The first time you hear a very clear Chinese woman's voice say "Sou Sou!" in your living room while you are supposedly alone, it is natural to brush it off. There are so many things making noises all the time! The second time, weeks later, when you're sitting alone by the fireplace reading at midnight, is terrifying. At this point, it is natural to wonder if this is how Moses or Allah or Jesus or Neale Donald Walsch or Oral Roberts or Ted Nugent or Charles Manson felt, when they first heard voices telling them what to do. But what did "Sou Sou!" even mean? It seemed less like [...]

Australian police are warning the people down there to stop using Apple's terrible maps program, because the app is so worthless that people could easily die if they believe the ridiculous maps have any connection to earthly reality. For example, Apple Maps is telling gullible Australians that an entire city, Mildura, is hidden within a vast and terrible wilderness 44 miles away from the actual city.

Police have received calls from motorists who have been stranded in the park without adequate food and water for as long as 24 hours. The park does not have a water supply, police said. Combined with the fact that temperatures in the [...]

If you're considering buying an iPhone, this fellow has been trying one for a while and offers some thoughts on the experience.

I’m broke. And, like a lot of people in New York, one reason I'm broke is because I sink a lot of money into my iPhone. So when I heard about the recently launched and revamped Gigwalk, the app that lets you make extra money by using your iPhone to find odd jobs that businesses need doing, I jumped at the chance to be a guinea pig. Basically, you open the app, tap the red dots around you on the map and do a small job for a few dollars. There are tons of these red dots all over the city, and most consist of just taking photos. Submitted [...]

It's never a good idea to go to Canada. And there were some other bad choices here-such as keeping the phone in "roaming" mode in a "foreign country," which, yes it is Canada but they do have a phone network. But no one should have to suffer like film publicist Reid Rosefelt: "I went to the Toronto Film Festival for 5 days and 4 hours and received a $1524 AT&T bill for data charges on top of the $199 paid for the first 200 MB. A total of $1723." And it ends… not well! "Eventually I found a sympathetic operator who filed a 4-page application for a full [...]

The data suggests that iPhone users have more sex.

I'd suggest that iPhone users are 1. more likely to live in big cities and 2. to work in fields where they don't have to carry a BlackBerry. You know: slutty fields-like architecture and graphic design and book publishing. And in big cities-where everyone is already a whore. So the iPhone is just a general marker. Like a Foursquare badge. But for casual sex.

This is so sad, that no one can preorder their new iPhone 4. It's fascinating to think about why there are so many people standing in line at AT&T and Apple stores for an expensive new phone, and yet also have those few hours to stand in a line on a Tuesday morning.

If you enjoy reading Kindle-brand electronic books on your iPhone or iPad, you've surely had moments when the best idea seems to be just erasing all your ebooks. There's something about the shoddy copy-editing and optical-character-recognition errors and lame single jpeg of cover art and terribly rendered illustrations that really puts a spotlight on the bad corporate non-fiction titles you've somehow spent $13 a piece to accumulate "in the cloud." Wouldn't it just be better if Kindle developed a "killer app" that would erase all of this garbage?

"In shipping the latest version, apparently the company's QA testers somehow missed a bug that can delete your entire book collection from [...]

The iPhone and the Samsung phone (sPhone?) are very good technological devices primarily because they have shiny metal on the backside, underneath the plastic case you bought to protect the shiny metal from smudges or scratches. But is the mining of this metal destroying a beautiful Eden-like Indonesian island? Probably! Friends of the Earth did a six-month-long investigation (PDF) of the Appalachian-style tin mining operations on Bangka Island, where a massive industrial operation is "destroying forests, farmland and coral reefs, injuring miners and driving away fish and marine life." All so you can put an "Otterbox" over the shiny metal!

Apple and Samsung "neither confirmed nor denied [...]

"Many believe that in the future collecting samples of saliva, urine or blood could be performed using a cheap, USB-stick-sized throwaway device called a lab-on-a-chip. The user would inject a droplet of the fluid in the chip, and micropumps inside it would send the fluid to internal vessels containing reagents that extract target disease biomarker molecules. The whole device would then be sent to a lab for analysis. But Hyun Gyu Park and Byoung Yeon Won at the Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology in Daejeon think touchscreens could improve the process by letting your phone replace the lab work. Park suggests the lab-on-a-chip could present a tiny droplet [...]

• authentic

• virus-free

• attainable

• exclusive

• compatible

• popular

• English-speaking

Apple came up with a crazy idea-it's going to make the guidelines for iPhone and iPad app approval public! Nuts right? "For the first time we are publishing the App Store Review Guidelines to help developers understand how we review submitted apps" is how Apple put it. But bad news too, because here's the part of the guidelines: "'Apps containing pornographic material, defined by Webster's Dictionary as 'explicit descriptions or displays of sexual organs or activities intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings,' will be rejected." It's crazy that the technology of the would-be future refuses to allow the present to catch up with [...]

"Someone would have fashioned Apple's iPhone 4 out of gold and diamonds sooner or later," notes Freshness mag. Correct! So the diamond version, by Stuart Hughes, is £12,995. His gold one is £21,995. The nice thing about having solid gold and diamond-encrusted iPhone cases is that when you flee your tottering regime of slaughter and despotism they can be scrapped or melted down into cash in some nice non-extraditing country.

"Oh, you guys have seen this already? I can see why you'd skip the event then." -Rather delightful comment on Gizmodo's liveblog of other people attending Apple's iPhone announcement today. (It's only funny if you remember, somehow, even though it was like a million years ago, that Gizmodo and Apple are currently "at odds" and/or "criminal investigations" over Gizmodo's maybe-dodgy acquisition of a leaked version of this new phone.)

Google's Android phones are used by more people, yet Apple's App Store sells 400% more than Google's online store for Android apps. How is this even possible? Consumer tech experts say it's because Apple started early and has stringent quality control and also has a whole lot of iTunes account holders who typed in their credit card information before they even owned a smart phone.

Consumers are more willing to fork over their money for an iOS app, because they know they’ll probably get their money’s worth, says app developer Zak Tanjeloff with DLP Mobile. “The App Store has a higher proportion of quality apps, thanks to the [...]

The world runs a little bit more smoothly without troublesome humans mucking up the works. Consider the least sexy sex scandal of all time, 60-year-old David Patraeus and his various middle-aged twin Florida gal pals and wives and shirtless old FBI agents trying to figure out this whole "sexting" business. Why not just have drones do the war fightin', right? OH WAIT THIS IS OBAMA'S PLAN.

Meanwhile, in China, there is trouble at the factories that produce our beloved iPhones and iPads and those iDevices currently manufactured in a compromise size between that of the iPhone and the iPad. The workers want the jobs, because of the [...]

For once, what all the tech blogs say is true! The Turntable iPhone app is out and it's gooood. Not that many people at all use Turntable, it's strange to say, but it's a really smart company that's built a great product and is trying to keep it on the up-and-up.

For the latest example of Americans' growing inability manage their own lives without the help of a trendy technological device, let's meet Doug Wilson of Arkansas.

During the day, he tends to carry the iPhone 4 in his hand. Putting it in his pocket would be too risky, he said, because he might miss a photo opportunity — like that crazy "rat tail" hairdo he saw at a fast-food spot recently. ("I was like, 'I've GOT to take a picture of this!'") And at night, access to this on-all-the-time gizmo is arguably more important than ever. First, there's the dog. Wilson uses his phone's LED camera flash [...]

Just as you suspected, no one feels comfortable using the new iPhone's "Facetime" videophone thing… unless they really miss their cats.

"Retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a phone. Not worth it." — Steve Jobs (or someone claiming to be him?) tries to soothe an iPhone 4 user who is, shall we say, agitated about the device's issue with dropping calls when it isn't held in the proper way. Is Jobs' response indicative of a new "be chill, bro" marketing technique coming from Apple, or is this simply the response of someone who doesn't have to pay AT&T for lousy service and is thus more Zen about the whole idea of a somewhat expensive device actually working? Either way, it's kind of amazing how low our [...]