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Macworld 2010 opens today. It is the 25th annual gathering of Mac users. That’s right, 25 years!

But thanks to the absence of Apple this year, this “Mecca for Mac Heads” may be the last. So check it out while you can.

• The show runs for 5 days. The Expo showfloor opens on Thursday at noon.
• For the first time since the eighties, it now includes a Saturday. Expect big crowds, lots of kids.
• There’s 250 exhibitors, down from 400 last year. Here’s the Exhibitor List.
• Attendance is expected at about 30,000 visitors. (But most Expo visitors this year got free passes instead of paying the usual $25 fee).
• People are hoping this isn’t the last Macworld but consider the history. As Jim Dalrymple notes: “Apple pulled out of Macworld Expo Boston/New York — it failed; Apple pulled out of Macworld Expo Tokyo — it failed; Apple pulled out of Apple Expo Paris — it failed.”
• Macworld Expo Floor Hours: Thu 2/11 12pm-6pm; Fri 2/12; 10am-6pm Sat 2/13; 10am-6pm
• Twitter hashtag is #macworld2010

And here, in chronological order, is the top 5 things to do at the show:

The announcement of the iPad has done a lot of things: it’s stoked up excitement in the Mac using community, it’s got a bunch of developers feverishly coding exciting new stuff, and it’s got retailers and cell phone companies the world over drooling over the money they can make from it.

And it’s also somewhat upset my plans for buying a new Mac.

It’s been a month since my review of Google’s “SuperPhone”, the Nexus One. Since that time, we’ve surfed, updated facebook, navigated, called, played endless hands of cribbage and even tried to freeze it to death on a trip to Dayton Ohio. Follow me after the jump to find out does the “SuperPhone” stand the test of time, or is it a phonebooth’d Clark Kent.

Silicon Insider posted this interesting graph putting into perspective exactly how large Apple is, compared with the other big three tech companies out there. And it’s all about cash.

Essentially, Apple is the second most cash rich company out there, with a little under $39.8 billion in cash and short and long term securities to call upon. Microsoft’s technically ahead of them, but it’s a comparatively small lead of a paltry $0.6 billion dollars… and while Apple’s cash reserves continue to rise, Microsoft’s have leveled off over the last half year.

Then comes Google, with only $24.6 billion in cash and investments, and finally Intel, with $18.9 billion on hand.

All of these companies have major assets, but Apple is clearly positioned to become more cash rich than Microsoft in the coming months. We’re on the brink of a huge transition in the tech landscape: the day that Apple is bigger than Microsoft. About time.

Welcome to the “iPhone photography toy of the week” slot. Today’s toy is: InfiniteScope.

The iPad has already launched a thousand jokes, some of which you can wear some on your chest, or your privates, before you can even buy one in March.

See some examples after the jump:

Forgive me for banging on about Notational Velocity – but it’s such an awesome app that it deserves a place on your Mac. And this week it just got a little awesomer.

The latest version of NV includes native support for syncing with Simplenote, the iPhone app and web notes service.

As I noted the other week in a post about rival (and NV-inspired) notes app Nottingham, the great thing about Simplenote is that you get access to what I call an “ecosystem”. Your notes are safe – there’s copies of them in the cloud and inside your NV database. But because Simplenote encourages third-party apps, you’ll always have plenty of choice about how you access those notes from your computer.

NV has also undergone a few visual tweaks to smarten up its appearance, not least of them smart and funny new icon by Colin Cody. There are some more technical details about the new update on this blog post if you’re interested.

Having all my Notational Velocity notes automatically and wirelessly synced with my phone is just wonderful. If you need a similarly simple synced notes service, I encourage you to download Notational Velocity and sign up for a Simplenote account. You won’t regret it.

Steve Jobs doesn’t follow a presentation template but as outlined in my new book, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, he does consistently follow the same principles that have turned Apple product launches into an art form. The iPad announcement on Wednesday, January 27th was no exception: classic Steve Jobs.

Photos courtesy of Gizmodo.

UPDATE: iMussolini Developer Luigi Marino told Cult of Mac that he discovered the lawsuit for copyright infringement by reading our story yesterday. Marino contacted the Italian state film archives, Istituto Luce, for clarifications about the video material he used from Mussolini’s speeches and they asked him to remove the app from the store to avoid a legal battle. Marino tells us he requested to pull the app and expects it to be gone from the iTunes store by 1 p.m. (CET).

UPDATE 2: iMussolini is gone. The competing Mussolini app — Mussolini’s historical speeches– — is, however, still available.

An iPhone app of Benito Mussolini’s speeches is the second-highest paid app in the Italian iTunes store a week after launching despite criticism for giving voice to Il Duce’s diehard fans and claims over copyright violations.

iMussolini, a mobile compendium of fascism, features 100 complete speeches,  plus 20 audio and video clips for €0.79 (it’s also available in the US iTunes store for $0.99, in Italian only) — without any kind of political commentary.

At about 1,000 downloads a day, iMussolini is more popular in Italy than Shazam and games like Ice Age and Dracula: the Path of the Dragon.

Comments by readers on iPhoneitalia, which broke the story, included enough pro-Mussolini sentiment  “Duce! Duce! Duce!”  and slogans (“Boia chi molla!”) to prompt complaints to the iTunes store that the app violates Italy’s 1952 Scelba law, which formally abolished fascism. The New York-based American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants  also slammed Apple over the app.

Today, the Italian state film archives, Istituto Luce, announced it will sue the developer for using archival clips and asked Apple to remove the application. At this writing, the app is still available.

iMussolini is the handiwork of 25-year-old Luigi Marino, who picked up an iPhone for the first time about six months ago and made the app in his spare time.

Cult of Mac spoke to Marino about why iMussolini is an excercise in free enterprise, getting the app approved and why his next app may feature Gandhi.

CoM: How did you start programming for iPhones?

Luigi Marino: I’ve been programming Java and C++ since high school, in July 2009 I bought my first iPhone and  in November 2009 in my first MacBook.  Programming for it is more of a passion than anything else. (NDR: Marino owns and runs an unrelated company).   In my free time, I also blog for an iPhone website called dev app.

Though the announcement of Apple’s iPad has met with the typical mixture of hyperbolic praise and hyperbolic criticism (no one can talk sensibly about it), there has been one consistent complaint that most would agree is valid: a device this powerful should be capable of some form of multitasking. But I think I have the answer.

Why is there no Adobe Flash on the iPad? Adobe says it’s not because it’s buggy, as an Apple source claimed this afternoon to CultofMac.com.

It’s because Apple is protecting revenue streams derived from content like movies and games. If users could watch free TV shows on Hulu, they wouldn’t buy them through iTunes.

“It’s pretty clear if you connect the dots: the issue is about revenue,” says Adrian Ludwig, an Adobe group product manager for Flash, during a telephone interview on Friday afternoon.

Steve Jobs will never pitch a product more effectively than he did at the announcement of the iPhone. He said he was introducing three products: “A revolutionary phone, a widescreen iPod, and a break-through internet device. And they’re all one product: The iPhone.”

I thought back to that legendary pitch when I saw Steve affix one of his weakest lines ever to the iPad, a device I think actually has remarkable potential:

Image via Gizmodo

That’s right, the selling point is that it’s “Our most advanced technology in a magical & revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.” Really? Your selling points are advancement, magic, revolution, and cheapness? The best thing that line has going for is that device and price rhyme. First of all, almost no one buys magic. More importantly, Apple should never make price a central selling point; other companies can make cheaper knock-offs and then Apple has to re-convince people that that higher prices are justified. Once you try to become the price leader, you can’t really try to go premium again.

But the tagline was also a summation of the one problem that kept coming up for me as I watched the iPad announcement: the device simply does not have a killer app. A killer app, is the use that shows why a new technology is worth buying. For example, microwaves didn’t start selling until microwaveable popcorn was introduced and PCs didn’t sell until spreadsheet software was launched. The iPhone’s killer app, quite honestly, was Safari; the iPhone could certainly do a lot more than browse the web, but for many people, seeing the New York Times home page in multitouch made the sale.

The iPad? Well, I’ll say that the most impressive thing I saw today was the New York Times home page all over again. It’s even better than mobile web browsing than the iPhone. So what? That’s not enough to get me to spend $500. But not to worry. I believe the killer app for iPad is on the way, and possibly by launch. It’s called iLife.

“Stop, hey, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.”

— For What It’s Worth, Stephen Stills

That sound, the one emanating Wednesday from the stage at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and reverberating throughout the blogosphere and interwebs, the one heard in literally millions of conversations at lunch counters and water coolers and dinner tables across the globe, was the sound of another ding in the universe.

Once all the snickering about feminine hygiene finally dies down, once Apple finally puts the iPad into the retail chain that saw 50,000,000 people walk through the doors in the most recent fiscal quarter, once people — aside from jaded technology journalists and geekazoids — get the iPad in their hands, Apple’s description of it as a “magical and revolutionary” product will begin to come into focus.

Why?

UPDATE: Check each contest website for details and closing dates — newer ones are last.

The contest list has doubled from the original post. If you hear of others, let us know. Scams have also cropped up with iPads as bait, so remember your due diligence.

Before the launch, we wrote about a daring intern who risked his job by staging a contest with the as yet unseen iPad as a prize.

Today,  a bunch of contests giving the iPad out as prizes have already cropped up, many involve no-brain activities like tweeting (sorry, witty chiruppers!) or signing up for Facebook groups. (If you can bug fix, try here or here. )

So if you want to get your hands on one without spending any cash, this may be the ticket.

Mashable

Springwise

MacMall

Failbooking

TeenCastic

Big Prize Giveaways

Appletell

Weekinrewind

Dealsplus

Retailmenot

3Dbookshelf

TheRagTrader

Winanipod

Geeknewscentral

Swagbucks

Squidoo

Catalink

Pricecanada

The tech buzz

Geeksugar

Savings.com

Meritline

Getafreeipad.co.uk

TheWhuffieBank

Zemime

Mouseenvy

EverythingiCafe.com

IrishAisle

Mahalo

Gimme

Artamata

Whytheluckymobile

Gazelle

Smarta

Appqanda

iPad contest

My contest

Socius

Simply free ipad

If you come across other ones, please add them in the comments.

NB: If you win one, Cult of Mac staffers reserve the right to come over and play with it.

When Steve Jobs first revealed the iPod on 23 October 2001, no-one had the slightest inkling of what it might become.

Nobody at the time predicted that the music player would morph into a phone, and then into a multi-purpose tablet device.

The iPad is itself a very similar starting point. What we’re looking at here is the very beginning of a new product line, one that we can expect to adapt, metamorphose, and grow just as the iPod did.

The backlash against the iPad was inevitable and predictable. The lack of a hard keyboard was enough to send most geeks into a fit. But the backlash against the iPad is particularly vicious and visceral.

The word “iTampon” is the #2 worldwide trending topic on Twitter right now.

“This thing sucks. Anyone who buys it is a moron,” says one commenter at Engadget.

Some sites, particularly Gizmodo, are going the extra mile in iPad-bashing.

“My god, am I underwhelmed by the iPad,” says Gizmodo’s Adam Frucci. “This is as inessential a product as I’ve ever seen, but beyond that, it has some absolutely backbreaking failures that will make me judge anyone who buys one.”

But similar reactions greeted the iPhone, the iPod and the original iMac (no keypad, closed system, no floppy), and look what happened to them. They’re just the most popular smartphone, MP3 player and single model of a PC ever built.

Thing is, the last people to ask about the iPad are geeks. This isn’t a product built for them. They’re WAY too in the weeds. They can’t get over the lack of camera, multasking or Flash. But ask my wife about the iPad and Flash and she’ll look at you like you’re speaking in tongues.

As we predicted, the iPad is Steve Jobs’ “computer for the rest of us.” It’s a natural successor to the original Mac, which introduced the GUI to PCs – and was derided by geeks as a “toy.” But look around, the GUI kinda caught on.

The iPad is not for geeks. It’s for ordinary people who want a lightweight computer and are sick of computer headaches. This is a machine you’d buy for your grandmother and not have to worry about tech-support.

Yeah, you relinquish some control — which is something PC fans have always hated about Macs — but most ordinary people are grateful not to think about file systems, software installers and virus definitions.

The iPad is the first computer for people who are completely computer illiterate — and there’s millions of them.

Earlier on we gave you a post crammed full of iPad hardware pics. But now, some software:

See that iTunes UI? A little bit different. What’s that slider at the top left? Thicker, chunkier controls. I might write a whole post about that.

Here’s the App Store. Looks very familiar.

Although John Gruber over at Daring Fireball predicted it a couple weeks ago, I think most of us were shocked when it turned out that Apple’s newly announced iPad tablet didn’t have a forward mounted camera.

After all, why not? With an entry-level price and a $29.95 unlimited 3G coverage plan, the iPad seems like it would afford a perfect solution for mobile video calling. Hell, even if it didn’t have those things, surely it would be just as good as, say, a MacBook in letting people play around in Photo Booth. Right?

No. I think Apple knew what they were doing here. Unless it’s mounted in the iPad keyboard dock accessory, the iPad is going to be predominantly used in a below eye-level position. What that means is that a forward fronted web cam would need to point upwards at a slant to capture a human face.

So what, our lithe and muscular long-necked readers ask? Two words: double chin. Or three words, if you prefer: double triple chins.

We’ve told you everything we know about the iPad so far. But when will you be able to buy it?

Well, the official page is here, and according to Apple, here are the release dates:

The WiFi version will be shipping in late March.

The 3G version will be shipping domestically in April.

International carriers will unveil contract plans in June.

You can sign up to be notified when one is on order here.

Phew. It’s all over. And a new era has begun.

Ladies and gentlemen: Say hello to iPad. It will cost you $499. Even the most expensive model is $829. The WiFi version ships in late March, the 3G in April

Here’s an overview of everything we know so far.

[polldaddy poll=”2603845″]

Prices for the new device: 32GB for $599 and 64GB for $699 (Wi-Fi only version),
Shell out an extra $130 for 3G-capable models — so $629, $729 and $829.

Is the price right? Is the iPad a must-have or wait-and-see device?

It’s been 50 minutes into the event and There’s no sign of multi-tasking. To switch between apps, all they are doing is simply closing the current and opening a new – no ProSwitcher like card management. This is definitely going to be a deal breaker for the most who are planning to trade their netbook for this device.

Also, the screen’s got some good real-estate, seems like 2x the resolution of the iPhone. However,

[polldaddy poll=”2603443″]

There were so many possible names for Apple’s new device.
Now we know the super-slablet has been christened the iPad.
Let us know what you think of the name and what you would’ve named it in the comments.

And here comes the Tablet.

After implicitly acknowledging that they will announce the Tablet, Steve Jobs has just asked whether there is a third category between laptops and the smartphone. He thinks there is. It’s called the iPad.

What a terrible name, and what a shame the rumors are true. The device is exactly the same as what was leaked on Engadget earlier today, yet without the bolts and S&M leather.

And I was so hoping for Magic Slate.

More details to follow.

[image via Gdgt]

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOxbLU_32jI&feature=player_embedded

If the most often repeated scuttlebutt is to be believed. Apple’s Tablet, when released later today, will feature some sort of souped up flavor of the iPhone OS. That raises an interesting point: even as it is, the iPhone OS as an operating system brand name is pretty clunky, especially when you’re talking about non-iPhone hardware like the iPod Touch. If the Tablet does indeed run some flavor of the iPhone OS, maybe it needs a name change to reflect its expanded scope?

According to Mac Daily News, that’s just what Apple plans. The video they use as proof is pretty questionable, but nonetheless, MDN claims that Apple will rebrand the iPhone OS to iOS during today’s media event.

Short of a few bigwigs cloistered away in Cupertino’s panic rooms, no one really knows the exact details of what Steve Jobs plans to announce today, but even if this iOS rumor turns out to be false — and I suspect it might be — I think it’s still a pretty good bet that a name change for the iPhone OS might be in store.