The newest, hottest podcast on the ‘net is back tonight with the latest and greatest apps and accessories in the known universe.

And stay tuned for our double-feature as ZEN and TECH returns to Sunday nights with a Valentine’s day special — dealing with dating and sex stress. 10pm ET. Be there!

Place: www.imore.com/live

Time: 9pm ET, 6pm PT, 2am GMT.

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Apple senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, Eddy Cue accepted the Recording Academy Special Merit Grammy for contributions to the music industry on behalf of his late boss, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. The Trustees Award, presented yesterday, was in recognition for Jobs’ accomplishments including the iPod and iTunes music store.

On behalf of Steve’s wife, Laurene, his children, and everyone at Apple, I’d like to thank you for honoring Steve with the Trustees Grammy Award. Steve was a visionary, a mentor, and a very close friend. I had the incredible honor of working with him for the last fifteen years.

Accepting this award means so much to me because music meant so much to him. He told us that music shaped his life…it made him who he was. Everyone that knows Steve knows the profound impact that artists like Bob Dylan and The Beatles had on him.

Steve was focused on bringing music to everyone in innovative ways. We talked about it every single day. When he introduced the iPod in 2001, people asked “Why is Apple making a music player?” His answer was simple: “We love music, and it’s always good to do something you love.”

His family and I know that this Grammy would have been very special to him, so I thank you for honoring him today.

The Recording Academy has also published a tribute to Steve Jobs by Yo-Yo Ma, a 16 time Grammy award winner and personal friend of Jobs.

Music was always been a passion of Jobs’ and a theme in most Apple products and events. With each new release of an iPhone or iPod, Jobs aimed to make music more easily accessible and enjoyable than ever before. Visit the link below to watch a video of Eddy Cue accepting the award.

Source: MacRumors

Whether iPad 3 will be your first iPad, or whether you’ve been an iPad user for years, we’re curious what kind of case or cover you’ll be wanting for it when you get it? Or will you prefer to go naked with no cover at all? Apple so far hasn’t kept one iPad form-factor around for more than a year, so while it’s possible iPad 2 cases and covers will fit iPad 3, it’s also possible accessory makers will once again have to go back to the drawing boards. What should they make you more of?

Apple’s own Smart Covers, those of the magnet power, are ultra slim but don’t provide much protection for anything other than the screen. Are you waiting for an iPad 3 version? Or do you want something more extreme like the Otterbox Defender and Incipio Destroyer?

Maybe thinner skin cases like the Incipio Hive HoneyComb or cases that offer nice extras like the Case-Mate Pop! with a kickstand (one of my favorites — great for watching videos!) better suit your fancy?

Some iPad cases include built-in Bluetooth keyboards, which are great for heavy-duty typists. Is that more your thing?

Will you be sticking with something even slimmer, like BodyGuardz skins, which don’t stop impact but, in our torture tests stop everything from stones and nails scratching your iPad 3?

Are you more the executive type who enjoys a leather case or pouch, like the Marware or Griffin Elan, to take your iPad 3 on business trips or to meetings? Or someone who goes to the beach, on hikes, or to the pool and wants a case like the Aquapac or Overboard that can protect your iPad from water damage (or deep water or car washes, or dish washers and boat races)

Do you prefer something more unique and luxurious, like Pad & Quill or DODOCase that give you that hipster moleskin vibe, or White Diamonds that showers your iPad 3 in art and crystals?

Or will you stick with nothing at all, just the iPad 3 the way nature and Jony Ive intended?

One thing is for sure — if history is any indicator we’ll be flooded with options just as soon as the manufacturers can crank them out. So go ahead and get your vote in early. Register it in the poll up top and give us the reasons why in the comments below. And if you’re not sure what kind of case you like yet, check out the links below for lots of examples!

• iMore iPad Case Store
• Amazon iPad cases

Like with Notification Center, Apple should draw inspiration from Android to better handle in-app privacy and permissions.

Earlier this week the internet got itself into a kerfuffle over Path, a small-circle social networking app for the iPhone, and its open transmission of Contact information from a users phone to Path’s servers. It’s an important issue to be sure, one worth getting into a kerfuffle over, and Path eventually apologized and vowed to make changes. But Path was only one of many, many apps to act this way.

A couple of years ago there was a similar kerfuffle over Dragon Dictation when Nuance was transmitting Contact information to their servers as well. Nuance did this, it turns out, so that its server-side voice recognition services could better understand the names of your friends and family.

Path, it turns out, did this so it could notify you if your friends and family were already using, or started using, their service and offer to connect you in the app as well. (Though the “open transmission” part was concerning — hashing or otherwise encrypting the data between iPhone and server would have been a good idea.)

It could have been any of a number of other apps in Path’s place, however, if they’d been discovered first. Many of them are now updating, adding security if they weren’t already, and custom-making request popups for user permission before transmitting Contact information. And that’s a good thing. But it exposes a problem with the way Apple currently handles user privacy on the iPhone.

If an app, any app, even a built-in Apple app, wants to know your location, it has to ask for permission. If it wants to send you Push Notifications, it has to ask for permission. If it wants access to any of your personal information, however, like Contacts, it doesn’t have to ask at all.

Apple should change that, of course. They should require that apps ask permission to access Contacts — and Calendars, and any other personal data — and insist any information be transferred in a secure manner, and never be stored permanently on a developer’s servers.

Just like with Push Notifications back before iOS 5, however, their popup requester system doesn’t scale. Imagine, you launch a new app for the first time and you get popup after popup, asking you to tap to approve location, Push Notification, Contact access, Calendar access, and conceivably other information. As the number of popups grow, the likelihood that a user will read and consider each one falls precipitously. They’ll just start tapping through to get to their app.

There’s a school of thought that says inattentive users deserve what they get — if they don’t read, they abdicate their right to complain later. Apple doesn’t usually subscribe to that school of thought, however. That’s probably why they’ve kept permission requesters to a minimum for now.

Just like with Push Notifications, however, a better solution exists outside popups, and Android could once again be drawn upon for inspiration.

When you browse an app on the Android Market, whether via the web or in the Market app proper, there’s a clearly defined place see what permissions that app will require. Arguably, Android presents way too many permissions and users might not bother to read them any more than they would a popup, but having them there as a permanent reference is invaluable.

for iOS 6, Apple could do what they did with Notification Center in iOS 5, remove the cumbersome nature of popups, simplify Android’s implementation, and, when an app launches, present a simple sheet of toggles allowing a user to pick and choose which ones they’re willing to grant access to.

Things like storage access are more noise than information, but Contacts and other areas that touch on personal information should absolutely be there.

Likewise, the permissions sheet could be kept available in the settings for the app (or in the general Settings.app), so users could easily change them at any time. Under special circumstances, if a service is absolutely required for an app to work — for example, location is required for a photo editing app to access potentially geo-tagged photos in the Camera Roll — then a popup could be generated explaining the situation.

Adding a list of permissions each app requires to the App Store, on device, in iTunes, and on the web would be a nice-to-have as well.

Path deserved the push-back they got for doing what they did with Contacts, but Apple deserves push-back for letting them do it in the first place.

Apple has shown a relentless drive to tackle the rough edges of iOS in recent releases, and as iPhones and iPads become more powerful and apps more sophisticated, privacy becomes one of the rough edges they need to get a handle on quickly.

They’ve used Privacy as a differentiator from the competition in the past, and Notifications and Location Services in iOS 5 are a huge leap forward when it comes to granularity and usability. Hopefully Apple brings it all together, and gathers up the loose ends like Contacts, in iOS 6.

NBC’s Saturday Night Live (SNL) lampooned Verizon Wireless’ confused, complicated, almost chaotic 4G LTE smartphone marketing last night. While Verizon has done a good, restrained job with their iPhone commercials to date, their non-Apple marketing has ranged from “Tell your wife it has a Tegra 2 processor” to tablet names that look more like 1980s Jean Claude van Damme movies, to a dizzying array of overlapping phones with very little in the way of clear segmentation or differentiation.

Right now, if my mom wanted a not-iPhone on Verizon, rolling dice and picking at random would likely be as effective a strategy as walking into the store. (Lucky for her, and for Verizon, there’s Android Central)

Verizon would do well to draw up one of the Steve Jobs product grids, but instead of consumer and pro, portable and desktop, stick with consumer and prosumer, keyboard and no keyboard. Then build out slowly from there. A few great devices that get phenomenal, long term support would be far more memorable and marketable.

Source: PhoneArena via The Verge, Android Central

Rene, Georgia, and Seth discuss AT&T data throttling, Spring iPhone sales, iPhone chart topping, iPad 3 quad-core rumors, WD-40 lunacy, and ZFS. This is iPhone & iPad Live!

[Apologies for the sound and the lateness. My mic was way too hot, Georgia and I were both badly sick, and we had huge technical problems getting the shows edited. Thanks for your patience!]

• Subscribe via iTunes: Audio | Video
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• Show notes

META

• February is fitness month at iMore and Mobile Nations! [iPad 3 giveaway!]
• Apps & Accessories Live 01: Video editors, Launch Center, and glowing Apple logos

iPhone

• Is AT&T tightening the screws on unlimited iPhone users with new, overly aggressive data throttling?
• Sprint had 1.8 million iPhone sales last quarter, 40 percent to new customers
• iPhone owns top 3 sales spots in hottest smartphone quarter in history
• Huge energy corporation, Halliburton ditching BlackBerry for iPhone
• Former Apple manager tells how the original iPhone was developed, why it went with Gorilla Glass

iPad

• iPad 3 rumors suggest thicker casing, massive graphics, no quad-core
• Operator profiles indicate a March 9th release date for iOS 5.1
• Warning: WD-40 will not fix your Home button, may damage your iPhone or iPad

Grab bag

• Apple testing Oracle's ZFS file system to make iOS and iCloud storage better, faster, and more resilient?

Hosts

• Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie)
• Georgia (@GeorgiaTiPb)
• Seth Clifford (@sethclifford)

Credits

You can reach all of us on Twitter @iMore, or you can email us at podcast@imore.com, or leave a comment on the website when the show goes live.

We’re here every Wednesday night at 6pm Pacific, 9pm Eastern, 2am GMT at www.TiPb.com/live

For all our podcasts — audio and video — including iPhone and iPad Live, ZENandTECH and Superfunctional, Iterate and Girls Gone Gadgets and more… see MobileNations.com/shows

If you haven’t already please subscribe to all our shows in iTunes and leave a rating. It helps people find the show and means a lot to us!

Thanks to the iMore iPhone Accessory Store for sponsoring the podcast, and to everyone who showed up for the live chat!

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