The White iPhone 4 is Vulnerable to the LimeRa1n ExploitThe White iPhone 4 is Vulnerable to the LimeRa1n Exploit

Good news, since I know nearly all of you will be lining up in the morning to lay claim to a white iPhone 4. I kid, I kid.

Nevertheless, there's a bit of good news coming out of the Twitter-sphere this afternoon, and it's regarding the vulnerability of the white iPhone 4.

The question people have been wondering is this: Will the iPhone 4 be vulnerable to a jailbreak out of the box tomorrow? Renowned iPhone hacker @chronic gives the answer inside…

The apparent answer to that question, according to the fine bunch of hackers on Twitter, is yes; you should be able to jailbreak your white iPhone 4 as soon as you bring it home from the store tomorrow.

This is highly indicative that the white iPhone 4 will come preloaded with iOS 4.3.2, a firmware version that has already been successfully jailbroken.

Even better is the fact that the current iOS 4.3.2 jailbreaks are untethered jailbreaks, so you get the real business from day one. As always, you can find our full list of jailbreak tutorials here.

Nice, huh? So who's lining up with me in the morning?

Apple to sell white iPhone 4 across the world starting Thursday

Apple's long-awaited white iPhone 4 will go on sale this Thursday in numerous countries around the world, with more to come soon, marking the end of delays for the device.

In the U.S., the white iPhone 4 will be available from Apple's online store, Apple's retail stores, AT&T and Verizon Wireless stores, and select Apple authorized resellers

"The white iPhone 4 has finally arrived and it's beautiful," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "We appreciate everyone who has waited patiently while we've worked to get every detail right."The full list of countries where the white iPhone 4 will be sold on Thursday is: Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Macau, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, UK and the U.S.

Apple also promised that it will launch the white iPhone 4 in many more countries around the world "soon."

AppleInsider first reported on Sunday that Apple began shipping white iPhone 4 units to its U.S. retail stores over the weekend. The device, which was plagued by production issues, is expected to also go on sale on carriers AT&T and Verizon stateside this week.

The white iPhone 4 was first announced last June, but was delayed numerous times by Apple as the company allegedly had issues with paint mixture. Despite the 10-month delay, at least one Wall Street analyst believes the "mystique" surrounding the elusive device will boost sales, even as rumors of the anticipated fifth-generation iPhone heat up.

Angry Birds boss says Apple's iPhone 'changed everything'

Speaking at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing on Wednesday, the head of Rovio Mobile, the developer behind the bestselling Angry Birds app, said that Apple's iPhone has changed the whole mobile market, noting also that the franchise has become the third most copied brand in China, behind Disney and Hello Kitty.

Vesterbacka, whose job title is the "Mighty Eagle" of Rovio, quizzed the crowd of more than two thousand attendees to discover that "mostly everybody" had played Angry Birds.The popular app has grown "faster than any brand ever before," quickly becoming a global phenomenon. The Angry Birds Rio version of the game became the fastest downloaded game ever with 10 million downloads in 10 days, said Vesterbacka.

Many of those games were developed for other gaming publishing houses; Angry Birds was Rovio's first attempt at developing its own intellectual property and franchise.

Despite lacking a fully implemented marketing plan in China, Angry Birds' popularity has spread to the country, which boasts more than 300 million mobile internet users. According to Vesterbacka, Rovio is now the third most copied brand in China, behind only Disney and Hello Kitty.

Vesterbacka showing an early design sketch of Angry Birds

Vesterbacka admitted that, in spite of the copying, the company was excited to break into the local market and had set a goal to become "the most copied brand in China," while adding that Rovio would "also like to sell authentic products as well."

Rovio's goal is to hit 100 million downloads in China in 2011, on its way to becoming a "leading entertainment brand" in the country in 2012. "We think we can do it, and to do that we're setting up a local operation and investing a lot into creating special versions of Angry Birds" for Chinese users.

Vesterbacka onstage at the GMIC in Beijing

Vesterbacka also attributed much of his company's success to Apple. When comparing the current mobile game climate with black-and-white feature phone games like Snake, he noted that "we have Apple to thank for a lot of change in the industry."

"Apple brought out the iPhone and it changed everything," he said, adding that before the arrival of the iPhone and App Store, carriers and handset makers prevented developers from directly reaching their fans.

"Apple created the distribution for us that we didn't have before. All of a sudden, great games mattered," said Vesterbacka. With Apple's new distribution model, Rovio was able to attain an unprecedented "hockey stick" growth curve. "We are seeing smartphone growth explode, and we are riding that wave," the executive said.

Vesterbacka pointed to Rovio's decision to design the game "around the characters" as contributing to Angry Birds' mass appeal. The company looked to Pixar and other entertainment franchises as models for "character-driven development."

According to the developer, 40 percent of Angry Birds customers make opt for the "Mighty Eagle" in-app purchase, compared to 2 to 3 percent for most companies. Rovio's goal is to reach a 50 percent conversion rate for in-app purchases.

Vesterbacka has been a vocal advocate for the iOS platform. Late last year, he said in an interview that he expects Apple to be "the number one platform for a long time from a developer perspective."

Though Rovio has seen some success on the Android platform, Vesterbacka sees "fragmentation of the [Android] ecosystem" as an issue. "The carriers [are] messing with the experience again," he said, adding that Android is "open, but not really open, a very Google centric ecosystem.

Last November, Vesterbacka apologized to fans for poor Angry Birds performance across a variety of Android devices and promised to develop a "lighter solution" for lower-end Android devices.

Apple executives defend crowdsourced data collection in building new iPhone features

In an interview focusing on the issue of access to users' location data, Apple executives defended the concept of collecting anonymous data to provide valuable new services in the future.

The company's official question and answer response to location services issues noted that Apple was collecting anonymous user location data to build an improved traffic database that would power a new service related to maps "in the next couple years."In an interview conducted by Ina Fried of the Wall Street Journal, Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs was asked whether he thought that companies like Apple "need to let people know specifically what you guys are doing with the information and choose whether to participate in these commercial projects, or do you think Apple and others should have fairly broad use of anonymized data."

Jobs responded, "If people don't want to participate in things, they will be able to turn location services off. Once we get a bug that we found fixed, their phone will not be collecting or contributing any crowdsourced information. But nor will it be calculating location."

However, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller then questioned the legitimacy of the question itself, nothing that "sometimes it helps people to understand an analogy that describes what these things are like because they are so new.

"I would think an analogy of a crowdsourced database is every time you walk into a retail store, many retailers have a clicker that counts how many people come in and out of the store. Nobody really cares about that because it is completely anonymous. It is not personal data. It is not anything to worry about. It's not something that people feel is private because it is really not about them. It's a coagulated total of all traffic.

"These crowdsourced databases are sort of like that. Things like that aren't so scary when you think about them in everyday terms," Schiller said.

Big Brother bears gifts

That's an apt analogy, because Apple already conducts anonymized data mining of foot traffic in its retail stores as part of an effort to improve how products are presented and how features such as Genius Bars and store cash registers are located. Nearly every retailer does the same thing.

On the web, Google and other companies regularly introduce products that have benignly ulterior purposes. For example, Google operated a Goog411 service that provided free, automated answers to callers' questions over the phone. Those calls were actually used to record realistic speaking voices in natural settings, data Google used to enhance its voice recognition algorithms.

Similarly, Google's reCaptcha project (originating in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University) is used to provide a free security service for web publishers that challenges users to type the correct captcha as it appears to prove they are a real person. However, the words displayed by the system are taken from Google Books and the Internet Archive sources to double check the automated OCR work in correctly identifying scanned text.

Traffic will be the only new leak today, thanks

Apple's efforts to collect anonymous information from millions of devices to improve the accuracy of location lookups or to power new services (like traffic) are the same thing, its executives maintain.

When asked what other uses the company may make of collectively culled data, Jobs said only that "we mentioned the traffic service and I think that is all we are going to mention at this point in time before we have something to announce."

Pressed further about other the possibility of crowdsourced data being used for other purposes, Jobs said "we are building a crowdsourced database based on traffic and that is what we are saying."

iPhone 5 or 4S: My Name is?

Well the latest revelations regarding the iPhone 5 seem to blow quite a few of the previous rumours regarding this device out of the water. That is of course if they are to be believed.

Apple's newest iPhone has become known by us as the iPhone5 and was thought to be launched with this name, but this new information that has surfaced indicates that the handset will actually be called 'iPhone 4S' and will look like the iPhone 4, but with an Apple A5 dual core CPU within.

The handset apparently will also not come with an 8MP camera and not be able to record 1080p HD videos, but will have a 5MP camera that is only capable of shooting 720p HD videos, with the front camera being the same resolution. This information comes to us by way of a thegadgets article via what they claim is there 'Apple source'.

According to the thegadgets article there is no information on the screen size or resolution of the smartphone. However, their source did say that Apple has given the prototype versions of the 'iPhone 4S' to certain developers within the Apple headquarters and also some selected application developing partners who are getting the apps sorted for the phones release and that the prototypes must stay on the campus.

In addition, the source indicated that the iPhone 4S will not come with iOS 5, but will have a version of iOS 4 instead, believed to be iOS 4.5 or possibly 4.6 and that it is more likely that the iOS 5 will be revealed at WWDC 2011, with the release date being withheld. However, the shipping of the latest iPhone addition in 'September', is believed to be correct, with the white version being shipped from the start.

Earlier today we did a post on this topic, see article here and we would now like to know what your thoughts are on the 'iPhone 4S' name and the possibility of the iOS handset not coming with many of the features we were perhaps hoping for? Please let us know below.

Reuters Joins the iPhone 5 News Blog In Predicting September iPhone 5 Release

Skeptics of a late-summer iPhone 5 release have balked at suggestions that Apple would depart from its usual June iPhone release. But new, well-sourced reports corroborate what the iPhone 5 News Blog has reported since January — that the iPhone 5 will ship in September.

It appears that the mainstream tech media has begun to embrace what the iPhone 5 News Blog has reported all along: that the iPhone 5 will be released at the end of the summer.

The news wires were abuzz Wednesday morning as Reuters and others reported that the iPhone5 is set to begin mass production in July, with a release planned for September. The Reuters report indicates that the iPhone 5 "will have a faster processor and will begin shipping in September, three people with direct knowledge of the company's supply chain said."

While the mainstream press has searched out reliable sources for months that could corroborate the theory of a late-summer release for the iPhone 5, the iPhone 5 News Blog predicted an August or September launch of the iPhone 5 on January 8th, 2011 on the heels of the Verizon iPhone announcement in this article, Verizon iPhone Announcement Clears Path For Future iPhone 5 Release.

From the outset of the Verizon iPhone release, it has been apparent to us that Verizon's deal with Apple would stipulate ample time to sell their version of the iPhone 4 without the disruption of a June iPhone 5 announcement to squelch spring sales. Just as AT&T enjoyed six months of uncontested iPhone 4 sales before the Verizon announcement, it stood to reason that Verizon too would expect a six-month sales window for the Verizon iPhone 4.

It now appears that well-placed sources are confirming this rationale for the iPhone 5.

The Reuters piece also reveals some other interesting details about the iPhone 5 as well, including some details about how it will look. The iPhone 5 is purported to look similar to the iPhone 4 in size and dimension. If the dimensions of the iPhone 5 remain true to the iPhone 4, then this would suggest that the only prospect of a larger screen would be if the iPhone 5 sports an edge-to-edge screen, maximizing the dimensions of the current chassis.

There's no word on the metal back rumor, however, which would indeed change the cosmetic look of the iPhone 5.

To be sure, even rumors that come from supposed well-placed sources "with direct knowledge of the company's supply chain" can never be completely trusted, especially considering that an audacious iPhone tip — whether true or not — most likely commands a great deal of money. However, another piece of this rumor, which reveals that Wintek, Foxconn, and Largan are producing the components for the iPhone 5, lends more credibility to the voracity of the claim, since Wall Street is responding positively. Reuters reports that "Largan's Taipei-listed shares ended up 3.7 percent, Hon Hai rose 4.3 percent and Foxconn rose 6.6 percent, outpacing the benchmark TAIEX share index's 2 percent advance."

The fact that top investors are staking their financial resources on these suppliers indicates that Wall Street is satisfied with this report on the iPhone 5′s release month.

While the tech community may not be completely convinced of a September iPhone 5 release until the WWDC has come and gone with no new iPhone announcement, this new Reuters report should begin to put to rest any lingering rumors of a June release.

Wireless Charging For the iPhone 5 May Lead To Poor Battery Performance

New rumors suggest that wireless charging could be coming to the iPhone5. But is wireless "inductive charging" a reliable enough technology for the next iPhone?

Scan the recent iPhone 5 rumor mill news and you'll see some new reports indicating that Apple has a few compelling patents on file that lead tech pundits to believe that the iPhone 5 could possibly feature next-generation wireless battery charging. Among the more developed articles on this purported new development is FoneHome's article, which explains that Apple's wireless charging patent features a series of docking models:

"Built into these docks would be an inductive coil. Once placed in close proximity to a device that also possesses one, an alternating current is passed from the base to the portable unit, which is then converted to DC power. Hey presto – you have a charged iPhone battery without ever having to directly plug it into anything. Interestingly, inductive coils can also be used to transfer data." You can read their entire article here

To be sure, battery technology — particularly for mobile devices — always remains a hot topic, since iPhone users understand intuitively that better batteries means longer, more extended mobile computing of advanced apps and features. All you have to do is take a look at the results of the poll at the bottom of our iPhone 5 Features page, which indicates that  an "improved battery" comes in third of twenty possible new features for the iPhone 5, ahead of much sexier features such as "e-ink/retina displays," "smart bezels," and "NFC technology," to name a few. Even though the battery on an iPhone isn't a very interactive feature, iPhone users understand its critical importance.

Of course, so too does the average tech blog, which is why taking an obscure Apple patent and crafting it into the next big iPhone 5 rumor is an easy way to garner a lot of attention and web traffic.

If docking your iPhone or plugging it in for a charge seems incredibly laborious to you, then the idea of being able to just lay your iPhone 5 down on a charging plate at the end of the day probably seems like a groundbreaking idea. And if this is the case, then Apple will be equally excited to sell an expensive wireless charging peripheral to go with the iPhone 5, thus exponentially increasing their profit margins.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, it's important to note that wireless charging has been around for quite some time now, and it is not known to be the most reliable technology when it comes to charging. It could, in fact, turn out to be a disappointing feature for the iPhone 5 if Apple doesn't make some considerable changes to the current technology.

Wireless charging, also known as induction charging, is known to fail at fully charging batteries. Electronics Warehouse has an interesting article that compares induction charging to the use of NiMH rechargeable batteries that were charged using AC power. The article quotes IGN on the issue of using Nintendo's induction charger for the Wiimote, saying,

"Transmitting energy wirelessly, as you can imagine, is not nearly as fast or effective as transferring it through a physical connection, as such, it takes a significantly longer time to fully recharge the battery pack. To fully charge an empty battery, a Wiimote has to be placed on the charger for somewhere between six and eight hours; a pretty lengthy bit of time, no doubt."

It really should be no revelation to gadget users that AC power remains king when it comes to charging batteries: DC power, such as the power used when charging with a cigarette lighter in your car — is historically underpowered compared to plugging your smartphone directly into an AC wall socket. The same is true with induction charging: although the base unit plugs into the wall alla an AC plug, the current that flows from the charger to the device is purely DC.

All of this being said, Apple has demonstrated over the years that they are technology leaders when it comes to rechargeable batteries. In fact, they have spent copious amounts of money, time, and resources on making bigger, bolder, better batteries. If the iPhone 5 ends up with wireless charging features, chances are that it will be the cream of the crop in terms of inductive charging. But no matter what, wireless charging will always be DC-powered.