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Real or fake? You be the judge.

Kevin Rose is famous/infamous among the Apple community. He seems to get information before anyone, and is a pretty big thorn in Steve Jobs’ side. He now has new information released about the new up and coming iPod Nano.

Here is a video of his leaked information:

Apple is moving its’ retail space into China starting tomorrow. It will the first official Apple store in the country, and looks quite impressive so far. The build will be situated in Beijing, at the Sanlitun entertainment district. The store will open at 10 AM.

Apple is looking to expand into China even further, saying they will be adding more stores in Beijing, Shanghai and beyond. The store will have almost the exact same features of other Apple stores. One big highlight missing when the store opens will be the iPhone. Apple is still in talks with China’s primary wireless provider to lay out plans for the introduction of the iPhone. The largest obstacle will be implementing the 3G iPhone as China has no standard 3G network as of now.

The 32 GB iPod Touch will be available when the store opens, which will retail for 4,488 Chinese yuan (USD $647.33). This will be a story to keep an eye on going into next week, to see how successful Apple is with their first official foray into the Chinese market.

For those of you who are still teetering on the fence about whether or not to pick up the 3G iPhone are in luck. The first reviews for the phone are in, and so far everything looks to be peachy keen. Here is a few key quotes from the reviews, and what the consensus is.

Walter Mossberg’s Review Synopsis - “If you’ve been waiting to buy an iPhone until it dropped in price, or ran on faster cell networks, you might want to take the plunge, if you can live with the higher service costs and the weaker battery life. The same goes for those with existing iPhones who love the device but crave faster cellular data speeds. But if you already own an iPhone, and can usually use Wi-Fi for data, you probably should hold off and get the free software upgrade before deciding whether it’s worth getting the new hardware.”

Edward Baig’s USA Today Review - “Apple’s claims that 3G speeds are twice as fast as Edge were confirmed by my own download tests. It generally took 10 to 30 seconds to load popular websites through 3G, a lot zippier than when I accessed the sites on Edge. Oddly, parts of the pages sometimes showed up first on the older iPhone screen”

“The physical size and shape of the new iPhone hasn’t changed much. There’s the same lovely 3 1/2-inch multi-touch display. The new device is a bit curvier on the back than the first one.”

“Apple has improved overall audio quality of the device. The speaker phone sounded better, as did music played directly through the phone’s speaker.”

“As with its predecessor, iPhone 3G doesn’t support popular Web browsing standards such as Adobe Flash, Windows Media Video or Java. And there’s still no removable battery.”

David Pogue’s New York Time Review - “So the iPhone 3G is a nice upgrade. It more than keeps pace with advancing technology, and new buyers will generally be delighted.”

“Above all, the iPhone is about to become a dazzling hand-held game machine. The games revealed so far feature smooth 3-D graphics and tilt control; in one driving simulator, you turn the iPhone itself like a steering wheel, and your 3-D car on the screen banks accordingly. Other games exploit the multitouch screen, so you and a buddy can sit at opposite ends of the screen and fire at each other.”

“Unfortunately, most of the standard cellphone features that were missing from the first iPhone are still missing. There’s still no voice dialing, video recording, copy-and-paste, memory-card slot, Bluetooth stereo audio or phone-to-phone photo sending (MMS). And when the battery needs replacement after a couple of years, you’ll still have to pay Apple $86 for a replacement.”

Rhapsody has officially announced the DRM-free MP3 store today. According to Rhapsody it was because of the incompatibility to the iPod that hurt their market share. Before this announcement, Rhapsody was a purely subscription based company. You could stream all sorts of songs on your computer, but could never put them on a music player.

The new MP3 store has a normal pricing structure at /$.99 person, and an album being $9.99. They boast a 5 million song library which will all have MP3 files available to download. While this might just sound like another carbon copy of other music download services, Rhapsody offers full track previews instead of 30 second clips.

As I’m typing away at this article, there’s no doubt a iPhone dev company working away at the next killer app. At the WWDC, there were some iPhone applications announced that sounded very intriguing. Here are a few apps being release; via the Software Development Kit (SDK).

Super Monkey Ball - This game was announced when the SDK was first launched. Now Sega released even more details at the WWDC. Apparently there will be 100 levels to playthrough. To navigate the character, Sega has utilized the iPhone’s accelerometer.

Loopt -  This app sounds like something that might potentially be used by a stalker. Basically it’s a social networking app that can let your friends know where you’re at, by way of a push-pin map. Your profile shows places you’ve been, along with blogging, texting, and other social networking devices.

(via: MacRumors)

It was reported by FreeMacBlog, that it looked like it would be awhile before Flash support would reach the iPhone. It looks as though this report could turn out to be wrong. In our defense, even Jobs said he didn’t know when Flash support would be available.

It looks as though, the wait wont be as long as originally anticipated. Anyone who has been anxiously waiting for Flash support, can thank the SDK for the good news. Adobe has announced that it plans to use the SDK to make a Flash client for the iPhone.

Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe explains the reasoning behind the decision, “We believe Flash is synonymous with the Internet experience, and we are committed to bringing Flash to the iPhone,” the Adobe head noted. “We have evaluated [the SDK] and we think we can develop an iPhone Flash player ourselves.”

One minor glitch with this setup, is that Flash had to run as an independent program. Apple doesn’t allow third-part programs to run as plug-ins, so Flash is going to have to run separate from the browser.

A patent application from Apple was made public today, which looks to be a patent for DVR.

Perusing through the patent, a couple of key ideas jump out. First, would be the ability to tune into live shows, and record, or rewind and pause on Apple TV. Another key element of the patent, would be the ability to hook up your iPod or iPhone. Once hooked up, Apple TV could detect the shows on your media device, and be able to select future recordings using that method. Once recorded, the shows then could be sent to your device for portable viewing.

As of now there has been no official announcement from Apple. But patents aren’t just made without reason, so this is something to definitely look forward to. Let’s just hope it comes sooner rather than later

Yesterday was the shareholders meeting for Apple. Many different strategies, and ideas were presented by Jobs and other key figures for Apple. One interesting piece of information was about the iPhone and Flash support for it.

According to Steve Jobs there is no time frame for Flash Support on the iPhone, so anxious iPhone users shouldn’t start holding their breath. Jobs explains that the current Flash application used by cell phones isn’t powerful enough for what the iPhone is capable of. What he wants is Flash that is on par with the likes of what you see on notebooks and desktops.

Jobs explains about the current Flash problem with cell phones, “There’s this missing product in the middle…It just doesn’t exist”

It looks as though Jobs’ strategy is to hold out and hope that Flash will release a specific application for the iPhone. As of now, Adobe hasn’t made any announcements as it pertains to a special iPhone Flash application.

The two companies have butted heads in the past, with Adobe showing Apple the shaft for some of its’ products. While Apple changed some of its’ products to slow down Adobe applications. Let’s hope for the consumer’s sake that they can get past this bitter past and do what’s best for the iPhone users.

It was released by Apple, that iTune was the #2 music retailer in the US. Any sports fan knows that #2’s are never remembered, as people can barely remember the loser of the Superbowl the year prior. While iTunes may have been beaten out by Wal-Mart in 2007, analysts are predicting a different outcome in 2008.

iTunes as of now has over 50 million customers, and has sold over four billion songs. As the dispersal of music is changing, from physical CDs to downloads it’s only looking like clear blue skies for Apple in the coming year. The president of NPD’s music division has made the prediction that iTunes will easily surpass Wal-Mart this year. Russ Crupnick comments on the state of music media, “Digital sales were up close to 50 percent and CD sales were down 20 percent last year”.