Apple might have denied a smaller and cheaper iPhone being developed, but that does not mean that there are none out there. This is a smaller version of the iPhone, and it is bloody hell cheaper than your iPhone 4. Of course, being too cheaply priced also makes it look and feel cheap. This is the imitation version iPhone made in China with a China brand, though we’re not sure whether it’s made by Foxconn too. Probably not. Then again, who knows right? Anything can happen. This is a Shanzhai-crafted shrunken iPhone 4 running an iOS rip-off based on Java, garnished with a 1.3 megapixel camera. All it takes is a measly ¥380 (approximately $58) to be the odd one out.

SOURCE via Giz China

The bar chart above is real, from Motorola’s own Facebook page. Funny isn’t it? That’s about 31,101 votes and counting, and we’re seeing most of the opinions being rather similar and repetitive. Hopefully Motorola catches the big hint given by the users.

SOURCE via Motorola (Facebook)

And you thought that Apple’s sales will slow down last quarter because everyone is holding away from buying the now-aging iPhone and waiting for the next iPhone. But no, they sold lots of iPads, and even wished that there’s more. They even had new MacBook Pros to sell, with the gimmicky Thunderbolt to help out. And nobody’s holding out from buying new iPhone 4 despite the ‘Antennagate’ and whatever gate it had.

Apple just announced its earnings for the second quarter of the year, and it’s once again beat estimates, with it reporting earnings of $6.40 a share, a total of $24.67 billion in revenue, and a net profit of $5.99 billion. That’s better than last quarter I believe.

As for the sales breakdown, Apple says it sold a whopping 18.6 million iPhones in the quarter (up 113 percent over the previous year, and ahead of estimates of 16 million) thanks to Apple’s own effort in opening up in more countries and widening their market.

They also sold 4.69 million iPads, which is actually less than the expected 6.29 million, apparently due to supply issues, and 3.76 million Macs, which represents a 28 percent jump over the same quarter a year ago thanks to the new MacBook and bigger exposure of the Apple brand.

Not surprisingly, iPods are the one area that continues to slow, with sales of 9.02 million representing a 17 percent decline over the previous year — the iPod touch accounted for more than half of those sales. One other big bright spot for the company is the Asia Pacific region, where it saw revenue grow a staggering 151 percent year-over-year, as we see Apple opening up in more countries in Asia Pacific. The iPod also had a bad sales in last quarter, and things will be pretty much the same in the next quarter, until Apple announce something magical either in WWDC 2011 or in fall.

Interestingly, Apple isn’t providing any specific sales numbers for the iPad 2 — it’s only saying that it sold every iPad 2 it could make in the quarter, and that it’s working hard to get it into the hands of customers as fast as it can. It didn’t add much more when pressed on the issue later during its earnings call either, with it only going as far as to say that the iPad has the “mother of all backlogs.”

SOURCE via Engadget

Here’s something not known to many. It seemed that your iPhone knows a lot about you. Yes, you left a lot of info on your phone, but do you know that your iPhone also knows where you’ve been all these while? This is something already known to iOS 4 but not documented and not publicized heavily.

The trouble with this uncalled-for location tracking is that the hidden file that holds the data — consolidated.db — is fairly easy to uncover and read, making any desktops you’ve backed your phone up to and the phone itself even bigger privacy dangers than they would usually be.

Some extra digging revealed this behaviour has been known about for a good while (see Courbis link below), though mostly by people involved in computer forensics. Additionally, restoring a backup or migrating to a new device keeps the data logging going, which the researchers point to as evidence that what’s happening isn’t accidental.

Now, is this very worrying? This may be worrying if you’re afraid of stalkers hacking into your phone and desktop, but I find this more fun to look back at where I’ve been these past few years, well at least last year. Mine is just a big black dot!

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The challenge about owning electric cars is to find battery charging stands. They’re not easily available unlike petrol stations which has already fully saturated, especially in cities. Google has been known to support electric vehicle concept for a long time, and many of their vehicles are also electric or hybrid. The good folks over at the search engine giant has teamed up with the US Department of Energy and more than 80 companies to form the GeoEVSE Forum, an organization aimed at bringing diverse electric car resources under a single umbrella. Looking for one of those elusive Best Buy charging stations? Use the Google Maps database, helmed by the DOE, which currently offers some 600 alternative fueling stations, including electric charging, hydrogen, and natural gas. Hopefully Google will spread their wings to international stage as well.

SOURCE via CNET

The iPad 2 has been released for over a month now, as Apple prepares to launch their highly popular iPad 2 in 13 more countries this upcoming weeks. However, you’d think that ColorWare, the famous electronics gadget painting experts in US would be furiously rushing out an alien iPad 2 with Lady Gaga’s taste, but that’s not the case today.

ColorWare already had their hands on the pair of Monster headphones but that doesn’t seem enough to them. Today they’ve launched very limited edition ColorWare “Chrome Beats” headphones, which surprisingly, don’t actually have any color. However, I’ve to admit that they do look gorgeous and sexy. Of course, such beautiful piece of already-very-expensive headphones getting even more glorified, you can expect a price tag of no less than $1,000 from ColorWare. ColorWare is only decking out 50 of these cans, so you better hurry up and flash out your platinum VIP cherry cards and swipe it in between your butts, or else Lady Gaga will be the one having them.

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Previously we thought its codename ‘Antiza’ was its name, and then we heard about it possibly being called ‘Thrive’, but now it’s officially called Regza AT300. Toshiba has finally opened up its curtain to the company’s latest tablet, and their first Honeycomb tablet. This 10.1-incher with 1,280 x 800 pixel display, USB, HDMI, and 5 megapixel rear-facing cam is Japan-only for now, where the Tegra-2 powered Android 3.0 tablet has just made its official debut as the Regza AT300 with a ¥60,000 price (about $723) in June. International market will have it shortly after, as usual.

SOURCE via Engadget Japan

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Surprise news for everyone. Samsung has just sold its hard disk drive manufacturing arm to Seagate Technology, probably more interested in SSD market than HDD. The deal is said to ink a sky high neat $1.375 billion in equal measures of cash and stocks. As a result, Samsung Electronics will own approximately 9.6 percent of Seagate and get to nominate one new member to join Seagate’s Board of Directors, while the two companies have further agreed to deepen their strategic relationship with related cross-licensing and supply stipulations. Samsung will provision Seagate’s solid state drives with NAND flash memory, whereas Seagate will furnish Samsung’s PCs and consumer electronics products with hard disk storage. The deal is expected to complete in full by year’s end. Looks like Seagate will be going head on with Western Digital in the future.

SOURCE via Seagate