No more sleepless nights for Apple’s lawyers, at least not until the Nokia and HTC suits begin to heat up. The company is now the proud owner of a slightly used trademark: iPad™, as of March 17, is no longer a Fujitsu mark and has been assigned to Apple. Much speculation had surrounded the trademark process for iPad, as Fujitsu’s mark was being challenged by Apple as early as September 2009, but it looks like the two companies have come to some sort of agreement. Read more…

Apple is readying two categories of explicit apps for the iPhone and iPad, according to MacStories.

The site has found these two URLs (here and here) which lead to sections for the “Top Explicit Paid Software” and “Top Explicit iPad Software”.

The categories are currently empty, and I suppose it’s because they’re not actually ready yet. I think it’s just another technical error by some engineer at Apple.

Read more…

Apple seems to have accidentally leaked listings for iPad titles already approved for the iPad onto iTunes Preview.

The discovery was made by PadGadget

We did a quick scan and were able to find several titles clearly marked as “HD”, a common label developers are now using to indicate an iPad specific version of their app. Read more…

Another analyst believes with ‘increased confidence’ that Apple will make a big splash this summer with a new iPhone form factor.

Barclays Capital analyst Ben Reitzes writes,

“iPad yields should improve dramatically throughout the year even if the launch starts out capacity constrained. These developments support upside to consensus forecasts for the iPad Read more…

Robot Touchscreen Analysis from MOTO Development Group on Vimeo.

A new test of touchscreen smartphones with a precise laboratory robot has confirmed what a human test already concluded: Apple’s iPhone touchscreen is far and away the most accurate touch panel on the market.

The test, conducted by MOTO Labs, compared an iPhone using the SimpleDraw application with a number of other touchscreen smartphones: Google Nexus One, Motorola Droid, Palm Pre, HTC Droid Eris, and BlackBerry Storm 2. As the company, which has no relation to Motorola, discovered earlier this year, the iPhone is in first, followed by the Google Nexus One in a distant second place. Read more…

Earlier this month, Major General Nick Justice and several members of his staff traveled to Apple’s Cupertino campus to discuss soldiers using Apple’s products and technology in the field. In addition to having the most awesome name ever, Maj. Gen. Justice also heads the US Army’s Research, Development, and Engineering Command. He’s reportedly interested in moving the Army away from the custom-built “big green box” electronics that the Army has used over the past decades; instead, Justice wants the Army to investigate existing solutions from the commercial sector, including Apple’s portable lines. Read more…

Developer Tommy Refenes has attracted the attention of a substantial number of his developer peers this weekend. Refenes’ game “Zits & Giggles” was yanked from the App Store a few days ago without the developer receiving any word from Apple as to why the pimple-popping game for the iPhone and iPod Touch was dumped. Read more…

The Street’s Jason Schwarz predicts that come June Apple will decrease the screen size of the iPhone as part of a new strategy to focus on the iPad.

“The iPhone turns into your tethering your device. It turns into your Internet connection. You only have to pay one bill, one phone bill, and all your devices can connect to a 3G and eventually a 4G wireless network. So in effect what the iPhone becomes for Apple is the glue that holds their mobile ecosystem in place.” Read more…

Apple is still negotiating with media companies for a price cut on TV show downloads for the iPad, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Apple also hoped to work closely with newspaper, magazines and textbook publishers on new ways to digitally present print content on the iPad, but has for now put the effort on backburner in favor of focusing on other content, said one of those people. Read more…

Here’s an interesting post by a blogger named teucher that echoes something we’ve heard from developers before — that the iPhone and the iPad will require completely different experiences. When the iPad was first announced, one of Apple’s big selling points was that it already had a full library of software ready to go — any iPhone app could and would easily run on the iPad. Read more…