We close out another week with a deal on i5-based MacBook Pros, the new Mac mini desktops, and price cuts on Electronics Arts games for the iPhone and iPad. Expercom offers a MacBook Pro powered by a Core i5 Dual 2.4GHz processor and a 15-inch display with 8GB of RAM for $2,198 from Expercom. There is also a deal on Apple’s recently refreshed Mc mini computer, complete with a Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.4GHz for $669. Lastly, Electronics Arts, maker of the Madden NFL games, offers its semi-annual sale on software, including “Battleship,” “Boggle for the iPad,” and “The Sims 3” for the iPhone.

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

Apple has taken MobileMe Mail out of beta and made it available to all me.com members.

The iPad-inspired three-column view is especially nifty. See the screenshot above.

The new web mail also includes a couple of features not available in the beta: mail forwarding from another account and improved junk mail filtering.

Here’s the full list of features:

Backing up your computer is like flossing teeth or mowing the lawn – something you know you should do but usually don’t. Apple has gone to great lengths to make Time Machine, the backup program included with Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard, easy and fun to use. Those aren’t terms which you typically hear applied to backup programs, and these efforts are to be commended.

Time Machine is easy to setup, but restoring files is not as intuitive. Many of my clients ask me for help with how to do this, and how to ensure that their backups are running reliably. Time Machine allows for restoration of files, folders, applications or an entire Mac, depending on your need.

A review of the process couldn’t hurt. Like chicken soup from Grandma …

The JooJoo Tablet has had a long and troubled history. Originally a project by TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington to build a $200 tablet and called the CrunchPad, the JooJoo came into being when its outsourced Singaporean developers violated their contract and decided to cut Arrington out and sell the tablet themselves… a mere month before Apple unveiled the iPad at a similar price point.

By March 30th, only 90 JooJoo tablets had been sold. But if you happen to have one of those 90 JooJoos, good news: you can now install OS X on it. None too surprising — the JooJoo boasts an Atom processor, which is compatible with Snow Leopard — but why would you even want to? OS X is an even worse tablet operating system than Windows 7, let alone the finger-based custom Linux distro the JooJoo ships with.

But hey, if you’re the kind of person who was willing to drop $500 on the JooJoo when you could have bought an iPad, you’re probably already prone to some truly questionable decision making,

I’ve never been quite convinced about the prudence of combining the spatial-awareness requirements of augmented-reality iPhone activities with benders — but if I were in NYC, this pretty cool use of AR might just have made me risk barfing all over my iPhone.

Metaio, the company behind augmented-reality app Junaio, has partnered with the iconic NYC nightlife rag TimeOut New York (TONY) to point users toward hot offers at bars throughout the city via a new “TONY Summer Drinking channel,” included in the 2.0 version of the free app. Of course, tips on where to find these deals is available via less hip methods — aka “the Internets” — but that’s so 2009.

Oh, and keep your eyes peeled next week for another surprise from Junaio.

We near the end of the week with a $999 deal for a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook with widescreen 13.3-inch display. Also among the day’s top bargains: a bluetooth iPad keyboard with 25-foot range for $32. Finally, a new batch of App Store price drops, including “Build-a-lot,” a strategy game for the iPhone or iPod touch.

Speaking of iPods, we have a number, including a4GB iPod nano for $70. Also, to keep your new iPhone 4 unmarred is a shield from ZAGG. Along the way, we’ll check out many other deals, details of which are available on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

The belief that the iPad is eating the netbook’s lunch isn’t new. However, we can now mark the calendar: 2012. That’s according to one analysis firm which also dropped this bombshell: tablet devices will soon comprise nearly 25 percent of all PC sales.

The report released Thursday by Forrester Research shows tablet growth increasing over the next five years, from the current 6 percent to 23 percent by 2015. Meanwhile, the market for netbooks – which took off because of their low cost – is gradually shrinking. Currently 44 percent of PC sales, that figure drops to 17 percent by 2015, according to Forrester.

Apple put together a video love letter to itself where app developers from A-list firms talk about how delighted they are to work with the Cupertino company.

About halfway through the 5-minute or so video, the execs start talking about how much they don’t like working with other platforms. (Read: “Android?”)

“We’ve actually spent some time working with other platforms, it’s a night and day difference,” says Calvin Carter of Bottle Rocket apps who made the NPR app. “They are more difficult for the user, they don’t have the power or the tools available, they don’t have the distribution network. They don’t have the standards, both in hardware or software.”

“It is that handset fragmentation, if you will, that causes developers a lot of problems,” says Skarpi Hedinsson of ABC TV. “Because you’re now targeting individual devices.”

“It’s really evident in Apple’s APIs, in the developer’s tools, that you’re working with something really mature,” remarks Tom Conrad of Pandora. “Not something that was invented two years ago.”

Via Jordan Stark

Steve Jobs has openly criticized Adobe Flash as being slow, buggy, insecure and crash prone… so it seems strange that the recent 10.6.4 update to Snow Leopard did not bother to include the latest version of Flash that actually addresses many of thoese concerns.

The version of Flash in 10.6.4 is version 10.0.45.2, while the latest version is 10.1.53.64, which not only patches numerous security vulnerabilities but implements support for hardware flash decoding under OS X… commonly cited as the number one reason why Flash works better on Windows than on a Mac. (Edit: As commenters below helpfully inform me, no, it jolly well doesn’t. Hardware decoding is coming in a future version of Flash for Mac.)

A conspiracist might think that Apple doesn’t want Adobe to fix Flash: they just want it to die. My guess, though, is that it takes so long to thoroughly test a software update that last week’s Flash update was simply too late to be bundled in.

If you’re concerned, just download and install the latest version of Flash yourself: it’s quite the improvement.

If you intend on upgrading to iOS 4 on Monday, the first piece of the puzzle has landed on Software Update: iTunes 9.2 is now available for download.

It’s a pretty tiny update, with the only non-iOS 4 specific feature being some new album artwork improvements, including a new transition effect. Apple’s clearly saving all the big new features for iTunes 10, which we can probably expect to land in September with some sort of cloud-storage and streaming functionality.

Here’s the change log:

• Sync with iPhone 4 to enjoy your favorite music, movies, TV shows, books and more on-the-go

• Sync and read books with iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4 and iBooks 1.1

• Organize and sync PDF documents as books. Read PDFs with iBooks 1.1 on iPad and any iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4

• Organize your apps on your iOS 4 home screens into folders using iTunes

• Faster back-ups while syncing an iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4

• Album artwork improvements make artwork appear more quickly when exploring your library

Get it now through Software Update, or download it directly from Apple.