All the Verizon iPhone News From Today

By Graham Spencer

So today has brought quite a bit of Verizon iPhone news, if you’ve struggled to keep up, this post has links to all our recent coverage. Plus there’s even more news after the break which includes information that Verizon is urging it’s staff not to buy the iPhone, you may need to save old voicemails if moving to the iPhone and Apple Stores adding antenna’s to boost Verizon reception inside.

Today

First Verizon iPhone Reviews Are In

Verizon Contact Transfer App for iPhone Now Available

Verizon iPhone Coming to Best Buy on February 10

Apple Confirms Verizon iPhone Available for Pre-Order Tomorrow

Previously

iPhone 4 Cases Now Available On Verizon’s Website

iTunes 10.1.2 Now Available, Adds CDMA iPhone Compatibility

Verizon iPhone Plans Now Live on Apple.com

AT&T and Verizon Finally Together In Apple’s New Ad

Mac App Store Developers Fall Into Open Source Rabbit Hole

By Graham Spencer

Lugaru, the game that is available for the Mac and other platforms about a violent rabbit is now available on Mac App Store. Except there are two apps for the same game, one at $10 and one at $2, the pricier one called Lugaru HD is made by the original developers whilst the other called Lugaru is made by a Michael Latour from iCoder. The original developers of the game have no idea who Latour is and are quite understandably angry that someone else has started selling the exact same game at a much cheaper price.

Lugaru’s developers claim Latour’s app is a complete fraud of their own app with their own source code being sold by a guy with no affiliation to them. Jeffrey Rosen, one of the Lugaru developers told Kotaku “We are not happy about this situation. It is not uncommon for people to sell pirated copies of our game, but we were completely caught off guard that Apple would approve this for sale on the App Store without any due diligence.”

First Impressions of News Corp’s The Daily

By Graham Spencer

News Corp.’s much hyped foray into an iPad exclusive digital Newspaper has just launched and it has some high expectations to live up to, not only for consumers but for Murdoch’s News Corporation which has endured a shrinking reader base and advertising revenue. Jump the break for our first impressions and a tonne of screenshots of the app.

OK well that’s it for our first impressions, undoubtedly some of us here at Macstories will in the next day or so write up an in-depth summation of our feelings towards The Daily so keep an eye on the site and our Twitter account for that!

The Daily is Now Available in the App Store

By Graham Spencer

Well the presentation over in New York regarding the launch of The Daily is underway and the actual App itself has now appeared in the App Store and is available for a monthly subscription of $0.99.

Go grab it here.

The team here at MacStories is working hard to cover this launch so keep your eyes on the site and our Twitter account, articles will be going live rapid fire and updating whilst the presentation goes on.

Check out our coverage of today’s launch of The Daily:

Full description of The Daily from iTunes and promo video embedded below. Read more

iOS, Android and RIM Deadlocked in US Smartphone Market Share

By Graham Spencer

Nielson has revealed its latest statistics on smartphone ownership in the US and there is some fascinating information contained in the report. 31% of all mobile consumers in the US owned a smartphone as of December last year. Ethnic and racial minorities also dominated ownership of smartphones with Asian/Pacific Islanders and Hispanics having 45% smartphone penetration, African-Americans also had higher numbers at 33% whilst White Americans were at a much lower 27%.

The smartphone war between RIM’s BlackBerry, Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android operating system was also at dead heat by the end of 2010. Apple was just ahead at 28% of the mobile operating system share but has been sitting steady at around that rate for a year. RIM’s BlackBerry OS market share continued diving and was at 27% and Google’s Android continued steaming upwards reaching it’s highest share of 27%.

Push Pop Press Teases a New Brand of Digital Books

By Graham Spencer

A new company focused on creating ‘a new breed of digital books’, Push Pop Press today unveiled their teaser site, beautifully minimal in its design and purely hinting at what is to come. However John Gruber over at Daring Fireball wrote up a fairly lengthy post about Push Pop Press and a demo he had been given last week, praising it and giving some fairly detailed insights into what is to come from the company.

The teaser site offers up a description of the mission of Push Pop Press;

Our team is bringing together great content and beautiful software to create a new breed of digital books. Books that let you explore photos, videos, music, maps, and interactive graphics, all through a new physics-based multi-touch user interface.

The team over at Push Pop Press is undoubtedly one high caliber bunch of people, with Mike Matas, Kimon Tsinteris and Austin Sarner. Mike Matas, the designer and co-founder is most notably known for working on Delicious Library and his stint at Apple (which started the young age of 19) in helping design the original iOS. The other co-founder, Kimon Tsinteris is a software architect and worked with Matas at Apple on the Map app on iOS. Finally Austin Sarner is software engineer who may be familiar from his apps including AppZapper, Disco and Pennies.

Aluminium That Glows? Apple’s Patented That

By Graham Spencer

Apple was today awarded a bunch of new patents (eighteen in total) and Patently Apple has covered those that were most important and one of those is particularly interesting to us at MacStories. The patent surrounds an invisible ‘light-transmissive’ display system that would allow Apple to craft a piece of aluminum and through manufacturing techniques, illuminate something such as a logo through the metal.

The process that Apple has patented involves thinning out the aluminum in the required area and then using a specific laser beam setup that drills microscopic holes in specific designs to create the shape that would be illuminated.

What this patent could allow for is an even more invisible sleep indicator light (that light that pulses when your MacBook is sleeping), a power button that is flush with the rest of the MacBook and even a glowing Apple logo on the back of iPhones and iPads.

[Via Patently Apple]

iOS Devices Accounted for 2% of Worldwide Browsing in January

By Graham Spencer

A new report by NetMarketShare has revealed that the iOS ecosystem of devices has broken 2% of all browsing on the web. The January figures published by the analyst revealed the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch reached 2.06% of global browsing, accelerated by the holiday period.

Singapore had the highest percentage of iOS devices at virtually 10% and Australia was one of the highest countries at 5.6%. The UK was also close at 5.1% and the US had 3.4% in January.

See above for a graphic of world browsing by iOS devices and head over to NetMarketShare for a full breakdown of each country’s percentage of iOS device usage.

[Via 9to5Mac]

The New Readability Has Ambitious Future

By Graham Spencer

Readability, the Javascript library that stripped websites of unnecessary graphics and elements to provide the user with a simple, easier to read page, has today revealed the next step in it’s future. The ambition plan includes fundamental new advancements including; usage on mobile devices, saving Readability-enhanced pages, social features, a subscription service that supports writers and a partnership with Marco Arment’s Instapaper.

One of the biggest new features of the new Readability is it’s subscription service which is a new model that aims to give back to the writers and publishers that you read from. The subscription starts from $5 but can be as high as you want to pay, and 70% go back to writers and publishers, so obviously the more you pay the more goes back to the content creators. There will still be the basic Readability which does not require a subscription.

Jump the break for full details.