• Ladies & Gentleman…finally there’s something worth writing about.  After literal years of rumors and predictions, Apple has unveiled its tablet-based computer, appropriately titled the iPad.
• Watch a quick video overview of it here.
• Price starts at $499 for the 16GB WiFi ranging all the way up to $829 for the 64GB WiFi & 3G.
• Does this signify the soon-to-come death of Amazon’s Kindle?  Will the device be widely adopted by the health industry? ….only time will tell, but surely it will be exciting to see.

• EcoATM, a new startup out of San Diego, just introduced their new e-cycling kiosks.
• First, the machine electronically inspects the phone for damage and automatically give it a real-time secondary market value.  If it’s actually worth something, you can opt for an in-store payment or simply donate the money to your favorite charity.  If the phone’s not worth anything, it goes into the recycling bin.
• EcoATM’s first location at the Nebraska Furniture Mart saw such success that they’ll be installing machines at wireless and big box stores in and around San Diego as well as Washington state and Vermont.
• The company is promising nationwide machines by the 2nd quarter of next year where they’ll be able to accept other gadgets like cameras, laptops, and MP3 players.  What a great startup.

• Looks like we’ll be seeing Rock Band on the iPhone / iPod Touch relatively soon.
• From the above shot, looks very similar to Tapulous.  Do you smell an app war?
• Another interesting thing the post point towards (via MobileCrunch) is that Verizon has something to do with it.  Which further contributes to my suspicion that Verizon will launch their service based off the 700 MHz spectrum when they get the contract for the iPhone in 2010.
• Your thoughts?

• Popular car sharing service, ZipCar, just made it that much easier for you techies out there with their new official iPhone app.
• You can find, reserve, and even control your ZipCar through the app.  Users are able to unlock and lock their car, and even beep the horn if you forget where/what car you were driving.
• The app’s free and is currently in the Appstore.  Go cop that ish!

• Oh no folks, this could be bad.  T-pain just dropped his new iPhone app, appropriately titled: I am T-Pain
• The app allows you to sing along with T-pain’s songs in your own auto-tuned voice.  You’re even able to record your own custom track and share it with your friends on Facebook & Myspace.
• App costs 3 bucks.  Go cop it, then you can be exactly as talent-less as he is   ….respect though, he did help make auto-tune pop, so there’s something to be said for that.

• Major Chinese news portal 163.com is reporting that Apple has finally signed a deal with China Unicom to bring the iPhone 3G to mainland China in October. China’s market contains 700 million mobile phone users, the biggest in the world. We have around 270 million here in the US. Expect an announcement tomorrow. CG

• Since Google started hyping up its home energy management tool, PowerMeter, people have started to get really excited about having the ability to personally control their energy consumption.  Even further, companies are developing ways in which consumers can manage their energy when they’re not even in their house.  Here are 6 iPhone energy management  apps in development or currently available that you should definitely check out.

1. Tendril Vantage Mobile:  Based out of Boulder, CO, the company’s already brought in $30 million in funding.  Although the app won’t be available until 2010, the company is promising to offer real-time consumption stats and the ability to remotely control your appliances and thermostat.
2. Energy UFO: Developed by Palo Alto based company, Visible Energy, the Energy UFO is already free on the app store.  Visible Energy produces energy management gadgets and power strips upon which the Energy UFO interfaces with.  Unfortunately, the app isn’t of much use yet considering their hardware won’t start shipping until Christmas this year.
3. Ecobee’s Smart Thermostat:  Ecobee, out of Toronto, already developed a thermostat that communicates through WiFi.  The company is planning to launch an iPhone app allowing consumers to remotely turn their thermostats up and down.
4. My House UI: Developed by digital home startup, Control4, the My House UI app allows users to control heat, lighting, and air conditioning.  The iPhone app, however, is useless unless you own Control4’s in-home devices.  The company’s already raised $17.3 million.
5. Meter Readings, MeterRead, and Wattulator : All three are $0.99 apps allowing consumers to manually enter electricity, water, and gas data.  Although they don’t directly communicate with your system at home, they’re good for finding out how much energy specific appliances in your home are using.

• Long story short, Apple banned Google Voice from the App Store yesterday, triggering the App Store team to remove all apps that call on any Google Voice API. Reasoning? They duplicate features already found on the iPhone such as the dialer and SMS. Apparently these apps didn’t duplicate the aforementioned features when they were first approved months ago… But they do now. Just like Google launching its mobile social network in the browser (Latitude), Google will be forced to bring Google Voice features to the iPhone browser experience.

• Many have pointed their finger at AT&T (seems like the cool thing to do these days..meh), but as my pal Om Malik puts it, if it were truly AT&T, then Google Voice would be banned on BlackBerry devices that use AT&T as well. As of this morning, everything is working fine on AT&T-connected devices. He also points out that people are forgetting that you need AT&T’s voice network to send and receive Google Voice calls. Meaning? AT&T makes money on Google Voice calls and SMS. This is Apple’s problem people, but it’s not that big of a deal when it comes down to it. Google Voice truly does mimick the features of the standard iPhone call/sms features. Apple should have voiced their concerns with it before they approved it months ago and let developers waste precious time building their apps around its open features.

• GigaOm (7/14/2009) “Verizon (NYSE: VZ) wants to build its own app store, and is planning a July 28 event to entice developers to its platform. Like everyone else wooing programmers, the company hopes to get the equivalent of the in-crowd building the hottest apps that will elevate its store, and thus its phones and network, to the level of popularity that Apple’s iPhone currently enjoys. But getting a critical mass of developers building great software isn’t an easy task. And while Verizon is romancing developers, the carrier isn’t as solicitous of its handset partners. Verizon’s Ryan Hughes, VP Partner Management, said in an interview Friday that the network operator’s app store will be the sole marketplace on devices sold by the company, meaning stores such as Research In Motion’s BlackBerry App World or Microsoft’s Windows Mobile Marketplace won’t get placement on Verizon handsets unless a consumer downloads them”
• For those thinking that the iPhone is soon headed to Verizon, think again. If Verzion wants to lock up the deck like this and control their own app store, Apple will have nothing to do with them. How Verizon thinks they can have one single app store to work correctly  seamlessly across all their devices, they have a ton of bricks coming their way. Just more stupidity coming out of mid-level management in the mobile telecom industry.

• In an official press release, Apple (AAPL) today announced that customers have downloaded more than 1.5 billion applications in just one year from its App Store. The App Store is also growing at an incredible pace with more than 65,000 apps and more than 100,000 developers in the iPhone Developer Program. “The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up.”. These press releases need to stop until the app store/ developer environment has changed. Here is my open letter. Feel free to add to it.

Dear Apple,

Congratulations on your success Apple. You deserve it. Now, can we please see some stats on what percentage of those 65,000 apps have been downloaded, and what percentage the top 50 apps make up of those 1.5 billion downloads? I think the results would be rather skewed due to the way the store is setup. Unless an app has made it into a commercial, cracks the top 25 (paid or free, which most of the time is a result of a commercial), is featured (which no one really knows how to go about), or catches on via word of mouth, it is a lost cause. A daily trip through the app store generally results in the download of the latest top 25 app, which will be fun for a few days and then it’s deleted. If I ever try to peruse further through the store by clicking on ‘categories’, I am thrown into the Bermuda triangle, that is the rest of the app store. I say Bermuda triangle, because once I am in there, my mind spins like a compass. I don’t know which direction to new land (apps), I am overloaded with unfamiliar territory (unreviewed), and trying to navigate through it could take a lifetime. Let’s face it, the only comfort zone of the whole app store is the Featured and Top 25 section, which I consider to be the homeland. There needs to be a way for Apple to give other developers a chance to display their creations, besides the guys who are beginning to look a little too familiar in the ‘top’ sections. For example, Apple this week released their “App Store Turns 1, Our Favorite Games/Apps” section. If you look at Apple’s favorite games, ngmoco Inc., has 3 games of the top 30 personally picked by Apple. Hmmm, out of the 65,000 games and more than 100,000 developers, it just so happens that ngmoco has 3? Out of those 3 games, only one of them is even a 4 star game? I thought the whole idea of a standardized platform was to give the carriers and manufacturers less control over the deck, and put it into the hands of consumers and third parties? I guess I was wrong. It is turning into a political game here Apple, and people are catching on. You can’t keep bragging about how well your store is doing and how many developers are signed up for your program, when there are only about 50 cases of rock star developer cases and about 95,000 cases of those starving for just a damn review or even acceptance of their app. It needs to change Apple, it needs to change. So do it.

Warm Regards,

Jason Wilk

Founder | TinyComb.com | DonationAir.com

• The China Times is reporting that the Apple tablet is dropping in October for around $800. Besides a patent registration and Wozniak’s Axiotron Tablet, there has been no other official news to sway us into believing the computer is actually real. Here is a translation of the article today:

Taiwan’s high-tech supply chain companies said Apple will debut its first netbook in October; Apple will pose itself to tackle the Christmas shopping season. Three corporations – Foxconn, Wintek, Dynapack have received direct orders from Apple.

• Wintek is mentioned in the story, a company previously said to have supplied a bunch of touchscreen panels to Apple for use in a tablet (which was false). Assuming this is true, it’s still just a hardware rumor and gives us no details on the OS, which could be the most compelling part.

• As far as I’m concerned, the biggest issue will be if it’s going to have an accelerometer so I can play my iPhone games on a full screen. Score.

• Apple refused to tell anyone just what chips power the inside of the iPhone 3G S. T-Mobile in the Netherlands apparently didn’t get the memo, and has gone ahead and posted the hardware specs on the product page for the new models.
• The numbers: 256MB RAM for the OS, double that of the 128MB in the original iPhone, and a 600MHz processor, up from the pedestrian 412MHz of the first two models. The added RAM alone probably makes a huge difference. Funny enough, the Palm Pre has the exact same number of megahertz: 600.

• AT&T, the exclusive U.S. iPhone service provider is considering cutting the price of its monthly service package or offering a range of lower-priced plans. One plan that could be introduced as early as late May would include limited data access at a $10 monthly reduction, the people say. (Yahoo). Apple and AT&T have been back and forth over pricing issues since the phone was released. Now that the contract between the two is coming up for renewal, AT&T is a little more willing to come down a bit.
• Lower-priced data plans would supposedly bring in 20% to 25% more customers for both the iPhone and AT&T. Most consumers are willing to pay the initial $199 for the phone, however with the average iPhone monthly plan costing $80 a month, most scoff at the idea of paying close to $1000 a year. I’m in favor of this.

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• According to the alleged leak posted in a Chinese forum today, these are the stats of the new iPhone 2 (model MB717LL 9). The phone will have a 600MHz processor (up from the current 400MHz unit), 256MB of RAM (from the current 128MB), 32GB of storage, a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus, as well as a digital compass and FM radio, all while retaining the same battery, basic shape, and screen size. Chances of this screenshot being real: 50/50

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• A little bird close to the Apple design team said that ‘Status Updates’ are coming to the next iPhone Contact List. The above image looks to be a potential photoshop effort, however it seems to be one rumor that makes perfect sense. Imagine being in class, in a meeting, out of town, etc, wouldn’t it be nice to let your contact list know about it? It would seem your other friends would need to have an iPhone and Status Updates might require a Blackberry Messenger type PIN to let one see, however it’s something that is desperately needed on the iPhone not associated with your Tweets or your Facebook Updastes.
• What’s your take on this?

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