Another busy week has passed us by, and left us with a lot to talk about. Apple made the headlines on a couple of occasions, we got another look at the purported 'budget' iPhone, and we finally entered the post-Google Reader world. Let's take a look back!

So, the much rumored 'budget' iPhone. The rumors of a plastic backed, lower cost partner to the next iPhone just won't go away, and this week we saw what's claimed to be a video showing the device assembled from leaked parts. The jury is definitely still out, but it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out.

  • Purported less expensive iPhone parts assembled for video, knocked off for Android

Apple has been directly in the news a few times this week, too. Early in the week we heard rumors of discussions on-going about an LTE-Advanced version of the next iPhone, while Apple launched their "Back to School" promotion offering gift cards to eligible customers on certain products, and we learned that the next earnings call from Cupertino will take place on July 23. Not done there, later in the week reports emerged that Apple had hired Paul Deneve, formerly CEO of Saint Laurent, reporting directly to Tim Cook on "special projects." Sounds intriguing.

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Elsewhere, we finally entered the post-Google Reader world on July 1, and we've seen a few teething problems for two of the top replacements; Feedly and Flipboard. Flipboard suffered issues early in the week followed by an actual outage, while Feedly reported as over-capacity to many users. Thankfully, as the week wore on, reports of further issues didn't appear.

Microsoft released their much rumored Xbox Music web player at the beginning of the week, and while we still await an iOS app from the folks at Redmond, Mac users can at least now finally access their Xbox Music collection. First impressions are mixed; it's definitely a nice looking client, but definitely lacking on the feature front, particularly for someone who may be new to the service. It also lead us to question whether Apple needs to offer their own web client for the forthcoming iTunes Radio.

Bringing things back in house, Talk Mobile returned this week, with the latest topic being social. A lot of great content came from it, and some really great discussions with the Mobile Nations community. On iMore, we continued our previews of iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks this week with a series of posts covering a range of different areas of the respective OS's. If you missed them the first time around, be sure to check back and give them a read, things are getting exciting as week-by-week we edge closer to release.

And, that's it for this week. If you have a particular favorite item from the past seven days, be sure to share it with us in the comments below!

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