Japan’s top 10 cell phones (with carrier) for July, 2009:

1. Apple iPhone 3GS 32GB (Softbank)
2. Sharp SH-06A (Docomo)
3. Panasonic 830P (Softbank)
4. Sharp SH-05A (Docomo)
5. NEC N-08A (Docomo)
6. Sony-Ericsson Premier3 (au)
7. Sharp SH-02A (Docomo)
8. Casio W63CA (au)
9. Apple iPhone 3GS 16 GB (Softbank)
10. Sharp SH001 (au)

According to MacRumors, the four-flavored app covers the U.S. & Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and, naturally, New Zealand. Pricing:

- U.S. & Canada: NZ $124.99 (US $84.41)
- Western Europe: NZ $179.99 (US $121.55)
- Australia: NZ $104.99 (US $79.90)
- New Zealand: NZ $119.99 (US $81.03)

Earlier this month, UK retailer Handtec let slip that the equally anticipated TomTom for iPhone car kit would sell for about $195. The price included the app itself, a GPS-boosting receiver, windshield mount, car charger and speakers. That news, and the perhaps premature New Zealand launch this weekend, would seem to indicate a global release is imminent.

We appreciate the information provided to us about SMS vulnerabilities which affect several mobile phone platforms. This morning, less than 24 hours after a demonstration of this exploit, we’ve issued a free software update that eliminates the vulnerability from the iPhone. Contrary to what’s been reported, no one has been able to take control of the iPhone to gain access to personal information using this exploit.

First, a recap: Sun Danyong’s death came after a case of prototype iPhones he was charged with shipping to Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino ended up short by one. Sun couldn’t produce the device and claimed not to know what had happened; security officials at Foxconn, the manufacturer of Apple’s iPhone and Sun’s employer, didn’t buy his story. At all.

In the days following the incident, Sun quite possibly went through hell. He confided in his university friends—he had just graduated—that his house had been searched repeatedly and without announcement, that he had been endlessly interrogated, that he’d been held in solitary confinement, and even that he’d been outright tortured by security guards. Soon after, he was found dead at the base of his apartment building, having fallen 14 stories. He died, one way or another, for a phone. Yeah, no, you’re right: This is fucking crazy.

A common snap response is that this is just symptomatic of poor labor regulations in China, a sentiment seemingly backed up by Foxconn’s tellingly honest statement on the issue:

Regardless of the reason of Sun’s suicide, it is to some extent a reflection of Foxconn’s internal management deficiencies, especially in how to help young workers cope with the psychological pressures of working life at the company.

They’ve since suspended one security guard without pay, and turned over the investigation to police. But to put this incident in that broad context isn’t useful, either to explain what happened or to know how to deal with it. To a certain extent, Apple does own Sun’s death, and it’s almost shocking that something like this hadn’t already happened.

Apple’s history of secrecy is long and storied, but hardly seen as scary by itself. We spend a lot of time trying to crack it for stories, and just as much laughing at how extreme it is—even Apple’s office employees in California are constantly monitored by cameras, forced to pass through absurdly complex security gates on a daily basis, carrying prototypes in black cloaks and flipping on warning lights in rooms when the cloaks are removed from the devices of idolatry.

But there’s a lot at stake for Apple, so to an extent their paranoia is understandable: keeping a device like the iPhone secret keeps their strategy out of competitors’ view, and more importantly ensures an all-out media eruption when it goes public on schedule. There is no more secretive company in tech, and there is no device more important to keep secret than the iPhone.

Apple’s also had, since the early days, a punitive attitude towards those who betray them. Stories of Steve Jobs not giving his best friend and early employee Dan Kottke pre-IPO stock because of disagreements, or banning difficult journalists from having access to the company’s products or briefings come to mind. (Disclaimer: But not all.) I’m hardly saying that killing is in the character of the company, but there has sometimes been a price to pay for crossing Apple.

This ethos becomes dangerous when combined with billions of dollars and the dubious values at Chinese manufacturing companies like Foxconn, which’ve placed profit above human rights in the past.

—Note: Foxconn is headquarted in Taiwan, but does the vast majority of manufacturing in China—specifically at the 270,000-employee plant in Shenzhen.

Foxconn may be huge, but they’re not unique, and if they can’t keep Apple’s hardware plans quiet, it’s easy to imagine another manufacturing conglomerate stealing their contracts worth untold billions. It’s a scary and very real threat to a solid business relationship, and a subtly tyrannical one.

But the stakes are much higher at Foxconn’s campus (to use a generous word) than at Apple’s. If an Apple employee leaks a product, he could lose his job, and Apple would lose what amounts to some free advertising—after all, leaks aren’t a bad way to build buzz either. If a Foxconn employee does the same, he endangers thousands of jobs, billions of dollars in contracts and a vital relationship for his company. That’s an unrealistically, recklessly high responsibility to ask each employee—Sun and his alleged torturer—to shoulder. Imagine yourself in Sun’s shoes: You have just lost a prototype of the world’s most coveted gadget, built by the world’s most unforgivingly secretive electronics maker. Would you like your life to be hung against the balance of billions of dollars, in a country with lax labor laws and a history of running its citizen over with tanks?

But wait, Apple says, let us be clear:

We are saddened by the tragic loss of this young employee, and we are awaiting results of the investigations into his death. We require our suppliers to treat all workers with dignity and respect.

They require every last line worker to keep secrets worth billions of dollars; they require Foxconn bosses to make sure these employees keep their mouths shut; they require that suppliers treat their workers well. Of those, requirement they’re most willing to talk openly about also sound the most like an afterthought, and to “require” something doesn’t necessarily mean you really expect it.

(As an aside, who’s to say that the case didn’t leave China with all the devices, and through the many handlers in the shipping and airline companies, ahem, lose a little weight during the complicated transit? And why weren’t such valuable prototypes delivered by hand? Art museums do this, and they don’t even have industrial spies to deal with.)

Rightly or not, Sun was the only guy Foxconn felt it could hold accountable for the mess it found itself in, a judgment which probably cost him his life, and which his employer felt tremendous pressure to make. But this scenario could have easily been foreseen, and the matter of how much human risk Apple calculated it could take before a 25-year-old man ended up dead is at least as important a question as how they respond to it.

Today I got my wish with a new product form WildCharge for the iPhone that allows Pre-like charging by just sitting the iPhone down. The good news is that the charge system works on any iPhone from the original to the new 3GS.

The WildCharge Skin is a durable form fitting case that can protect the iPhone from drops and has a little part on the inside that plugs into the charge port of the phone. Then all you need to do is sit the phone on the WildCharger Pad to get power to your phone. The skin is available for $34.99 and a kit with the skin and the charge pad is about $80. The only downside I can see is that it appears you have to remove the case to synchronize your phone.

Navigon has announced a new application coming to America for the iPhone 3G and 3G S soon called MobileNavigator. The app is only compatible with devices running the 3.0 OS update. The app stores a full map database on the iPhone and offers turn-by-turn routing.

The App will be offered in Lite and full versions. The Lite version will not have the navigation capabilities, but will offer maps and a POI database. The full version will offer those features and driving directions. The maps rotate depending on the orientation of the screen. The app features Reality View Pro, Lane Assistant Pro, and Speed Assistant modes.

The man, Steve Bierfeldt, was detained for carrying too much money. Not that this is a crime or anything (it isn’t), but it was enough of a phantom infraction for the unnamed TSA official to remove him from line, put him in a windowless room, and interrogate him for an hour.

Enter the iPhone, and one of its many voice recorder apps (keep in mind this happened in March, so no 3.0 recorder just yet). Thanks to the recorder, we can now read about gems like this:

On a recording a TSA agent can be heard berating Bierfeldt. One sample: “You want to play smartass, and I’m not going to play your f**king game.”

All that because Bierfeldt, who’s in the employ of former presidential candidate Ron Paul, was trying to bring $4,700 in campaign funds onto an airplane. An ACLU lawsuit is pending, which is probably the least surprising part of this entire story

600MHz CPU, 256MB of RAM

Apple’s being pretty cagey with the hard specs of the iPhone 3G S, but apparently T-Mobile Netherlands didn’t get the message — it’s just posted up a specs page listing 256MB of RAM and a 600MHz CPU. That’s up from 128MB and 412MHz in the first-gen and the 3G, and it’s basically exactly what was rumored. Of course, the 3G S also has that new PowerVR SGX graphics chip that supports OpenGL ES 2.0, so the total speed boost is probably more than just pure clock speed, but we’ll find out for sure when we get our hands on one.

The iPhone 3GS:

I expect Apple to announce updated iPhones with significantly faster processors, twice the RAM, and twice the storage. I expected prices to remain the same as the current lineup: $199/299 for 16/32 GB, respectively. The video camera is going to be a major selling point.

Lower-priced iPhones:

I believe this is true, and the new price will be $99. But since I expect the new top-of-the-line iPhone 3GS to start at $199, that means the $99 iPhone must be something else. I see two possibilities: (a) a new device, something that is to the iPhone what the iPod Mini was to the original iPod; or (b) the existing 8 GB iPhone 3G, unchanged but reduced in price.

And an iPhone nano might round out the three tiered line some day, but not tomorrow.

“Marble”:

While I am convinced that “Marble” is a real design project at Apple, I no longer believe it is slated for Snow Leopard. A new visual appearance isn’t something Apple can spring on third-party developers at the last moment. If they plan to ship Snow Leopard soon – say, by the end of August – that just isn’t enough time to allow developers to update their software to look good under a new UI theme.

Oh, and that about tablet thing… Gruber seems to think it exists in some shape or form, but don’t expect it tomorrow. Like the rest of these predictions, that sounds pretty safe.

Wholesaler China Ontrade.com has posted parts from the next-generation iPhone 3G 2009: The LCD screen and the middle internal bezel. They even have pictures comparing the new parts to the old ones:

The wholesaler says the following in their site:

This is great honor for China Ontrade (HK) chinaontrade.com to be the 1st started to supply iphone 3gen 2009 parts directly from factory

It looks like the web site and the new parts are legit, but who knows. They also sell every single spare iPhone 3G part you can imagine—as well as original factory parts for Blackberry, Nokia, LG, HTC, MacBooks, and even Nintendo. They claim the new iPhone 3G 2009 parts will ship “within 5 to 12 working days.”

As expected, there is no OLED screen in sight. Unless they have another product using the OLED, which I highly doubt.

Yves Guillemot crossed his name off the list of people who have yet to predict that Apple will become a bigger player in gaming hardware today. He did that as part of his explanation about how he thinks the home console market is going to transform gaming as we know it.

“There’s also a new entrant in the business,” he said, after riffing off the looming gaming potential of set-top boxes. “[That entrant is] Apple, with the iPhone. And we don’t think they will stop there.”

Guillemot made the comments about Apple during Ubisoft’s conference call to report the company’s finanicial results for its fiscal year ended in March. The head of the company behind hits such as Assassin’s Creed and Splinter Cell has repeatedly addresses the topic of the next generation of consoles in these earnings costs. He touched on it again, when asked by a financial analyst on the call: “We will see more customers coming to the video game industry .. they will start also to come under the boxes you see under the TV because those TV boxes will be more powerful.. We will see more consoles on which we will be able to put products. As for the next generation of consoles we can’t give you a date but from what we see there is a lot of energy to improve the consoles [that are out now.] We are already working on some of the elements that will appeal in the next generation.”

The allusion to the impending importance of gaming via set-top boxes prompted a follow-up question from an anlyst, and this produced more specificity about why the devices like cable boxes might begin to be discussed in the same breath as Xboxes and Wii: “You saw new interfaces with the Wiimote and also with the DS with the stylus,” Guillemot said. “What we see for the future is they will also be big announcement in interfaces. It will not only happen in consoles but also happen on those TV boxes as well.”

And right after that, Guillemot made his remark about Apple.

One of Guillemot’s older brothers, Michel, runs GameLoft, one of the most aggressive developers of games for Apple’s iPhone.

It hasn’t gone live yet, but soon you’ll be able to download a cool little application that lets you control the aperture, white balance, shutter speed and the shutter with your iPod Touch or iPhone. Granted you’ll need a laptop to act as the middle-man, but still a cool app nonetheless. Hit the jump for a full breakdown on how it works.

Okay, if you’re wondering how it works, here’s a quick run down.
1. You need either an iPhone or an iPod Touch
2. You need a supported Canon EOS DSLR
3. A laptop or desktop computer running the free companion DSLR Remote Server software
4. A USB cable to connect your supported Canon EOS DSLR camera to the computer running the free server software
The DSLR Remote app running on your iPhone (or iPod Touch) communicates to the DSLR Remote Server software via a WIFI connection.
From your iPhone you can control settings such as shutter speed, aperture and white balance. You can of course fire the camera shutter as well. If you have a Canon EOS DSLR camera that supports Live View you can even get a live stream of the camera’s viewfinder on your iPhone.

So just which Canon EOS DSLRs are supported? That’d be the Digital Rebel XT, Rebel XTi, Rebel XS, Rebel XSi, 20D, 30D, 40D, 50D, 5D, 5D Mark II, 1D Mark II, Mark IIn, Mark III, 1Ds Mark II, Mark III. Oh, and don’t worry, the server software will run on both Windows and Mac OS. I’ll definitely be checking this out when it hits the App Store, so I’ll let you know how it goes.

The SlingPlayer iPhone app is finally launching today! It’s going to be $30, Wi-Fi only (No 3G), but will work with older Slingboxes.

We’ve been testing the player for a couple weeks and it definitely works great. On Wi-Fi, it’s smooth—smoother and better looking than other Slingplayers for other mobiles—which is great, since that’s the only way you’ll be able to use it.

It was actually fine over 3G (which I tested with, but you won’t get to use), with slightly more lag and noticeably worse video quality, but that’s the compromise you have to make when you want to WATCH TV ANYWHERE. Looks like that rumor about AT&T not being happy with Sling pulling down so much data over their network was true.

In any case, watching Slingplayer Mobile is fine, but controlling Slingplayer Mobile—especially if you have a TiVo or other DVR—is somewhat clumsy. There are various remote screens that work, but have to refresh whenever you hit a button. It’s slow, so setting up your show will be tedious. That’s the limitation Sling had to work with since the iPhone has no physical buttons. And, there’s black-bar issues around the side (and sometimes top) of the phone that’s occasionally impossible to get rid of (depending on the aspect ratio you’re watching), which is a limitation of the player software.

If this had been 3G-capable, we’d happily pay $30 for the privilege of watching TV on the train or at the bank. As is, you’re limited to Starbucks, your office, or anywhere else where you can latch onto a network.

We are glad that it’s now compatible with older Slingboxes, which is something Sling did very right. You just won’t get tech support for it if you use the older models.

The app should appear in the iTunes App Store at the latest by tomorrow morning.

The app mostly lets people send in live photos of their Diddy worship, which is then compiled into a mosaic (yay?!) and catch up on the chosen one’s twitter feed. There’s also some other banter about the upcoming album in question (not gonna shamelessly promote this…it shamelessly promotes itself). So Diddy zealots, your golden calf has arrived. Now fall on your knees and download. [iTunes]