9to5Mac is reporting, based on multiple sources, that Apple is now selling unlocked off-contract but still locked to AT&T iPhones at US Apple Retail Stores, at list price.

List price means $499 for 8GB [for iPhone 3G], $599 for 16GB and 32GB is $699 [for iPhone 3GS].

Gizmodo scored the pic above. It’s unknown whether or not this is in response to the unlocked AT&T-friendly Google Nexus One being released (or the Palm Pre on AT&T… we guess), or just part of an ongoing, unrelated sales strategy.

It’s limited right now to one iPhone per person, per day, and who knows how long it will last so if you want your officially unlocked device — go get it! And tell us what your local Apple Retail Store says when you ask for it.

Apple Retail Now Selling [Off-Contract, Still Locked] iPhones in US is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Editor-in-chief Dieter Bohn is once again still braving the Las Vegas strip for the good of the Smartphone Experts network, this week at CTIA 2010.

He’ll be keeping an eye on things for TiPb while he’s there so if you’re at CTIA and have anything iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad related you really want to show off, hit us up at via news(at)tipb(dot)com (or @TiPb).

Dieter (@backlon) will also be covering all the new for PreCentral.net, and he’s brought Phil Nickinson (@philnickinson) from Android Central and WMExperts and the inimitable CrackBerry Kevin (@crackberrykevin) along with him to round out our presence. Keep an eye on their respective sites for all the news, and follow them on Twitter for the inevitable behind-the-scenes shenanigans that follow. (Which I’ll no doubt be poking jealous fun at via @reneritchie — just sayin’!)

TiPb at CTIA 2010 is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Apple has just updated iTunes to allow users to gift paid apps to other users in the same country (i.e. US App Store to US App Store — no cross-border gifting!). The feature appears as part of the drop-down widget in iTunes on the desktop.

Similar to the previous music-gifting feature, once you’ve opted to gift a paid app you’re taken through several screens where you’re asked to enter your name, the email address for the person you’re gifting (for smooth service, make sure you use the email associated with their iTunes account), a personal message, and confirmation.

Note: iTunes rolled out new terms and conditions to presage the new functionality, so you’ll have to agree to those before you can use it.

We’ve tested it out and it seems to work well. Let us know if you get in the giving spirit (or if you receive any gifted apps).

More screenshots after the break!

Apple Adds “Gift App” for Paid Apps in iTunes App Store is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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The folks at MindTapp dropped us a note to tell us about their new iPhone app, PhotoNest [$1.99 - iTunes link], that allows you to easily — and visually — post pictures to Twitter:

Twitter is an amazing real time communication tool, but it only sends links to photos and not photos themselves, which isn’t very pretty.

We are dedicated to fixing this! PhotoNest is an application that goes through your Twitter feed and looks for photos that your friends have posted. It then pulls that photo out and puts into a nice visual stream of photos from your Twitter friends.

The photos show up in a vertical stack. Tapping on one takes you to a full-screen view. Tapping on the action button sends you to the web page where the photo is stored (no “reply”, “retweet”, or “email link” options there that I could find — which is a real shame). You can post pictures of your own either by taking one via the embedded Camera or by picking one from your Photo galleries. It works well for what it is, and I like focused Twitter apps, but hopefully it will get rounded out over time. A grid-view option, for example, to rapidly parse and select photos would be great.

I’m a well known sucker for Twitter apps but I’m not a huge photo poster (outside of trade shows) or follower of high-volume photo posters, so I’ll have to wait and see what Leanna and the other far-cooler-than-me writers think before rendering final judgement. In the meantime, ask if you have any questions and if you’ve tried PhotoNest, let us know what you think!

PhotoNest: View and Post Twitter Photo Streams with your iPhone is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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In Stock: XGear Touge Case for iPhone

The XGear Touge [$37.95 - TiPb Store link] is inspired by the Japanese Street Racing scene where reputation is everything.

Touge Special Edition features a shock absorption inner layer wrapped in a tough non-removable exoskeleton. The result is tremendous impact protection, light weight and a killer look that will turn heads whenever you pull it out.

• Dual layer protection
• Dock while protected
• Anti dust treatment
• Fixed exoskeleton
• Includes: Mirror Screen Protector and Microfiber Cleaning Cloth

In stock and available for order now from the TiPb iPhone Accessory Store…

In Stock: XGear Touge Case for iPhone is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Confirming that it won’t just be Apple’s iBookstore (and your own free ePubs) on the iPad, the New York Times today mentions that both Amazon and Barnes & Noble are both working on book stores of their own. While both market their own hardware devices, the Kindle and the Nook respectively, the iPad is expected to throw a huge spotlight on eBooks in general, and they want to benefit:

The Kindle app for the iPad, which Amazon demonstrated to a reporter last week, allows readers to slowly turn pages with their fingers. It also presents two new ways for people to view their entire e-book collection, including one view where large images of book covers are set against a backdrop of a silhouetted figure reading under a tree. The sun's position in that image varies with the time of day.

At the offices of Barnes & Noble's digital unit in New York, 14 developers have occupied a windowless room since January, completely redesigning the company's iPhone app for the iPad, according to Douglas Gottlieb, its vice president of digital products. The developers hunch over Macs around a big table, and printouts and notecards are taped up on the walls.

The new app will let users flip through books quickly with finger swipes and customize fonts in multiple colors and sizes. Mr. Gottlieb said the company was talking to publishers about adding multimedia to digital books.

Neither company received one of those secret, early-access iPad units for testing, so while they may be simulator-ready for the April 3 launch, they may not want to release until they’ve had a chance to run their apps on the real hardware. Comic reader app Panefly, for example, thinks a bad day 1 experience with an app that worked fine in the lab but poorly on the actual iPad could “kill the train before it leaves the station”.

As to whether or not Apple will approve competing bookstores for the iPad App Store, TiPb’s always felt that the best indicator was Steve Jobs announcing iBooks as a separate, downloadable app rather than a built-in like iTunes Store. While this may have also reflected iBooks US-only availability, and there’s never any way to tell for sure what Apple will do until they do it, at the end of the day they want to move hardware and letting existing Kindle (and Nook) owners bring over their books is a great way to lower the barrier of iPad entry.

Right now, both the Kindle for iPhone [Free- iTunes link] and Barnes & Noble eReader for iPhone [Free - iTunes link] frequire a clunky web-based work around for purchasing books, however, and it would be nice to see that process actually integrated into the apps — like iBooks and the iBookstore.

So, given the choice, what will you be buying and reading your eBooks with — Amazon Kindle for iPad, Barnes & Noble eBook Reader for iPad, or Apple’s iBooks?

[NYT via AppleInsider]

Amazon, Barnes & Noble Readying Book Stores for iPad is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Outside storing music in the iPhone’s built in iPod app, there are a variety of ways to simply stream the audio you want to listen to:

• Streaming internet radio/subscription apps are the obvious place to start. Slacker [iTunes link], Pandora [iTunes link], Pocket Tunes [iTunes link], Spotify [iTunes link]… the list goes on an on. Some are limited to the US (or just slightly beyond the US) or Europe, but those who have them in their area often swear by them. Some of these also provide local storage so you can keep some of the songs on your device for those occasions when a Wi-Fi or 3G isn’t available.
• Musical games, spearheaded by Tap Tap Revenge [iTunes link] and Rock Band [iTunes link] have shown that users are just as willing — sometimes even more willing — to buy songs for sport as they are for simple enjoyment. With in-app purchases, some of these games have even become music stores unto themselves.
• Musical apps, where an artist or group wants to create something more than just a song file or even iTunes LP, have also become fairly common on the App Store. These can range significantly in content and presentation, but they can and do bring the music.
• Storage apps, like MobileMe iDisk, Box.net, DropBox, etc. can give you access to the music you keep on the cloud. Just like they can view your documents and other files, they can typically play any supported audio format you’ve loaded them up with.
• Mobile Safari, the iPhone and iPod touch (and soon, iPad) web browser can play any music format Apple supports. Just tap on a link and the Quicktime player pops up, buffers, and plays your audio. This includes audio you’ve stored on your own web-enabled server setups. And it’s one of the few apps that’s allowed to keep playing in the background — when it doesn’t run out of RAM or lose connection or otherwise glitch-out.
• iTunes app, while it will only give you 30 seconds of music for sampling, will stream full-length podcasts if you tap on the title instead of the download button. If you prefer talking and creative commons to the latest premium hits, it’s a surprisingly useful option. And it will play in the background just like Safari (and potentially fail, just like Safari).

We’re all hoping iPhone 4.0 addresses that pesky “no streaming internet music while using other apps” multitasking miss we’ve suffered through lo these last 3 years, but in the meantime — what are you using to stream your music on your iPhone? Any tips and or tricks you can share?

How Do You Stream Music on Your iPhone? is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Waiting for Apple’s iPad and its iBooks and iBookstore app? The outstanding Project Gutenberg has 30,000 free-as-in-beer-and-and-as-in-speech ePub format eBooks to help keep you start building your library today.

If you’re not already familiar with the geeky details, ePub is the open, free-flowing eBook format that Apple is using for iBooks. However, let’s caveat that “open” piece — ePub books bought from the iBookstore will be using Apple’s FairPlay DRM (digital rights management) which means that while ePub is a widely supported format, Apple ePub books won’t work on other devices, and ePub books using other DRM (like Adobe Content Server) won’t work on the iPad. Headache, right? Well, the good news is DRM-free ePub eBooks — like those from Project Gutenberg — should work on the iPad and pretty much everything else.

To use Project Gutenberg, just click on the link above and browse or search away. If you’re not sure where to start, try their Top 100 list. When you find something you like, scroll down to the EPUB link and download the file.

Apple is also giving us an easy-as-iTunes way to drag, drop, manage and sync free ePub books over to the iPad. (Hopefully iPhone owners will one day get the same ability, though in the meantime we have the powerful if less elegant super-combo of Calibre and Stanza.)

If you know of any other great sources for free ePub content — or any terrific free eBooks you want to recommend — tell us about them in the comments.

iPad 101: Get Your Free ePub eBooks at Project Gutenberg is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Best of Smartphone Experts, 21 March 2010 is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog