Earlier this week, as if in response to the iPhone’s incredible gains on the handheld gaming market, Nintendo announced the successor to their popular DS console, the 3DS. The main difference over their earlier, dual screen device? 3D without glasses.

The problem with this approach is that the Nintendo DS’ screens are too small for true, pop-out-of-the-display 3D to really work… and it also raises some big questions about touchscreen gaming.

Over at Kotaku, Deputy Editor Steven Totilo has an interesting theory on how Nintendo is going to do 3D gaming without 3D displays: they’ll borrow a trick from the book of App Store developers like Ngmoco and fake the 3D by using the accelerometer.

If you don’t purchase an iPad online or in-person at an Apple Store, you may be able to walk into some Best Buy stores come April 3, reports suggest Friday. About half of the electronics giant’s retail location could have Apple’s tablet device available next week.

The retailer’s “Store-within-a-Store” locations, which comprise about half of Best Buy’s 1,000 stores, will become the first to offer the iPad outside purchases through Apple, according to MacRumors. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has indicated as much in emails reported earlier this week. As to where iPads will be sold, Jobs reportedly responded: “Initially at Apple Retail and online stores and Best Buy.”

Star Wars titles on the iPhone tend to be bog-standard, lightsaber-swishing affairs, but THQ Wireless looks like they finally might have a Star Wars game in development that’s worth picking up: Star Wars Cantina.

As the title perhaps implies, this is a light-hearted simulation of running a cantina at the famous Mos Eisley Spaceport.

According to the official blurb, “Your task is to see that the right beverage finds its way to the right customer. And don’t keep them waiting, some of the customers are real troublemakers! Working towards your daily quota, accuracy and speed are essential. As a reward for a job well done, outfit your cantina with decorations and attractions to appeal to even the most difficult customers.”

Star Wars Cantina should be coming to the App Store soon. It looks great. Now what about the HD version?

Pioneer have just unveiled two new high-powered 7.1 SurroundSound AV receivers… both of which come with a homegrown remote app, making them perfect additions to your home theater set-up if you like to do all of your media control through your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Both the VSX-1020-K and VSX-1120-K feature Bluetooth audio streaming, HDMI 1.4 connections for 3D home theater systems, Internet radio support and Dolby ProLogic IIz decoding in the 5.1 channel receivers. For $200 more, the VSX-1120-K includes the Marvell Qdeo video processor, which provides excellent clarity and superb accuracy for the highest quality video switching.

As for the app, iControlAV is Pioneer’s first foray into app development, and predictably allows its flagship AV Receivers to be fully controlled over WiFi.

Unfortunately, there’s no release date available for either model, but the VSX-1020-K starts at $549, and the VSX-1120-K will cost $749.

One day after Apple stock granted to four top company executives vested, the 1.1 million shares were sold during a day of record-high trading in the Cupertino, Calif. firm.

After Jerome York’s recent death, the Wall Street Journal has an interesting overview of the history and composition of Apple’s Board.

Apple’s current board is only made up of six individuals, making it one of the smallest boards of the Fortune 500.

One of the reasons Apple’s board is so small is that one of the stipulations of Steve Jobs’ return to Apple was that all of the members who “let things go to hell” were fired, and the remaining board members were hand-picked for their personal loyalty to Jobs, which was tested by Jobs recent illness.

Despite this, the recently deceased York himself was disgusted with the way Steve Jobs handled his illness, saying that Jobs should have publicly disclosed his health problem three weeks earlier in the same news release that announced he was pulling out of the Macworld trade conference. He claimed the concealment “disgusted” him: “Frankly, I wish I had resigned then,” York said last year.

It remains unclear when or even if Apple will choose to replace York, but if so, it’ll be another cherry-picked Jobs candidate.

It’s worth noting that while the remaining members are extremely loyal to Jobs, York’s passing actually removes one of the most vocal and outspoken independents on Apple’s board, which could increase shareholder unrest.

A fascinating read. Check out the whole thing.

There’s a new king in town.

According to mobile advertising company AdMob, Apple’s iPhone OS now accounts for fifty percent of worldwide smartphone traffic on its networks, increasing its share from 33 percent just a year ago.

The iPod Touch is also a huge winner: although it’s not a smartphone, the iPod Touch lead AdMob’s Mobile Internet Device (MID) traffic, their biggest source of network growth over the last year.

The venerable but aging Symbian OS was the main loser in Apple’s market gains: the smartphone OS plummeted from 43% in February 2009 to a mere 18% in 2010.

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You may want to put your Mac on mute — audiophonic doofus explosion incoming — but what you’re looking at here is the first working, untethered jailbreak of the iPhone 3Gs and iPod Touch G3… and if its developer is to be trusted, it should work on the iPad when it comes out next Friday too.

According to jailbreaking wunderkind George Hotz (aka geohot), the jailbreak should be out soon, although asking for a release date “won’t make it happen any sooner.”

If geohot’s right about the iPad jailbreaking technique being similar to the iPhone 3Gs and iPod Touch G3, we could be looking at a zero day iPad jailbreak. Oh, good. I don’t think I could do without 5 Icon Dock HD.

Almost a week before Apple is expected to begin selling the iPad, an analyst has increased this year’s sales estimate for the tablet device by 30 percent. Apple may also release a new iPhone in June, along with seeing a 17 percent jump in Mac sales, the analyst adds.

BMO Capital analyst Keith Bachman told investors Thursday his initial estimate of 2.5 million iPads sold this year “may be conservative.” In addition, Bachman raised his estimate for 2011 iPad sales to 7.2 million, up 30 percent from his earlier prediction of 5 million.

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 Action Bowling Free, Advent Annihilation, Alien Glyphs, Color Expert, Cross Fingers, Fingerzilla, Minigame Party, Monkey Flight, Sound Warp Free, Super KO Boxing 2 Free, and Vintage Video Maker.

Trapster is a popular iPhone app that alerts drivers to police speed traps, red light cameras and DUI checkpoints. It’s attracting between 15,000 and 50,000 new users a day. Among those new users are are some of the most unlikely – the police themselves.

Trapster is partnering with several police departments to get cops to add their own traps to the database. The company is training cops how to use the software. The Travis County Sheriff’s Department in Austin, Texas, is already publicizing its use of the app, and the company expects to announce more partnerships soon.

“It’s more effective at slowing people down than issuing citations,” says Trapster founder and CEO Pete Tenereillo. “It’s not about revenue; it’s about enforcement.”

Travis County Deputy Tom Carpenter told a local TV news crew the same thing: “Our job is compliance, so if I can slow traffic down by just being there, that works too,” he says.

Tenereillo disclosed  more interesting facts: Trapster’s biggest competition is not nav apps, but Pandora. And even though navigation apps are popular, people hardly use them.

So you’re browsing around and doing your stuff, and you see some video on a web page that you want to watch.

Most of us will just watch it in situ, but what if it’s something special? What if it deserves to be displayed with a little more respect for the medium?

Enter Extract from Zach Waugh in Baltimore.

It’s a tiny utility that displays web videos in a minimal, chrome-less window of their own, very similar to the way QuickTime Player does its job in Snow Leopard.

Using Extract is as simple as pasting in the embed code for the video clip you want to watch.

Introducing Extract, Zach says: “Extract will also modify the embed code so that the video will expand as you resize the window. Then you can have it as large or as small as you want it.”

Here’s a quick demo video (which of course, you could always watch in Extract if you’ve already gone and grabbed it):

Auteurist is an all-purpose multitool for writers with iPhones, boasting an impressive array of features and different writing modes.

Its developer has been keeping users up to date with progress at the Auteurist Posterous, and in the latest post looks in detail at the challenges of creating a decent scriptwriting mode.

One interesting approach is to make the script on the iPhone screen look right, even though it doesn’t actually follow any rigid formatting rules. It looks as it should, and that’s sufficient on the iPhone screen; yet when you choose to export the finished script to a desktop computer, Auteurist will do the proper formatting on-the-fly, ensuring the final output meets the standards that people who read scripts will expect.

It’s still a work in progress, but it’s interesting to see the progress as it happens. And as the developer notes, things will get much more interesting when a future version of the app is ready for iPad.

Part of me wants to run a mile away from writing apps on the iPhone, simply because I can’t imagine wanting to write anything of any length on it. But another part of me knows the feeling of being struck by sudden inspiration, and having nothing but an iPhone with me to start writing on.

Fans of classical literature rejoice. Project Gutenberg – the publisher of thousands of free, public domain eBooks – is coming to Apple’s iBookstore. Having previewed Apple’s iBookstore, AppAdvice.com reported this morning that the iPad book store will include free access to more than 30,000 public domain titles, including Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and if Apple doesn’t ban it, the Kama Sutra.

The report confirms speculation that the iPad would be compatible with free eBooks.

The iPad certainly hasn’t made the once-untouchable Kindle look cutting edge, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves: the Kindle’s still got some advantages on Apple’s e-reading tablet. For one, the Kindle’s e-ink screen is much easier for long reading sessions than the iPad’s LED-backlit LCD display… and because of the power efficiency of e-ink, the Kindle can go weeks at a time without needing a charge. For a lot of people, the Kindle is going to be good enough, especially for the $259.99 price.

The problem is, while the Kindle has some advantages on the iPad, what it’s doing technologically is easily done for less. Enter the Kobo, a $150 e-reader that smartly shaves a few specs to undercut the already-ailing Kindle by over a hundred bucks.

According to tech apocrypha, after Commodore International released their revolutionary PET 2001 home PC, a couple of scruffy young men named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak plopped down in Commodore’s offices with a cardboard box full of circuit boards and tried to pitch the more established electronics company the first Apple II prototype, a revolutionary home PC with far more advanced color, graphics and sound capabilities. Jobs and Woz had no money, and they wanted Commodore to push the Apple II to market.

Instead, Commodore balked, following up the PET 2001 with the VIC-20 in 1980, and then finally bringing to market the computer they would become best known for: the Commodore 64. Largely thanks to a sub-$200 price drop, It went on to sell 17 million units, making it the best-selling single personal computer of all time with an astonishing 30-40% market share between 1983 and 1986. The computer was such a success that was only discontinued in 1994.

Oh, how things change. Now, Commodore International is basically dead, and the company Commodore shuffled out the door is one of the most profitable computer companies on Earth. But after sixteen years, the Commodore 64 has finally raised a mottled hand out of the grave. Can it compete with Apple once more?

Brick-and-mortar media may seem tepid about the iPad, but their sales people are not.

According to the Wall Street Journal,  interactive iPad ads are selling for figures reminiscent of their paper counterparts, back before magazines made the endangered species watch.

Both Time and The Wall Street Journal are charging — and have sold — iPad ads costing from $200,000 – $400,000, depending on the length of the ad run.

Time will charge $200,000 for an ad in the first eight issues. Clients so far include Unilever, Toyota and Fidelity and three other unnamed “major advertisers.”

Ads in the pricey iPad edition of The Wall Street Journal cost $400,000 for four months.  Coke, FedEx and four other “major advertisers” are already on board.

People magazine said it took just two days to line up six advertisers for the first three months of its iPad edition, which won’t even launch until late July.

“Mind-blowing” games, video and interactivity are getting ad folks to write checks, Steve Pacheco, FedEx’s director of advertising, told the Journal. “You are taking something that used to be flat on a page and making it interactive and have it jump off the page.”

Via WSJ

Today we have another batch of bargains for Mac fans. First up is a fully-loaded MacBook Pro running a Core 2 at 2.8GHz. The laptop is $2,787 and includes a 15-inch screen. Next is more App Store price drops, including “ElementalMonster TD,” a tower defense game. We round out our top trio with a free iTunes offer: Archie Bronson Outfit “Shark’s Tooth.”

Along the way, we’ll check out a Mac Pro memory upgrade kit, the Firefly interactive fitness game and Filemaker Pro 10.

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

I have ridiculously sensitive eyes; the kind of eyes that feel like they’re being repeatedly stabbed with chopsticks if more than just the slightest bit of light hits them before they’ve had time to adjust.

So when I ran across the press release for Wake Up Now? describing an app that makes the iPhone call out the time, I was intrigued.

Police in rural England are offering kits that capture DNA traces so locals can mark high-tech valuables such as iPods in the hopes of preventing thefts.

The CSI-worthy plan comes from cops in Fleggburg, an idyllic-looking village of 909 people in Norfolk, England.

Similar to the home kit pictured above, the product made by Selecta consists of a water-based adhesive containing a locked-in DNA code, a UV tracer and a series of microdots which can be easily applied to property “such as a TV or an iPod,” police said.

The fluid marks the property with a unique code which is revealed when scanned with a UV light. The DNA marking allows police to place the burglar at the crime scene, which could increase chances of a conviction.

Apple reportedly has inked a deal worth $240 million for Samsung to supply 3 million additional 9.7-inch iPad displays. Although no time period was provided, the deal was confirmed by an industry executive who talked with a Korean publication.

“The most expensive component in the iPad is the display and touch-screen interface that costs $80 for all models,” the person wishing not to be identified told The Korean Times. The iPad display also costs five times as much as the handset’s screen, the person added.

Digital is… well, what is it exactly?

Officially, it’s “a computer mystery/romance set five minutes into the future of 1988”. It’s available for Windows, Linux and Mac, and it’s a joy for old-timers like me to behold.

What you see when you start Digital is how computers used to be. Back in the days when Cult of Mac would have been a roughly-stapled fanzine sold for 50 cents a copy (please send a stamped addressed envelope).

But it’s more than a nostalgia trip. It’s something else. Built by Ontario-based author Christine Love, Digital promises much more than just nostalgia. You might even get to save the world by exploiting a buffer overflow. That’s how old-school nerd superheroes used to do things.

Although much of the buzz about Apple surrounds the iPad, the venerable three-year-old iPhone has a great deal of life, one analyst argues. Indeed, if Apple takes this analyst’s suggestions, the handset’s market could increase seven-fold. Key factors are expanding carriers selling the iPhone and offering a phone that doesn’t require a data plan.

Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi told investors Wednesday that it will become “increasingly difficult” for Apple to get beyond its current 39 percent of the global smart phone market without expanding the major carriers selling the iPhone. If Apple added 13 of the world’s largest carriers – such as Verizon Wireless, NTT DoDoMo and China Mobile – the Cupertino, Calif. company jump from selling 29 million phones worldwide in 2009 to 557 million, according to the analyst.

Early last year, Palm bet the farm. They hired a bunch of ex-Apple engineers, killed off all of their old Palm OS devices and announced a new smartphone operating system, webOS, the first truly exciting alternative to the iPhone OS since its unveiling in 2007. They went all in, with their only conciliatory gesture to the existing Palm OS ecosystem a third-party emulator.

Unfortunately, as great as webOS is, that gamble hasn’t paid off for Palm: they are now in dire financial difficulty, and it looks likely that the once revolutionary mobile device maker will soon only be remembered as a footnote in smartphone history.

It’s a shame, and the death of Palm might otherwise have signified the final death of PalmOS, which — before the App Store — was perhaps the most vibrant, crowded and creative platform of mobile app development.

Good news for Palm OS nostalgists, though: the StyleTap emulator has just come out on Cydia, allowing anyone with a jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch to use it to run Palm OS apps. It’s a bit pricy at $49, but at first blush, StyleTap looks pretty flawless. If the impending death of Palm has you finally considering trading your Pre in for an iPhone, StyleTap will help make that transition a bit easier.

Maintaining the pretense of objective journalist integrity by reporting in third-person upon itself, the Wall Street Journal claims that “according to a person familiar with the matter,” they’ll be charging you $17.99 a month to read on your iPad.

That’s ten bucks less than a monthly subscription costs… but that’s still a hefty price tag for digital content. My gut instinct is that only existing Wall Street Journal subscribers would be tempted by an annual $216 subscription… it’s not a price point that is going to attract new customers. That multimedia content better snap. What do you think?