Thanks to an issue with light leaking onto the camera sensor, Apple has delayed the white iPhone 4 until at least March of next year… a nine month delay which probably harbingers the cancellation of that device.

It’s a delay that has bitten some customers harder than others: in fact, some customers have been so desperate to have a white iPhone 4 that they have converted them to white themselves as an aftermarket mod.

Don’t even think about buying or selling an iPhone 4 modded to white on eBay, though: Apple’s coming down hard on “fake” and “counterfeit” white iPhone 4s, banning them from sale on the world’s most popular online auctioning site.

One thing’s for sure: iOS 4 hasn’t been very kind to iPhone 3G owners. Not only did the major update end up slowing most iPhone 3G devices to a crawl once installed, but iOS 4.x under the iPhone 3G is missing many of the features like multitasking or GameCenter that other devices get to enjoy.

The good news for iPhone 3G users is that the soon-to-be-released iOS 4.2 update supposedly does a lot to improve the 3G’s sluggishness problems. The bad? Apple’s culling yet another promised feature from 3G owners: AirPlay isn’t coming to the iPhone 3G after all.

Apple’s social network Ping is kind of a lonely kid. The iTunes-based network launched in September has only attracted 2,000 artists.

Twitter, on the other hand, is a big man on the social media campus.   Some 95 million taunts, shout-outs, heads’ up, musings pass through it  every day — and a lot of that noise is about music.

So Twitter has now “friended” Ping in the hopes that it can become more popular.

As a glimpse of the possible gaming future of an iOS-capable AppleTV, this is pretty tops: for the latest update of The Incident, Big Bucket Software has added the ability to hook your iPad up to your HDTV and play the game from your couch using a Bluetooth-paired iPhone as the controller.

If Apple ever introduces an App Store for the AppleTV, this is the way they’re going to do it: in the meantime, we can count on jailbreak developers implementing this sort of functionality in jailbroken AppleTV apps. I can’t wait for someone to get an emulator working on this thing already!

We have just learned that a new patent has confirmed Cult of Mac’s earlier report that Apple is working on ambitious remote computing tech that would allow files and settings to be transferred between the Mac and iPhone through a Near Field Communications (NFC) chip.

Apple’s retail stores have suspended sales of iPhone 4 slide-on cases because of concerns about trapped dirt causing scratches and cracks — the so-called “Glassgate” issue.

The ban is impacting at least half-a-dozen case makers who expected to have a blockbuster holiday season, said a source who works in the case industry and asked for anonymity.

At least one manufacturer has hundreds of thousands of battery pack cases that have been suspended by Apple’s stores, despite being certified by Apple’s “Made for iPhone” program.

“Glassgate is a real problem,” said the source. “Apple is not approving slide-on cases right now for its stores.”

Apple’s official line of headphones and earbuds have always been pretty lackluster in my eyes, but a secret acquisition might mean that Cupertino is planning on changing all of that: according to reports, Apple might have quietly purchased a small Bluetooth wireless headphone designer a couple of months ago, and are hard at work in their labs on a new pair of totally wireless cans.

Over the weekend, Apple CEO Steve Jobs provided a few (very few) reasons why the Cupertino, Calif. was shelving the Xserve: it wasn’t selling well. “Hardly anyone was buying them,” Jobs explained in an email to a French website.

In a related mini-mystery, an Apple executive publicly affirmed Apple will still support its server customers, but then mysteriously deleted the message.

Ever played Lazer Tag? If Apple has its druthers, next time you play it, it won’t be with big ray guns and fluorescent sensors, but with your iPhone.

Apple’s gaming plans are described in a newly discovered patent dated April 2009 for “Interactive Gaming with Co-Located, Networked Direction and Location Aware Devices.”

The nitty gritty’s a lot cooler than that dry legalese description, though: what Apple is describing here is away to take advantage of an iPhone’s gyroscope, accelerometer and GPS to turn your handset into an aimable device that can talk to other iPhones that it is pointed at.

When owners of the iPhone 3G started reporting massive performance issues with iOS 4, we knew it was only a matter of time before the first lawsuit dropped, and here it is, lodged by plaintiff Biana Wofford in the Superior Court of California for San Diego.

The lawsuit’s even crazier than what we expected though: it thinks Apple conspired to make iOS 4 on the iPhone 3G suck so that users would be forced to upgrade to a new model.