9to5 Staff

Apple

The iPhone is breaking into that most corporate of corporate sectors, banking, with up to 75,000 employees of Standard Chartered being offered the chance to dump their BlackBerries and pick up an Apple smartphone, Reuters reports.

Now, let

Former ally, Google is cosying up to Apple

Just in case any iTunes users out there had any hope at all of seeing music from The Beatles ever being made available via the service, more bad news today from former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney, who has once again slated EMI for delaying this small digital music miracle.

“To tell you the truth I don’t actually understand how it’s got so crazy,” Sir Paul said. “I know iTunes would like to do it, so one day it’s going to happen.”

The nature of getting music from the band to the service has been a constant dance of expectation and disappointment. And it hasn

Engadget breaks down Palm’s buyout by HP as detailed in its SEC statement on the matter with some very interesting little tidbits.  It breaks down like this:

• In February, Palm realized it needed outside help.  Options included a buyout or selloff of assets (patents) or licensing of WebOS
• 16 companies were targeted and contacted about a buyout or other options.  In March, Palm decided that a full buyout was the best option 
• HP and two others wanted to buy the company.  Two more made offers to buy patents/license WebOS.
• It eventually came down to HP and ‘Company C’ who “told Palm it wasn’t raising its acquisition offer [which was only 20 cents/share below HP], but offered to buy patents and take a nonexclusive license to webOS for $800 million.”
• HP and Palm completed the deal from April 24-28th when it was announced.

Company C sounds a lot like HTC to me.  Remember that the HP deal was announced on the 28th but was probably finalized earlier.  

Don’t forget HTC sold its soul to the devil made a patent sharing deal with Microsoft on April 27.  That sounds like Plan B.  Buying Palm was probably Plan A in its patent battle against Apple but it probably became too expensive.

Other payers involved could have been Dell, Motorola, Lenovo, Nokia and a few others, including Apple.

Here

Every time we think this Gawker/Apple thing can’t get any stranger, we are proven horribly wrong.  Last night, Gawker’s Ryan Tate and Steve Jobs got in an email exchange that quickly took a turn for the worse.  Have a look:

Wow.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_c0sK8lclk&w=700&h=400]

Here’s another big leak coming out of Vietnam.  If not a fake, it looks like the $999 MacBooks are going to recieve a silent update in the coming days/weeks/months that will bring them largely inline (still only 2GB of RAM) with the current base model 13″ MacBook Pros.  The processor on the model they show is bumped to 2.4GHz, the screen is LED and the video card is updated to the NVIDIA GeForce 320M.  It also appears in the video that it has the fancy new AC power adapter from the Pro/Air line.

This one is running OSX 10.6.3 and it is the same Model 7,1 A1342 so we think these will drop sooner rather than later, without much fanfare.

Updated specs:

via Engadget

More pictures below with system profiler:

The iPhone 4 case took another ugly turn yesterday when the search warrant + affidavit (PDF) used to gain access to (the finder) Brian Hogan’s home was (mistakenly?) released.  It showed that Apple got the authorities involved after Hogan’s roommate, Katherine Martinson, contacted Apple to say her roomate was the one with the iPhone.  She wanted to absolve herself of any wrongdoing because her computer was used to try to restore the wiped iPhone 4.

It appears that the authorities knew that Jason Chen was a blogger for “Internet Magazine” Gizmodo.com, when they applied for the warrant to search his home and take his computers as well.

For those hoping that stiff penalties be enforced, remember that trade secrets can include just about any leaked information, no matter how small (i.e. like screen resolution of iPhone 4 or what processor it will use).  This is a very slippery slope.  The Apple employees that leak this kind of information to the media can be criminally charged with the same trade secret violations as the police are using to go after Gizmodo.

Apple is seeding developers with access to an all-new build of Mac OS X 10.6.4.

Build 10F50 includes numerous fixes and just one known issue, reports World Of Apple. It weighs in at 581.3MB in its delta form, reports World of Apple. Mac OS X 10.6.4 entered testing towards the end of last month. Speculation (and WWDC) suggests a June launch for the new OS iteration.

Included in this update:

• Resolve an issue that causes the keyboard or trackpad to become unresponsive
• Resolve an issue that may prevent some Adobe Creative Suite 3 applications from opening
• Address issues copying, renaming, or deleting files on SMB file servers
• Improve reliability of VPN connections
• Resolve a playback issue in DVD Player when using Good Quality deinterlacing
• Resolve an issue editing photos with iPhoto or Aperture in full screen view
• Improve VoiceOver compatibility with iMovie and GarageBand
• Improve compatibility with some braille displays

Known Issues

• Marketing text is not formatted correctly, line returns missing.

Focus Areas:

• Graphics Drivers
• SMB
• USB
• Voice Over
• VPN

There

With Apple and Adobe spending money and reputation on a fight neither party looks truly pretty playing in, a third party developer has cleverly found a compromise that lets iPhone users watch proprietary Flash content on their Apple smartphone. So why can’t we all just get along? Read more…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp8tnOv5S6g&w=700&h=550]

Remember the strike at Wintek earlier this year, when workers smashed vehicles in a violent protest about bonuses? Seems they weren

Surprising no one at all, the App Store disapprovals team has rejected that useful WiFi Sync for iPhone app many of us had been hoping for.

Developer Greg Hughes has instead released the software via the Cydia network for jailbroken phones with a $9.99 price tag. The developer disclosed discussion with Apple went thus:

The U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) will investigate Apple Inc

Apple today updated its productivity suite of iPad applications with various bugfixes and small features.Keynote gets:

What’s New in Version 1.1

– Support for French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish
– Enhanced Back/Front slider in the Arrange panel
– Added the option to show additional alignment guides at smaller intervals

This update also:

– Improves reliability when importing Keynote

OK, if you hadn’t already guessed, this is a photoshop fake.

Today: fresh claims and a shadowy image have emerged all the way from Vietnam (aka. Viet Nam), with EnGadget excitedly declaring itself to be in possession of photos of this escaped iPhone HD prototype that got the internets all higgeldy-piggeldy when images and video emerged yesterday.

So what

Apple

Apple’s refusal of Flash support on the iPhone, “could undermine this next chapter of the Web – the chapter in which mobile devices outnumber computers, any individual can be a publisher, and content is accessed anywhere and at any time,” say Adobe co-founders, Chuck Geschke and John Warnock. Read the rest.

We like this clip a lot. It shows an iPad loading a fresh batch of software on an age-old Apple IIe that

We all know Apple and Adobe aren