In his emails to Apple customers who take the time to write him and ask him questions, Steve Jobs usually comes across as a really busy guy who, despite his workload, is really trying his best to maintain a human, one-on-one connection to his customers.

On some other occasions, though, Jobs will occasionally comes across as a devastating master of pith, capable of infusing a few matter-of-fact words with a palpably scornful undercurrent, as if — if he wasn’t just so darn busy all the time — he might instead muse for a few hundred words on just what it must be like to be as stupid as the quivering, moronic biomass to which he must deign to pander… and of which his correspondent is just one molecularly small part.

Whether the specific email from Jobs that is the subject of this post comes across as the former type of Jobsian communiqué or the latter is up to you. Either way, it contains at least one new bit of information about the iPad: you won’t be able to tether it to your iPhone.

Apple just premiered the very first iPad commercial during the first ad break of tonight’s Academy Awards. It was very good, just a rock song and demoing every imaginable feature while continually rotating from portrait to landscape. We’ll post as soon as Apple or Youtube does. Embed from Engadget now in post. Real Apple version here.

Thanks for the finds, Mitchell and Paolo!

Edit: And CNET caught Steve Jobs on the red carpet.

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 Angry Birds, Bloom, FallDown!, Icy Escort, RandomPlay, Sir Revs-a-Lot, SteamPunk Hockey, Vector Runner

Design collective Quirky just launched this earbud detangler that looks like a pocket protector for the aughts.

Cute, colorful and just $5, Wrapster is made out of bendable rubber. It keeps your wires uncrossed when you’re wearing an iPod and stores them when you’re not.

Perhaps if nerds start wearing what look like 4-inch safety scissors in their front pockets, those annoying co-workers who waste their time with questions like “How do I clear cookies from Firefox?” will start running for cover.

The Italian priest who launched prayer app iBreviary has now slashed the price from $0.99 to gratis.

Given the popularity of the app, Don Paolo Padrini decided to give the current version away for free. (Profits from the app previously went to refurbishing a parish shelter.)

Available in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin and an  Ambrosian Rite version (for mobile Milanese), this virtual breviary, or book of hours, gives the morning prayer, evening prayer and night prayer or complines for the day. It is the first app of its kind to obtain approval from the Vatican.

As a paid app, it was in the top 100 of its category (reference) beating out similar mobile prayer helpers like iPieta and iMissal.

What’s next? Don Padrini tells us his developers are hard at work on an iPad version they hope will be ready to launch when the new device hits stores in March.

Have you ever been in this predicament: you’re on the road with your laptop and you want to listen to some tunes, but don’t want to haul out the external speakers that will give justice to your music? Or, maybe you are traveling and all you have is the laptop’s built-in speakers? Why compromise between between good sound and convenience? Logitech has introduced the perfect middle-ground: laptop speakers that easily attach to the screen of your laptop or netbook.

The Laptop Speaker z205 (pictured) is just 1.35 inches thick and 2.5 inches tall. But good things come in small packages. The $39.99 unit includes two high-performance drivers, built-in amp and an acoustically-tuned enclosure for “superior audio quality,” Logitech claims.

We close out another week with a trio of hardware deals. In the spotlight is a deal on 3.06GHz 22-inch iMacs from ExperCom. The desktop computers are outfitted with 8GB of RAM and AppleCare for $1,399. (There are other iMacs available in today’s deals.) Also on tap: MacBook Pro laptops, starting at $849. We round out our top trio with deals on Mac Pro Xeon workstations starting at $2,149 for a 2.66GHz model.

Along the way, we check out a new crop of App Store freebies, including the game “Scoops – Ice Cream Fun for Everyone.” In addition, we take a look at some storage options and new bargains on Mac software.

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

Speculation over whether or not Verizon will get a contract to sell the iPhone is pointless. But no matter the outcome, Apple is on track to sell at least 35 million of the iconic handsets in 2011, an analyst told investors Friday.

Merrill Lynch analyst Scott Craig said selling 33 million iPhones this year is “basically achievable” this year, no matter if Verizon becomes the second handset carrier this year or AT&T remains Apple’s exclusive carrier throughout the remainder of 2010.

Back in the mists of time at the dawn of the Gadget Age, Richard Thalheimer’s Sharper Image was one of the more highly regarded purveyors of well-made, interesting and sometimes even useful products for the discerning gadgeteer. Starting out as a catalog selling jogging watches in 1977, The Sharper Image eventually grew into a heavy hitting company selling high-end consumer gadgetry through dozens of retail stores throughout the US as well as its monthly catalog and website, before imploding in bankruptcy in 2008.

The end for The Sharper Image was drawn out over a couple of years and after being forced from his position as CEO in 2006, Thalheimer founded RichardSolo, an online venture completely unrelated to The Sharper Image, in 2007. Recently RichardSolo debuted its own line of portable charging solutions for iPhone, iPod and other smartphones, proving sometimes it’s smart to dance with the date that brung ya.

The RichardSolo lineup is eerily reminiscent of items that might have been found at The Sharper Image back in the day, updated of course to reflect technology’s advances: in addition to chargers, there are cases, speakers, docks headsets and personal stereo devices, all in the $29 to $199 range and all featuring a design aesthetic positioned to lend the buyer a claim to a certain degree of coolness. Beyond the realm of personal gadgetry the company offers everything from massage chairs to body monitors to travel and Earth Friendly items. And yes, even jogging watches.

Although I generally find a reason to pick them up anyway, I was particularly enamored with MacHeist’s last nanoBundle, which offered some really fantastic Mac apps (including my all-time favorite, distraction-free text editor, WriteRoom) for, well, nothing.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to beat free, which makes MacHeist’s sequel to the nanoBundle a little harder to recommend: it costs $20. Still, complaining about a few fins is just greedy when you’re looking at this amount of cheap quality software, including MacJournal, RipIt, Clips, CoverScout and Flow.

As usual, there’s further incentive to buy: once 50,000 people purchase the bundle, Tales of Monkey Island will be unlocked, with Rapidweaver to be unlocked at an unspecified point thereafter. I don’t believe MacHeist has ever failed to unlock every title in their bundles, regardless of sales, so you can probably consider it a sure-thing that you’ll get these two titles as well.

These are some great apps, each one of which normally costs more than the $20 asking price of the bundle. Even if you’re only interested in one or two of these titles, this is an impulse buy you can feel good about.

Not long ago, up to 30% of App Store downloads belonged to the Games category, which — when the total number of games is counted in the billions — means a lot of games. Dedicated gamers, then, would stand to benefit from some way of organizing, tracking and getting information about all the games in the App Store, right? Hey, as the saying goes: there’s an app for that.

Well, not an app, actually, but a website. AppSpy.com is a nifty clearinghouse of information on all things mobile gaming for the iPhone, with a handy tracking feature that alerts registered users to price drops on their most coveted apps. In addition to being alerted when prices drop, users can read and watch quality reviews of all the hot new games and gather information on the latest iPhone gaming news. “We wanted to design an easy to use site that will improve user experience while shopping for Apps,” says founder Adam McKinnon. “AppSpy.com makes it easier to find exactly what you’re looking for.”

Up to six game reviews are released daily, including full video reviews which demonstrate actual game play. All videos are linked to AppSpy’s popular YouTube channel. Reviews include a list of pros and cons, verdict, screenshots and a 1 to 5 rating system.

Just this week Books overtook Games as the leading App Store category in terms of the number of offerings, perhaps heralding the dawn of the iPad era. But Games are sure to remain popular and may even grow with the introduction of Apple’s new device. Either way AppSpy.com should remain a great way for Apple’s mobile gamers to keep their eyes on the prize.

Word that Apple will ship the iPad April 3 and accept pre-orders Mar. 12 comes on the heels of the second analyst to talk delays. Thursday, an analyst said a ‘minor hiccup’ in production means Apple will need to wait until at least April before manufacturing ramps-up to 1 million iPads a month.

Temporary production issues resulted in just 200,000 to 250,000 iPads produced in March after an unexpected slowdown in February for Taiwanese manufacturers, according to Vijay Rakesh, analyst with Think Equity.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzwLOqC2kVI

It was perhaps inevitable that Old Spice’s surrealist Manmercial campaign would eventually yield an Apple-specific parody. It’s a simple formula: just take the shirtless, dripping beefcake of the Old Spice ad, replace it with a doughy nerd in a turtleneck and change the can of Old Spice into an Apple product.

Predictable or not, though, neo-fight.tv‘s adaptation is worth an early Friday morning chuckle, especially on a day when we’re all celebrating the iPad’s officially announced release date.

Rest assured: it all ends on a horse. Natch.

The original Old Spice Manmercial after the jump.

The potential for Apple’s iPad to be wildly successful is a concern for more than direct rivals of the Cupertino, Calif. company. If the iPad becomes yet another hot product, expect flash memory to be even more expensive and don’t hold your breath for solid state drives to replace traditional hard drives on PCs, warns a Friday report.

“With the iPad likely to grab most memory supplies, prices may increase causing higher prices for SSDs,” writes industry publication Digitimes, citing an unnamed source. Apple currently consumes nearly one-third of the total flash (or NAND) memory supplies, the report says.

It’s official! After a month and a half of eager anticipation, Apple has announced the U.S. launch date of the iPad.

You’ll be able to pick up the iPad WiFi on April 3rd, with the iPad 3G coming later in the month.

Pre-orders start next Friday on March 12th through Apple’s online store.

International roll-out in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK of both the iPad WiFi and iPad 3G will happen in late April.

Hurrah! The end is in sight! So much for those rumored delays: this puts the iPad launch exactly within the 60-90 day launch window Steve Jobs promised on January 27th.

Who else will be compulsively refreshing Apple.com on March 12th along with me?

Press release after the fold.

Apple’s always struggled to keep its laptops both cool and quiet. Steve Jobs is notoriously perturbable in regards to fan noise, which means the fans on Macs, when present, kick in a lot less often than on their PC counterparts. A lot of the true engineering genius of the unibody aluminum MacBooks are in the way they effectively dissipate heat while keeping the fans turned low.

It’s a great solution for now, but laptops are just going to burn hotter in the coming years, not cooler. Forward thinking Apple isn’t going to sit on its haunches when it comes to notebook heat dissipation. They’ve filed for four separate patents related to cooling efficiency in future Macs: one for venting heat through open USB and FireWire ports, two addressing a notebook’s ability to adjust its performance dynamically based upon airflow measurements, and one that outlines a plan to use heat conductive hinge assemblies.

As usual, there’s no telling just when, or even if, we’ll see these patents rolled out into actual Apple products, but it’s good to know Apple’s staying on top of the problem as computers continue to burn hotter. After upgrading to a unibody MacBook, I couldn’t go back to my first-gen’s proclivity for scrotum searing if I tried.

Ahh, bless ’em. The hacks at The Sun aren’t famous for hard-hitting investigative journalism, but at least you’d expect them to know an iPhone app when they see one.

A couple of weeks ago a builder fooled them (and the Daily Mail) into believing that he’d taken a photo of a ghostly boy on a building site in Hull.

But as the internet pointed out shortly afterwards, anyone can make the exact same ghostly figure appear pretty much anywhere they like, thanks to the Ghost Capture app for iPhone.

Even funnier are some of the comments posted under the stories. On the Daily Mail’s version, for example, Mel from Stroud says:

“i am mildly psychic and i snese this boy was evacualted from the war,his father died,his mother died of old age,he lives with an old couple and this used to be his school,hopes this helps everyone”

(To be honest, I don’t think for a minute that the journalists at either paper actually believed that the photo was real, and they probably did instantly work out where it came from. But The Sun’s purpose is to entertain as much as it is to inform – so they wrote it up in all innocent seriousness, knowing that readers with a clue would be in on the joke. And that some readers would fall for it.)

(Via Macenstein, Know Your Mobile, Tabloid Watch, and half the rest of the internet.)

Oh. My. God.

Forget the iPad, kids, just forget it forever. You don’t need one anymore. Because the guys at E4 have created… ePad. It’s more than amazing. It’s amazinger.

Don’t just take my word for it. Watch this video for the full details.

One of the greatest things about App Store games is that they’ve broken the seemingly relentless escalation of costs for developers and price-increases for end users. In a sense, many of the games on the store return us to the halcyon days of 8-bit games—playable, quickfire efforts that innovated and packed in plenty of personality.

Over at creature24.com, three guys are about to take this idea to the extreme, taking a skeleton idea for an iPhone game through to App Store submission—all in just 24 hours. Progress will be shown live on the website on March 6, starting at 9:00am EST, and the trio of devs say comments from visitors might even be integrated into the game. I caught up with one of the three crazy game creators, Binary Hammer‘s Bob Koon, to find out more.

Pulling a stunt worthy of Tom Cruise in “Mission Impossible,”  thieves cut a hole in the roof of a Best Buy then dropped down 16-feet to snatch up 20 Apple laptops. Then they climbed back up, escaping with $26,000 of merchandise without ever touching the floor.

Touching ground would have set off the store’s burglar alarm. And the two or three person crew were too clever to get caught on tape: they cut the roof hole in a spot where security cameras are blocked by ad  banners.

The cinematic caper took place in South Brunswick, New Jersey leaving police to marvel at their handiwork:

“(This was a) high level of sophistication,” said Detective James Ryan, a police department spokesman told NJ.com “They never set off any motion sensors. They never touched the floor. They rappelled in and rappelled out.”

Via NJ.com

Apple won the top spot in Fortune’s  most admired company list for the third year in a row. In the annual popularity contest — business people from around the globe are asked to vote for the outfits they admire the most — Apple earned a total score of 7.95.

Why is Apple so prized? According to Fortune: Product, product, product.

“The whole world held its breath before the iPad was announced,” observes BMW CEO Norbert Reithofer. “That’s brand management at its very best.”

The top 10 of the 50 companies included just two other tech outfits Google (2), Amazon (5). Microsoft ranked number 11.

Via AJPontti

Apple’s iPhone, which has steadily risen in marketshare against most competitors, hit a bump in February, losing 3.2 percent of its marketshare, according to a Web analysis firm. By comparison, the marketshare of Android-based phones rose 8.3 percent in February.

The problem isn’t a falling interest in the iPhone, says Quantcast. At 63 percent, the iPhone has the largest piece of the Mobile Web Consumption pie, the firm said. Rather, Android phones are taking off at a much faster pace. Android’s marketshare grew 44 percent during the past quarter and almost 100 percent the past year. This is while the iPhone’s marketshare fell 4.5 percent and 10.2 percent during the same periods.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzresnkvFGA

Ok, a cardboard theater with an iPhone in it, but this still beats the sugar-cube igloos my dad used to pile together to amuse us kids on rainy days.

Gary Katz crafted this theater in a couple of hours using a laser printer, rubber cement and a humble shoe box.  Put an iPhone in and voilà: it’s showtime.

Katz shows how he did it above, but if you’re short on patience, he sells pre-made kits — personalized on request — for $20, plus shipping.

Via iPhone Savior

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

We’ve already got a good handle on how periodical publishers intend on using the iPad to revitalize their businesses, but what about book publishers? Outside of just having another e-book platform to publish for, how can the iPad’s incredible multimedia and interactive capabilities be leveraged to transform the way we experience literature?

On Tuesday, Penguin Books’ CEO John Makinson tried to answer just those questions, demonstrating some upcoming books that will be coming to the iPad. Perhaps the most impressive demo was for the iPad version of the beloved children’s book, Where’s Spot? which has been transformed into an adorable interactive learning app. Penguin’s not stopping there: their Vampire Academy e-book is “an online community for vampire lovers” that features live chat between readers (a nice touch, but parents might get their heckles up at the idea of a real-life Edward Cullen prowling for pre-teens in the pages of their cildren’s book) , while a Paris travel guide switches to street map view when it’s put on a table.

Patent infringement lawsuits filed by Apple and Nokia in Delaware were put on hold after a judge ruled Wednesday their outcome must wait for international trade complaints to be sorted out. In February, the International Trade Commission announced it would investigate Apple’s claims against Nokia, a move following a similar January pronouncement concerning Nokia’s allegations against Apple.

It is uncertain when the Washington, DC-based ITC will announce decisions in the two cases, although some say the probe could last about 15 months. The body can demand the halt of imports if a company is found guilty of infringing upon a competitor’s patents.