Details are now emerging about how closely-involved Apple’s co-founder became during the search for a stolen next-generation iPhone that later was splashed across the front page of a prominent gadget blog. According to court records released Friday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs contacted the site around April 19, asking for the phone’s return.

Soon afterwards, Gizmodo editor Brian Lam e-mailed Jobs, telling him the blog would return the device only after Apple acknowledged it came from the Cupertino, Calif. company. A letter asking for the return of “a device that belongs to Apple” was sent to Lam by Apple attorney George Riley. Talking with lead San Mateo County Sheriff’s investigator Detective Matthew Broad, the lawyer had said the prototype’s return was “invaluable” and the potential damage from its loss “was huge,” according to an affidavit.

When you have deep pockets, you’re likely to be the target of lawsuits. That maxim has never been more true than with Apple. A week after Nokia again sued the Cupertino, Calif. company, a graphics display outfit in Washington State has sued Apple, claiming the iPhone infringes its patents on scaling web graphics to mobile devices.

Patent No. 7461353, entitled “Scalable Display of Internet Content on Mobile Devices,” mentions many iPhone-centric features, including manipulating the size of on-screen graphics. “Mobile devices enabled to support resolution-independent scalable display of internet (Web) content to allow Web pages to be scaled (zoomed) and panned for better viewing on smaller screen sizes.”

Apple just can’t seem to keep its hands on a prototype these days. Less than a month after Gizmodo released the first full teardown of the fourth generation iPhone, new teardown pictures of a different handset have been posted to Vietnamese forum Taoviet (link includes breakdown images, which are also mirrored at MacRumors)

The NPD claims that Android is outselling the iPhone and commands seven percent more of the US smartphone market than Apple, but now Cupertino, in a rare response, is saying “Not so fast.”

Nokia is again back in court, this time claiming Apple’s iPad and iPhone infringe five patents. The venue — a federal court in Wisconsin — has some people scratching their heads.

In its latest legal jab at the Cupertino, Calif. consumer electronics giant, Nokia alleges the patents involve “enhanced speech and data transmission, using positioning data in applications and innovations in antenna configurations that improve performance and save space, allowing smaller and more contact devices.”

Apple’s always experimenting with new ways to interact with their devices, and their latest patent takes that experiment one step further into turning your iPhone into a programmable heart rate monitor.

The patent describes a design in which a series of electrodes are seamlessly embedded into the iPhone’s shell in such a way that they are not “visibly or haptically distinguishable on the device.”

You may not be able to see or feel these electrodes, but that doesn’t mean they don’t do anything: instead, they’ll constantly measure your heart rate, with the data used to do anything from measure burned calories to change your music depending on your mood to automatically discharge the battery as a “paddle shock” when your heart suddenly explodes. Win!

In what might charitably be called the most toothless and limp parody this side of your dentureless grampa doing a timely Grover Cleveland impersonationation right before nap time, Ellen DeGeneres went on her talk show on Monday to poke fun at the iPhone 3Gs.

Ellen’s hilarious gag? When she wants to send a text message, she can’t do it through the “Maps” application. The punchline? The iPhone’s hard to use!

As a contributor to Cult of Mac, you can probably guess that I’m an Apple fanboy. I showed up to the Apple Store at 5:45 AM on April 3rd (iPad Day for you civilians) ready to have my mind blown. Little did I know that I would soon be returning my iPad to that same Apple store.

I blame iPhone OS 4.0 and here’s why:

One million iPads have sold in under 30 days, Apple announced Monday. It took twice as long for the iPhone to reach the same figure.

“One million iPads in 28 days — that’s less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with the iPhone,” CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement. Demand for the tablet device continues to outstrip supply, but the Cupertino, Calif. company is “working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers,” Jobs added.

I’m surprised that they were still a contender, but according to Forbes, Apple has just reached a milestone: they’ve just passed Motorola as the largest phone maker in the United States.