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This week on the Gadget Lab podcast, the crew talks about big Amazon news, the upcoming iPhone event and Microsoft’s latest mobile update. Read More…

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Apple's iPad (left) next to Samsung's Galaxy Tab (right). Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Apple and Samsung this week won awards for display technologies on their mobile devices. Read More…

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by Sam Biddle

Tuesday is the day a lot of you have been waiting for — theiPhone 4 taken under Verizon’s big red wing. We know the announcement’s happening, but what else do we know for sure? And what about thosefloating rumors?

First, here’s what we’re sure of.

It’s Announced Tomorrow

It doesn’t get much more solid than this. Verizon’s sent out invites to tech writers, and, though only through the always-nebulous “people familiar with the matter,” the Wall Street Journal has confirmed.

It’s the Same Phone as Ever

The odds of Apple giving Verizon anything other than a CDMA version of the same iPhone 4 AT&T has are extremely low. If a new Apple product — say, the iPhone 5 — were about to be loosed on us, you better believe it’d be Apple doing the unveiling, not Verizon. There’s also a whole host of reasons whyan LTE iPhone doesn’t make sense right now — poor coverage, battery-life murder, Apple’s early-adoption anxiety, and existing knowledge of a CDMA model’s development behind closed doors. Engadget’s alsodug up photos of an adjusted antenna design, likely made with CDMA optimization in mind.

Finally, if Apple had something shiny and exciting to debut, they’d be doing it themselves. So keep your pants on until this summer, when a new version is likely to be announced.

It Might Have an Unlimited-Data Option

Now we head into slight uncertainty territory. AWSJ report — again, via “a person familiar with the matter” — says Verizon’s planning an unlimited data plan. This makes sense, as it would give Verizon a competitive edge over AT&T, which terminated its own unlimited plan in favor of capped data (except for those subscribers grandfathered in with an unlimited plan that predated the change).

It’ll Be Out … Soon

The original WSJ report points to an end-of-the-month release for Verizon’s iPhone, whileBGR says sometime between Feb. 3 and 6 (based on a Verizon employee-vacation blockade during that time). Not much of a difference, either way.

Steve Jobs Might Show Up

All Things D, citing “sources in a position to know,” says Jobs’ appearance alongside Verizon is “likely,” unless there are “unforeseen circumstances” (a flat tire?). The significance of Jobs’ attendance, and what role he might take, of course a whole other barrel of speculation.

Verizon Might Get the White One

The elusive great white whale of mobile electronics! Could it show up tomorrow?ZD Net’s “educated guess” is that, yes, Verizon will indeed land the oft-delayed white model.

This story was written by Sam Biddle and originally appeared on Gizmodo.

Photo credit: jfingas /Flickr

See Also:

• Reports: Verizon iPhone Likely Coming Jan. 11
• WSJ: Verizon iPhone Debuts Early 2011
• Verizon CEO Throws Wet Blanket on iPhone Rumors
• Bloomberg: Verizon to Launch iPhone in 2011
• Verizon to Apple: We Want the iPhone
• Fortune: Verizon iPhone Debuts Early 2011

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American iPhone users frustrated with AT&T’s slow data speeds and dropped calls may soon have an alternative.

Verizon yesterday sent out invitations to a Tuesday, January 11 press event in New York.

Many believe that this event will be the debut of the iPhone on Verizon.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that “a person familiar with the matter” had confirmed the Tuesday event would be the announcement of a Verizon iPhone. Earlier, the New York Times cited “people with direct knowledge of Apples plans” who said that Verizon would soon be adding the iPhone to its lineup. Both phrases typically mean that a company has delivered a controlled leak to the newspaper.

Adding credence to the codewords, Gizmodo reports that it did not receive an invitation, despite having a good relationship with Verizon — while Apple-centric blogger Jim Dalrymple, who never covers Verizon, did. Gizmodo has been excluded from every Apple press event since it published photos of the then-unreleased iPhone 4. Gizmodo’s conclusion: Apple is behind Verizon for this event.

Many iPhone users have been frustrated with AT&T, the exclusive U.S. carrier of the iPhone since its launch in 2007. The company’s network frequently drops calls (especially for iPhone users) and many users crave faster data speeds and more extensive geographic coverage. Despite adding additional infrastructure, AT&T appears to have had difficulties keeping up with the demand for the wildly popular phone. Many hope that Verizon would do a better job — or would at least offer an alternative to customers who like Apple’s phone, but don’t like AT&T.

We’ve been unable to confirm the NYT and WSJ reports independently, but the signs point strongly in one direction: Verizon is about to get the iPhone.

Maybe it will even be available in white.

An award-winning writer specializing in technology, science and business, Dylan Tweney is a senior editor at Wired.com and publisher of tinywords, the world’s smallest magazine.
Follow @dylan20 and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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LAS VEGAS — Every year at CES, there’s a theme or expectation that quickly becomes codified the moment you step inside the cavernous and often soulless Las Vegas Convention Center. This year, it was clear that everyone and their grandmother was coming out with a tablet PC. Pre-show estimates put the number around 50. Scuttlebutt inside Central Hall here put that figure closer to 80, although an exact count would be a near-Herculean and mind-numbing task.

What is painfully obvious is that many of these tablet makers showing off their wares will be drubbed by giants like Apple, Samsung, Motorola, RIM, and maybe a couple other fortunate ones. For the rest, 2011 is looking to be a gruesome battle of attribution amongst dozens of other companies.

“The market will only bear so much,” said IDC analyst David Daoud before CES kicked off. “It’s going to get pretty ugly as the year goes on.”

And with so many options out there to pick from, it’s going to be up to the manufacturers to separate themselves with unique features, although some are banking on being the budget-priced model of choice for those looking to spend under $500 on an entry-level tablet. Let’s look at show some of the major players of 2011 might be.

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Erik is the editor of Playbook, Wired.com’s sports blog. He’s also the managing editor of Longshot and a contributor to Pop-Up Magazine.
Follow @erikmal and @wiredplaybook on Twitter.

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The Mac App Store has launched, freshly stocked with over 1,000 OS X applications. The store comes as part of an OS X update, version 10.6.6, and is a standalone application rather than being yet another add-on to the already creaking and bloated iTunes.

The store works a lot like the iOS App Store we know already: You sign in with your Apple I.D and then you can shop. Buy a Mac app and the payment is charged to your registered credit card account, and the app downloads automatically and is placed in the applications folder, with a convenient shortcut placed in the dock (the icon actually leaps from the Store window and lands in the dock neat). This is clearly aimed at novice users who may never have actually downloaded and installed third-party software before, and the interface will be instantly familiar to anyone who has used the App Store in iTunes or on an iPad.

That said, there is plenty for power-users, too. Apple’s flagship photo-editing software, Aperture, is in the store for just $80. You can still buy it from the conventional Apple Store, but it’ll cost the usual $200. That’s quite a saving. The iWork office suite is in there, too, although it remains at the ‘09 version, the a new ‘11 update many were hoping for. The three iWork apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote, cost $20 apiece, a saving on the usual $80 bundle price. If you already have these installed on your Mac, the App Store detects this and shows them as “installed”, just like on the iPad.

There are also free apps the slick new Twitter, for example, which is the long awaited v2.0 of Tweetie for Mac as well as some old favorites (Angry Birds is quite something on a 27-inch iMac screen).

There are no trials in the Mac App Store, and submissions are subject to strict rules, just like the iOS store. It appears that some of these can be waived, though. Twitter is clearly using custom, non standard user interface elements and it is featured on the front page. Apple is clearly playing somewhat by its own rules here, too. No trial versions are are allowed in the store, so developers have to host them on their own sites. Apple has abided, and the trial for the iWork suite is on the main Apple site

I predict that the store is going to be huge. It has the same kid-in-a-candy-store addictive qualities of the iPhone and iPad stores, along with a few features missing from the mobile versions. On the Mac, for example, all your purchases are listed under a tab in the top toolbar. Finally, here’s a tip: Up in the Apple menu, on the top left of your screen, you’ll see a new entry called “App Store.” This replaces the old “Mac OS X Software” which has quietly been retired.

Mac App Store [Apple]
Apples Mac App Store Opens for Business [Apple]

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Apple’s iOS App Store hit the ground sprinting two-and-a-half years ago, and it hasn’t slowed down. In 2010, programmers unleashed a plethora of high-quality apps for the iPhone and its brand-new big sibling, the iPad.

For Apple’s tablet, many of the most impressive apps focused on the reading experience. That’s not surprising, because what better to do with that big, beautiful screen? And for the iPhone, we saw some clever apps that made excellent use of the handset’s always-on data connection, geo-awareness and camera.

With 400,000 apps crowding the iOS App Store, it’s tough to choose what’s worthy of a space on your screen. Here are Wired staff’s picks for the best iOS apps of 2010. There may be a lot of useless apps out there, but these are worth downloading.

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See Also:

• 15 iPad Apps You Should Download Today
• 10 Stellar iPad Apps That Will Blow You Away
• Top Five iPad Comic-Book Apps Reviewed
• GeekDad: IPhone Apps
• Underwire: IPhone Apps

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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Apple’s loose-lipped overseas partners are exchanging whispers about the next-generation iPad, claiming it will come in three different versions, one of which would work with Verizon’s network.

The iPad 2 will support three different wireless configurations: UMTS, CDMA and Wi-Fi only, according to “industry sources” citing component makers. That’s up from the two versions Apple currently offers: UMTS plus Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi only.

To explicate the alphabet soup, UMTS is the standard used by major 3G carriers such as AT&T and T-Mobile, while CDMA is compatible with Verizon and Sprint networks.

Currently the 3G iPad ships with a MicroSIM card slot, and in the United States, the only carrier that uses MicroSIM is AT&T. Customers who want to connect to non-AT&T 3G networks must either buy an external wireless hotspot device such as the Verizon MiFi (Verizon even sells a MiFi plus iPad package already) or trim a standard SIM card down to MicroSIM size, like Wired.com’s Charlie Sorrel.

The current 3G model of the iPad is not tied to a contract; customers pay a flat rate monthly for data and can opt out whenever they please.

So if this rumor is true, what this means is when the iPad 2 ships, you’ll have to pick a 3G model based on your carrier preference. If you don’t plan to be on the road a lot, there’s still the Wi-Fi option.

Support for both major wireless standards in the U.S. will make the iPad 2 available to a much larger potential audience, whereas before it was only available from AT&T here in the states.

Whether Apple hammers out sales agreements with Verizon or Sprint remains to be seen, however.

Recent rumors suggestion that the iPad 2 will hit stores April 2011, one year after the original iPad’s release. Some third-party protective cases for a purported “iPad 2″ have been cropping up in Asia, hinting at the possibility of a bigger speaker and a rear-facing camera.

Persistent rumors — so far unsubstantiated — have also pointed to a Verizon-compatible iPhone to be released in early 2011. If Verizon got the iPhone and the iPad, it would greatly expand Apple’s potential market, and would also likely deal a severe blow to AT&T, which has been roundly criticized for the inability of its 3G network to keep up with iPhone-induced demand.

Photo of the current iPad: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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Apple can’t stick to its own rules with the gigantic iOS App Store.

The company recently approved an iPhone camera app that carries a special feature: the ability to snap a photo with the physical volume button rather than tapping the touchscreen. Oddly enough, about four months ago Apple banned a top-selling iPhone app for including the same “volume-snap” functionality.

Apple in August rejected the photo app Camera+ when it included a volume-snap feature, because changing the behavior of the iPhone’s external hardware buttons was strictly prohibited.

“Your application cannot be added to the App Store because it uses iPhone volume buttons in a non-standard way, potentially resulting in user confusion,” Apple told Camera+ developer Tap Tap Tap in its August rejection letter. “Changing the behavior of iPhone external hardware buttons is a violation of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement.”

Following the rejection, Tap Tap Tap hid the volume-snap feature as an Easter egg inside the app and hinted that it could be enabled by visiting a URL in the Safari web browser. That led to Apple slamming the ban hammer. After four months in the penalty box, Camera+ returned last week with the volume-snap feature removed.

So it’s inconsistent that the app Quick Snap got the greenlight in the App Store, explicitly promoting the volume-snap feature that Apple strictly forbade (see screengrab above).

“Why choose the soft or full screen shutter when you can use VOLUME BUTTON as the hard shutter button on your iPhone?” Quick Snap’s iTunes description reads.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Hosting over 300,000 apps for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, Apple’s App Store has drawn criticism for some of its rules regulating the content and functionality allowed inside third-party apps. Apple only three months ago published guidelines listing reasons why apps get rejected from the App Store.

But with the case of Camera+, it’s evident that disclosing guidelines hasn’t solved one of the App Store’s major problems: App Store reviewers are not consistent with enforcing the rules, and therefore censorship still seems arbitrary. I’ve argued in the past that arbitrary censorship in the App Store is detrimental to creative freedom an issue poised to grow as Apple continues to expand as a major media publisher.

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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Apple’s AirPlay streaming feature enables the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad to stream video and audio to the Apple TV 2. But why stop there?

Wired.com’s friend Erica Sadun has been hard at work hacking away at AirPlay to expand its powers. About a week ago she released AirPlayer, a Mac app to stream video from the the Apple TV to the Mac. And just recently she released AirFlick to do the reverse: stream video from the Mac to the Apple TV. No jailbreaking required.

If you own a Mac and the new Apple TV, you need the AirFlick hack. You already can stream video from the Mac to the Apple TV, but you’re limited to iTunes-compatible videos (.H264-encoded MP4). AirFlick adds support for a multitude of video formats that you wouldn’t be able to stream normally (such as AVI, MKV, FLV, WMV and RMVB).

The AirFlick and AirPlayer hacks are in very early development stages, so be warned: Some features might be buggy. They’re free downloads, though, so give it a whirl. See the video above for a quick tutorial.

AirPlay utilities [Erica Sadun]

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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Apple has issued a press release saying that it expects to sell one million new Apple TVs by the end of the week. The second-gen set-top box has been on sale for three months. That puts it out of the league of Apple’s top-sellers, the iPad and the iPhone, but it’s still selling a lot faster than the first version.

Apple likes to brag about its sales numbers if they’re good enough. Otherwise, those numbers are never mentioned.

The timing of this announcement is rather odd. Apple is usually very clear with it’s messages, but here it is expecting us to report that it will probably sell one million units by the end of this week. This is because of the Christmas weekend, of course, but it’s still out of character.

The press release is also less clear than usual. When I read the headline “New Apple TV Sales to Top One Million This Week”, my first thought was that Apple was shifting one million units in this week alone.

Either way, it shows that Apple’s hobby has finally become a paying job.

New Apple TV Sales to Top One Million This Week [Apple PR]

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

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Editor’s note: This article is the first in a series of profiles about hit apps and the successful app programmers behind them.

Every day from morning to night, Maria Popova hunts for digital gold on the web.

Some of her finds: A neuroscientist explains how brains feel emotion. A lost, unpublished Dr. Seuss manuscript resurfaces. An infographic breaks down the economics of the hamburger.

Under the Twitter handle @brainpicker, Popova shares every nugget she can find with her 37,000 followers. But as interesting as all this content may be, her Twitter.com profile, like everyone else’s, is little more than a pile of plain links and text.

And this is why the Flipboard app for iPad is a godsend for readers, and why we’re excited that Wednesday’s new software update adds several new features. It grabs photos, text or video from links in a Twitter stream like Popova’s and stitches them into a magazine-like layout with neatly arranged panes, lots of white space and beautiful typography.

So when looking at Popova’s Twitter feed on Flipboard, you see part of the burger infographic she mentions, alongside an excerpt from the interview with the neuroscientist and a clip of the lost Dr. Seuss book. Swiping your finger across the iPad screen flips to another page of her content (left goes back chronologically and right takes you forward).

When you launch Flipboard, the main screen displays a grid of nine large tiles, each one representing a section (see picture at top of the post). The Facebook tile loads a Flipboard-ized version of your friends’ status updates; tapping the general Twitter tile shows content from people you follow in the same magazine fashion.You can also add sections for specific Twitter feeds you’d like to read (like @wired), and it’ll do its magic.

The new version of Flipboard that just went live in the App Store adds the ability to magazine-ify content from your Flickr stream, Google feeds and Facebook groups.

It’s all extremely easy to set up; you’ll be flipping around in minutes.

The end result is a visually rich magazine that’s alive — breathing with content posted by people you care about on the internet. (Hell, Flipboard looks so good you’ll start appreciating photos and comments from people you don’t care much about, too.)

If only the web could be this much fun on its own. In fact, a superior browsing experience is exactly what gave rise to Flipboard.

“One of our first thought experiments was, how would you re-imagine a web browser?” said Evan Doll, an ex-Apple engineer and co-founder of Flipboard.

“We love magazines,” he added. “There’s something great in terms of the graphic design, typography and emphasis on the visual side. And there’s also the fact you have editorial — someone filtering down the new stuff, telling you what’s important, interesting and worthwhile. Both those things we wanted to try to marry with social.”

The wedding is generating a lot of buzz. Apple last week namedFlipboard as the best iPad app of the year. That same week, the startup announced partnerships with major media outlets including The Washington Post, Bon Appetit and the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Flipboard team is only a year old, and it has already received $10 million in funding from stars like Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and actor Ashton Kutcher.

That’s a good thing, but it also means that Flipboard is going to have to make money — not easy for an app that’s free in the iTunes App Store.

Doll says the team is still hatching a plan to rake in cash, which could involve embedding advertisements into Flipboard pages or splitting micropayments with content creators. And it’s not just creators, but also prolific content sharers like Popova that Flipboard would like to help earn money.

“She should be able to do that as her full-time job,” Doll said of Popova. “She’s a one-woman magazine.”

Flipboard download link [iTunes]

Price: Free

Category: Media

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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Syncing an iPhone to a computer stinks: You have to physically plug in the device via USB, and iTunes still takes forever to copy your files. Apple hasn’t delivered a cloud-based iTunes yet, but a new iPhone app at least offers a wireless syncing solution for photos.

With the app Cinq, you can snap photos and save them straight into a folder on your computer even when you’re outside. Here’s how it works:

• You download the Cinq app for Mac or Windows to create a server on your computer. Register to create an account.
• Then you download the Cinq app for iPhone and log in with your Cinq account.
• From here on, you can pop open Cinq and tap the camera icon to snap a photo, and it will save straight into your Cinq folder on the desktop.
• You can also choose photos stored in your iPhone’s photo library and save them into Cinq.

It’s a pretty nifty app, especially for iPhone shutterbugs who haven’t gotten in the habit of plugging in and syncing to iTunes and iPhoto on a regular basis.

I just have a minor complaint: When choosing stored photos from an iPhone album to send to Cinq, we can only select one photo at a time. It’d be much more efficient if we could select multiple photos, or even the entire camera roll, to wirelessly sync with our Cinq folder.

But hey Cinq is less than a week old, so hopefully future software updates will make this a really sweet app. It’s a free download in the iTunes App Store; there’s also a $2 version that’s ad-free.

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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Newly-approved Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan is a Kindle user, while longtime conservative Justice Antonin Scalia wields an iPad.

This nugget of information appeared in a recent video clip on C-SPAN. Both justices use the devices (plus hard copy printouts) to read the vast quantities of written material they must wade through — up to 40 or 50 briefs for each case, Kagan says in the video above.

The news, however, made us wonder about something of far more pressing national importance: Is this a deep ideological divide on the Supreme Court?

Would Scalia see things differently if he read opinions on the monochrome Kindle? Does Kagan need a dose of iPad color, and maybe a round or two of Flight Control HD between court sessions?

Are Kindle-wielding Justices writing angry “Mactard” and “fanboi” comments on the opinions of their opponents, while the Mac-loving faction refuses to talk or even think about anything that wasn’t designed in Cupertino?

Nah, that doesn’t seem realistic.

Thanks, Jeremy!

An award-winning writer specializing in technology, science and business, Dylan Tweney is a senior editor at Wired.com and publisher of tinywords, the world’s smallest magazine.
Follow @dylan20 and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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Like books, e-readers and tablets need protection. Their delicate, computer-like screens can get cracked or smashed by the vagaries of life.

And like books, we spend hours staring at these delicate devices. So why not make them look more like books?

We don’t just want to protect tablets and e-readers, but honor and personalize them, and maybe bring back some of the quaint pleasures of reading an old leather-bound volume at the same time.

The most natural way to signal their special status as reading machines and engines of cultural consumption is to borrow what we know from the look and feel of book covers. And if making an e-reader look like an old hardcover book or a composition notebook adds a little trompe l’oeil fun, so much the better.

This slide show highlights some of the best faux-book covers for e-book readers and tablets.

Above: Covers made by Dodocase for the Kindle 3.

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With the next-generation iPad rumored for a spring 2011 release, Asian websites are posting images of purported third-party cases for the device.

The cases, spotted by Apple fan blogs MacRumors, Powerbook Medic and iLounge,sport common characteristics: a hole for a rear-facing camera and a rectangular hole that could be for an SD-card slot.

The premature-accessory game is a crapshoot. Occasionally accessory makers have sources connected to Apple in the plastics industry, who leak characteristics of new Apple hardware so they can get a head start on making cases. There have been times when leaked case designs accurately foreshadow new hardware features, but also times when they were wrong.

If the iPad cases above are based on real characteristics of the iPad, they reveal some interesting tidbits. Many have speculated the iPad 2 would gain a front-facing camera, but a rear-facing camera, as the cases suggest, was less expected. Also, the possible addition of an SD-card slot would eliminate the need for buying acamera-connection accessory made by Apple.

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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Apple has put in the request for its Asian partner Foxconn to produce and ship the second-generation iPad within 100 days with plans for a spring 2011 release, according to a Taiwanese publication.

Foxconn was notified of plans to ship the iPad by February 2011, with initial shipments of 400,000 to 600,000 units, according to DigiTimes. Sources expect the product to launch April 2011.

This timing is plausible because the original iPad hit stores April this year. Apple’s iPhones are refreshed once a year, and a similar one-year product cycle for the iPad is realistic.

Journalists and analysts have speculated that the next-generation iPad will come closer in line with the iPhone 4. Here are some features that we can expect:

• A 9.7-inch “retina” display similar to the iPhone 4’s
• A front-facing camera and a built-in FaceTime video phone app
• Expanded support for AirPlay streaming (as suggested by a Steve Jobs e-mail)

Meanwhile, here are some items on our wish list:

• A physical switch that locks screen orientation like it used to (Apple recently modified the functionality of the switch into a mute button, which nobody seems to enjoy).
• Tighter integration with the new Apple TV, allowing you to stream media from the Apple TV to the iPad (because currently you can only do the other way around). Streaming movie rentals on the road with an iPad would be pretty sweet.

What are some features you’d like to see in the next iPad? Add your ideas in the comments below.

Photo of a first-generation iPad: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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A high school coach claims that a first-aid app on his iPhone helped him save a basketball player’s life.

Can’t say we haven’t heard this story before.

Xavier Jones, 17-year-old basketball player at Verne Lutheran High School, stumbled when attempting to receive a pass, and his heart stopped beating.

Eric Cooper, coach of the basketball team, said he had downloaded a $2 iPhone app Phone Aid last week to brush up on CPR. Thanks to the app’s refresher, he was able to successfully administer CPR to Jones to save his life, according to LA Times.

“It was really fresh and clear in my brain,” he said. “We are trained in CPR, but the iPhone app was a stabilizer for us.”

This story is extremely similar to that of Dan Woolley, who used an iPhone first-aid app to help him treat his wounds and ultimately survive the Haiti earthquake in January. Woolley gave Wired.com a closer look at the tech he used until a rescue team dug him out of the rubble. Incidents like these highlight the implications of having data seamlessly integrated into our everyday lives through apps and versatile devices we carry everywhere, such as the iPhone.

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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Apple banned an iPhone magazine app because it contained content related to using Android phones, according to the app’s creator.

Apple refused to approve the magazine Android Magasinet, a publication about Google’s Android OS, according to Brian Dixen, managing editor of Danish magazine publisher Mediaprovider.

Dixen said when he asked why, an Apple executive replied, “You know… your magazine… it’s just about Android…. we can’t have that in our App Store.”

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

File this under “trivial” for now, because it’s questionable why an iPhone owner would want to read an Android magazine in the first place. However, Dixen said he’s concerned about the implications that this incident poses about editorial independence in the App Store. I’d agree the implications are more concerning than the end result: As I’ve argued before, the issue of Apple’s editorial control is poised to grow as the iPad matures into a major publishing platform.

From Fortune

Photo: laihiu/Flickr

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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Apple last week rolled out a major update for its mobile operating system iOS 4, and among the new features is a nifty free tool: Find My iPhone.

As its name suggests, Find My iPhone is a tracking feature to locate a missing iPhone 4, iPad or fourth-generation iPod Touch. (Only the latest models get the free feature.) If you’ve dropped your iDevice in a cab, or if someone’s stolen it, you can hop on a computer to follow the GPS coordinates of the iPhone on a Google map (see above).

Or, if you’re just absent-minded like me and you misplace your iPhone as often as you lose your keys, you can use your computer to trigger a beeping sound to help you find it. It should be loud enough to hear from under a couch cushion. (You’ll never have to bug a friend to call your phone again.)

If you do indeed think your iPhone is in the hands of a thief, you can use Find My iPhone to remotely lock the device or wipe the data. (Do note, however, that a clever thief could just remove the SIM card, and you wouldn’t be able to track or wipe the phone.)

Of the many new features in iOS 4.2.1, I found this one to be one of the sweetest bonuses. Find My iPhone originally was only available as part of a MobileMe subscription, which costs $10 per month. Making it free was a nice move on Apple’s part: An iPhone can potentially contain a treasure trove of personal information, so losing one is a big deal.

You need to activate Find My iPhone before you lose your phone, so do it now. Since the steps to turn this useful feature on aren’t immediately obvious, here’s how to do it:

1. Make sure you have the latest iOS update (iOS 4.2.1) installed. Plug in your iPhone and click “Check for updates” in iTunes to get the software.

2. With iOS 4.2.1 installed, tap the Settings app on your iPhone. Then tap “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” and “Add Account.”

3. In the account menu, enter your iTunes or Apple ID and password (i.e., the login you use to buy iTunes media on the iPhone).

4. The “Find My iPhone” option should appear. Slide it to “ON” to activate it.”

And you’re done! From here on, you can hop on a computer and enter www.me.com in a web browser. Then enter the same login credentials you used to register for Find My iPhone, and you’ll immediately get a GPS reading of the phone, along with a simple menu of buttons allowing you to lock, wipe, or send a message or sound to the iPhone.

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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iPad owners have had less than a week with iOS 4, but a software update offering news and magazine subscriptions targeted at them could arrive in less than a month.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber reports that Apple’s Steve Jobs will join News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch on stage at a December 9th event to announce Murdoch’s new forthcoming tablet newspaper, The Daily. According to Gruber’s sources, The Daily will be an app in the App Store, but make use of new recurring subscription billing on users’ iTunes accounts, and “developers at News Corp building the app already have preliminary documentation on the new subscription billing APIs from Apple.”

Macstories’ Federico Viticci reports further that recurring subscriptions are part of a new version of iOS — iOS 4.3 — with a scheduled release date of December 13.

According to Viticci’s sources, iOS 4.3 wasn’t intended to be released so quickly after 4.2.1, which was originally internally slated for an early November release. It’s possible that 4.2.1’s later official release might also push back the release of 4.3. But with Apple playing such a large role in the release of The Daily, both companies may stick with mid-December announcement and releases after all.

Subscription-based recurring billing would likely increase the number of paid magazine, newspaper, TV, video and other media applications on iTunes. Really, any application that depends on continuous content or service delivery could introduce a subscription model: online gaming, data backup, GPS, office applications and more. Many subscription-based services already have iOS apps, but have to establish accounts and recurring billing separately from iTunes.

Another technical challenge posed by subscriptions that could require an OS update is automatic background content delivery. If you’re being billed automatically every week for a newspaper or magazine, you shouldn’t have to go through a long, complicated routine just to download a new issue.

A final open question: how much customer information will Apple and app/content makers share with each other about their subscribers? This data has value, too — as does customers’ privacy.

Image by Apple.

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The iOS 4.2 update brings one really big new feature to the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch: AirPlay. IPad users might be overjoyed with folders and support for background processes, but the real star is the new music and video-streaming function. It will change the way you consume your media, and it will justify all the AirPort Express units you have dotted around your home. But first, how does it work?

You’ll need a device running iOS 4.2, and at least one of the following: an AirPort Express, a v2 AppleTV, a third-party AirPlay-ready speaker, or a Bluetooth audio device. Using it is as easy as you’d expect when Apple controls the whole infrastructure. In any app that uses the standard media-controls (iPod, Video, Spotify, YouTube) you will see a new symbol, a rectangle being penetrated from underneath by a triangle. Tap this and a menu pops up showing available devices.

From this menu, you simply pick where you want to send the media currently playing on your iDevice and, after a couple seconds buffering the signal, it starts. Audio will play anywhere, and video and/or audio will play on the AppleTV (not every video app is yet working – YouTube in Safari, for instance, sends only audio, while the YouTube app works as expected).

And that’s it. Thanks to background processes, you can switch away from the music or video app and read a book or surf the web. The stream continues, uninterrupted. The background stream can be controlled from the standard iOS 4 places: Double-tap the home button and swipe right to bring up the media controls to play, pause, skip or adjust volume. On the iPad you’ll also see the currently-playing app’s icon in this view. If your iDevice is locked, a double-tap will bring up the controls overlaid on the lock-screen, and both these shortcuts also give access to the AirPlay icon and menu.

Another handy trick is that you can adjust the volume using the hardware volume keys on the iDevice while the display is still sleeping.

One little-known extra is that any paired Bluetooth audio devices also show up in the same AirPlay menu. Tapping one switches the audio stream to that device, with one just difference: Bluetooth streaming starts instantly, without the two-second buffer required by Wi-Fi.

AirPlay also works from iTunes, although not as well as it does from an iOS device. While your iPhone will sync an on-screen movie with streamed audio, iTunes will let you select an AirPlay destination, but it will play the soundtrack locally. It will let you choose multiple sources, however (although not Bluetooth), while iOS devices can send to just one place at a time.

That’s pretty much it, apart from one oddity. If you’re streaming music to, say, an AirPort Express and then start playing, say, Angry Birds, then the game’s soundtrack will also be piped to the speakers. This could be a neat feature, but the sound suffers the same two-second delay, lagging behind the on-screen action. This seems to be a bug, and is inconsistent. Perhaps it is caused by apps that have yet to be updated to be iOS 4.2 compatible.

AirPlay really is a big deal, and you should expect to see it built-in to more and more third-party speakers and components in the future. Not only does it give you an instant, multi-room audio setup without a computer, it also turns your iPhone into a pocket home-theater.

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Apple’s found itself in market cold wars with many tech companies, most notably Microsoft, Adobe and Google. But things are really heating up with smartphone maker RIM. In the last 24 hours, RIM has attacked Apple’s technical chops and software philosophy.

First, RIM’s Playbook team posted a video (see below) comparing its forthcoming tablet’s mobile browser to the iPad’s. Interestingly, the video highlighted not just the iPad’s lack of Flash (which everyone knows about), but also its slow page-loading speed, lack of pixel-by-pixel rendering fidelity and lack of support for high-quality JavaScript and HTML5 video.

The implication is clear: Steve Jobs has said that Apple isn’t putting resources behind Flash so it can focus on HTML5 and other open web standards. But the iPad’s implementation of those standards is far from perfect. RIM is now claiming that it has been able to put together a faster browser with better HTML5 performance — and, as a bonus, support for Flash — even though Apple’s had more time to get its browser right.

RIM’s HTML5 emphasis is key for its second attack on Apple, which CEO Jim Balsillie voiced at Tuesday’s Web 2.0 conference: Apple’s highly-touted app marketplace really just masks iOS’s subpar web performance.

“You dont need an app for the Web,” Balsillie said. Since many iOS apps are just frontend clients for web properties — stores, games, media companies, social networking sites — and RIM’s app strength is in documents and productivity, it’s a clear contrast.

Theres still a role for apps, but can you use your existing content? Balsillie asked web companies. Can you use your existing web assets? Do you need a set of proprietary tools to bring existing assets on to a device, or can you use known tools that you use for creating websites?

As for Apple catching up to Blackberry in the smartphone market, when asked what he would tell Jobs if he were there, Balsillie simply said, “You finally showed up.”

This isn’t the first time Balsillie has shot back at Jobs and Apple. After an October earnings call where Jobs crowed about passing RIM in quarterly smartphone sales and denigrated 7-inch tablets (a class that includes RIM’s Playbook) as overexpensive underperformers, Balsillie took to the official Blackberry blog, questioning Apple’s numbers (RIM’s fiscal quarters are slightly different from Apple’s), its software philosophy and Jobs’s treatment by the media.

“For those of us who live outside of Apples distortion field,” Balsillie wrote, “we know that 7-inch tablets will actually be a big portion of the market and we know that Adobe Flash support actually matters to customers who want a real web experience.” He added, “We think many customers are getting tired of being told what to think by Apple.”

It might be surprising that Balsillie taken such a hard line against Apple, considering that Android smartphones are arguably taking a bigger bite out of RIM’s core smartphone business, while Windows Phone 7 is trying to peel away customers too. But targeting Apple makes a lot of sense.

First, no company in technology is more visible than Apple and no person in technology is more recognizable than Steve Jobs. Shooting down Apple and the iPad is news, and doing it on the basis of HTML5 and web support is a strike at the heart of what Apple has staked its claim on. It’s like Pepsi beating Coke in a sip test.

Second, the iPad surprised everyone — including Apple — by its adoption rate among business users. RIM, which has traditionally been very strong in the business world, is eager to stop that trend in its tracks, before companies that were RIM-only decide to go iOS-only.

Finally, Blackberry offers a lot more smartphone models, at different price points and in different form factors, than it did when the iPhone was announced. It’s rebranding itself in the consumer market as a company that’s all about the web and communication. This week’s attacks were aimed at driving that point home.

No more of what Jobs once called “the baby web” for baby-sized smartphone screens. Email, Messenger, text entry, and the full web: that’s the space Blackberry wants to occupy in the customer’s imagination.

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