Last year, Apple joined forces with Microsoft, Research in Motion, and Sony to form the “Rockstar Bidco consortium,” which outbid Google for more than 6,000 Nortel patents covering wireless and LTE technologies. Together, the consortium paid $4.5 billion for the portfolio, most of which — around $2.6 billion — came from Apple.

However, the Cupertino company has reportedly been quietly handing over more cash to secure sole ownership of select patents.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office just granted Apple its trademark for Passbook that was originally filed in June. After several months of internal processing on the USPTO’s end, Apple now owns the rights to Passbook and can leverage its trademark against infringing companies.

Passbook was first announced by Apple at WWDC 2012 in June and was touted as the company’s digital wallet technology. After being included in the iOS 6 betas, Passbook launched to the public with the release of iOS 6 on September 19th, 2012.

While its initial launch left much to be desired, Passbook is starting to gain traction with big franchises like Starbucks signing on. Apple has experimented with NFC-related patents, and there’s a good chance Passbook will eventually mature to be Apple’s one-stop mobile payment solution.

Source: Patently Apple

While Apple’s taking a wait and see approach to the nascent mobile payments and digital wallet industries, PayPal seems ready to launch an all-out offensive. In addition to its existing assortment of mobile, local, and online payment systems, PayPal announced this week that it is acquiring startup card.io.

card.io currently works with a range of iOS and Android developers to help them integrate mobile credit/debit card payment capabilities into their apps without the need of additional hardware like Square’s card reader or PayPal’s Here card reader. Instead, card.io’s partners use the built-in camera of an iPhone (or other iOS or Android device) to snap a photo of a credit card. The card number and related information is extracted and passed to a payment processor to complete the transaction (manual keying in a card number is also supported as a backup).

Evernote, the clunky-but-popular note-taking app and service, has acquired Penultimate, the slick, smooth and generally fantastic drawing and handwriting app. So good is Penultimate, in fact, that it is Apple’s 4th best-selling iOS app ever.

So what does the acquisition mean for Penultimate and — more importantly — Penultimate’s customers?

A very interesting factoid has been revealed in the newly-released iPhoto for iOS: Apple isn’t using Google Maps. More specifically, Apple is using its own mapping technology to provide map tiles in its brand new photo editing app.

There have been rumors for many months saying that Apple is working on proprietary mapping technology to replace Google Maps, and it looks like the rumors are true.

Following recent speculation that has suggested Apple may release a “budget” iPhone at its October 4 event, that will have minimal storage and will rely on streaming content from the cloud, the Cupertino company has gone ahead and taken over the iCloudiPhone.com domain name. But does it really mean anything?

Apple has just released iOS 5 Beta 7 to registered developers. The latest beta build of iOS 5 can be downloaded in the iOS Dev Center. 

Remember the report that Apple was preparing its own Netflix-killer called iTunes Replay for launch in the next few weeks? Well, don’t hold your breath… it’s not coming anytime soon and, as usual, you can blame a reclacitrant Hollywood for having to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century.

Two weeks after releasing iOS 5 Beta 4, Apple has now pushed a fifth beta out to developers. You can grab iOS 5 Beta 5 with your registered developer account in the Dev Center, and the update can also be received as an over-the-air update on a device running iOS 5 Beta 4.

Apple has proved once again that Fridays are still work days by dropping iOS 5 Beta 4. Developers can now download the latest iOS 5 beta in Apple’s dev channel, and, for the first time, through the miracle of over-the-air updates.

Those on iOS 5 Beta 3 should be able to wirelessly upgrade to Beta 4.