Phonesuit, makers of the excellent Mili PowerPack battery extender for iPhone and iPod Touch is set to leverage the video capability of iPhone 3G S and increasing interest in micro projectors with the Mili Pro, a new hand-held projector designed just for Apple mobile devices, coming in September 2009.

The Mili Pro is an iPhone / iPod compatible (all models), rechargeable, micro video projector with built-in speakers that will allow users to watch movies, video clips, podcasts and more in 640 x 480 resolution on screen surfaces up to 40 inches.

The projector will feature a variety of AV inputs, allowing users to feed AV directly through the standard dock connectors of iPhones and iPods, with two included RCA and VGA cables permitting connection directly to a laptop or PC, and to most standard AV equipment sources such as DVD players, VCR’s, etc. Users can switch between the various inputs at any time with the input source button.

The device will also ship with two removable. swappable battery packs providing up to 3 hours of uninterrupted projection power.

More hi-res pics after the jump

Apple has spoken on the issue of porno iPhone apps, and it’s, ‘No way Jose.’

An Apple spokesman says the company will not approve iPhone apps with “inappropriate” content, especially pornography, despite the iPhone 3.0 age restriction system.

The question of porno apps arose after Hottest Girls appeared on the iPhone app store — the first app to feature saucy photos of naked women. Promising “2200+ sexy bikini babes and lingerie models,” the app is decidedly softcore. (The app disappeared for a few hours on Thursday, apparently because Apple had pulled it, but the developer had removed Hottest Girls voluntarily because of the strain on the image servers.)

Thanks to age restrictions in the new iPhone 3.0 OS software, mature apps can be blocked from download from the App Store. Many observers expected the App Store to be flooded with pornographic apps, especially because mobile porn is turning into big business. Juniper Research estimates the mobile porn market to be worth $3.5 billion by 2010. Growth will come from streaming video and video chat. The biggest market will not be the U.S., but Western Europe, Juniper said.

But now Apple says categorically it will not approve porno apps now or in the future. In a statement received by Cult of Mac, spokesman Tom Neumayr said:

“Apple will not distribute applications that contain inappropriate content, such as pornography. The developer of this application added inappropriate content directly from their server after the application had been approved and distributed, and after the developer had subsequently been asked to remove some offensive content. This was a direct violation of the terms of the iPhone Developer Program. The application is no longer available on the App Store.”

According to local news reports, hundreds of people camped outside a discount store in San Marcos, California hoping to buy 8G iPod nanos for $0.99 cents.

Matt Roberts told TV station San Diego 6 he waited 26 hours to be the first of the lucky nine customers who got the device at a $148 discount as part of grand opening celebration for a 99¢ Only Store.

The eight guys behind him eyed each other  for stamina; if none dropped out after the overnight vigil, the rest of the folks in the parking lot got scooters, DVDs and computer mice for a buck.

If you’ve got the staying power and are short on cash, check out the openings of 99¢ Only Stores or follow their Twitter feed, they’ve been running the iPod scheme to celebrate new stores for months now.

Wonder if people would do that for a Zune…

Via San Diego 6

What it is: Diorama is the first stereoscopic 3D game for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Think the lovechild of Labyrinth and MC Escher.

Why it’s good: With standard red/cyan 3d glasses the depth illusion of the hologram is truly hard to believe and the application of Apple’s mobile OS accelerometer makes Diorama one of the coolest things we’ve seen on the platform.

The current version, which sells for 99¢, features Jaw-dropping holographic 3D graphics, Stereoscopic rendering at 30 frames per second, and super realistic 3d physics played across 9 challenging board environments.

Plus, if you don’t happen to have a pair of 3D glasses lying around, you can send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to

American Paper Optics
3080 Bartlett Corporate Drive
Bartlett, TN 38133

and they will send you some.

Even better, Diorama’s developers provide a link to instructions for DIY 3D glasses.

Where to get it: 99¢ at the iTunes App Store

This video doesn’t even come close to doing the actual game justice, but we provide it here because that’s just how we roll.

UPDATE: As predicted, seven of the Top 10 albums on iTunes are Michael Jackson’s. Checked at 8AM Friday morning.

Just hours after his untimely death, Michael Jackson’s albums are storming the charts on iTunes.

Jackson’s seminal album Thriller is currently the number one album on iTunes, while The Essential Michael Jackson is number two.

Several of his other albums are climbing the charts fast. At the time of writing (about 6.45 PST) Jackson has nine albums in the iTunes top 40:

Thriller (25th Anniversary, Zombie Cover) is #7; Off the Wall is #9; The Ultimate Collection is #12; Number Ones is #13; Bad is #22; Greatest Hits is #27; Dangerous is #29; and Thriller (25th Anniversary, Deluxe Edition) is #28.

Jackson is the best-selling solo artist of all time. He sold more than 750 million albums worldwide, and Thriller, produced by the genius Quincy Jones, sold an estimated 100 million copies worldwide.

I expect Apple to post a homepage tribute, and Jackson’s albums to dominate the chart by the morning.

Mike Giepert discovered a novel use for the icons in his dock — spelling out words like “sex,” “props” and “agoraphobe!”

He asked the readers of his blog to submit their own. See some of the results after the jump. Much more here.

Via SwissMiss.

The King of Pop died in Los Angeles on Thursday afternoon. He was 50-years-old. He’d been staying in Bel-Air while working on his comeback, including 50 sold-out shows in London. CoM pays tribute to one of the greatest popstars ever: rest in peace Michael.

Michael Jackson on iTunes.

UPDATE 2: The app is available again from the App Store. Just checked at 4PM 6/25/09.

UPDATE: Apple hasn’t removed the app, the developer has, thanks to the strain on the saucy images server. “The server usage is extremely high because of the popularity of this app,” says the developer. “Thus, by not distributing the app, we can prevent our servers from crashing.” The app still works for those who have already bought it,  the developer says.

The first iPhone porn app has been removed from the iPhone App Store.

The softcore app, Hottest Girls, was downloadable for a few hours on Thursday, but is now unavailable. Neither Apple nor the developer were immediately available to provide an explanation, but it appears Apple changed its mind after the app received so much press attention on Thursday.

The $1.99 app for the iPhone and iPod touch featured 2,000 images of “topless, sexy babes and nude models,” according to reports.

Wired.com’s Charlie Sorrell, who downloaded the app before it was removed, said it was “terrible.”

“There is no slideshow to display a progressive striptease of the same model, so you are limited to one picture at a time before you have to navigate back to the main screen, which shows a lack of understanding as to how a porn app should work,” he wrote.

The brief approval of the app had many wondering if Apple was now willing to approve adult content on the App Store. The iPhone 3.0 OS includes age restrictions on applications.

Not saying I’d proudly adorn myself with it in public, but on days like today when that spinning beach ball of death has threatened to freeze the faithful MacBook several times, I’d kind of like to have it nearby to recover something like a sense of humor.

Made by a “guy in his mid-twenties born, raised, and terrified of economic collapse in West Michigan” who also has a cute Mac addict button, both cost $1.00 on Etsy.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qbWjaW25mQ

Just how badly most iPhone owners wanted video may be seen in the spike in YouTube upload traffic  — 400% since last Friday when the phone came out.

The surge, attributed to the iPhone 3GS, follows the general pattern of upload increase from mobile phones, some 1,700% in the last six months, YouTube noted in a press release:

“This growth represents three things coming together: new video-enabled phones on the market, improvements that make it easier to post a video to YouTube from your phone, and a new feature on YouTube that allows people’s videos to be quickly and effortlessly shared through social networks.”

iPhone 3GS uploads (most are tagged “testing the iPhone 3GS,” which is how we’re guessing they culled the numbers, since they didn’t specify) range from baby Kaylee at Grandma’s to kitchen table trials and one dropped into a pool above — with a fairly surprise ending…

The vids are pretty good, content aside, clear and not too shaky. Got something interesting?
Add your upload link in the comments…

Update: Yes, my Google Fu was off yesterday. Before you clue me in, I was aware of GarageBand as a solution (was before I wrote the story, but it requires iLife 08 or better) and internal iTunes editing (omits tools for ringtone characteristics like looping and delay). The free online solutions and free Mac solutions were not in evidence, buried under a whole lot of spam content and endless rehashes of the iTunes method. Googling “make iphone ringtones free” doesn’t bring up Rogue Amoeba’s excellent Make iPhone Ringtones app.

I still think it’s funny that this kind of work-around even exists and stand by the humor category, even if the iPhone knowledge is weak.

For two years now, Apple has had an incredibly dumb official system for handling ringtones on the iPhone. Rather than allowing you to just convert any song in your library into a ringer, Apple restricts you to only music purchased from the iTunes Store, and then charges 99 cents a song, at that.

Now, there is an elegant shareware solution to this problem, iPhone Ringtone Maker from Efiko, which costs $7.50 at the moment and can generate unlimited new tones for that initial purchase price. Which is nice, but what do you do if you just want one song in your library made into a ringer for life? Unfortunately, there is no free solution for Mac. Windows has iRinger, a serviceable (if ugly) app that does the trick for free.

And in the current era of virtualization, that suggests an incredibly kludgy solution in the making. Here’s a free (not-so-easy) 9-step process for turning any MP3 into an iPhone ringtone on your Mac. And yes, I actually did this, although I installed VirtualBox and Windows 7 for other reasons months ago, so I could at least leave that out.

1. Install VirtualBox from Sun on your computer.

2. Download and install the Release Candidate of Windows 7, following these directions.

3. Launch your Windows 7 environment in VB.

4. Direct a Windows web browser to the iRinger page, and download and install it.

5. From your Mac environment, e-mail the audio file you wish to convert to yourself.

6. Launch a webmail site in the Windows environment and download the song.

7. Import the song into iRinger, trim to just the portion you want, and export.

8. E-mail ringtone back to the Mac environment and import to iTunes.

9. Add it to your iPhone and select it.

And that’s it! Total time with downloads and installation…36 hours. Maybe you’re just better off spending $7.50, huh?

Joining other experts, billionaire investor Warren Buffet says Apple might have violated the law by keeping quiet about Steve Jobs’s liver transplant.

The head of Berkshire Hathaway said Jobs’s life-saving operation was a “material fact” that Apple was legally obliged to report to investors. The Securities and Exchange commission requires public companies to report material facts to shareholders. Failure to do so is in breach of the law.

“It’s a material fact,” said Buffett on CNBC on Wednesday. “Whether he is facing serious surgery or not is a material fact. Whether I’m facing serious surgery is a material fact. Whether (General Electric CEO) Jeff Immelt is, I mean, so I think that’s important to get out. They’re going to find out about it anyway so I don’t see a big privacy issue or anything of the sort.”

Ex-Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki’s Twitter feed has been used to spread a Mac Trojan.

Kawasaki’s popular feed, which has 140,000 subscribers, included a link on Tuesday night to a what purported to be a sex tape featuring Gossip Girl actress Leighton Meester. However, the link pointed to the OSX/Jahlav-C Trojan, a rare Mac Trojan that has popped up recently on a couple of porno websites.

Kawasaki said the link was the result of leaving his feed open to “user generated” stories.

“Here’s the scoop,” Kawasaki said by email to CoM. “I used Twitterfeed to insert the Truemors feed into my tweets (Here’s the feed). I thought that was a 100% safe, moderated feed, but I now know it isn’t. ‘User generated’ stories can get inserted into that feed. The bottom line is that my Twitter account wasn’t hacked; Twitter-Twitterfeed was all working right. It’s just that a bad story got into the feed that was refed by me.

“My short career as a pornographer lasted 45 minutes. :-)”

Graham Cluley, a spokesman for Sophos, a British security firm which first publicised the malware tweet, said it was the first time he’d heard of Twitter being used to spread the Mac malware.

“Guy is the only person we’ve discovered by this attack, but it may just be that he’s the most high profile,” said Cluley.

However, Twitter has been used before to spread malware on Windows. In August, security firm Kapersky Labs warned of banking Trojans posing as porno tapes of Brazilian pop star Kelly Key.

In a twist on the “I’m a Mac” ads, this sticker shows a PC playing solitaire while waiting for the Mac to load a witty retort. Or maybe the PC just froze.

The 4″ x 2.75″ sticker costs $1.50 and, according to the description, was made on a PC.

Via Nerd Approved

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9E2D2PaIcI

“Objectified” the indie documentary film about industrial design that gives you a rare peek into Apple designer Johnathan Ive’s studio is out in movie theaters now — with a limited number of screenings from Stockholm to San Francisco.

The 90-second trailer is punctuated with Apple products (iPhone, MacBook) and a nice-close up of Ives.

At least one reviewer said Ive’s contribution — where he explains how a laptop emerges from just about one piece of metal — is a highlight of the effort by director Gary Hustwit.

If you catch it, let us know what you think.

An intrepid software developer has published a thorough memoir that details many reasons why Apple is so far ahead of the field in the mobile applications game, and why Blackberry, Palm and Android will have a hard time catching up any time soon.

Marcus Watkins found himself developing an application for his mobile phone in much the same way that countless other developers undoubtedly realized their inspirations: he was minding his own business when he realized one day his life would improve if his phone could do something that, at the point of his epiphany, it couldn’t.

He did his research, found out there wasn’t an application to meet his needs, realized the size of the potential market for his app in the many millions of people with his phone – a good percentage of whom might find his application useful – and he went to work.

Unfortunately (perhaps) for Watkins, his phone is a Blackberry, but fortunately (for Blackberry users) he persevered, and his story shows just how far behind Apple the other smartphone makers are as the device category enters its third year in existence.

Besides its (much-needed and noticeable) speed bump, the new iPhone 3GS offers only three exclusive features over its predecessors. There’s the extremely well-executed video editing, the promising but presently limited compass, and the voice control app.

And, surprising no one, the voice program is the only one of the three that isn’t ready for prime time. Why? Because voice recognition programs suck. Based on the challenges facing the 3GS, a truly foolproof voice interface is about as close to arriving as a mind-power interface. Having never owned a Newton, I have the distinct pleasure of playing with an advanced Apple technology that really doesn’t live up to the hype. It’s almost exciting!

Let’s get out the good first. When the app works, it does a pretty good job. On about 3 out of 10 efforts, it has actually done what I asked (more than any previous voice dialing app I’ve ever tried). Another third of the time, it did the function I wanted but with the wrong content (it placed a phone call, but to my mom, not my wife). And then 40 percent of the time, it just did something crazy and frustrating, like shutting down and locking the screen or, when I asked it to “Call Bruce,” it began to play a Sonic Youth song.

So there you go, a 30 percent hit rate of actual usefulness. Which is about 69 percent below the rest of the iPhone’s functionality — even the AT&T-dependent parts. Though I’ve owned an iPhone for all of 56 hours, I’m typing like a pro now, much faster than I ever managed on a BlackBerry. Every part of the iPhone experience that’s supposed to be questionable is actually brilliant.

Which just makes the voice control app’s flaws that much more prominent — it’s like a holdover from a Moto Razr that somehow snuck onto my iPhone. It’s not even good enough to use in the car — too great a risk of calling the wrong person. Honestly, I think it’s as good of an example as you can find for the overall difficulties with making voice-anything bullet-proof and reliable. Too many vocal variations, accents, and possible disruptions to ever be as good as what Apple shoots for.

Still, it’s hardly a downside to owning a 3GS — you can pull it out at parties and amuse your friends as it screws up. It’s like the first-generation Newton’s handwriting recognition all over again. Ian is riding a taste sensation, indeed!

The popular Boxee media center software is the rare app that starts on the Mac before going to Windows. CC-licensed pic by Matt Grimm.

Here’s some good news for Mac users of Boxee, the popular media platform for Macs and Apple TV: The software is going Windows.

At a developer event on Tuesday night in San Francisco, Boxee released its first version for Windows PCs.

This is good news for Mac users because the Boxee platform will have a much larger user base for developers to create plug-ins for. Significantly, the software will run on Windows Media Center PCs, which is by far the biggest installed base of computers connected to TVs.

UPDATE: Hospital spokeswoman Ruth Ann Hale declined to add any more information to hospital’s statement. She would not say when the transplant was performed (the Wall Street Journal said about two months ago); how long Steve Jobs had been on the transplant waiting list; nor where the donor organ came from. “We’re not saying anything beyond what it says in the statement,” she said by phone on Tuesday night. It’s safe to assume the donor liver came from a deceased patient — otherwise Jobs wouldn’t be on a waiting list. But the lack of a time frame for the operation is curious. Perhaps it’s to protect the identity of the donor? If the time of the operation is known, maybe it makes it easier to identify potential donors?

Methodist University Hospital in Memphis has confirmed that Steve Jobs had a liver transplant — and the disclosure was made with Jobs’s permission, the hospital says.

In a statement released on Tuesday, the hospital said Jobs was the sickest person on the waiting list at the time the donor organ became available.

The hospital’s statement is likely in response to growing questions about the transplant. On Tuesday morning, the New York Times published a high-profile story asking whether Jobs’s money and power helped him to jump to the front of the queue. “Whenever someone rich and famous receives a transplant, suspicions inevitably arise about whether that person managed to jump to the head of the waiting list and take an organ that might have saved the life of somebody just as desperate but less glamorous,” the paper said.

The hospital’s statement appears to be a flat denial that Jobs received any preferential treatment.

“He received a liver transplant because he was the patient with the highest MELD score (Model for End-Stage Liver Disease) of his blood type and, therefore, the sickest patient on the waiting list at the time a donor organ became available,” the hospital said.

The hospital said Jobs is doing well.

“Mr. Jobs is now recovering well and has an excellent prognosis.”

Full text of the statement after the jump.

Hacker George Hotz appears to have found a way to jailbreak and unlock the iPhone 3GS.

The 19-year-old Hotz, better known as GeoHot, may have found a hole in the iPhone 3GS boot sequence, which will allow hackers to unlock the device.

The crack comes just days after the release of the new iPhone. Previous jailbreaking hacks have sometimes taken weeks.

Details are hazy, however. Hotz has posted a screenshot that appears to show a custom command inserted into the iPhone’s iBoot, implying that signature checks had been bypassed, according to one explanation in the comments of the post. If so, it’s the first step in jailbreaking the device.

In addition, the just-released UltraSn0w unlock should also be compatible with the iPhone 3GS.

Via iClarified.

In a bid to preserve some of the best modern industrial design for future generations, Smithsonian’s National Design Museum, the Cooper-Hewitt, is asking Apple fans to donate their old and not-so-old devices.

Aptly, webmaster William Berry calls the request a “wish list:”

Newton Message Pad (1993)
iBook (2001, white)
iPod, 1st generation (2001)
iMac G5 (2004)
Macbook Pro (2006)
iPhone, 1st generation (2007)
Macbook Air (2008)

While you can get rid of something that has given up the ghost, your device should still be in excellent (external) condition, with original parts and power cords or batteries.  All donors will be listed on the credit line whenever the works are displayed or published.
The  generous-minded can get in touch with Cynthia Trope, Associate Curator of Product Design and Decorative Arts, at [email protected].

What, if anything, would you be willing to part with for a museum?

Kevin Miller has a great story about how he used the new “Find My iPhone” feature to track down his stolen iPhone and recover it from a thief.

In Chicago for a Lego convention, Kevin had his iPhone stolen in a bar. Luckily, he’d just activated the Find My iPhone feature. The following day, Kevin and a couple of his Lego-convention friends used the iPhone’s built-in GPS and Google Maps to track its location.

As they converged on the crook, he tried to make a run for it. I won’t ruin the rest of the story. It’s a great story, well told.

Help plant a tree to offset carbon emissions from your iPhone or iPod is the green idea behind AcornHq, a London-based company.

The brainchild of a couple of New Zealand transplants, John and Sarah Lewis, the company asks 20 Apple device owners to give $3.50 per device — iPhone or current and older iPods — to plant a tree to counteract the effects on the environment from manufacture and use.

Those oak trees take root on a New Zealand planting farm, where Lewis hopes Acorn donors willing to trek that far will be able to visit soon.

After the jump, details on how it works from John Lewis.

The Dev-Team, an iPhone hacking group, has released a free jailbreaking and unlocking tool for the iPhone 3.0 OS.

Called UltraSn0w, the easy to use unlocking tool jailbreaks the 3.0 iPhone to allow unauthorized apps and unlocks it for use with other carriers.

Apple broke the law by lying about Steve Jobs health, says a top marketing professor.

But whether the Security and Exchange Commission has the “balls” to prosecute is unclear.

Paul Argenti, Professor of Corporate Communication at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, says that Apple’s communications about its CEO’s health violated the SEC’s full disclosure regulations.