Zounds! It seems Apple has picked today to be a big day for iPhone news. Apple has finally confirmed the iPhone 3G, and it looks to be a big upgrade over the previous iterations of the iPhone. More after the jump!

Apple gets sued once again, and this time they're getting chewed out over something that was meant to make customers happy. iPhone owner Dongmei Li has filed a lawsuit against Apple, Steve Jobs, as well as AT&T over the iPhone price cut, and the US$ 100 rebate given to early adopters of the iPhone.

As previously reported, Jobs announced the iPhone price drop to US$ 399 in the same media event where he introduced the new iPod products. Some iPhone customers were disgruntled with the sudden price drop, but were appeased by the US$ 100 coupons sent to those who bought the iPhone launch units.

According to Li, she is now a victim of price discrimination as a result of the above business decisions that Apple and Jobs made, because she cannot resell her iPhone for the same value as those who bought it after the price drop.

Li stated that there was no reason behind the price cut, which she said was grounds to underselling.

The lawsuit also covers AT&T, due to accusations of forcing customers to sign two-year service contracts, which have US$ 175 termination fees attached to them. Li then goes on to say that it was unfair simply because those who purchased the iPhone were able to use unlocking applications that freed them from the contracts.

This may seem like a story of another day, another lawsuit, but we do hope that this gets resolved properly, and soon.

Smashing the various iPhone 3G rumors to bits is the announcement of an iPhone 3G coming in 2008, delivered by Apple's main man himself, Steve Jobs.

"You can expect a 3G iPhone later next year," said Jobs in a press conference aptly named "Mum is no longer the word," held in the Regent Street Apple store in London.

Jobs explained the reason why Apple did not put the iPhone on EDGE in the first place: the 3G chipset technology will just drain out the iPhone's battery life (currently 8 hours). However, future iPhones will indeed run on 3G.

An iPhone model equipped with 2G EDGE technology is already in the works, and will be available in the UK on November 9. That may also mean that the leaked German T Mobile ad may not be just a rumor after all.

  

The Apple Summer Mac product conference is already rolling hot with Steve Jobs manning the show. As expected, his keynote address is filled with surprising unveiling of new Apple projects and the "everybody saw this coming" types. Tab this one under the second category - as predicted and whispered around various boards the past few weeks, Apple is giving us brand new iMacs.

Sporting a retroish look, the sleek new iMacs are made of aluminum and glass. It comes in 20- and 24-inched versions, each equipped with the usual but impressive specs such as up to  2.4GHz Core 2 Extreme processor, up to 4GB of memory, ATI Radeon HD graphics card, up to 1TB of hard drive storage. 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.0 built-in. There's also the usual compliment of ports like USB 2.0, Firewire 400/800, a slot loading SuperDrive, iSight camera etc.

What's also worth noting is that the oft-rumored new keyboard for the iMacs turns out to be true, with Steve Jobs himself confirming it. Boasting of large spacing and flat keys, Apple seems to be aiming to give the iMac users the laptop feel while typing. iMac purists seem to be a bit skeptic with the move, but let's all wait and see what happens. The 20-inch iMac goes for US$ 1,199 each (add three hundred bucks more for a processor and graphics enhancements), while the 24-inch monster demands US$ 1,799 per unit.

Anyone who has had to deal with snail-crawling 2G or 2.5G-limited Internet access would want 3G on their iPhone, too. "Where'd my SMS go?" wouldn't even begin to cover the network grief experienced with the multimedia-enriched mobile phone, but it appears that in order to have 3G, you'd have to get another iPhone.

 

Or so they say. While many rumors have flown around dubbing European phone buffs as the lucky ones to get the extra G, none have proven factual or true. And while Steve Jobs himself admits that iPhone 'surfing' on AT&T isn't as fast as preferred, Apple is going to be hard-pressed to come out with a simple 3G solution.

Another bit of interesting developments was a mention of AT&T, Apple, planning, iPhone and 3G in one sentence. PBS' Robert Cringely wrote in a column that he believes "Apple and AT&T are planning a fall rollout for full 3G iPhone service, with technical trials already underway in certain AT&T markets," although there were no factual statements to support his claim.

He goes on further that the iPhone has a 3G capability tucked within its innards, ready to burst open at Christmas when a new firmware rolls out and flicks the magic switch. Some folks have turned their iPhone inside out and have yet to spot a piece of hardware that rings 3G-capable, pointing against the speculations of Cringely.

3G needs a transceiver with 3G capability, blogs Philip Elmer-DeWitt, which means that another iPhone with the hardware would be needed before being able to even use 3G capabilities. In turn, that would also require more power for the additional hardware. 

But instead of scrambling over the comm for Scotty, Apple considered battery life was first and foremost in their list of priorities. Apple has assured customers that Wi-Fi Internet access can still be used as a faster alternative to AT&T's current EDGE network, but while hotspots are few and far between, there's nothing more you can do to speed up your iPhone 'surfing' experience.

According to numbers released by the NPD Group, the worldwide market of laptop notebooks saw a 14% rise in Apple shipments since last month. And better yet for the Cupertino-based company, 14% of all notebook computers sold last month were also Apple-branded.

Analysts believe that this may be an indication that the laptop community is embracing more and more of Apple, despite being only fourth place in the current generation laptop race in the U.S. Hewlett-Packard, Gateway, and Toshiba sit at spots above Steve Jobs' company, as reported.

Further consideration of Apple's year-on-year growth, however, may drive the company to steal the third spot. The May figures actually represent a 65% jump from Apple's figure last year, and if Apple can keep that year-on-year rate up for the next month, the numbers would spring the modest 14% to a proud 20% in just thirty days.

While the ever-anticipated iPhone cannot run other OS X applications apart from Safari and OS X desktop email, Steve Jobs hinted in an interview that they are certainly considering the possibility of making third party applications for the iPhone. He says that it is a security issue, but he assures that Apple is currently working its way around it to allow third party developers to build applications for the iPhone.

Jobs is anxious about the problems that may arise from using third party applications, and doesn't want the iPhone to be “one of those phones that crashes a few times a day... We would like to solve this problem and if you could just be a little more patient with us, we’ll do it.” Hear that, Nokia?

Having a mobile phone that doesn't hang every once in a while is a great change, and that in itself is a good enough innovation that will make flustered cellphone users give additional points to Apple over Microsoft.

It's good that Jobs has hinted on that likelihood in a positive note: Imagine a plethora of games available for the iPhone. Should that happen, though, how those games would turn out is still a bit of a mystery, what with the iPhone having no physical keyboard... but we'll see.

Rob Mead at Tech.co.uk shared some of the "secrets" that were revealed at the Apple shareholder's meeting at Cupertino, California.

Third-party apps for iPhone. First, it seems that the iPhone will be open to third-party applications. Apple CEO Steve Jobs had said that the Apple iPhone wouldn't be open to third-party applications, that it would be a closed system based on Mac OS X (the goal was to make sure that the iPhone wouldn't be buggy). But it now seems that Mac developers are free to make apps for the iPhone.

Leopard delay. Steve Jobs also said that the delay of the launch of the Mac OS X Leopard operating system, the next version of Mac OS X, was partly due to the iPhone. According to Jobs, the issue isn't money; the issue is talent. It seems that Apple has dedicated a lot of time and talent to the iPhone, and there just wasn't enough left over for the Leopard. "I wish developing great products was as easy as writing a check," said Jobs. "If so, then Microsoft would have great products."

The smaller and innovative iPhone. It looks like there's a smaller iPhone on the way. Apple has made an application to the US Patent & Trademark Office for a sleek little device with a display on each side (patent number 0070103454). This "Back-Side Interface for Handheld Devices" has a rather interesting concept:

An electronic device uses separate surfaces for input and output. One of the surfaces (e.g. the bottom) includes a force-sensitive touch-surface through which a user provides input (e.g. cursor manipulation and control element selection). On a second surface (e.g. the top), a display element is used to present information appropriate to the device's function (e.g. video information), one or more control elements and a cursor. The cursor is controlled through manipulation of the back-side touch-surface. The cursor identifies where on the back-side touch-surface the user's finger has made contact.

In other words, the new iPhone is a dual-screen set-up with a touch screen. Hm. That reminds us of the Nintendo DS (over 40 million units sold worldwide).

Apple and the mobile phone market. Jobs also said that Apple really has to look deeper into the mobile phone market. In 2006, there were 135 million MP3 players and 200 million PCs sold. But in that same year, there were 1 billion mobile phones sold. That's a big market to explore.

If Apple thinks that the mobile phone market is worth exploring, then we at QJ.NET wish Apple the best. Several of us love our iPods, and if Apple's iPhone can do for mobile phones what the iPod did for "mobile audio and video," then we don't mind the Leopard delay at all.

Schools in New York are now pulling the plug on laptops and laptop-based teaching programs. The reason for this? Not only do they disrupt lessons with glitches and bugs, but they also give students a way to cheat and view materials not conducive to the learning process, as Winnie Hu of the New York Times reports.

In the dawn of the Internet age, where one could easily connect to the Information Superhighway and access the knowledge stored within - teachers and parents ferociously pushed for that same technology to be installed and instilled in their respective schools' classrooms and curriculums, banking on the benefits of students having such a large source of information at hand.

It was to be the 'Classroom of the Future', with pen and paper replaced with laptop screen and keyboard. Unfortunately, things didn't turn out quite as planned.

Nowadays, students use their school-issued laptops to surf pornographic websites, play video games, even cheat during exams which they're instructed to take ON the laptops in question - the exact opposite utility of the high-end (and high-cost) electronics. Of course, measures were already taken at the start to prevent this type of misuse, but as today's youth having the tendency to funnel their creativity into some wayward purpose, students continue to easily find back doors and loopholes through those measures, as if they never were.

It doesn't stop there. When the chance to be used for assisting in lessons comes up, laptops conveniently glitch out and crash - delaying lessons and stretching already thin school budgets even thinner with the necessity of laptop repair staff. It's these reasons that force the hand of school administrators to drop the programs themselves, and to switch back to the days of pencil and paper. "You have to put your money where you think it’s going to give you the best achievement results,” said Tim Bullis, a district spokesman.

But there could be hope for laptops in schools yet. Mr. Mark Warschauer, who supports laptop programs, cites the benefits of technology that the old, traditional teaching methods could never replicate: a Middle School in Yarmouth was able to use their laptops to create a Spanish book for poor children in Guatemala, as well as debate Supreme Court Cases found online.

"Where laptops and Internet use make a difference are in innovation, creativity, autonomy and independent research," he says. "If the goal is to get kids up to basic standard levels, then maybe laptops are not the tool. But if the goal is to create the George Lucas and Steve Jobs of the future, then laptops are extremely useful."

We've previously reported that Apple CEO Steve Jobs himself said that a subscription-based model for Apple's iTunes store isn't coming any time soon, but during our routine visits to the Intertubes we came across something that suggests otherwise.

In Seeking Alpha, Eric Savitz writes that Pacific Crest Securities analyst Andy Hargreaves believes that Apple "has built and is capable of launching a subscription music service." Hargreaves points towards increasing competition from cellular carriers and attractive economics for a subscription service as reasons to believe that "will drive Apple to launch its subscription service within the next 18 months."

According to Savitz, Hargreaves predicts that a billion music-enabled phones will be sold next year and that carriers' music offerings will become "extremely viable competitors with iTunes." Hargreaves also predicts not only a subscription services but also more personalization options, tiered pricing and "more social aspects."