Report: Google, Not Apple Poses Biggest Threat to Amazon's Kindle Fire

Despite anticipated holiday sales numbers indicative of the iPad losing some traction to the upstart Amazon Kindle Fire, a new report indicates that the tablet landscape could look much different from its present form by the middle part of this year. And that could change who Amazon perceives to be its chief competitor.

According to the latest buzz engendered by Digitimes, Google's widely expected mid-2012 tablet offering will take square aim at the Kindle Fire's market segment - not the iPad's. Although, on the surface, it appears that all tablets are competitors, that isn't the case in today's market.

A primary reason the Kindle Fire proved so popular over the holidays is because of its lower price. While promising high-end functionality at a lower cost, the Kindle Fire is believed to have poached somewhere between 1 and 2 million iPad sales from Apple over the holiday quarter.

Pod2g Updates Blog With A5 Jailbreak FAQ Explaining Why it is Not Currently Possible

A4 iDevice users have been enjoying the labor of love that is the iOS 5.0.1 untethered jailbreak for over a week now. However, A5 device owners (iPhone 4S and iPad 2) still live in a jailbreakless world, and apparently many have expressed their displeasure to pod2g.

This displeasure resulted in pod2g posting the following FAQ on his blog this morning. It explains, in brief, why an A5 jailbreak is currently not possible.

Originally Posted by :
How could pod2g have an untethered 4S and dev teams still haven't released tools to achieve this at home ?

The exploit I used to inject the untethering files to the 4S relies on having a developer account, and can't be released publicly.
It's the same reason why @MuscleNerd has an iPad 2 tethered jailbreak but couldn't distribute it.

So, we need to find a distributable exploit to remount the system partition read/write and to set Corona files at the correct places.

Verizon: 4.2 Million iPhones Sold During Holiday Quarter

Oops. It looks as though Verizon's chief financial officer Fran Shammo prematurely spilled the beans on a major fact of business for the nation's largest wireless carrier.

The revelation came at the Citi Global Entertainment Media & Communications Conference on Wednesday where Shammo was speaking.

It isn't clear exactly why the Verizon executive opted to reveal this information only a few weeks before Apple is set to report earnings for the holiday sales quarter, but one thing is for sure: Verizon apparently sold a whole bunch of iPhones.

As the numbers indicate, for the final three months of 2011, Verizon logged twice the number of iPhones it sold during the third quarter of last year. By comparison, AT&T sold 2.7 million iPhones in the third quarter. And it now appears that both carriers may be neck-and-neck in terms of Q4 iPhone sales.

TidyTilt: Smart Cover for iPhone 4/iPhone 4S

Want a Smart Cover for your iPhone 4/iPhone 4S?

Please view the video content on a computer.

There have been several attempts to make a Smart Cover for the iPhone, but here's a cool one. It's called the TidyTilt and it's expected to be launched by January 29th of this year. The designers behind the product are two design students from Chicago named, Derek Tarnow and Zahra Tashakorinia. The design is nearly similar to that of the Smart Cover for the iPad 2, except there's one major difference, the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S don't have that magnet engineering that the iPad 2 does. To make the iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S work with this cover, there is actually a mount that has to be placed on the back of the iPhone. It is a stainless steel band that is stuck to the iPhone's rear end with sticky adhesive. The colored TidyTilt is magnet-integrated, so it clings to that stainless steel band that you put on the rear end.

Apple Claims GameStore App Released Prematurely - Issues Refunds

We previously reported about an application that prematurely made its way into the iPhone App Store called “GameStore.” It was deemed an Apple internal testing tool for their iOS in-app-purchase system. The June 2009 date, which is the month of the event in which the in-app purchase was formally announced, on the application store page seems to confirm that. Apple recently sent out an email that informed everyone that the app was pulled from the App Store:

You recently purchase the GameStore app. The app was made available for sale prematurely. We apologize for the problem and have refunded the purchase amount back to your account. These funds will be applied to your original payment method within 5 business days.