Bites from the Apple: Quien Es Mas Macho?

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday out of the way, everyone seems to be taking a bit of a breather this week and the crop of Apple-y goodness is a bit on the low side, but there are a few ripe pickings to be had:

• You can tell it's a slow week when the iPhone gets into a battle royale with its long-gone predecessor, the Apple Newton, at CNet's Crave UK. The results may surprise you.

• With no hard evidence or even soft scuttlebutt, a couple of stock analysts set off quite a bit of churn in the gadgetosphere with the idea that Apple might turn to T-Mobile as an additional partner once AT&T's iPhone exclusivity comes to an end. The speculation comes as Verizon and Apple have been ratcheting up the competitive juices in advertising their premier smartphones (the iPhone in one corner with the Motorola Droid in the other).

• And speaking about that mano a mano smartphone cage match, Verizon gets all manly with its most recent ad for the Motorola Droid, subtly insinuating that the iPhone is a "tiara-wearing digitally-clueless beauty pageant queen" (via All Things Digital).

• Here's the rumor of the week: CNet says that Apple is in advanced talks to acquire the streaming music service Lala (which has certainly become one of my favorite ways of discovering new music, as you can stream entire albums once for free). While this could bring full streaming music to iTunes at some point down the line, Greg Sandoval at CNet writes that "Apple managers are very interested in working with Lala's engineers, who have come up with 'a payment and fulfillment system that could save Apple millions of dollars a year.'"

• Much is being made of how smartphones are changing the GPS landscape by moving GPS navigation capabilities away from standalone devices. But Jason O'Grady over at The Apple Core notes another gadget is being subsumed by the iPhone and its smartphone brethren: the clock radio. And I'd have to agree. I recently unplugged by clock radio and replaced it with my iPhone sitting on its side, plugged into an Apple dock, and running the Touch Flip Clock iPhone app (link opens in iTunes).

• Dave Zatz over at Zatz Not Funny offers a hands-on look at the Mophie Juice Pack Air battery extender for the iPhone 3G/3GS... and comes to the conclusion that he doesn't need it as much as he thought he did.

• While we don't know when it's coming out (or even if it's real), publishers are readying themselves for an iTablet future. Podcasting News posts a concept video that Sports Illustrated put together to show what an interactive issue of its magazine could look like on a tablet device.

• If you're a diehard IKEA shopper (like myself), there's now an app for that. IKEA has now released an iPhone app version of its 2010 catalog. However, while it's available through the U.S. iTunes store, the app is for the U.K. version of the catalog (via Swiss Miss).

• And finally... The Sun newspaper in London does its best Apple impersonation with this cheeky ad:

--Agen G.N. Schmitz

Comments

[Formerly known as Skeptic on December 05, 2009 at 12:58 PM]

Re: the SUN ad;

BRILLIANT!

[Study in Sweden on January 14, 2010 at 02:37 PM]

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[australian wholesalers and dropshippers on February 03, 2011 at 01:32 AM]

iPhone is brilliant and it spread rapidly but don't understand that Motorola is one the best choice of UK people for many years and still it is famous in people there.

[Satellite Dishes on April 09, 2011 at 12:37 PM]

Brilliant ad from the Sun. Pity nobody in Liverpool has seen the Sun since Hillsborough!