It's the final look at Apple news and rumors in 2008. iPhones at Wal Mart, Apple Media servers? iPhone Nanos? We cover it all this week. Show notes/credits are below. Enjoy!
Apple Rejects iPhone Application That Lets Users Jiggle Breasts
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,471564,00.html
Apple's online App Store has decided it'd rather not be stacked with an iPhone application that lets users jiggle a pair of breasts.
The "iBoobs" application was rejected because Apple deemed it "objectionable content," the U.K.'s Register tech blog reported.
"If you believe that you can make the necessary changes so that iBoobs does not violate the iPhone SDK Agreement we encourage you to do so," Apple reportedly told the creator, Mystic Game Development of Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
The iBoobs application is a computer animation of a large pair of breasts in a bikini top. Shaking the iPhone makes them wobble from side to side, or up and down, depending on the movement.
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Amazon Touts Best Holiday Sales Ever; Acer, Apple Win
http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2008/12/26/amazon-touts-best-holiday-sales-ever-acer-apple-win/
Amazon.com (AMZN) this morning announced the holiday season was its best ever, with 72.9 items going out the door per second on the peak day, December 15, for a haul that day of 6.3 million items. The company lists in its press release a number of humorous stats regarding holiday purchases — enough coffee sold to give every citizen of Seattle a cup a day for two months — and lists best sellers, which include, in electronics, the Samsung (SSNLF.PK) 52-inch hi-def TV, the Apple (AAPL) iPod touch 8-gigabyte, and the Acer (2353.TW) Aspire One 8.9-inch Netbook.
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$99 iPhone Arrives, But Not at Walmart
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/12/99-iphone-arriv.html
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Apple’s App Store sees big iPod Touch downloads this Christmas
http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/12/29/apples-app-store-sees-big-ipod-touch-downloads-this-christmas/
by Doug Aamoth on December 29, 2008
Looks like the iPod Touch had a good Christmas, as App Store downloads on December 25th increased three-fold or more for most titles.
The boost in sales "appears to be from a large influx of iPod Touch users," according to MacRumors.com, who noted that it would have been much easier to give an iPod Touch as a Christmas gift versus an iPhone, which would have to be activated and whatnot.
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Google, Microsoft, Apple sued over preview icons
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10129022-92.html
A Michigan-based networking company on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Google, Microsoft, and Apple, alleging that all three tech giants violated a patent it owns on the use of document-preview icons--or thumbnails--in operating systems.
In the suit (PDF), Cygnus Systems targets Google's Chrome, Microsoft's Vista and Internet Explorer 8, and Apple's iPhone, Safari, and Mac OS X as patent infringers. Apple uses the patent-protected technology in its Finder and Cover Flow Mac OS X features, the lawsuit claims.
Cygnus describes the technology covered by the patent as "methods and systems for accessing one or more computer files via a graphical icon, wherein the graphical icon includes an image of a selected portion or portions of one or more computer files."
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Wal-Mart Has Started Selling the iPhone
http://www.mercurynews.com/businessheadlines/ci_11313954
Wal-Mart on Friday confirmed one of the worst-kept secrets in technology: It will begin selling Apple's iPhone on Sunday.
But the retail giant officially knocked down one other rumor that had been making the rounds: It won't be selling a special 4-gigabyte version of the iconic phone for $99.
Instead, the retail giant will offer the same two standard iPhone models that are already sold at Apple, AT&T and Best Buy stores. Wal-Mart customers will be able to buy the phones at a discount, but not much of one.
The retailer's stores will sell the 8-gigabyte model for $197 and the 16-gigabyte for $297. Both of those prices are $2 less than they can be found at other outlets.
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The Dream iPhone Pro
http://gizmodo.com/5119445/the-dream-iphone-pro
--The photo is the story--
That's good, but we thought it could be a bit better. We fixed the keyboard to make it more rational and compact, losing some unneeded keys. With the space, we added what it's really needed to make the iPhone a true Nintendo DS competitor: A direction pad and two buttons. For the D-Pad, we didn't want to reinvent the wheel and just copied Nintendo's tried-and-proved design.
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Apple wants to swipe your iPhone
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/29/swipe_patent/
Apple has applied for a patent to replace some tap-based gestures on the multi-touch displays of a variety of computing devices, phones, and media players with "swipe gestures" - that is, making a device's display responsive to a finger being drawn across it rather than simply tapping it.
Swipe gestures, of course, currently exist on the iPhone and iPod touch for rudimentary tasks such as moving from one home screen to another or pinching images, but this new patent would extend that capability to enhancing what's now keyboard-based input.
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Rumors abound, Apple working on media server?
http://www.tuaw.com/2008/12/29/rumors-abound-apple-working-on-media-server/
According to 9to5, the new product will include a Dynamic DNS system to tie in with MobileMe; this will provide username.me.com domains for easier access across the Internet. In addition, the device will include AFP filesharing and Time Machine backup stores. The device will not run off of Mac OS X Server, as you might suspect; rather, it would run the same system and processor that the Time Capsule does.
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