Coinciding with Steve Jobs return to the public eye next week, Penguin Portfolio is reissuing my book Inside Steve’s Brain with a new chapter about how Apple will cope without its dynamic CEO.

Published in April 2008, Inside Steve’s Brain was a New York Times best-seller and an international hit (translated into 15 languages and a best-seller in Brazil and Italy). But the book was written before Jobs’ recent liver transplant, so the publisher asked me to update it for a second edition.

Jobs will take the stage next week at Apple’s special press event to show off new holiday iPods to the press. He has to: If he doesn’t show up Sept. 9, there’ll be a media shitstorm and Apple’s stock will tank.

Jobs’ last public appearance happened exactly a year ago. Last Sept. 9, he presided over a similar iPod event at the same venue. Bloomberg had accidentally published Jobs’ obituary, and when he appeared onstage he flashed a slide with Mark Twain’s famous line: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

Indeed. One liver transplant later, Jobs is still with us, thank God. But there will be a time when Apple will have to do without its supreme leader, and as I explain in the new chapter of Inside Steve’s Brain, the company will be both royally fucked and totally OK when the inevitable happens.

Apple is expected to announce the availability of pre-cut ringtones made from popular music tracks at next week’s media event on September 9, according to a report Wednesday at CNET News.

Despite being able to easily make their own ringtones out of any mp3 file for free, consumers have in the past shown a willingness to pay as much as $3 to hear a few seconds of a favorite song when receiving an incoming phone call.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment for the report and no details are available about what the company might charge for ringtones, but the formerly booming, high-margin source of music industry revenues saw a 24% decline from 2007 – 2008, according to a recent report from the research firm SNL Kagan.

With many expecting little more than some tweaks to iTunes and a possible refresh of the iPod line next week, Apple appears to have done a good job of setting the stage for a blockbuster announcement of some kind.

On the other hand, Apple can’t be expected to put a ding in the universe with every single press conference; maybe what we’ll get next week will only amount to “Hey, Look – Ringtones!”

Duracell’s cheap and cheerful little rechargeable battery pack is “perfect,” Gizmodo says in a nice little review of the new gadget.

Just released, Duracell’s $20 Instant Charger is good for about half a charge of an iPhone, or a full charge of an iPod nano.

“Duracell’s Instant Charger is a perfectly executed little gadget,” Gizmodo says.

The site has seen plenty of pricey chargers with all the bells and whistles, which are usually superfluous. Gizmodo is charmed by the Instant Charger’s purity: it’s basically a rechargeable litium ion battery hooked to a USB port, and that’s it.

You plug in your own charging cables, so it’s good for iPhones, iPods, digital cameras, Bluetooth headsets and any other gadget that comes with a USB cable.

The Instant Charger ‘s bigger brother, the $50 Powerhouse Charger, stores enough juice to charge an iPhone 3G 1.2 times, or an iPod nano 4 times, Giz says. But it isn’t as compelling as the Instant Charger, which is perfectly simple and cheap.

Searching the iTunes app store is much easier when you’re not using the iTunes app store. Launching today, uquery.com aims to be the vehicle for the app discovery process.

The site uses its own system of algorithms called “AppRank” to make it easy and fast to find the right app for certain tasks. Search results appear in a easy-to-navigate center column along with options to refine your search.

Unlike the iTunes App Store, you can use your browser’s “find in page” command to pinpoint your search term in the search results. It’s the little things.

At the moment, uquery.com appears to generate search results from the full text app descriptions. As the site gains visitors, search queries and tweets, the “AppRank” system will improve its ability to make the app discovery process more intuitive.

RadTech today doubled the usefulness of its AutoPower on-the-go iPhone and iPod charger, offering two USB ports. The new device also nearly halved the price, to $10 from $17 for the single-port version. The single-port option does include a 30-pin retractable cable.

The 3.3-inch by 1.3 inch AutoPower includes fuseless recharging with a sensor to avoid hardware damage. RadTech says the 5V 500mA recharger is “not for 1st -3rd Generation iPod.”

[Via iPodnn and RadTech]

The camera world is all aflutter over Panasonic’s Lumix GF1 digital camera. Along with questions about how the device measures up to the rival Olympus E-P1, the question on everyone’s lips is the GF1 a DSLR wannabe?

It seems the question has some substance. The “R” in DSLR requires a mirror. However, the GF1, the latest in Panasonic’s Micro Four Thirds standard, is “mirror-free,” according to the company.

The British security firm Intego has published a security memo that provides a clear and detailed view of Apple’s new XProtect anti-virus system in Snow Leopard.

There are several interesting tidbits: Apple’s new XProtect system cannot recognize all the variants of the Trojans it is supposed to protect against, for example.

Also, the XProtect system does not spot Trojans hidden inside .mpkg files downloaded from the internet, a major weakness, according to Intego. (Apple’s installer recognizes two types of files — .pkg files for simple packages, and .mpkg files that contain multiple packages to be installed.)

The memo is patently self-serving — Intego sells several anti-virus and privacy packages for the Mac — but nonetheless provides a clear and detailed view of what Apple’s new XProtect system does — and doesn’t do.

The full memo after the jump.

Apple, you guys always make me smile! I love you and all your products!

I love surprises too! Those cute little tricks you discover when you’re using Apple stuff! Great!

And I’ve just discovered the best surprise yet!.

Vonage’s App has been approved for the iPhone/iPod Touch and the company is looking for volunteers to help beta test the app.

“Interested in Vonage app beta? Few spots left. Follow me & send your email address via DM. Lots of interest..cannot guarantee spot.” says the official Vonage Twitter feed.

The offer was posted at about 7.40 AM PST and should still be good — for a little while at least.

The Vonage app will allow customers to make cheap VOIP calls on the iPhone — but over Wi-Fi only, like the similar Skype app. AT&T bans VOIP on its 3G cellular network.

Today’s deals include iPods starting at $39 (a shuffle), soft-touch iPhone cases from iFrogz for $12 and MacBook Pro laptops starting at $999.

Details on these bargains and many more can be found at the CoM “Daily Deals” page.

Way way back in the mists of ancient history, I owned a Palm device, and I loved the little fella.

One of my favourite apps for the Palm was AvantGo (now defunct) – a huge database of free newspaper and magazine content that the device would download every time you synced the Palm with your desktop computer.

I used to spend long train journeys catching up with news from the BBC, Wired, and a bunch of other publications. Most of it was full text, there were no ads (not that I can remember, anyway – this was a long time ago now), it was fast and quick and easy. Superb.

This week I noticed Time magazine’s new app, and started poking around elsewhere in the news section of the App Store. In particular, I wanted to see what the UK media were up to.

We’re big fans of the unauthorized doc “Welcome to Macintosh” — a true love letter to the history of Apple and its community.

Now this indie film is available on iTunes.

Well, it’s also available on Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, Netflix etc., but we love the idea that what is a totally handmade film (tagline: “a documentary for the rest of us”) is now worthy of being sold by Apple.

In what’s turning out to be a busy few weeks for the team at Bare Bones, their information manager app Yojimbo has just been bumped up to 2.0. The new version is a 20 dollar upgrade for owners of older versions, is Snow Leopard compatible, and has this spectacular new icon.

There are a lot of Apple-inspired confections out there, but this apple pie with a logo at the center by a photographer in Uruguay who goes by Miss Gong looks almost too yummy to eat. (Not sure if the reverse logo was intentional or just turned round in the photo).

Imagine inviting your Mac user group over and serving this apple pie for dessert…

Mobile phone gadget maker Parrot Tuesday introduced one of the few in-dash car stereos meant for iPhone users. The RKi8400 ($400 in the U.S.) was unveiled at the Frankfurt Auto Show.

“All iPhone functions — music, navigation of the music directory and playlists and Bluetooth phone capabilities — have been adapted for in-car use,” said Henri Seydoux, Parrot founder and CEO.

Today’s Apple gadget deals lead off with a bevy of aluminum iMacs, starting at $999. AT&T again offers iPhone 3Gs, featuring $49 8GB models. Finally, PC Micro has a 50%-off deal on iPod touch accessories.

Details on these and many other deals can be found on CoM’s Daily Deals page.

The more I play with Snow Leopard, the more it looks like it’s designed to run Apple’s upcoming tablet.

Look at Expose in the Dock — the new feature that reveals all an application’s open windows when you click and hold the application’s icon. It’s tailor-made for fingers. Even more convincing is Stacks in the Dock. Hit a folder icon in the dock, and up pops the folder and all its files. Each icon is a big target for your finger, and the window has a big, fat slider for scrolling up and down (no more fiddly little arrows at the top or bottom). Both of these UI tweaks scream ‘touchscreen.’

And then today I discovered an unheralded feature that the minute I saw it, I thought, “Game over! Here’s rock-solid proof that Snow Leopard is designed for touchscreens. This is a tablet operating system.”

Rockstar Games’ critically-acclaimed Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is coming to the iPhone/touch this fall, the company says.

Released last year for the Nintendo DS, the game got reave reviews and is still the highest-rated DS game on GameRankings, with an average review score of about 93%.

“Chinatown Wars is a big fat raspberry to the competition; a masterclass in not only hand-held development, but video game design as a whole, exploring exactly how to craft Liberty City around the console’s unique strengths without compromising the series’ character,” said the Daily Telegraph.

The game follows the misadventures of Huang Lee, a young Triad, as he investigates the mysterious death of his dad, kills his rivals, steals cars, deals drugs and evades the cops — all in a miniature version of the company’s infamous virtual playground, Liberty City.

Sounds fun. Here’s the trailer:

If the TV industry doesn’t invent a digital business that customers want, it risks an “iTunes moment,” when Apple took hold of the online music business, a Microsoft exec said.

“Realistically. I think the industry has about two to three years to adapt or face its iTunes moment. And it will take at least that long for media brands to build credible, truly digital brands,” Ashley Highfield, managing director of consumer and online at Microsoft UK, told the Guardian.

Highfield gave the gloom and doom prediction today as the keynote speaker at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival.

Answering the inevitable question of how to make money from these new ventures, he said “media companies need to embrace controversial targeted advertising techniques, such as behavioral targeting based on users’ web viewing habits, with the ad inventory going into an auction-style model similar to the system Google operates.”

Interesting he didn’t name Apple TV — speculated “dead” as Sony and Microsoft entered the market last year — as a specific threat, but spoke of the success of iTunes.

In 2007, a Forrester analyst said both iTunes and Apple TV were “dead ends” that would be “eclipsed by television and cable networks will quickly shift their content to free ad-supported streaming.”

Ha. I tried out Apple TV for about a week while house sitting this summer.  The interface was nice, the remote control cool. I’d still rather keep the cheapo PVR with a slightly wheezy fan a friend rigged up — because, while it’s an ugly little box and the remote control works about 40% of the time, there’s no DRM.

Via the Guardian

Apple decides to open doors in Milan — recently named more fashionable than New York — so you’d think it’d be somewhere the city’s whippet-thin Pradamatons would want to be seen sashaying into.

Instead, Apple is opening its first Milan store this Saturday in a place called Carugate. It’s 15 km away from the city center,  a place best known to locals because Ikea also calls it home.

It’ll be in a mall — note the pic above of a woman with a grocery cart — and hopefully  the inside layout is a bit more interesting than the storefront. And instead of having 24/7 access, like many Italian malls, it’s usually closed on Sundays.

Rumors were that Apple’s first Milan store would be a former Stefanel store in Corso Vittorio Emanuele, a pedestrian shopping zone favored by locals and tourists who stroll from the Cathedral to Piazza San Babila.

Next time I need anything, I’ll be heading to the  reseller in the chic Brera area — used as a fashion shoot backdrop and where staff wears “Steve Jobs for Mayor” T-shirts.

People: location, location, location.

Via Corriere della Sera

As expected, Apple is hosting a special “Rock and Roll” media event on Sept. 9 and is sending invites to members of the press.

The tag line for the event is: “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it” —  a play on the Rolling Stones song “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (But I Like It).”

Some had speculated the event would be tied to the reissue of the Beatles catalog on the same day: 09/09/09. The band is re-issuing its entire remastered catalog and The Beatles: Rock Band game. But using a line from Rolling Stones now makes that seem unlikely.

The event is likely to showcase Apple’s holiday lineup of iPods, which are widely expected to get cameras, and a new version of iTunes with social networking features.

Although many are hoping the event will also see the introduction of an Apple tablet, that seems unlikely. But an appearance by Steve Jobs does not. If he hosts the event, it’ll be the first public appearance by Steve Jobs since his liver transplant earlier this year.

The event is being held at 10:00 AM PST at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the venue of several previous Apple media events.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking for insider traders of Apple stock — possibly Apple staff — who made suspicious trades of the company’s stock, according to the Huffington Post.

The SEC is asking brokerage firms for the identities of clients who made suspicious trades, HuffPost financial columnist Dan Dorfman says.

The SEC is looking at suspicious stock trades during four specific time periods, which is unusual, Dorfman says; investigations are usually limited to single time periods — not multiple.

Insider trading is the buying and selling of stock by people with access to information not available to the general public, and is closely watched by the SEC. Insider trades often revolve around news that moves the company’s stock, such as good or bad revenue reports, or the announceent of new products.

The SEC would not reveal any details of its investigation, but traders contacted by Dorfman speculated that it concerned reports about Steve Jobs health and liver transplant, and/or sales of the iPod. News about either create volatility in Apples stock, which insiders can profit from.

As Dorfman notes, Apple’s stock has been great for traders: insider or not. It’s almost doubled in 8 months, jumping from $85.35 to $170.05, just below the 52-week high of $176.25.

Snow Leopard is being widely touted as a performance increase, but the OS upgrade resulted in a 10-15% performance DECREASE on both my Mac Pro as well as my MacBook Pro — at least, according to the Xbench benchmarking tool.

Now of course, that could just be things that Xbench measures, perhaps it doesn’t account or provide sufficient weight for multi-threading, and multi-tasking. But we would like to get to the bottom of this, and are asking for your help.

If you followed our handy dandy upgrade guide you ought so still have a functioning Leopard install to boot from. If so, please follow this testing protocol:

1. Power down your machine until cool.
2. Boot Leopard, and kill all running applications
3. Run XBench All tests except the drive test**
4. Upload results using the name: CoM – YOUR NAME – PRE (Uploading XBench results is part of the process. Once you’re done, it asks if you want to upload your results and what name to give it)

Use the same protocol with your Snow Leopard install, but name the result CoM – YOURNAME – POST.

Thanks in advance I’ll be releasing results in the next few days.

** Why no drive test? XBench places too much emphasis on hard drive performance, and in an era where all hard drives perform basically the same, it skews all performance tests to the center. Running the test without drives provides a better picture of the actual performance delta.

We may be getting closer to a hardware version of hands-free navigation for iPhone users. The FCC has released several documents plus photos of a planned TomTom Car Kit for the iPhone.

The kit (pictured above) includes a mount enabling the iPhone to be positioned either vertically or in landscape mode. Engadget also writes the kit includes Bluetooth and a dedicated SiRFstar GPS chipset.

The announcement may be welcome news to iPhone navigators who hoped an actual TomTom product would follow an iPhone app released earlier this month. The app, priced at $99.99 for U.S. and Canadian iPhone owners, competes with the likes of CoPilot Live ($34.99), Sygic Mobile Maps ($39.99), AT&T’s Navigator ($10 monthly fee) and Google Maps.

[Via iClarified and Engadget]