And queue the supposed case-leaks for the iPad 3, one of the traditional sings of impending Apple-pocalypse that every new device, real and imagined, has to go through before it gets announced, much less launched. These particular cases, when compared to an iPad 2 cases, seems to show some small, subtle differences between the two, as highlighted in the images above. We’ve also got some more rumors on both graphics power and chipset power — or lack thereof.

First up, that supposed iPad 3 case, picture above. Here’s what they have to say:

1. You can see here that the mounts for the logic board are very different, which means the logic board shape will be different allowing for . . . .

2. More battery. The width of where the logic board sits on the iPad 2 appears much larger than that of the i.Pad 3. We have long heard that the iPad 3 was going to provide longer battery life, and this back housing seems to support that.

3. The camera is different. It is hard to make a judgment just by looking at the casing, but what we can expect is a different camera on the iPad 3 than what we had on the 2.

4. LCD will be different than what we have had before. Whether or not it will be the super screen we have seen reported will have to wait. But the different mounting does mean that the LCD has been redesigned at the very least.

We’ve heard nothing but conflicting rumors about this, some saying it’s slightly thicker either to make extra room for LTE and more battery power, or to properly light that big 2048×1536 Retina display screen. Others say it’s the same thickness as the iPad 2, no difference at all.

The Verge is also weighing in on the iPad 3, saying it will be powered by upcoming Apple’s A6 chipset but that the A6 chipset would not be quad-core as previously rumored.

Instead, the iPad 3 will supposedly remain a dual-core device with a more powerful GPU inside. Given Apple’s tight control of both hardware and software, they’ve often been able to do more with less than other platforms, like Android, where the same software has to run on many different types of hardware. If Apple chooses to optimize for something specific, everything gets optimized for it. That’s part of the reason iOS devices, despite typically having less RAM and clock speed than competing Android devices, were still able t more than keep up and offer a smooth user experience. Don’t get us wrong, we’d love a couple gigs of RAM and a quad core, but Apple may not think it’s needed.

Once again, the only thing we know for certain is that none this is for certain but with the speculation of a March announcement gaining steam, we’ll hopefully soon find.

Sources: Repair Lab Blog, The Verge

One of the cool features of Foursquare is Explore, a way to find really great things to see and do nearby to where you are, but until now, most of its features were only available on the web. That’s all changed with Foursquare 4.2 for iPhone — you can now set your location and filter your recommendations by type, or even specific foods like “ham sandwich”. Your search result just got a lot more personalized!

One of the improvements with the new version of Foursquare is that your recommendations are also now dependent on time of day, where your friends have been, and places on the lists you follow. That means many more data points are factored in to the process. You are also no longer restricted to only searching for recommendations in your current location. If you’re on your way downtown and want to search for places to go before you get there, you can move the map to the area you wish to search, or specifically search a specific neighborhood, city, or address.

Oh, and Foursquare also snuck in menu and pricing information in the update. Pretty sweet!

Free – Download Now

Source: Foursquare

Mid week and things have been rather busy here at iMore thus far. Lots of updates, news and rumors happening. If you missed out on anything make sure you get yourself caught up either here on the blogs or in the iMore forums. You can register now to get started today and while you’re at it, check out some of the threads below:

• Where do you keep your brightness?
• Forgot restriction password
• How many of you use iCloud?
• Twitter apps with multiple account support?
• How much data did you use last billing cycle?

If you’re not already a member of the iMore Forums, register now!

Mid week and things have been rather busy here at iMore thus far. Lots of updates, news and rumors happening,  If you missed out on anything make sure you get yourself caught up either here on the blogs or in the iMore forums. You can register now to get started today and while you’re at it, check out some of the threads below:

• Where do you keep your brightness?
• Forgot restriction password
• How many of you use iCloud?
• Twitter apps with multiple account support?
• How much data did you use last billing cycle?

If you’re not already a member of the iMore Forums, register now!

Marc, Seth, and Rene iterate about high-concept eBooks and page-curl API, Bjango’s Skala Preview, RealMac’s Clear, ScoreKeeper XL, and the Metro-fication of iOS apps, and interrogate Dave Wiskus of Black Pixel about design… and what’s wrong with PhotoShop.

• Our podcast feed
• Download Directly
• Subscribe via iTunes

• [KAIST ITC - Smart E-Book Interface Prototype Demo], a totally insane use of Apple’s page curl API (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVyBwz1-AiE)
• Skala Preview
• Clear from Realmac
• Scorekeeper XL

• Dave Wiskus of Black Pixel

Hosts

• Marc Edwards (@marcedwards) of Bjango
• Seth Clifford (@sethclifford) of Nickelfish
• Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie) of iMore.com

Feedback

• Email: podcast@iterate.tv
• Twitter: @iteratetv
• Facebook: Iterate page

If you’re one of the best-of-the-best-of-the-best in mobile design for Android, BlackBerry, iOS, webOS, or Windows Phone, we’d love to get you on the show, or if you’ve found a drop-dead gorgeous app on any platform and really want us to talk about it, contact us and let us know.

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

If you’re a Vonage user and you have an iPhone, great news — Vonage has launched a new mobile app that allows you to send text messages and make calls with other Vonage users around the world. For free. The Vonage app pulls in your iPhone’s native address book for quick access to initiating calls. Outgoing calls are recognized as originating from your usual phone number, so Caller ID on your friends’ phones should still work fine. Needing others to be on Vonage is a pretty big caveat, but even for calling regular land lines, they’re claiming rates are 30% lower than Skype. To sweeten the deal, Vonage is throwing in 3000 minutes/month of free mobile and landline calls to the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico for a limited time.

I’m not as impressed with the new Vonage app as Dell Voice, which lets you make outgoing calls to regular ol’ landlines and cell phones within Canada for free for the foreseeable future (not just a limited time). Of course, there’s no SMS text messaging included with Dell Voice, but I use instant messaging way more often anyway. Besides, if you’ve got to harass friends to sign up for a new service to get free calling anyway, wouldn’t you have better luck with pushing a more widely-recognized brand like Skype? At the very least, Vonage Mobile’s offer for free calling to land lines and mobile is pretty nice, even if it’s only for a limited time.

Head on over to Vonage for more info on the app, which is also available for Android (if you’re into that kind of thing). If you’re ready to roll, go ahead and download directly from the App Store.

Still waiting impatiently for iOS 5.1 to be released? Well, carrier profiles that were recently published by iPhone carriers in Japan, France, Greece, Finland, and Sweden indicate a March 9 release date for iOS 5.1.

Apple has been slowly trickling out betas for weeks and weeks now, more slowly and less regularly than is usual for an iOS beta cycle. In previous years, the new version of iOS would debut with the iPhone in June and the x.1 release with the iPod touch in September. This year, iOS 5 didn’t debut until October with the iPhone 4S, and there was no new iPod touch. So we’re in uncharted territory here.

Based on leaks from the beta, there also don’t seem to be many new features included in iOS 5.1. At least not yet. March 9 would put the iOS 5 release somewhere around the anticipated March release date for the iPad 3.

That starts to sound interesting. Apple has been known to hold back key features in the past, preferring to introduce them live on stage when unveiling a new device.

We’re hip deep in crazy rumor season right now, so it’s impossible to say what, if anything, carrier profile dates have to do with actual Apple plans. (Which can and have changed at the last moment anyway.) But things do look like they’re aligning nicely.

Source: Your Daily Mac

The darling of hardcore iPhone twitter users comes to the iPad, but how does Tweetbot measure up on the big screen compared to Twitterrific and Twitter’s own app?

Twitter may not be as big a social network as Facebook, but you can’t turn on a television, let alone visit a website, without seeing an endless stream of @usernames and #hashtags. While smartphones are great for Twitter on the go, the iPad is perfect for sitting back and really getting engaged. But which Twitter app for iPad is the best to engage with? Not only do you have Twitterrific, the original iOS Twitter app, but you have Twitter’s official Twitter for iPad app, and now you have Tweetbot to consider as well, one of the most popular iPhone Twitter apps, just released for the iPad.

We’ve often said iOS and Twitter and like chocolate and peanut butter, two great tastes that taste even better together. And it’s true. Time after time, platform after platform, the best developers and designers always seem to gravitate towards making Twitter clients, and nothing proves that more than Twitterrific, Twitter, and Tweetbot.

So which one is best, or more importantly, which one is best for you?

Caveats

We’re going to be using a lot of Twitter-specific jargon here. If you’re not already familiar with Twitter and are reading this as a way to decide which app you should start with, be sure to check out our Twitter and social networking slang dictionary so you can get up to speed on also the latest terms. (Or just skip to the conclusion to find out which one you should get.)

Also, Twitter for iPad is currently still the version that began life as Tweetie for iPad by Loren Brichter of Atebits but was bought and rebranded by Twitter before release. Twitter has since redesigned the iPhone version of Tweetie/Twitter, and we expect will be redesigning the iPad version soon as well. When that happens, the pros and cons listed here will change dramatically, and we’ll do an update.

Similarities

Since Twitterrific, Twitter, and Tweetbot are all Twitter apps for iPad, there are a great many similarities. They all have timelines to see the tweets of the people you follow. They all show you mentions, lists, and direct messages. They all let you search and see favorites. They all let you compose new tweets and direct messages. But the way in which they go about doing this varies greatly.

Reading Experience

Twitterrific has a combined timeline, so you see all the tweets of the people you follow listed alongside your @mentions and direct messages. You can read @mentions and direct messages as separate lists, but there’s no option to separate view just the tweets of the people you follow. The sidebar contains those tabs, as well as search, recent searches, lists, and current trends.

Twitterrific makes extensive use of popovers (a combination of popup and dropdown menu that Apple introduced alongside iOS for the iPad), but it can also make you feel boxed in, unable to expand content like pictures and lists to fill the screen. All this makes Twitterrific a good reading experience, but not a highly scalable one.

Twitter for iPad uses an almost futuristic feeling, highly table-optimized sliding panel user interface that’s also deeply divisive. Some love it, some loathe it. Everything you tap causes a new panel to slide in from the right, layer after layer, and you need to swipe them all away to get back to where you started. You can also pinch to zoom out on a tweet to bring up a user’s profile, and pinch to zoom in to fold it away again. Twitter’s sidebar contains a list of all your accounts (if you have more than one), and timeline, mentions, messages, lists, your profile, and search are shown for the currently active account. Overall, Twitter manages to feel scalable and spatial, but still simple to some, while annoying and needlessly fancy to others.

Tweetbot has a charmingly distinct user interface that some adore and others feel is overly loud and heavy. Instead of popovers or sliding panels, Tweetbot simply replaces the main window content with whatever you tapped on, be it timeline, user, or picture. That makes it harder to quickly refer back to something, but also removes a lot of the visual clutter that can otherwise build up. Tweetbot’s sidebar presents tabs for timeline, mentions, messages, favorites, search, your profile, lists, retweets, and mute filters (so you can temporarily suppress people, hashtags, and even certain clients and services). The web view also has a toggle to switch between standard and Readability views.

Despite the distinctive design and gesture actions for more advanced users, Tweetbot behaves a lot like a standard iOS-app, making it easily accessible to new users as well.

Writing experience

Twitterrific’s compose window is unique in that the content persists, even after you close it. If you start typing a tweet, then close it to go do something else, when you tap compose or hit reply again, your text will still be there. (You have to tap the counter and then hit Reset Text to clear it.) There are no auto-complete buttons, but if you type an @ (at) symbol it will start offering username suggestions. If you type a # (hashtag), however, it won’t start offering trend suggestions, and you can’t change which account you’re replying from once you’ve begun to reply. Also, if you add a picture or video, no thumbnails are shown so if you come back later, you’ll need to go to the link if you want to remind yourself what it was.

Twitter’s compose window can quickly start looking like an unruly stack of papers, one piled atop the other. However, it means you have instant, same-screen access to the contents of your timeline and of any conversations you’re joining, which makes checking references while you type a breeze. Twitter supports drafts, and offers auto-complete for both @mentions (which, ironically, brings up a popover in one of the few places Twitterrific does not) and #hashtags. If you add a photo or video with the camera button, you can preview it by tapping the camera button again, and there’s a location button to toggle your coordinates on and off as well.

Tweetbot has a clean, clear composition screen but you lose out on the ability to reference any other content unless you cancel, save as draft, and come back later which is more cumbersome. There are buttons for auto-completing @mentions and #hashtags, and toggling location, and any photos you add are placed in the menu bar as thumbnails you can tap to view or remove.

Bells and whistles

Twitterrific doesn’t yet support native iOS Twitter integration, which means you have to authenticate through the web the first time you set it up. (I’m guessing this will be updated in the not-to-distant future). Twitterrific also doesn’t support push notifications, which means unless you have email or SMS alerts set up, you won’t know if you get any mentions or direct messages until you open the app.

Twitterrific’s settings are found in the built-in iOS Settings app, and there you can enable the Dark Theme for night-time use, set up Tweet Marker to sync your timeline position between different clients, like iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and toggle and customize services, including read later (called bookmark) and advanced features like custom media uploads as well.

Twitter for iPhone supports native iOS Twitter integration and push notification, but not Tweet Marker. Despite having been on the market for a significant amount of time, it never got all the power features Twitter for iPhone enjoyed, and likely won’t given the almost certain redesign in its near future. You do have control over which image, video, and read later services you use. However, there’s still no pull-to-refrsh direct messages and while it marks messages as unread, frustratingly, there’s still no way to quickly mark them all as unread.

Tweetbot supports a ton of features, including native iOS Twitter integration, push notifications, and Tweet Marker. For notifications, it not only has options for mentions and direct messages, but retweets, favorites, follows, adds to lists, and subscribes to lists. It’s almost too many, but they can be mitigated by sleep options that suppress them at night (just pick your start and end times).

You can also customize services, including read later and mobilizer (like Safari’s built in Reader feature, but with your choice of provider). Literally, the options threaten to burst out of their popover.

Cost

Twitterrific is free but requires a $4.99 in-app purchase to turn off ads and turn on tweet translation and multiple account support. A universal binary, it supports both iPad and iPhone.

Twitter for iPad is free and also universal for iPad and iPhone.

Tweetbot is $2.99. It’s not universal so the iPhone version will cost you another $2.99.

Conclusion

That part about there being an embarrassment of riches when it comes to iPad Twitter apps wasn’t fluff or filler — it was truth. Twitterrific, Twitter, and Tweetbot each come from brilliant designers and developers with sometimes very different visions for what the ideal Twitter app entails.

Twitterrific is great for new users who want a simple, stable experience, where everything is easy to find, and often all in one place. It doesn’t have as many features, and lack of push notifications might be a show-stopper for some, but those who have been using it since the beginning and like the way it works and syncs consistently across iOS and OS X will also do well to stick with it.

Twitter for iPad, in its current form, is great for those who want fast access to literally layer upon layer of information. It’s an audacious, inspired interface that’s likely going to be replaced with something much more like the Twitter.com website, which also makes it very difficult to recommend to anyone who isn’t already using it.

Tweetbot might feel over-designed to some, but it’s well-designed. It has a ton of features for power users, including the best push-notification implementation in the business. As far as general purpose Twitter apps go, Tweetbot hits the best balance for the widest range of our readers.

Twitterrific could update any time now, and Twitter for iPad will be going through a substantial change soon, but as of right now, if the $2.99 price tag — less than the cost of a fancy coffee, mind you — doesn’t give you pause, Tweetbot should be your go-to Twitter app for iPad.

- Twitterrific – Download now

- Twitter – Download now

- Tweetbot – Download now

“Tweetbot has made the leap from iPhone to iPad and brought with its excellent user-interface, best-in-class notifications, and powerful yet accessible feature set.”

Twitter is the social network antithesis of Facebook — limited amounts of content, no obligation to follow those who follow you, and most of the communication is done out in the open by default. Twitter launched around the same time as iOS, and the two platforms immediately seemed made for each other (something which became official with iOS 5 Twitter integration.)

Tweetbot came out only in the last year but has quickly become one of the most popular and most powerful Twitter apps on the iPhone, going so far as to sweep the social network category in both iMore’s readers choice, and editors choice awards. Now it comes to the iPad with the same distinctive, mecha-inspired interface, but not as a universal binary — meaning you have to pay for the iPad version separately, even if you own the iPhone version.

It’s only $2.99, which is less than the price of most burgers, but is Tweetbot worth it? Do the features and functionality that rocked the iPhone scale to match the bigger iPad screen?

Setup

Thanks to support for native iOS 5 Twitter integration, setting up Tweetbot for iPad is as simple as tapping “okay” to the system popup requesting the access. Boom. All the accounts you’ve logged into in Settings.app are ready and waiting in Tweetbot.

Web-based authorization was always a pain, so this made for a delightful first impression.

Browsing for tweets

If you’ve ever used Tweetbot for iPhone, the biggest change you’ll have to get used to is also one of the easiest changes to get used to — instead of timeline, @mentions, messages, and the other tabs along the bottom of your tweet list, you now have them all available and un-nested in a handy sidebar. In landscape mode they’re fully expanded, with text labels and unread counts (where applicable), and in portrait mode they’re reduced to icons only but are no less easy to get to.

To switch accounts, just tap the tab at the top left with your name and avatar.

If you’re new to Tweetbot, the sidebar is how you control what you’re looking at:

• Timeline shows you the tweets of everyone you follow
• @Mentions shows any public messages or replies other users have sent you
• Messages shows any private, direct messages (DMs) other uses have sent you
• Favorites lists the tweets you’ve marked as memorable
• Search lets you quickly find terms, people, #hastags and current trends (popular topics)
• Profile shows your information, including bio, locations, and link, as well as follower, following, listed, and tweets counts, and your most recent tweets.
• Lists shows your own lists, or groups of other users you’ve set up
• Retweets shows your tweets that others have retweeted (forwarded on to their followers), tweets you retweeted (forwarded on to your followers), and you tweets, retweeted (tweets of yours that have been forwarded on by others).
• Mute filters lets you temporarily and selectively suppress other users (such as the guy from work you can’t unfollow but who suddenly feels compelled to tweet an entire 2-day cricket match!), specific hashtags (like an event you don’t want spoiled or just find annoying), and clients (for example, if you don’t want to see any Instagram pictures)
• Settings, which lets to toggle and customize all the various options, including a lot of what appears in the sidebar.

The bulk of the screen is taken up by the tweets themselves. The rather heavy looking title bar on top tells you what you’re looking at at any given time. Tapping the list button at the top left gives you quick access to your Twitter lists. Tapping the compose button at the right opens up a new tweet, ready for you to write.

The layout was well thought out and it works.

Interacting with tweets

The tweets themselves function almost identically to Tweetbot for iPhone. Tap a tweet to get option to:

• Reply (or reply to all)
• Retweet (or quote a tweet)
• Favorite (or unfavorite)
• Get a popup list of actions (including Read Later services like Instapaper, Pinboard, Readability, or Read it Later), copy the link to the tweet, copy the contents of the tweet, email the tweet, or translate the tweet if it isn’t in a language you understand.
• Get a detail view, which includes the tweet by itself, a tab to get to the user’s profile, a list of replies to the tweet, a list of users who retweeted the tweet, and a button to go to the favstar.fm webpage for the tweet (to track who favorited or retweeted the tweet)

For more advanced users, Tweetbot gestures are also available on the iPad. Just swipe from left to right on a tweet to bring a view of the complete conversation, in context, if applicable, and swipe for right to left to bring up a list of all replies to a tweet, again if applicable.

Gestures are inherently hard to discover, but Tweetbot does a great job using them as shortcuts for those who do discover them, but leaving everything just as accessible via the tap-through buttons and tabs.

Composing tweets

With a tap of the compose button or quote button, you’re ready to type. And that’s about it. Unlike some other Twitter apps, in Tweetbot for iPad the timelines all disappear, and the text doesn’t stay persistent if you cancel out of the new tweet sheet (though you can save as a draft). This makes it cumbersome for those who like to refer back to other tweets when replying, but it does keep the screen clear and focused.

Buttons along the top let you easily add location, auto-complete @usernames and #hashtag trends, and add pictures or video. The buttons aren’t the iOS default location arrow, @ symbol or # hashtag symbol proper, but rather icons of a compass, bust, and tag, which may make them less immediately recognizable but certainly not impenetrable.

Speaking of which, you can switch accounts by tapping your avatar. New users probably don’t have multiple accounts, so the hidden nature of this feature isn’t a show-stopper, but throwing a visual bone our way certainly wouldn’t hurt.

If you have previous drafts, you can access them via the drafts button at the top right.

Searching for tweets

Tap the search tab and your timeline is replaced by a search box, a Find People tab, a list of saved searches, and a list of worldwide trends (you can change that to country-specific trends in Settings). Having to tap through again to search for people may seem like a wasted step, but the find people search page includes a lot of additional options, like finding followers or people your following, as well as a list of interests such as music, sports, entertainment, and much, much more.

While Tapbots’ implementation is good, Twitter focuses on real-time results which often means older tweets are frustratingly unavailable, even if you know exactly what you’re looking for. Also, tapping or searching for any trending topic is sometimes just as likely to produce an overwhelming abundance of useless, rather than valuable results. Again, Twitter’s fault, not Tapbots.

Muting tweets

We’ve all been there — someone whose tweets we otherwise enjoy has gone off the deep end about sports, religion, politics, is spoiling a movie or TV show, has gotten drunk or is simply drowning out everything else in your timeline. You either can’t (boss, brother-in-law) or don’t want to unfollow them. That’s where mute filters come in. They’re like time-outs for Twitter, and Tweetbot excels at them.

You can mute or un-mute any user, at any time, by hitting the options button (which looks just like the location button), above their profile. You can choose to mute for a day, a week, a month, or forever. Once muted, the user appears under people in the mute filters tab.

You can also mute based on #hashtags, to stop anyone from ruining the game or the show, or otherwise filling your timeline with stuff you’d really rather not see. To mute or un-mute a #hashtag, just tap and hold down on it when you see it in the timeline.

If there’s a particular service or platform you really don’t care for either for some reason, you can tap edit, tap + (add), and choose from a long list of easily mutable clients. Turning off tons of Instagrams, or game scores, or social marketers who live in TweetDeck are all potential uses, though you’ll likely miss some good stuff in the process.

Mute filters aren’t something everyone uses, but Tweetbot makes them so easy, I’m betting many more are about to start.

Settings

To say Tweetbot has a plethora of settings is almost an understatement. There’s everything here from sounds (all, notifications, none), to display (font size, display name, date format, new tweets bar) to what’s in the navigation sidebar (you can toggle off everything but timeline, mentions, and messages), to quote format (standard, old style re-tweets, or via), triple-tap shortcut (set it to reply, retweet, favorite, translate, or launch Favstar), to post in background.

And that’s just the top level stuff. Phew.

Push notifications

Account settings open the door Tweetbot’s phenomenal push notifications implementation. Not only can you turn on notifications for the standard @mentions (either everyone or just those you follow), or direct messages, but you can get notifications for retweets, favorites, follows, when you’re added to lists, or when your lists are subscribed to.

It’s almost too much, or it would be if Tweetbot for iPad didn’t also provide sleep options. Basically, you can tell Tweetbot to suppress all push notifications during certain hours of the day or night (depending on your schedule). You tell them when to go silent and when to come back on, and that’s what they do.

If you’re frantically waiting for an incredibly urgent tweet, and are paranoid the system will choose that exact moment to go down, you can even see when the last notification came in, and hit a test button and make sure it’s still working.

It’s not anything Tweetbot for iPhone users haven’t been enjoying for a while, but that doesn’t make it any less superb on the iPad.

Services

All the usual services can be configured in Tweetbot for iPad, including your URL shortener of choice, image uploader, video uploader, Read Later host (they support Instapaper, Pinboard, Readability, and Read it Later), sync with Tweet Marker, and something akin to Safari’s super clean, distraction free Reader mode with Mobilizer (including support for Google, Instapaper, and Readability).

Tweet Marker stands out, especially if you have Tweetbot or another app that supports it on your iPhone or other smartphone, or your desktop Twitter app.

The good

• Features enough to make any power user happy
• Clean and accessible enough for new users
• Exceptional notification implementation
• Distinctive, charming user-interface

The bad

• Some might find the user-interface too distinctive and heavy
• Not as information-dense as some other Twitter apps
• No theme support

The conclusion

Tweetbot has made the leap from iPhone to iPad and brought with it’s excellent user-interface and best-in-class notifications. It’s not Tweetbot re-imagined for the iPad, but it’s Tweetbot brilliantly executed for the iPad. Powerful enough for the pro, accessible enough for the new user, it doesn’t have the audacity of Twitter for iPhone, but it has much more functionality — and everything needed to be the go-to Twitter client for the vast majority of iPad Twitter users.

$2.99 – Download now

Dell Voice launched in Canada today, allowing iPhone owners to get a free phone number with both free incoming and outgoing Canada-wide calls to land lines and mobiles alike.  The service comes complete with voicemail, caller ID, Call Waiting, and even 911 emergency calling. The VoIP app was built with Fongo, operating over a network called Fibernetics which seems well-entrenched across all of the major Canadian cities and a lot of the smaller ones. If you’re calling someone outside of Canada, they have some pretty reasonable international rates. Dell Voice provides you with a local number, and when you receive a call, it pops up as a notification on your iPhone. The call is then routed over a data connection, be it 3G or Wi-Fi – a great situation if you’re on a shoestring budget and all you have is an iPod touch. You can also port over an existing number for a one-time $25 fee.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any utilities for handling text messaging, but seeing as we don’t have access to Google Voice up here, I think we’re happy to just have access to a free VoIP phone number. It would be great to see Dell Voice to expand to include Video Calling, at which point it would be properly competing with the recently-launched Rogers One Number.  On that note, I’m really curious to hear how carriers will react to this service. I find this is a little more aggressive than Skype, since you don’t have to pay to get a number for incoming calls. The little carriers, Wind Mobile and Mobilicity, are having a hard enough time attracting customers even with absurdly cheap plans, and I worry that something like Dell Voice would cut them out altogether. Of course, the dependability of the service is yet to be seen, and if it’s not up to snuff, it might not be worth your while.

The one set-up that Dell suggests that I could see being helpful is creating a number for out of town, so if you have family elsewhere in the country, they could make local calls to you.  Dell Voice apps are available for iOS and Android, with BlackBerry coming soon. There’s also a PC app if you want to start taking calls on your computer. Head on over to the Dell Voice landing page for a closer look, or download directly from iTunes to get registered.

Tweetbot, the widely popular iPhone Twitter that also just happens to be a 2011 iMore readers choice, and editors choice award winner, has just been updated with new timeline and direct message views that feature image thumbnails, a redesigned “new tweets” bar, support for readability, and more.

Following the launch of the official Twitter 4.0 redesign, many power users fell out of love with the new, more mainstream direction Twitter decided to take, and switched over to Tweetbot instead. I’ve been using Tweetbot since it launched and it has consistently been one of my favorite Twitter apps.

The Tweetbot 2.0 update has made the already awesome experience even better. Now that the timeline features image thumbnails, Tweetbot meets all my requirements of the ideal Twitter app: gorgeous, fast, native push notifications, and image previews.

The new timeline also features colored links that are single-tappable, a new “retweeted by” bar, and some minor adjustments to the cell colors to improve contrast. The tweet replies view has also received some changes, and the overall performance of the app, including scrolling, is snappier.

$2.99 – Download Now

For today only, the iMore Store has the iSkin Aura for iPhone 4S, iPhone 4 on sale for only $22.95! Get them before they’re gone!

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Sprint sold a total of 1.8 million iPhones during Q4 2011, with 40 percent of those going to new customers. Admittedly, 1.8 million is only about a quarter of the 7.6 million iPhones AT&T sold during the same period, and less than half the 4.2 million moved by Verizon, but considering Sprint’s 55 million customers ranks as the the third largest U.S. wireless carrier, and this is the first official quarter that Sprint had the iPhone to sell, it still indicates a fairly solid adoption by their subscribe base.

"Our strong fourth quarter performance illustrates the power of matching iconic devices like the iPhone with our simple, unlimited plans and industry-leading customer experience," said Dan Hesse, Sprint CEO. "During the past year, Sprint added more than 5 million net new customers and grew wireless service revenue by more than 5 percent, including 17 percent for the Sprint platform. This momentum gives us confidence as we execute our Network Vision upgrade and 4G LTE roll-out."

Although the company recorded a $1.3 billion net loss for the quarter, they’re focusing on added subscriber value and overall unit sales this time around. And with those added smartphone sales, new customers are subsequently coming in by the masses according to their earnings report — mostly thanks to the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S, and their position as the last U.S. carrier to offer unlimited data contracts.

It looks like that $20 billion bet Sprint made with Apple is slowly starting to pay off.

Source: Sprint

Hasbro has announced that its next release of Lazer Tag guns will use your iPhone or iPod touch to provide augmented reality and a heads up display. The Lazer Tag guns can accept an iPhone or iPod touch which is slotted into the gun in a purpose made holder. The user can then download an app from the App Store which can keep track of your gear, power levels and also setup multiplayer games with up to 23 other players.

To experience the LAZER TAG game, players download the free LAZER TAG app to their iPhone or iPod touch device, connect their device to their LAZER TAG blaster, and find themselves immersed in a world where video games and real life connect. Using either single or multi-player mode, players can engage in a LAZER TAG match featuring either real life worlds or virtual opponents. Each LAZER TAG blaster equipped with a device has a virtual firing range of over 250 feet and contains a ‘Heads Up Display’, or HUD, which allows players to keep track of their gear and remaining power, while also providing a view of the augmented reality targets and enemies in the area. A virtual leaderboard keeps track of each player’s profile and, with every successful mission, players will gain in-game access to upgradeable attacks, missions and gear. With LAZER TAG blasters, the stakes are high, the game is real. Don’t just play it, live it.

The Lazer Tag system is a very popular game for many but the thought of letting your children run around the streets with your iPhone or iPod touch inside their gun is not that appealing. These guns probably take a lot of stick and get thrown around a lot too, hopefully the holder within the gun will offer plenty of protection for the iPhone or iPod touch.

The Lazer Tag blasters will be available in August this year. A single gun will cost around $39.99. The app will be available as a few download.

Source: Engadget

Paul McCartney is celebrating the release of Kisses On The Bottom, which came out Tuesday, February 7, with a free live-streaming concert on February. 8, 2012. The event is being held at Capital Studios in Los Angeles and will be available to one and all via iTune.

Kisses On The Bottom is a collection of music McCartney grew up listening to plus two new songs — My Valentine and Only Our Hearts composed by the former Beatle himself with some help from Eric Clapton and Stevie Wonder.

For the album, McCartney also got help from Tommy LiPuma and Diana Krall, whose band who will also be on hand for the live-streaming event. You can hear McCartney speak more about the album in the video below.

Source – Guitar World; More Info: iTunes