 It looks like Twitter’s acquisition of the developers of the Tweetie app for iPhone is about to serve up the ‘official’ Twitter app for Apple’s smartphone.
Tweetie 2 has disappeared from the App Store this week, suggesting that the developers are about to finally release the first official Twitter app for smartphones.
The cannily-named “Twitter for iPhone” should arrive within the next few days, we will be sure to update this news story the second it does.
Whether or not we will see an iPad version bundled with it is still to be seen.
Twitter has previously confirmed that it was preparing a dedicated “Twitter for iPad” app and that it was is coming shortly.
Via TechCrunch
By Douglas MacMillan and Adam Satariano
July 1 (Bloomberg) — A Verizon Wireless version of the iPhone will create a boom in sales of downloadable tools and games for the device, strengthening Apple Inc.’s already close ties to mobile software developers.
Verizon Wireless customers may buy $1 billion in applications, adding to an expected $6 billion in apps through Apple’s App Store in 2011, according to technology research firm IDC. Verizon Wireless will start selling the iPhone in January, two people familiar with the plans said this week.
As the largest U.S. mobile phone service provider, Verizon Wireless gives developers a bigger pool of customers than AT&T Inc., now the exclusive U.S. iPhone carrier. Its network ranks higher than AT&T’s in consumer-satisfaction surveys and may provide a showcase for a wider range of multi-media features.
“We don’t have to do anything — it just increases the size of our audience,” said Andrew Stein, director of mobile business development at PopCap Games, the Seattle-based maker of “Bejeweled” and “Plants vs. Zombies,” two of the top- grossing games in Apple’s App Store. “Hopefully we start to see our sales increase drastically as Verizon customers start moving to the iPhone.”
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 Another day, another iSuppli teardown. The folks at iSuppli have found that the iPhone 4, according to their estimates, costs $188 to make. While this is almost comically low, it says something about Apple’s ability to mass produce phones and the high margins they’re able to make on relatively low-cost products.
The gyroscope chip, for example, apparently costs Apple $2.60 while it costs $2.90 in quantities of 200,000. These disparities pop up in a number of places, which, sadly, lends an air of WTF to the proceedings.
Incidentally, iSuppli is well-known for low-balling these numbers in an effort to convince manufacturers to contact them in order to connect with their preferred suppliers, so grains of salt must be taken.
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 Apple acknowledges the iPhone 4′s reception problems. Their solution: Hold it differently or buy a case. But if this is an Apple design problem, they should fix it for real or give out cases for free.
We have evidence that proves that the iPhone 4 antenna problem was caused by an internal cultural problem at Apple, one that plagues more than just the iPhone 4, but the iPad and probably future Apple products as well.
A source in Apple’s engineering team tells us that the kind of reception issues found in the iPhone 4 are a symptom of an internal issue that’s been going on for a while—extremely inflexible mandates around the industrial design of products during their development. Jon Ive and his team of industrial designers can run “a little amok sometimes”, they said, coming up with and steadfastly insisting on designs that, while aesthetically pleasing, cause the engineering team extreme difficulty in terms of implementation and maintaining the highest levels of functionality.
Apple engineers have evidently had a tough time trying to mitigate things, for example, like thermally-challenged designs and issues related to the fact that wireless signals don’t go through metal. So perhaps this inordinate power wielded by the industrial design team at Apple is at least one factor contributing to a phone design that allows people’s hands to interfere with the antenna.
Now, Apple is facing public backlash over the consequences of those design decisions.
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How can a flawed iPhone be the best yet? Here’s how:
***I’m at dinner. The waitress is slow to take our order. I don’t mind. I reach into my pocket for the iPhone 4. It seems like the fifth time I’m doing this tonight. It’s probably the fifteenth.
It’s nearly impossible to tell which side is the front. Both are slippery and oleophobic and smudged by fingerprints—flat, delicate and hard. I respond in cursory agreement to whatever it is my wife just said. My mind’s too busy concentrating on fingertip sensations, maneuvering so the screen faces the right way when it emerges from its hiding place.
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It looks like Twitter’s acquisition of the developers of the Tweetie app for iPhone is about to serve up the ‘official’ Twitter app for Apple’s smartphone.
