We're getting a flood of reports from many of you that iMessage is down and you can't send or receive messages over Apple's network. Unlike iCloud, Apple doesn't provide a specific iMessage status page, so it's hard to tell how wide spread the issue is, how critical any failure might have been, or project how long it might last.

The pattern seems sporadic and the issues inconsistent, and it's working fine for me and the rest of iMore right now. If you are have problems with iMessage, however, please let us know when it started, where you are, and when it starts working for you again.

It's been a busy week here at iMore. iPhone 5 and iPad mini rumors have been heating up, my Google Nexus 7 tablet arrived, a bunch of apps were bought by big companies, a bunch more great apps weren't, and we've started doing a ton more videos and a ton more contests.

So let's get to it.

Nexified

Only Nixon could go to China and only the editor-in-chief of iMore can pick up the new Google Nexus 7 tablet and tell you how it really compares the the iPad. The video above is just for fun, but check out my initial impressions via the link below, and I'll be following up on Monday with more. Stay tuned.

• Google Nexus 7 vs. iPad 3, unboxing and first impressions -- from iMore!

iPad mini not iPod maxi

The Nexus 7 to me, so far, is more of a super iPod touch than a small iPad. And that the exact opposite of the approach I believe Apple is taking with the rumored iPad mini. It's an important distinction two. The iPhone and iPod touch branch of iOS, and the screen size that it's optimized for, are different in kind to the iPad branch. Look no further than the interface, and the apps, work on one compared to the other.

The iPad mini will use the iPad version of iOS, which means the iPad interface and iPad apps. It may not be as easy to do everything on a 7.x-inch screen as it is on a 9.7-inch, but it will be possible.

You can't run iPad apps on an iPhone or iPod touch. You'll be able to run iPad apps on an iPad mini.

It's an important distinction. It's why the iPod touch sounds like it will be sticking around. And it's why the iPad mini sounds like it's being launched to begin with.

• The name game: What Apple could call the 7-inch iPad.
• Regarding Retina: How Apple could handle the 7-inch iPad mini display:
• What happens to the iPod touch in a post-iPad mini world?.

Contests

Lots of stuff to be won this week on iMore, have you entered them all? (What, you don't want free stuff?)

• Weekly Photo Contest: Gadgets!
• Make your own Apple/Samsung apology
• Win a Mobile Nations dream device of YOUR choice!
• Twitter Treasure Hunt: Find, follow, and retweet your way to over $500 in prizes!

Daily Shows

We've launched a new, quasi-daily show -- iMore today. It's designed to bring you all the Apple news you need to know... in about 3 minutes. We're keeping it light and snarky for now, but would love to know what you think of it so far. Also, quite a few of you have asked for RSS and iTunes versions. At 3 min. long it seems a little brief for that, but if enough of you want it, we'll get it done. How about it?

Meanwhile, over on the weekly iMore Show, with Georgia away this week, Seth and I got our geek on about Apple vs Samsung, iOS vs. Android, and the iPad mini. Watch it below.

Features

• How to take spectacular photos of your car with your iPhone. Leanna Lofte continues her amazing iPhoneography series, this time taking it to the streets -- or at least the vehicles on them.
• Which next-gen iOS device do you want the most?
• Regarding reaction to the reaction to Sparrow being end-of-lined. Passionate, engaged users have every right complain about the software they love.
• AT&T vs Verizon: Which shared data plan should you get?. Leanna Lofte shows that sometimes you do need to bring a math professor to a carrier plan fight.
• iOS 6: How many betas will there be?. Yet more of your questions, answered.
• Checkmark vs. Due vs. TellMeLater: iPhone reminder app shootout!. Ally Kazmucha once again pits app-vs-app until a winner emerges.
• How iOS 6's flagship features compare to past versions, and to Android 4.1, BlackBerry 10, and Windows Phone 8. Spoiler: iOS 6 is more platform than user-centric.

Recommended reading

• Mid Atlantic Consulting is full of shit. Jim Dalrymple doing what he does best -- putting internet fist to internet dumb.
• Unicorns and Jaguars. Kevin Michaluk wrote it, but it's Phil Nickinson's Photoshop work on the top that crowns it.
• Brief History of the iPad. Dave Caolo's serialized look at the events leading up the iPad launch in 2010.
• New Apps & Tools For More Efficient Writing. Federico Viticci shares his tools of craft. I love behind the scenes looks at process, and Viticci is one of the most thoughtful writers in the industry, so these types of pieces are always great to see.
• 50 Things I've Learned About Publishing a Weblog. Shawn Blanc, speaking of behind-the-scenes and thoughtful.
• Why bother? The sad state of Office 2013 touch support. Peter Bright on why making something look like the widely acclaimed Metro interface doesn't actually make it mobile-native like Metro. Sad indeed.
• Android Central Podcast 103: Live nude Jelly Bean flashing, Nexus abounds, group data love. Phil Nickinson gives one of the best names ever to one of the best episodes ever of the Android Central podcast. A podcast which, truth be told, Phil spent shopping for tablets, writing posts, flashing ROMs, and otherwise not podcasting. And it worked brilliantly. (Disclaimer: I produce the show, so I'm obviously biased.)
• Talent acquisitions. Marco Arment on the Sparrow and Acrylic acquisitions.
• Why Did Sparrow Sell Out?. Matthew Panzarino on the specific of Sparrow's case, and how the Google deal could simply have been their best exit strategy.

Next stop -- The Wall... er... 'Peg

I'm flying the Winnipeg, Manitoba -- you may know it as The Wall from the HBO show, Game of Thrones -- on Wednesday for a Mobile Nations Summit with my fellow editors-in-chief, Kevin Michaluk of [CrackBerry.com](http://CrackBerry.com], Phil Nickinson of AndroidCentral.com, and the newly full-time Daniel Rubino of WPCentral.com.

As anyone who's ever met Kevin knows, he puts the hy in hyper, so we'll be working around the clock, but there should be some time for at least one live Mobile Nations podcast, and some great phone-vs-phone and tablet-vs-tablet action.

Keep it locked on the whole Mobile Nations network. And keep some bail money ready for us, just in case. (Apparently, Manitoba Mounties don't play.)

See you on the other side.

If have a lot of music on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, using the shuffle feature can be a great way to listen to a random selection of music. Unfortunately, it comes at a price if you have content that you just wouldn't want to listen to. For example, I have a couple of albums with children's nursery rhymes and also some Christmas songs. Every time I select shuffle and begin to relax, without fail t plays one of the nursery rhymes and drives me mad.

Well, if all of your music is stored on your Mac or Windows PC in iTunes, there is a very easy way to tell your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to leave certain tracks or albums completely out of the shuffle list.

1. Open ITunes.
2. Click on the Music Tab.
3. Scroll to find the album or track you wish to omit from any future shuffle.
4. If it's a single track simply right click on it.
5. If it's a full album, click on the first track, hold down the shift key, and then click on the last song. That should highlight all the tracks in the album.
6. Right click with your mouse and select Get Info.
7. Click on the Options tab.
8. Look down and you will see a tick box and a drop down menu next to the heading Skip when shuffling.
9. Click the box and then change the drop down menu to Yes.
10. Hit OK.
11. Sync your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch with iTunes.

That is all there is to it. The attributes will have been transferred to your iOS device and those chosen tracks or albums will no longer play during a shuffle. If you use iTunes Match, iTunes should automatically update to iCloud and all your devices should automatically be updated with the attributes.

This has been a feature that has gone under my radar for quite some time but it is a really nice tip to know. Now I no longer need to listen to nursery rhymes when all I want is some AC/DC!

Note: There is also the checkbox immediately to the left of song titles in iTunes, that can cause iTunes on Mac or PC to exclude a song from shuffling. However, it also does other things, and in general doesn't seem to govern how a song reacts to shuffling on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. The method above has proven more reliable for that specific purpose.

Anyone else have any tips or tricks for better controlling what does or does not get shuffled?

In iOS 6, coming this fall, Apple will fix a security vulnerability in the App Store's in-app purchasing process that allows "man-in-the-middle" style attacks, steals from developers, and potentially exposes user account data to hackers. This according to a new, publicly-available support document posted to developer.apple.com on in-app purchase receipt validation on iOS. Apple's preamble states:

A vulnerability has been discovered in iOS 5.1 and earlier related to validating in-app purchase receipts by connecting to the App Store server directly from an iOS device. An attacker can alter the DNS table to redirect these requests to a server controlled by the attacker. Using a certificate authority controlled by the attacker and installed on the device by the user, the attacker can issue a SSL certificate that fraudulently identifies the attacker's server as an App Store server. When this fraudulent server is asked to validate an invalid receipt, it responds as if the receipt were valid.

iOS 6 will address this vulnerability. If your app follows the best practices described below then it is not affected by this attack.

Matthew Panzarino from The Next Web points out that Apple is exposing some private APIs (application program interfaces) to developers as part of the short-term fix:

Essentially, Apple has added a hash to each transaction that is calculated based on a digital certificate. That certificate must be coded into the app by each developer. This is used to determine whether the in-app purchase receipt has come from Apple directly. The data in the receipt is used to calculate that hash so that each one is unique and can't be faked.

Apple typically scans for, and automatically rejects, any app that uses private API. The reason for this is, unlike public API which cary with them the promise of future compatibility and support, Apple can and will make changes to private API at any time, potentially breaking apps that rely on them.

Exceptions to the prohibition on private API are almost unheard of, which shows both the importance of the fix, and short period of time it's meant to cover (less than 3 months).

Since the security vulnerability was discovered and exploited, Apple has been engaged in a back-and-forth series of actions against the hacker in an attempt to prevent any theft of developer assets or user data. While the process has been successfully used to steal in-app purchases without paying for them, it's uncertain if any account information has been compromised. Even if it wasn't, and even if this hack, in this case, was aimed at developers rather than users, it doesn't mean the next one, using the same or similar exploits, won't specifically target user account data. Apple has to fix it and make the fix stick.

iOS 6 was announced at WWDC 2012, is currently in beta, and will be made publicly available this fall, likely alongside the next generation iPhone 5.

Until then, for developers who rely on in-app-purchases, it looks like there's some work to do to tighten up security in the meantime.

For users, while the prospect of free Smurfberries might sound enticing, essentially breaking open your iPhone or iPad's security and passing all your transactions through a hacker's servers, potentially exposing your iTunes account and related credit card information could end up being a much, much higher price to pay.

Source: developer.apple.com, The Next Web

The iPhone 3GS is now being offered, unlocked, for the equivalent of US$180 on India's Aircel network, provided customers sign up for minimum $55/year unlimited, post-paid data plan. That makes for a TCO (total cost of ownership) of only US$235, something far, far lower than the thousands of dollars typically required over the course of 2-year American cellular contract. Matthew Panzarino of the The Next Web reports:

Aircel is India's 7th largest network, with a large share of customers where it is headquartered in Chennai. The iPhone is being offered for 9,999 Rs, which converts to $181 U.S., with a minimum commitment of 3,000 Rs in advance rental ($54.37), reports IBN Live. The advance rental, which roughly equates to a '1 year up front payment of service', brings the total cost of the phone to Rs. 12,999 ($236), which is still easily the cheapest we've seen the iPhone 3GS being offered yet.

The iPhone 3GS is 3 years old now, an eternity in smartphone time. While it doesn't have a Retina display or FaceTime camera, it does run iOS 5 and will be upgraded to iO6. It won't get all the features, especially hardware dependent ones, but it will stay binary compatible with modern App Store apps, and that's absolutely key.

As to pricing, when the iPhone 3GS launched in 2009, iSuppli's Andrew Rassweiler pegged the bill of goods for the then-entry level 16GB model at $172.46, with manufacturing expense of $6.50, for a total of $178.96.

In 2010, Apple dropped the memory in the iPhone 3GS down to 8GB, the on-contract price to $99, and the unlocked price to $549.In 2011, Apple kept the iPhone 3GS the same but dropped the on-contract price to $0, and the unlocked price to $375.

Economies of scale have likely pushed the iPhone 3GS bill of materials lower over the last 3 years. iSuppli estimates the current iPhone 4S has a bill of materials of $188, for a total manufacturing cost of $196, so it's hard not to imagine the iPhone 3GS isn't well below that now. Likewise, iPhone 3GS research and development costs have likely been more than offset over the intervening years. (It's important to remember with any bill of materials estimate that while the first production unit cost just over a hundred dollars in parts, the R&D getting to that point cost millions.)

Apple typically won't budge a penny on margins, and absent a statement from Aircel, it's hard to tell how much they're subsidizing the iPhone 3GS or data plan to get the TCO that low, but the simple fact remains -- there's now a sub-$250 iPhone on the market, all in.

The importance of that can't be overstated. While Apple enjoys top-selling status in North America, and unmatched profits, they currently do not compete, or compete well at least, in emerging markets, or markets where pre-paid plans dominate post-paid plans. When carriers don't subsidize the price of the iPhone, it costs significantly more than bargain basement Android or BlackBerry devices, making the latter more realistic options for budget shoppers.

In an earlier article on The Next Web, Panzarino wrote:

There are hundreds of millions of customers using pre-paid devices that would gladly replace their devices with a cost-effective iPhone, gaining access to Apple's app library and its aggressive support for software updates on older devices.

That's exactly right. If Apple keeps the iPhone 3GS on the market for another year, and can bring the cost down significantly, it suddenly has a handset that's interesting in Africa, South America, Asia, and parts of Europe where phones and plans are decoupled, and sticker price is key.

Commenting on the post iPhone 5 future of the iPhone 3GS, Daring Fireball's John Gruber pointed out:

[The iPhone 3GS] is sold around the world as a low cost (by iPhone standards at least) pre-paid device. So AT&T wouldn't even carry the 3GS anymore, they'd just have the 4 as their "free" iPhone, where the word free gets wrapped in dick quotes because it's only free with an expensive two-year contract.

The big thing to remember about the iPhone 4 is that it's the first CDMA iPhone. No way it's going to disappear from the lineup, because now Apple could offer a "free" iPhone on Verizon and Sprint, too.

Up until now, only AT&T in the U.S. has enjoyed a $0 iPhone on their network. Having a $0 on-contract iPhone on Verizon in particular is a big win, at least psychologically. Many customers don't or can't consider TCO, only up-front costs, when picking a new phone.

Even if Apple removes the iPhone 3GS from sale on the major carriers (it can't offer it for -$100 on-contract, after all), it can certainly keep it on small, regional U.S. carriers for customers that are far more price sensitive.

At that point, just like they did with the iPod line years ago, Apple has the market pretty much covered at every price point that matters.