9to5 Staff

From 9to5Toys.com:

Apple today lowered the prices of its refurbed iPads across the board. The Original iPad 16GB Wifi is now down to just $279.  Meanwhile, iPad 2s are down to starting a base price of just $319, a price drop of $30 over previous $349 clip.  Higher capacity iPads are dropped as low as $50 over prices set when Apple debuted the new iPad in March.

One reason for a drop could be Apple’s move to a “new iPad 2” with increased battery life due to its more efficient processor which may be worth more than a $50 premium at #499.

It is going to be hard to find an excuse not to get mom that white iPad 2 now, isn’t it?

MacRumors has the full list of reductions,  below.
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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lpLGb1WW8E&hd=1]

Samsung announced the Galaxy S III today at the Unpacked event in London. Apple’s biggest competitor in the smartphone space, and the only other manufacture making any significant profit, showed off the upgraded 4.8-inch 720P SuperAMOLED display device that now weighs 133 grams among other minor spec improvements.

A few of the features shown off were S-Voice, which is like Siri, Scan and Match for Music (iTunes Match), and Airplay-like “AllShare Cast” for streaming content to your HDTV through the AppleTV-like AllShare Cast Dongle.  Samsung also named its iPod nano-like music player “Pebble,” which bears a resemblance to the iOS Kickstarter watch that goes by the same name.

One cool new thing is a face recognition photo app. It lets you instantly send pictures to your friends that it recognizes in your pictures. The S III also has a pop-up player, which is sort of an app version of picture-in-picture that allows you to watch a movie while you switch around to other applications.

Initial reviews seem a little luke-warm on the device. Most call it an incremental update from the S II with new features that also brought some new flaws.

Oh, and Phil Schiller will not like this news: Flipboard for Android is debuting on the S III.

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An admittedly biased source, Techbargains conducted a survey of mothers on their upcoming special day presents prospects. According to the survey, 91 percent picked an iPad over flowers.

While the iPad is a bit pricier than your garden-variety bouquet, you can save $100 and get her an iPad 2 (let’s face it, mom’s eyes are no longer going to need the Retina pixels – j/k!).

Speaking of bargains, moms were not quite as interested in the $199 Kindle Fire (18 percent), as they preferred the iPad (58 percent) when the devices were put head-to-head.

See the whole survey below:

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From 9to5Toys.com:

The Spring 2012 Mac SuperBundle is one of the better Mac Software bundles we’ve seen.  If you want to burn DVDs or even Blu-rays on your Mac, you are getting Toast Titanium 11 for half its $99 list price and get 9 other solid apps to boot.

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The Spring 2012 Mac SuperBundle includes:
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In an interview with the Guardian over the weekend, Google cofounder Sergey Brin said:

[…]he was most concerned by the efforts of countries such as China, Saudi Arabia and Iran to censor and restrict use of the internet, but warned that the rise of Facebook and Apple, which have their own proprietary platforms and control access to their users, risked stifling innovation and balkanizing the web.” There’s a lot to be lost,” he said. “For example, all the information in apps – that data is not crawlable by web crawlers. You can’t search it.”

It is interesting that “lost” is defined above as “not crawlable by Google’s search engine.” Framing the argument—as “what is in the best interests of users” versus what Google wants—would probably have helped his case. We are supposed to think that it is just a coincidence the two biggest corporate threats to Google are also the two biggest threats to humanity/the Internet. (via Slashdot)

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From 9to5Toys.com:

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Today only, Best Buy takes 20% off select iTunes eGift Cards, as listed below. We saw Walmart has a similar deal last week but only on $50 denominations. Note that international US iTunes users are eligible to purchase because the gift cards will be emailed for redemption but must use a US credit card or Paypal.

iTunes gift cards are good for Mac Apps, iOS Apps, iTunes Music, Videos, iBooks and more.

The deals:

• $15 iTunes eGift Card for $12
• $25 iTunes eGift Card for $20
• $50 iTunes eGift Card for $40
• $100 iTunes eGift Card for $80

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Probably not.

The “hacks” require the attacker to have physical access to your device (whether it be Android or iOS). That could be a speaker dock, a charging station, or a friend’s computer, but it still requires you to plug the iPhone into something compromised or give up physical access to it.

The issue, as Gareth Wright first discovered, is that Facebook stores saved account information in a plaintext file that can be transferred to another phone and used to log into your Facebook account without signing in. Other services, like Dropbox, were also shown to have the same vulnerability (but that is disputed).

This is why, when you restore a phone from a backup, you already have access to your Facebook app without having to sign-in again. Facebook attempted to dispel the concern by claiming that a phone would need to be compromised for this to work. That is untrue.

However, as we know, once someone with the right software has your iPhone, your information is pretty much his or hers to use.

[tweet https://twitter.com/chronic/status/188363051139989504]

The bigger issue here is the software that people use to access your data. It is free—and the process is very simple. I expect Facebook and Apple will probably make it more difficult in forthcoming updates.

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From 9to5Toys.com:

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For a few more hours, Walmart is offering the $50 iTunes gift card for $40. That’s 20 percent off and the lowest price yet. The card comes immediately through email, and it counts toward free shipping on other items. It can be purchased for use in the US iTunes Store on iBooks, Mac and iOS Apps, Music, Videos, Movies and more.

Limit two per customer (You can get around the 2 per customer limit if you have multiple credit cards). International readers are telling us that their foreign credit cards are rejected (though US based Paypals are working).

Update: This ended over the weekend  – subscribe to 9to5toys for the latest deals on tech.

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Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster has surveyed kids for a many years on their electronics usage. This spring, he polled 5,600 students, and half the group was male, while the other half was female. A surprising 34 percent of high school respondents said they owned an iPhone and 40 percent said they planned to get one in the next six months:

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This is surprising, because comScore released its own Mobile phone breakdown today that claimed only 13.5-percent of ages 13 and up owned Apple phones:

Included in that 13.5-percent are supposedly those 34 percent of high school kids, meaning the adult population would have to be even lower than 13.5-percent, which also means high school kids are three times as likely to own an iPhone as their parents if the numbers are right.
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A Japanese TV crew approached a booth at the Foxconn plant in the suburbs of Taiyuan in Shanxi Province and asked a woman manning the booth about the 18,000 people Foxconn is recruiting for the next iPhone (video here at 7:10 via Macotakara). She said something about “being built for June.”

That plant is hiring many workers (and facing strikes from current workers) for iPhone production, according to local reports.

While she seems to imply that Foxconn is ramping up for a June production or release (or it may not), we are not convinced this is a credible source with knowledge of Apple’s plans.

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How many new iPads sold this quarter? Find out April 24 when Apple streams its earnings call after the market closes. Like always, we will be on hand to cover the news as it happens.

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