Acoording to a report by Reuters, Apple’s generous customer service may be causing huge problems for victims of iPhone theft. The warranty plan is tied to the iPhone and not the person who owns the phone; this means anyone can take an iPhone to an Apple Store for service or replacement.

The ease of trading in stolen iPhones and selling their replacements makes them nearly as tempting as grabbing cash. In cities from coast-to-coast, reports of iPhone thefts are common. While some thieves sell the phones through the traditional channels of fencing stolen goods, examples abound of stolen iPhones being brought back to Apple, as if broken, for either replacement or a discount on a new unit. ”Apple seems to have not considered stolen devices and instead is relying on the honor system,” says Robert Siciliano, a consultant for Intel Corp’s technology security unit McAfee and an identity theft expert. “The honor system is devised with the mindset that we are all sheep and there are no wolves.” Siciliano says he has known of this problem for a while, but doesn’t see any immediate solution. “Until consumers scream loud enough about this issue, Apple probably won’t do anything about it.”

Apple has yet to comment on the findings within the report but let’s hope a simple solution can be found that will not cause pain for the honest amongst us. The last thing we need is for Apple to change its policies and make life more difficult when it comes to iPhone service and replacement.

Source: Reuters, Image Wikipedia

The folks over at Red Pepper Land came up with an ingenious way to get Siri to pour you a cold glass of beer, completely hands free, using Twitter, an Arduino controller and an R/C toy car. They call it Beeri, and I want it..

When Beeri sees a new Tweet containing the word “pour” she triggers the sequence of preprogrammed pour commands (go, stop, adjust) that interface with the truck’s circuit board to control her movement. Her route is preprogrammed (drive straight) until her two proximity detectors sense her moving away from the puncture wall after impact. This allows her to halt the driving sequence and adjust to a 6 inch depth in order to get the beer to enter the funnel. With a clean pint glass underneath to collect the liquid gold, the only thing left to do is enjoy your tasty beverage.

Hey, no one promised you the cool new future wouldn’t be a little messy, right?

Source: Red Pepper Land

Have an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, looking for more and better apps but need help sorting through the hundreds of thousands piled up in the app store? Want to find more apps like your favorite or get alerted when apps and games go on sale? No worries, we’ve got you covered. Read on for TiPb’s top 5 apps — and web sites! — that help you find more and better apps!

Genius for apps

Genius for apps is Apple’s own recommendation engine built right into the App Store app on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad under the Featured Tab. Since you bought your apps from the App Store, they know what you have and try to find and show you more apps you like. If you share your device and iTunes library with another person, for example your young children, you’ll probably see a lot of recommendations that interest them and not you but you can always swipe an item to remove and help “train” the Genius system. It’s not the most robust or feature packed app discovery system but again, it’s already there. Both iPhone and iPad. [Free - Built in]

AppStart for iPad

By the fine folks at AppAdvice.com, AppStart for iPad’s goal is as simple as it is welcome — to help new iPad owners with a specific focus find the apps they need to do what they want. Sorting the massive App Store and trying to curate it based on task or user type is no small feat so if you know what you want but don’t know how to get started, AppStart is there to do some of the heavy lifting for you. [$0.99 - iTunes link]

Also check out:

• AppAdvice: Their titular app and available as a universal app for both iPhone and iPad. [$1.99 - iTunes link]
  

AppShopper

From AppShopper.com, the app brings all the great website services — new and updated apps, price drops and sales, wish lists and popularity trackers — and puts it right on your iPhone and iPad. It’ll even sync to your AppShopper web account. Universal app – download once, use on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. [Free - iTunes link]

148apps.com

Named after the original iOS 2 limit of 148 apps for device, the site has grown almost as fast as iOS 4′s 11 screen, 12-apps per folder-stuffing potential. They track new apps as well as price drops to help you stay updated and on budget. [Free - Web link]

apps.tipb.com

apps.tipb.com is powered by App Tap and brings their social app recommendation engine right into TiPb.com so you can search for apps from our sidebar (look to your right!), see how other users and sites have rated them, and pretty much figure out what’s what — and what’s not — across a fair slice of the web. [Free - Web link]

Your top apps?

So there you have them, our top 5 apps that help you find more and better apps. Be sure to check out our Picks of the Week and iPad App and Games Forum for more recommendations, and if we missed any of your favorites leave them in the comments below!

Back in September, when iTunes 10 launched, Apple introduced their new Ping social network. This was followed by iTunes 10.0.1 which added the Ping drop down options but also replaced the Genius sidebar with a new Ping sidebar.

Earlier this week, Apple made some server-side changes (which means we don’t have to update iTunes), and now Genius Recommendations have returned to the iTunes sidebar.

If you haven’t selected a song, your sidebar will show you Genius recommendations for all your iTunes-purchased music, however once you select a song, a new sidebar comes up which combines both Genius and Ping. (Genius recommendations will appear at the bottom of the sidebar, and if you’re a Ping user, your Ping activity will be displayed at the top.)

Tell us, are you happy your Genius recommendations are back? Do you like the new combined sidebar? Do you still use Ping?

[TUAW]

Apple has added a Genius tab to the iPad version of the App Store. Tap the tab, agree to the terms of service, and Apple will upload an (anonymized) list of all your apps and games, compare them to lists of millions of other (also anonymized) users, and recommend other apps and games you may be interested in.

So if the what’s new and what’s hot sections just don’t strike your fancy, if the top selling, grossing, and free stuff has lost its charm, if the categories are just impossible to sort through, give the Genius tab a try.

Then come back here and let me know just how smart the newly enabled iPad Genius was for you.

(My results so far: it recommended Fruit Ninja based on Angry Birds, Tetris based on Flight Control, iTeleport based on Brushes, Osfooha based on Twitterrific — which is interesting because I already own all of those I just don’t have them installed currently).

[Thanks @ltaylor5311]

Apple’s new iPod shuffle 4GB with VoiceOver comes with a little something else: the requirement for iTunes 8.1, which is yet to be released. However, in somewhat uncharacteristic style for Apple, their iTunes product page already has a teaser up for just what we can expect in the (presumably immanent?) new version:

• Speed improvements: iTunes gets a speed boost. Now when it comes to loading large libraries, browsing the iTunes Store, and syncing your devices, iTunes responds faster than before.
• Genius sidebar for movies and TV shows: In addition to music, the Genius sidebar now introduces you to movies and TV shows you might also enjoy.
• Import as iTunes Plus: Automatically import music from your CDs as higher quality, 256-Kbps iTunes Plus files. Watch a tutorial to find out how to

Looks like only tangential love at best for the iPhone — not even any Genius for Apps feature! Anyone find anything particularly compelling?

We mentioned this thought in passing alongside Dieter’s report on the Nokia App Ovi Store, which he says has far, far better discoverability than the iTunes App Store:

What Nokia has done is build a sophisticated relevancy engine that can sort apps based on a variety of factors that are actually relevant to you — like what you friends are using, or what kind of app you like to download, or what music you tend to prefer. It looks to be much better than your standard “top 50″ list

What if Apple merely took their own, existing discoverability process — Genius Recommendations, which debuted in iTunes 8 and iPhone OS 2.1 — and extended it to include Apps?

Sure, the automagical playlist generation part of Genius wouldn’t be necessary, but the part of Genius that scans your collection, anonymously uploads its metadata to the cloud, and then compares it with everyone else in the massive ecosystem in order to crowd source recommendations… that could help discoverability immensely. It could give us great apps that go great together, in Apple-speak.

Of course, Apple also has to crack down on short-sighted developers trying to game the search results, but Genius recommendations could go a long way towards cutting through the glut that 20,000+ apps brings with it. What think you?

Joy of Tech are geniuses. Read their cartoons. Laugh. Or just smile knowingly. ‘Nuff said!

One of the new features in the iPhone and iPod Touch 2.1 firmware is the ability to create Genius Playlists on the fly, and right on the device. iTunes 8 introduced the concept of Genius Playlists, which like Pandora and Last.fm, use algorithms based on audio profiling, metadata matching, and (anonymously acquired) end user tastes, crunched in the Apple cloud. Basically, they take a song you like, what you typically like with it (what playlists you include it on), what others who like it also like (what playlists they include it on), and what music mathematically (tempo, tone, etc.) fits in with it. Then they try to predict other songs you might also like — in this case already on your iPhone — and whip you up a near-instant playlist on-demand.

How good is it? That depends entirely on how much music you have on your iPhone (the pool from which it can draw), how closely the metadata matches what’s in iTunes (or it won’t recognize your music — try tweaking the fields if you have trouble), and how many other users have contributed their data to the cloud (because the engine will supposedly get better and better the more information it’s fed).

Okay, so enough about what Genius Playlists are, how do we get them working on our iPhone? Full instructions after the jump!

UPDATE: In order to use Genius Playlists on your iPhone, you have to have the Genius service enabled under iTunes 8, and if you are manually managing your music, have at least one iTunes playlist you’ve dragged to your iPhone (otherwise the iPhone Genius service will not initialize). Also, as mentioned above, if you didn’t get your music via iTunes, make sure you copy iTunes’ metadata as closely as possible or Genius may not recognize your songs. For more, check out the comments below. (Thanks Matt for the tips!)

First, from your iPhone or iPod Touch home screen, tap the iPod App icon. Next, tap on the Playlist button at the bottom (if you’ve customized your layout, you may have to tap More.. first, then hit Playlists). From the top of the playlist screen, tap Genius.

The iPod App will slide up a song chooser. Flick-scroll your way through it until you find a “seed” song you want to use to generate your Genius playlist around. If you don’t have enough music on your iPhone similar to the “seed” song, iPod App will pop up a dialog box to alert you. No worries, pick another song! When you find one Genius can work with, a new, automagically generated playlist will slide up.

If you hate the playlist, just tap New and start again. If it’s okay, but not great, tap Refresh and Genius will use the same “seed” to generate a new, differently ordered playlist (and if you have tons of music, with variations in the exact songs selected). If you loves it, tap Save, and your awesome new Genius list (named after your original “seed” song) will be added to your existing playlists. Get sick of it later? Go back to Playlists, choose it, and hit Edit. From there you can Refresh for variety, or Delete for eternity.

jna from the comments points out that you can also create a Genius List on-the-fly while listening to a song. Just tap to enable the heads-up controls and then hit the Genius icon in the middle. Voila!

Give it a try, and brilliant lists or total duds, let us know just how dazzling your Genius is!