Zipcar members, can now use their iPhone or iPod touch to quickly and easily find and reserve a Zipcar around the corner or across the globe. You can also honk the horn, and even lock and unlock the doors. The streamlined interface makes for a very smooth ride.

10 COOL THINGS MEMBERS CAN DO WITH THE ZIPCAR APP:

1) Find available Zipcars on a map using your current location, a favorite location or any location
2) Reserve a Zipcar any time, 24/7
3) Sort cars by time available, car type and model
4) View upcoming reservations
5) Easily locate your reserved Zipcar by honking its horn
6) Unlock and lock your Zipcar after scanning your Zipcard at the

start of each reservation
7) Get directions to your Zipcar Tap to contact Zipcar if help is needed during a reservation
9) Extend or cancel reservations on the go
10) Play around with the virtual key fob and make sounds even when you’re not in a reservation

Download the app and kick the tires. See which Zipcars live near you, make fun sounds with the virtual key fob and learn what being a Zipster is all about. Join Zipcar and the app gets even cooler, because then you can reserve, honk and unlock Zipcars with your iPhone. To hear what current members are saying, find us on Facebook. To learn more about Zipcar or to sign up, visit zipcar.com.

CNN launched their CNN Mobile iPhone app today, and it will bring full print and video news reports, and even allow users to record their own news/eyewitness accounts of stories and submit it, if need be.

More from the app description:

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“Maximizing the revolutionary features of iPhone OS 3.1, the new CNN App showcases news of the day through text, video and photos. It also features live breaking news video, push notification, localization and personalization tools, user-generated content capture and upload functionality through iReport, and more.

“The CNN App has what we think

is one of the best user experiences around, and will quickly become an essential daily news source for many iPhone and iPod touch users,”said Louis Gump, vice president of CNN Mobile. “We tailored the best of CNN specifically for them, whether they check in from the beach, the airport or the ballpark.”

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You can even personalize the news to bring local events and new reports, weather, and videos of local interest to your iPhone. It all sounds pretty solid to us.

The app sells for $1.99 in the App Store right now.

It’s hard to believe, but the App Store has recorded over 2 billion downloads as of today. It’s amazing to think about…

The release claims 50 million+ iPhone users, and 85,000+ apps are currently available on the platform, which is pretty mind-boggling in and of itself.

To commemorate the occasion, Apple issued this press release: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/09/28appstore.html

CEO Steve Jobs:

“The rate of App Store downloads continues to accelerate with users downloading a staggering two billion apps in just over a year, including more than half a billion apps this quarter alone. The App Store has reinvented what you can do with a mobile handheld device, and our users are clearly loving it.”

Truer words never spoken, and the numbers prove it.

UK Wireless provider Orange issued a statement today stating that the carrier will begin offering the iPhone in the UK and related territories.

This effectively ends the exclusivity agreement that O2 has held for awhile now on the iPhone.

Part of the statement is here from the site:

“Orange, which has the largest 3G network covering more people in the UK than any other operator, will sell iPhone in all Orange direct channels including

Orange shops, the Orange webshop and Orange telesales channels, as well as selected high street partners. A pre-registration site for customers to log their interest has been launched at www.Orange.co.uk/iPhone”

It has been rumored for awhile now that Apple would end its exclusivity agreement in the region, and now it appears that is the case. It could be a harbinger of things to come in the US and its agreement with AT&T, if whispers prove to be true.

A new patent application filed this week by Apple suggests the iPhone maker is looking to use the device’s accelerometer to detect possible theft of the hardware.
In a application entitled “Acceleration-Based Theft Detection System for Portable Electronic Devices,” Apple describes a system that would analyze movement via a device’s accelerometer to determine whether a theft is present. If the system were to interpret fast movement as a theft, it would initiate an alarm.

“The drive toward miniaturization of electronics has resulted in computer-based systems that are becoming much more portable,” the application reads. “Current portable electronic devices such as laptop computers, hand-held devices such as cellular telephones and personal media devices, such as the iPod from Apple Computer, Inc., and even devices such as compact disc players, are sufficiently compact and lightweight as to make them easily movable. Unfortunately, such ease of transport also implies ease of theft. While the rightful owner of a portable electronic

device may conveniently transport it almost anywhere, so can a thief. ”

It goes on to say that traditional theft-prevention methods like mechanical locks are bulky and tether the device, eliminating portability and convenience. In the proposed system, the accelerometer would be used to determine whether the device is currently in a likely theft condition.

“Typically, theft or other large-scale movement of the device results in an acceleration signal having characteristics different from other events such as shock, impact, nearby machinery, etc,” the application reads. “The detected acceleration as a function of time is thus analyzed to determine whether it corresponds to such large-scale movement of the device, rather than an innocuous event such as the impact of a book dropped nearby. If so, an alarm is produced in order to alert others to the theft.”

The patent was filed by Apple on May 20, 2009 and is credited to Paul J. Wehrenberg of Palo Alto, Calif.

As part of the iPhone/iPod Touch 3.1 Software update released during Apple’s rock and roll event, Mobile Safari gained anticipated anti-phishing features currently present in its desktop version.

However, security firm Intego is criticizing the feature’s inconsistency as being worse than if the feature hadn’t been included at all.

“We’ve had a number of people test [the anti-phishing feature], and some people get warnings for sites that others can load just fine. We’ve tried isolating locations, iPhone/iPod touch models, and whether they are connecting over a cell network or via

wifi, but all we’ve come up with is that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. This is clearly more dangerous than no protection at all, because if users think they are protected, they are less careful about which links they click.”

The desktop version of Safari uses Google’s Safe Browsing API. It’s unclear what technology the Mobile Safari browser uses and what the exact reason is for the inconsistent results, however Intego as well as other researchers promise to continue to investigate the issue.

We’ll update you as this story develops.

Yahoo’s Flickr service now has a native app available in the App Store. The iPhone has become the most popular cell phone camera used to upload photos to the image sharing site and it’s likely this new native app will only increase its popularity among Flickr users.

When you first sign in to the Flickr app, you are required to authorize the app to use your Flickr account, which is done through Safari on the iPhone. After this, uploads to your Flickr account will be handled directly through the app with no further authorization requests (another plus for those who upload on the run).

The app can geotag your photos and offers immediate access to your recent uploads, your entire Flickr stream, and those of your Flickr contacts, making it multi-functional and flexible.

TomTom has postponed the release of its iPhone hardware accessory kit until October, due to unspecified reasons.

TomTom spokesman Kevin Carter confirmed that the company’s iPhone hardware kit will not be available for its previously announced summer release deadline, though no specific reason was given. The accessory is a cradle that will interface with the iPhone and provide enhanced GPS capabilities.

“I can confirm that we have decided to take some extra weeks in order to deliver the highest quality on this innovative product,” Carter said. “So, the car kit will become available for purchase this October on www.tomtom.com.”

Additionally, the official FAQ section on

TomTom’s iPhone page has been updated to reflect the new release date. While the hardware is not necessary to use the software that is currently available in the iPhone App Store, it will amplify the GPS signal for the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS. In addition, the original iPhone and the iPod touch, both of which do not have a GPS receiver, will be able to use the hardware kit.

The TomTom kit will act as a basic suction cup mount for the dashboard or windshield, and will also support hand-sfree calling and music through the stereo system, as well as charge capabilities through the vehicle’s 12-volt port.

It isn’t the only solar charging case on the market, but Novothink’s Solar Surge is the first to receive an official thumbs up from Apple, and thus noteworthy indeed.

The case features an integrated solar panel that should yield 30 minutes of talk time on a 3G network or 60 minutes on EDGE after 2 hours of sun exposure. Plus, the battery is a rechargeable 1500 mAh 3.7 V lithium-ion that offers 120% capacity of the iPhone 3G. The Solar Surge for the 2G iPod Touch will be available later this month for $70, while the iPhone 3G/3GS version will come in sometime in the 4Q of 2009 for the same price.

If you are into this sort of thing, the Solar Surge is probably the most compact and practical solar iPhone charger on the market—and the price point seems to be in line with many standard charging cases, making it an even better deal, and fits in with any “green” consumers ideals quite well too.

AT&T has confirmed that multimedia messaging capabilities will come to the iPhone a few days late, on Sept. 25 — just after the end of summer — bringing to an end months of waiting and speculation.

The service will be available with a software update on the launch date. The update will arrive for customers as a download from iTunes. The feature will only be available for iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS users.

“It was important to give our customers a positive experience from day one,” AT&T said. “We support more iPhone customers than any other carrier in the world so we

took the time necessary to make sure our network is ready to handle what we expect will be a record volume of MMS traffic. We truly appreciate our customers’ patience and hope they’ll understand our desire to get it right from the start.”

AT&T officials said they have been working for months to prepare their systems and network for MMS capabilities on the iPhone, which is expected to bring a great deal of additional bandwidth the the wireless provider’s network. Officials have admitted that the additional bandwidth consumed by iPhone users has been taxing on their data infrastructure, thus the delay in MMS support.