Like my colleague Mel Martin, I’ve had a serious GPS jones for quite a while. When I was in much better shape, I rode the local trails on a mountain bike with a Garmin eTrex Summit. It didn’t have any maps, nor did I really need any for what I was doing. My next GPS receiver was a Garmin GPSmap 60cs that I used for geocaching. It had a nice color screen and some limited maps, but really didn’t do a very good job of helping me find my way around town.

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Normally we’d just send out a tweet about this (that’s usually what we do with free app deals, so if you’re not one of the almost 40,000 people following us yet, you definitely should be), but this is a good one, and it’s a holiday, so we wanted to make sure you knew. Sega is feeling particularly generous this weekend, so they’re giving away free copies of their Columns Deluxe, a port of the old Genesis game, for the iPhone.

Read More www.tuaw.com

Gauging the iPhone’s popularity in Japan is not easy.

Just ask Brian X. Chen. He wrote a piece for Wired.com last April called Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone suggesting that despite the long lines that greeted the iPhone 3G last summer, the device was a big flop in Japan.

Read More apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com

iHanWel today is proud to announce iDay Deluxe 2.3, an update to their popular day calendar and event utility for iPhone and iPod Touch. Designed specifically to leverage the iPhone’s unique capabilities and interface, iDay makes it easy to keep track of birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, or any special event. Choose any entry and iDay will present useful, accompanying information, including numeric data, Western, Chinese, Native American, and Celtic Zodiacs, and the moon phase for that day.

Kirkel, Germany - iHanWel today is delighted to announce iDay Deluxe 2.3, an update to their popular day calendar and event utility for iPhone and iPod Touch. Designed specifically to leverage the iPhone’s unique capabilities and interface, iDay makes it easy to keep track of birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, or any special event. iDay is currently on sale during the weekend of July 4th/5th for $2.99 (USD).

Read More www.iphonetunes.net

First off, props to Dan Wiersema (my friend and Creative Director at Guifx) for being the brains behind this tutorial. Concept and wireframe were both developed by him. He also helped me iron out the creases in terms of rating my work from beginning to end.

In this tutorial, we’ll create a main menu interface for a fictional iPhone game. We’ll go through setting up Photoshop to accurately display target screen size, setting up a wire frame for the project, creating a background, making a logo, creating rock texture for the sidebar, and wood texture for the saved games-box and buttons.

Read More psd.tutsplus.com

To Jailbreak or not to Jailbreak? That is the question a lot of iPhone users are asking. Charlie Mallow reviewed Inspell by BigBoss & Planet-iPhones

Before you walk down dark alleys and hide in shadows, the first thing you need to do is ask yourself if it’s worth the trouble. Are there applications and features that you need to use and can’t get by standard practices? This question is answered by the need for one silver bullet app or function that an individual just doesn’t want to live without. I have found my silver bullet App.

Read More www.iphonetunes.net

With all the hoopla about the iPhone 3GS’s speed, what about its little non-cellular brother, the touch? I took a second-generation touch, (reportedly sporting a 533-MHz ARM processor, versus the 3GS’s 600-MHz chip).

I ran the touch through a battery of performance tests before and after the OS upgrade from 2.2 to 3.0, and compared the results with those for the iPhone 3G and 3GS.

Read More www.pcmag.com

iPhone owners have begun filling forums with grumbles that Apple’s latest firmware causes Google Maps to become more than a little inaccurate.

The “GPS and Maps not working after 3.0 upgrade” thread on Apple’s own Discussions website is filled with comments from angry iPhone owners that the firmware update causes the bundled Google application to spit out current location results anywhere between a few hundred meters and four miles off course.

Read More www.reghardware.co.uk

Facebook is preparing an update to its popular iPhone app, with several features designed to take advantage of the latest firmware, according to Inside Facebook. Facebook 3.0 integrates a new menu selection for news feeds, along with a section for organizing events or sending RSVPs. Users can create new photo albums, view profile picture albums or upload content, while image viewing supports zoom.

Read More www.macnn.com

Now that the iPhone OS 3.0 firmware has added stereo Bluetooth functionality to the Apple iPhone, we thought it would be a good idea to revisit stereo Bluetooth and what it promises.

Stereo Bluetooth, or A2DP (Advanced Audio Distribution Profile), is essentially a Bluetooth profile that lets you stream music from one device to another without the use of wires. The technology has been around for years, and almost all music phones have this feature.

Read More news.cnet.com