Apple is offering Apple gift cards for its products which can be redeemed at any online or retail Apple stores for an Apple product (iPhone in particular). You can gift someone an Apple iPhone gift card which starts from as low as $25 for a new iPhone while the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3G S start at $99 and $199 respectively.

All you need to do is buy an iPhone gift card and give it to the recipient. When the recipient moves in to redeem the card, the Apple Store will deploy a ‘Specialist’ to take care of the post-purchase duties.

Apple iPhone : The Best Holiday Gift

That means, the Specialist will take charge of setting up the iPhone, the user’s email account, and the Specialist will also help the person in customizing the Home screen, personalizing ringtones, choosing some ‘great iPhone applications’ and also finding the favorite songs.

Accessories like stylish cases for iPhone, iPhone skins, iPod Docks,  designer bags for Macbooks, Eye-Fi Wireless Memory cards, printers and a bunch of Roxio softwares, Office Mac, iWork, Nike+iPod Sports Kit and many other interesting softwares are also available which can make great gifts.

Not just this, you can even choose to gift from a fully customized MacBook Pro, Mogo Talk Bluetooth headset for iPhone, Apple Magic Mouse, a set of cool headsets,  great Mac games including The Sims 3, Sid Meier’s Civilization IV and Plants Vs Zombies by Popcap.

Precisely, everything that’s available through Apple is up for holiday season sale and can be gifted. The most exciting part of this is that all the items available in the gift guide will be shipped  free to your place during the holiday period.

Also, you can personalize the item you are gifted by engraving a custom message on it for free. So, what are you waiting for? Grab the chance and make the most of it ’cause you don’t need an occasion to make someone smile. But if you insist, we’ll suggest it couldn’t get any better than making it a Christmas gift.

Click here to view Apple’s Holiday Gift Guide.

Click here to buy an iPhone Gift Card.

The Safari browser would not close at any cost. It was acually eating up the memory in the iPhone and ultimately forced it to crash down. When asked, Apple presumptively said it would not occur unless the iPhone was jail broken.

In a crave to enrich the applications suite on the iPhone, many users had their iPhone jail broken, well it does enough good but more than it, it does the evil. Jail breaking your iPhone opens a security hole that hackers can exploit to take control over your iPhone wirelessly and effortlessly.

This means that the iPhone users have something new to worry about besides their AT&T bills, bad coverage, and slow 3G speeds. It also creates business possibilities for the antivirus companies, the company who comes up with the first Antivirus for iPhone is likely to win. Do you really need a iPhone Anti-virus? It’s hard to say at this point but if a company comes up with a Antivirus for iPhone they will scare the users to death if they don’t get one.

The first iPod virus named Podloso was discovered by Kaspersky Labs that infected the iPods running iPod Linux, a very few of the majority. And what different is the iPhone from the iPod? Sooner or later, we were expecting this sort of chalk to infect the iPhone and today, the day has come.

It’s now the iPhone SMS Virus or iPhone Virus. It’s not really a virus, it’s a bug that was discovered by Charles Miller and Collin Mulliner, two researchers at BlackHat Cybersecurity some six weeks ago.

When the first time, the bug was discovered, it was only meant to crash the iPhone, now it has outgrown the possibilities and it can take over virtually any iPhone with just a simple SMS. So beware!

How do you identify the infection? Not a big deal. Some fine day if you receive a text message with a square character, you must immediately turn off your iPhone or just switch to airplane mode. That’s only how you can resist infection.

The virus can spread to any iPhone, you don’t even need to click a link or so but only if one of the infected phones has got your contact no in it, then you are done. Reports reveal that it is a consequence of the “serious memory corruption bug” that occurs due to the way the iPhone handles messages.

Latest Update: ‘i’ got Company!

When the iPhone bugs or so called iPhone virus was first reported, F-Secure, a security research organization said:

“Hopefully this serves as a warning for those who have opened their iPhones using a security hole in the system and then installing unverified software without a second thought to what they are doing.”

Once your iPhone virus is infects the phone, the hacker is at liberty to take over all the functionalities of your iPhone., from making a call to browsing the web, from accessing the camera to corrupting your applications, and more harmfully, forwarding this virus to other iPhone user. Cnet also termed jailbreaking posed a threat to national security.

“This is serious. The only thing you can do to prevent it is turn off your phone,” said cybersecurity researcher Charles Miller. “Someone could pretty quickly take over every iPhone in the world with this.”

Even if antivirus security organizations decide to confront the iPhone virus, the biggest hurdle will be the inefficiency of the iphone to run the applications in the background. JR Smith, CEO of AVG said “We can’t add a layer of protection on to the iPhone today, so that’s a lot of the conversation that we’re having with Apple.”

In the league: i Like It!

McAfee which has been providing security solutions to Mac for sometime, said “We are working on a much more comprehensive suite for the Apple family.” Because the big deal is providing real time protection from viruses and not actually the antivirus.

More iPhone viruses are likely to emerge as people can’t resist cracking the iPhones and the hackers wouldn’t leave any chance to exploit the wicked possibilities and make the iPhone Original, iPhone 2G, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3G S vulnerable to this attack.

We are expecting a bug fix for this from Apple in its final OS 3.1 release, however Apple has been numb over the issue for all this while, even though the SMS Virus bug was brought to their knowledge about 6 weeks ago.

Time to taste the soup…..’cause ” . . . our pleasures in this world are always to be paid for . . . ” and it implies to iPhone users as well.

Update – 31st July: Apple just confirmed the SMS exploit and also released an update to patch the exploit. To get the latest update, plug your iPhone into your computer, launch iTunes and click on “Check for Updates” and install the new update.

Simply record videos and share it with your friends with a few clicks. All videos are uploaded to TwitVid.com, user can use the Twitter login info to login to the site to manage or share their uploaded videos with others.

Here is one of the videos I shot to test the application.

Following screenshot should give you an idea of what the application looks like on the iPhone and how easy it is to upload videos from iPhone to Twitter!

See that? Thats how easy it is!! Click here to download the application from App Store!

The world is shrinking into an iPhone and the proof of that is in its capabilities which let iPhone lovers watch movies, listen to endless music, keep in touch with their online lives and now with the powerful iPhone 3G S it is posing a threat to handheld gaming devices like Nintendo DSi and Sony’s PSP.

An Australian based company called 22moo which offers interesting iPhone / iPod touch accessories announced a game controller called GameBonePro (Look at the picture above you will know where the name came from) for iPod Touch / iPhone. If done right, it will turn your iPhone into a mean gaming machine.

The new game controller for iPhone comes loaded with 6 buttons, 8 Way D-Pad, Built-in Speakers, mic and 3.5 audio headphone jack and 2000mAh Lithium-ion Battery which also supports iPhone when physically connected to the device.

GameBonePro is capable of hooking itself with your iPhone through Bluetooth wirelessly or with a 30-pin dock connector cable. It also comes with a stand supporting iPhone / iPod Touch vertically and horizontally for better gaming experience.

The gadget is not approved by Apple yet but I don’t see a problem with it. The gadget is expected to hit the market in September this year and interestingly the company is taking suggestions from users like you and I to rightly price GameBonePro. Click here to send your price suggestions to 22moo

Click here for more on GameBonePro

There was technology in the air and gadgets everywhere at the WWDC 2009 and one thing that made it remarkably big among the rest is the Apple’s announcement of the new iPhone 3G S. The new iPhone 3G S is an enhanced version of the iPhone 3G and is considered to be the fastest and the most powerful iPhone yet.

The physical design of the iPhone 3G S is same as that of the earlier iPhone models but the materials used are greener like arsenic free glass and a mercury LCD. The user interface is much fluid-like and renders smoother transitions between the applications.

The iPhone 3G S offers improved performance , voice control, digital compass, internet tethering and a built in digital camera for video recording as highlight additions besides innumerous various enticing features.

The iPhone 3G S dominates the earlier iPhone models by sporting a camera on its back with an extra mega pixel. Yes, it comes with a 3MP camera with smart features like auto-focus, auto exposure and auto white balance that will capture the finest quality images and record your memorable moments at 30fps video to your iPhone gallery. You can also get one touch access to options like delete, share and save to the images and videos you have shot or even share them over web via MMS, email, MobileMe or YouTtube.

Another smart new additional feature is the voice control operation of the iPhone 3G S. Interesting? Yes, of course. You can control a set of operations on your iPhone 3G S using your voice or speech. To activate voice control, just press and hold the home button on the iPhone 3G S for a couple of seconds and you will be prompted to speak. You can listen to the songs on the iPhone, make voice and video calls, and even ask your iPhone’s gallery to create playlists for you, play and pause songs and much more.

Imagine you are lost in a desert and no help at hand. The iPhone 3G S is here for your rescue with its digital compass which will assist you with the geography of your location. Basically, it operates like the actual magnetic compass but is much more than it. You can trace your destination over maps with the improved map support and navigate through the busiest streets with ease using its advanced GPS.

Noticeably, the user interface is much comfortable, smoother and faster to use, that means you can quickly open or close an application or switch between any open applications much faster and even faster is its internet access. The improved graphics support will render you a rich and appealing gaming experience so you can now play much complicated 3D games. Thanks to its CPU which now runs at 600MHz and the extended internal memory storage of 256 MB over the previous 128MB of storage.

The Nike Plus support will help those of you who are health conscious while the ‘Find my Phone’ feature will help you trace the location of your lost or stolen iPhone 3G S via GPS. The superfast iPhone 3G S is also packed with MMS support so you can quickly share your photos and videos with your friends or help them with contact info, voice memos and map locations as they need it.

The battery life is again an improvement over earlier iPhone models favoring you to listen to music for up to 30hrs against the previous 24 hrs, video playback of 10hrs against the previous 7 hrs and also longer talk time and internet browsing experience.

With increased performance, battery life and a host of other exciting and intelligent features, the iPhone is sure to claim its place as the mobile phone of the future or at least as the most powerful smart phone yet.

The iPhone OS 3.0 will be publicly available to all the iPhone users from around 17th of June and the iPhone 3G S will be available from 19th of June this year in black and white colors in two different memory capacities. The original iPhone 8GB (not an iPhone 3G S) will be available for 99$ against the standard iPhone 3G S models which include a 16GB and a 32GB phone which are priced at $199 and $299 respectively.

Click here to buy iPhone 3G S

Watch the following video to see all the functionalities of the new iPhone 3G S!

Let’s take a look at few of the highlights from the WWDC 2009 event.

Apple announced new MacBooks with non-removable batteries which are said to work for about 1,000 recharges, each recharges lasting upto 7hrs.

Now you can become Apple Fanboy with a brand new MacBook Pro starting at $1,699, 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB DDR3 RAM, 250GB HDD, etc.. all the way to $2,499 for a 17-inch unibody 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB DDR3, 500GB HDD, etc..

Then there are these less expensive MacBook and Mackbook AIR starting at $1,199 to $1,799 with 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB DDR3 RAM, 160GB HDD to 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB DDR3 RAM, 128GB SSD!

Now that’s wide right? Offers more choice at less expensive rates!

WWDC also announced Safari 4 promising it to be faster than all its previous launches and Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome. The latest release offers a lot of new features like a Cover Flow, Full History Search, Nitro engine, etc..

Download the latest Safari from here

Snow Leopard is ready to ship out starting this September and will cost $29 for the existing Leopard users and $10 for users buying a Leopard machine between now and December.

The new release is a refined version of the existing Leopard OS which includes built-in support for the latest version of Microsoft Exchange server for easy access to Mail, Address Book, etc..

Click here to read more ..

Now coming to iPhone and its announcements one of the interesting announcements was about a new service called “Find My iPhone” this feature can locate a your iPhone on map using its GPS technology, not only that but it also lets you send a message, play sound even if it is in silent mode or simply send a message and delete all the information on the phone.

About a year ago I wrote about an Indian company called Maverick Mobile which offers a similar solution for other mobile phones.

Besides that other Apps like the one from TomTom, ScrollMotion’s Iceberg, Line 6 Variax, ZipCar, etc.. also grabbed some limelight.

Apple also added about 1 million books and magazines to Appstore for the iPhone reader.

iPhone OS 3.0 will hit the new devices starting June 17th. All iPhone users will be upgraded free of cost but iPod touch users will require to pay $9.95.

The new features include,

• Tethering over Bluethooth and USB for MAC and PCs
• MMS Support
• Purchase or rent movies or audiobooks using iPhone

iPhone 3G prices dropped to $99 for a 8GB variant on a 2 Year contract. The new iPhone, iPhone 3G S will hit the stores starting June 19th and “S” in iPhone 3G S stands for “Speed” which means that it is faster than all its previous versions.

iPhone 3G S has a 3 megapixel camera with 30 FPS, Auto Focus, Auto White Balance, etc.. recording feature. The video capabilities can be added to any of the third party applications using the new API.  The phone is loaded with improved battery offering 9 hours of surfing and 5 hours of talk time.

Now the exciting features, iPhone 3G S offers a new digital compass functionality which can come in handy. It also offers a new exciting way of interacting with the phone by just talking to it. Yes, it is capable of reacting to voice commands to complete a certain task.

iPhone 3G S comes in 2 variants, 16 and 32GB for $199 and $299 respectively. The new devices will be available starting June 19th. The new iPhone 3G S will start shipping to other countries starting August.

So that was the important stuff! Now readers who were planning to buy a Palm Pre, will any of the announcements made today stop you from doing this or did it put you in two minds?