all-up action, but Brainphant even programmed in stereoscopic 3D glasses support. You know, like James Cameron used.

At $4.99, Brainphant’s Vertigo Rogue is looking like a strong contender for my weekend time sink. If you need more convincing, check out Touch Arcade’s spot-on review.

This incredible infographic from Information is Beautiful really puts the iTunes business model in perspective: for the vast majority of artists, iTunes gives them a significantly larger share of the revenue than traditional retail outlets, and orders of magnitude more cash than any other digital music service out there.

Full infographic and breakdown after the jump.