Iphone, Apple | featured news

When it comes to tech rivalries, everyone loves a good smackdown -- but the race for smartphone dominance is starting to feel like a blowout sporting event where there's almost no point in watching.

Over the last few years, Apple used technologies from its Macintosh computers to create the iPhone and the iPad, building a multibillion-dollar mobile computing business that now accounts for 60 percent of its revenue. Now Apple is doing the reverse, taking technologies like the multitouch user interface from the iPhone and the iPad and using them to refresh its Mac business.

Stuart Hughes, the British jeweler known for his expensive remakes of popular gadgets, is at it again, this time with a diamond-clad iPhone 4 with a price tag of 5 million pounds, or roughly $8 million.

Apple Inc's shares cruised past $300 for the first time on Wednesday, as investors anticipated another strong earnings report from the iPhone maker next week.

There have been so many rumors of a CDMA iPhone headed to Verizon over the past few years that at this point it could be really tough to believe that it may actually be happening.

The App Store review office at 1 Infinite Loop has officially frozen over: we've gotten word that the official Google Voice application is on its way to the iPhone in the next few weeks. In fact, we've heard from a source close to Google that it's already been approved — Google just needs to revamp the application to work with the iPhone 4 and iOS's multitasking capabilities. If you're a Google Voice user and you're on an iPhone, this is great news.

It's been a long, long road to get here.

It seems more than a little odd to us that Apple hasn't bothered to make FaceTime compatible with its own longstanding desktop video chat service, iChat, but we've at least supposed that it's an inevitability with whatever upcoming Mac OS X update or software bundle that Apple deems appropriate. Now Mac4Ever, who was spot on with a pile of rumors last year, but hasn't succeeded with its recent prediction of an iLife '11 launch in August, is saying that Apple is prepping FaceTime both for Mac and PC.

Apple said it is ending its offer to give away free cases to iPhone 4 owners after Sept. 30, stating that the antenna-design issue "is even smaller than we originally thought."

We'll soon have downloaded more apps than songs from iTunes, according to app developer Asymco.

Recent revisions to the iOS developer agreements caused considerable controversy by restricting which programming languages could be used to develop iOS apps. Those changes also restricted what kind of analytics data could be collected by developers and advertisers. Now, however, Apple has backed off on its position: it will relax these rules in order to give developers more flexibility. Additionally, Apple will now actually publish a list of app review guidelines for developers—the first time the company has done so since the App Store launched more than two years ago.