Apple has just set iBooks 1.1.1 loose in the App Store. A point release, it does sneak in some nice functionality none-the-less:

• Double-tap an image within a book to view it in greater detail.
• Experience books that include audio and video.
• Enjoy substantial performance improvements when reading PDFs.
• Look-up definitions to English words inside books without a specified language.
• Addresses an issue that may have caused some book downloads to not complete.
• Includes many stability and performance improvements.

If you’re trying it out, let us know how it works for you.

[iTunes, thanks @daveizzle!]

iBooks 1.1.1 hits App Store is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Not to be left out of all the point release fun, Apple has just pushed out iTunes 9.2.1. Hit software update or head on over to Apple’s iTunes download page to grab it.

iTunes 9.2.1 provides a number of important bug fixes, including:

• Disables older versions of some incompatible third-party plug-ins
• Addresses minor issues with dragging and dropping items
• Addresses a performance issue when first syncing to some devices with

If you notice anything else, let us know in comments.

[Apple.com/iTunes, thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

Apple releases iTunes 9.2.1 is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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The Caze Swarovski Apple Logo Decal is just the item for adding a touch of bling to your iPhone. It features 26 Swarovski in the shape of an apple. The decal is handmade and I have had it on my iPhone for 3 weeks and I have not yet lost a Swarovski crystal. I use my decal with my CaseMate Chrome which I feel makes a nice pairing as the CaseMate Chrome has a opening in the back for the Apple logo. This also protects the logo from wear and tear.

The decal is self adhesive, similar to a sticker. Those worried about getting some adhesive stuck on the back of the iPhone can choose to use a clear round backing, which comes with the decal. (I used it for the photo but wouldn’t again — next time it goes bare on the back). I do wish that the apple logo and the leaf were stuck together as the leaf is getting loose and I worry that I will soon lose it.

The decal is wonderful but the drawbacks are that you can not use many cases with the sticker on. I have been able to still use my Mophie Juice Pack albeit snuggly, which would have been a deal breaker for me (yes, I often forget to charge).

Give-away: we have 2 Caze Swarovski Apple logo decals for our faithful TiPb readers. Just leave a comment below telling me why you want to bling out your iPhone it and be sure to include a real email address (we won't make it public but we will use it to notify you if you win!). Now start typing!

The Caze Swarovski Apple Logo Decal is $19.90 and available in light blue, Pink, gold, clear, light purple and purple, from Caze.

Caze Swarovski Apple logo decal give away is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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

This is ridiculously future-cool — an iPhone 4 video call from the middle of the Pacific Ocean thanks to a boat, a satellite-powered Wi-Fi hotspot, and FaceTime.

FaceTime from the middle of the Pacific. Arthur and Peter, my MotionX colleagues are in the office in Santa Cruz, California and get video-taped doing FaceTime between Pete's iPhone 4 in Santa Cruz and my iPhone 4 in the middle of the Pacific Ocean one of the most isolated spots in the world. When it came up, it was like magic! To paraphrase Arthur Clarke, Great innovative technology and magic are literally indistinguishable. This is what the Camera-Phone was designed to do.

Video after the break…

[Skipper's Blog via Daring Fireball]

FaceTime from the middle of the Pacific Ocean is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Camera+ for iPhone is a photography application that allows you to take photos and edit them. tap tap tap claims Camera+ is “all about one thing – GREAT PHOTOS!” How does Camera+ hold up to this expectation? Follow along to find out.

When you launch Camera+, you will be looking at the back of camera with a view finder. Under the viewfinder, where there would normally be a screen on a digital camera, there are two options: take photos and Lightbox. Behind the camera, you can see a little of what your iPhone’s camera can see. Inside the viewfinder, you’ll see a very small version of exactly what your camera sees. Tap on the viewfinder or “take photos” to take a picture.

When taking a photo, there is a 3×3 grid to help line up your shot (optional). There is also a stabilizer which will not snap the picture until the iPhone is held still. This is great for low light situations or when you are zoomed in (up to 5x).

The Lightbox is where you go to view all the photos you’ve taken with Camera+. The Lightbox is designed with filmstrips containing 3 photos each and is very visually appealing. None of the photos save to your camera roll until you tell it to. This is great for keeping your camera roll clutter-free of photos you don’t want. Tapping a photo brings up options to edit, save, copy, or share. Double tapping a photo makes it larger and provides the same options.

There are 4 different ways to edit your photos: scenes, crops, effects, and borders. Scenes is similar to the different modes you might find on a digital point and shoot camera: auto, flash, sunset, night, backlit, portrait, beach, scenery, concert, food, and text. There are 9 different common crop ratios available. The 21 different effects are categorized as color, retro, and special. I am impressed with all the options and quality of these effects. They are fun and look great. There are 7 different borders to choose from. Most are very basic; the only “fun” one being “instant” which makes your photo look like it was taken with a polaroid camera.

Overall, I was impressed with Camera+. The plethora of good effects makes the app worth it alone. Camera+ does a great job of producing great photos.

[$1.99 - iTunes link]

Pros

• Unique UI
• 5x zoom, stabilizer, and grid available when taking photos
• Creatively designed Lightbox to scroll through pictures
• Many scene modes, crop ratios, borders, and effects
• Share to Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr
• Support for multitasking, Retina Display, flash, and front facing camera on iPhone 4
• Access photo library to edit photos not taken with Camera+

Cons

• Landscape only supported when taking and viewing photos
• Cannot view photos in full screen
• Saving a photo to camera roll removes it from the Lightbox

Camera+ for iPhone – app review is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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

One of the greatest tricks Apple pulled off at the iPhone 4 press conference was changing the dialog from death-touch — a single point of antenna trouble on iPhone 4 — to death-grip — a device-wide point of antenna trouble faced by the entire industry.

Apple for their part did cop to making iPhone 4’s point of attenuation very external and incredibly visible. Steve Jobs called it “x-marks the spot”, but then Apple very quickly moved on from this death-touch to a wider death-grip and demonstrated it on handsets from RIM’s BlackBerry to HTC’s Droid to Samsung’s Windows Mobile.

I initially thought this was a mistake on Apple’s part — that they were spending too much time deflecting onto the competition. Turns out I underestimated Apple, but not as badly as the competition. What Apple very neatly managed to do there was conflate their own widely reported iPhone 4 death-touch into the very real but widely under-reported death-grip phenomena that does indeed affect the entire industry.

What’s more, by those very competitors responding that the death-grip either didn’t affect their devices, was minimal at best, or wouldn’t affect future devices, they cinched it for Apple. They became part of the problem. Why?

Because their devices absolutely suffer from the death grip. Instead of pointing out that yes, Apple was correct, the death-grip was an industry-wide problem but the death-touch was thus far unique to Apple, RIM BlackBerry, Samsung, and Nokia denied the death-grip, thus ensuring everyone with the issue — or just an itch for attenuation attention — would fire up YouTube and make a video clearly discrediting their statements.

HTC for their part just said they didn’t have many reports of the problem. However, as David Chartier points out, HTC effectively white-labels their phones to Verizon and they didn’t make it clear whether the number of complaints they reported included Verizon numbers. This is similar to Apple citing AT&T return numbers for iPhone 4, not gross Apple return numbers. It’s what brought about the saying “lies, damn lies, and statistics”.

My original take on Apple’s press conference was that Steve Jobs should have just stressed that making the iPhone 4 antenna the way they did was a trade-off, better battery life and stronger signal in many cases in exchange for that single point of problem — the lower left hand corner death-touch. Andy Ihnatko made the same point, if more eloquently. Arguably a modern smartphone has any number of tradeoffs — AMOLED screens offer better color and blacks that utterly fail in direct sunlight. (Free sun-screens anyone?)

I still think Apple should have been crystal clear about that trade-off, but it’s looking increasingly like they didn’t have to. In their rush to get comments out in front of the media RIM, Samsung, Nokia, et al have let the conversation get changed from death-touch to death-grip, and they’ve let videos on their own handsets propagate across the web. One look at BlackBerry on Boy Genius, Nokia on Electronista, Samsung on InformationWeek, HTC on Engadget, many others via Daring Fireball, and even manufactures’ own warnings against touching their antennas in their own manuals via 1FPS shows how they’ve become part of a story that last week was all about Apple.

Sure a few sites like Ars Technica and When Will Apple? will raise a fuss over it, but it’s done. Competitors dove headlong into it. And since Apple has now effectively priced the death-touch problem as one free case per phone, all that remains to be seen is if competitor’s denials + customers videos = free cases for other phones too.

So I underestimated Apple but they didn’t underestimate their competition.

Note: this editorial is based on a Twitter conversation with Seth Weintraub from 9to5Mac who is absolutely right, one day college courses will be taught on these PR tactics. Check out his article on Fortune.

Update 1: Dilbert’s Scott Adams comes to the same conclusion, which he calls the “high ground maneuver”, and wonders if Jobs has had hypnotist training.

Update 2: I said above that while many smartphones have the death-grip, only the iPhone has the death-touch. Daring Fireball links to a YouTube video showing the Samsung Galaxy S having, if not the death-touch, then at least the death-finger. Again, from now on no smartphone is safe.

How Apple moved the conversation from iPhone 4 death-touch to industry-wide death-grip is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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

Here I am showing how to apply a BodyGuardz screen protector to your iPad. Why? I don’t know about you but for me my iPad screen is 9.7 inches of beautiful, colorful joy and the thought of scratching it fills me with equal parts apprehension and terror. So, in the better safe than sorry department, here’s what I did:

1. Clean my iPad screen thoroughly (I use iKlenz)
2. Apply the liquid to my fingers
3. Peel off the screen film and apply liquid to the back
4. Place the skin carefully on my iPad
5. Squeegee out excess liquid, carefully blotting to keep it away from water sensors
6. Press out any remaining bubbles

I use a big squeegee for the initial pass, the supplied smaller one for the details. I also made sure to put my iPad on a non-slip mat first so I don’t have to chase it around the table. (Basically what I did for the iPhone screen protector how-to, a little more conservative than Dieter’s approach).

We’ll be testing BodyGuardz out for durability in the future, and I’ll be looking at other skins soon. If you have any tips for applying them, or any questions about them, let me know in comments.

If you want to pick up a BodyGuardz screen protector for iPad, check out the TiPb iPad accessory store.

How to apply BodyGuardz screen protector for iPad [sponsored] is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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

Apple has just announced that, come Friday, July 23, the next round of international iPad roll-outs will hit Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore.

Beginning this Friday, customers can purchase all models of iPad through Apple's retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers.

And they’re not done yet:

iPad will roll out to many more countries later this year and Apple will announce availability and local pricing for these additional countries at a later date.

Are you in one of those countries, ready to get your iPad? Or are you in one of those countries still waiting? Let us know.

iPad launches on Friday, July 23 in Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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

Boy Genius and 9to5Mac have been digging deep into how FaceTime might work on iOS devices that don’t have phone numbers attached to them — namely the next generation iPod touch G4 and iPad G2. Since iPhone 4 uses phone numbers as “accounts” to route FaceTime connections, the alternative for iPod touch and iPad seems to be Apple ID and the associated email address.

You enter the email address, hit verify, check your email, and if it works — boom — you’re good to go. Then something like Push Notification could be used to request a FaceTime session.

If iPod touch G4 and iPad G2 indeed get their front-facing cameras and FaceTime on, and if Android, Palm and others choose to implement the open standard Apple released, next year could be a very interesting time for smartphone users. Hundreds of millions of smartphone users.

Want?

[Boy Genius, 9to5Mac]

Is this how FaceTime will work on next gen iPod touch G4, iPad G2? is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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

Taiwan news decided to have a little — fun? — with Apple and iPhone 4 by casting Steve Jobs as Darth Vader, laughing as Foxconn workers jump off buildings, and light-sabering off the fingers of customers who complain about reception problems.

It’s sensationalistic, callus about the suicides, and convenient in casting blame entirely on Apple for the problems of Taiwanese and Chinese owned businesses, and some might find the imagery disturbing. Consider yourself warned before you hit the play button. But, hey, Star Wars.

[Thanks Michael for the tip and the subtitles!]

Taiwan news animates Steve Jobs as Darth Vader – Monday video (NSFW-D) is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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