Apr 21

-Apple was granted a whopping 18 patents on Tuesday states. However, the most interesting patent from the group appears to allow a touch display to act as a space-saving RFID tag reader. Apple states that its reason for embedding an RFID tag reader into a touch display is so that the display could also function as an RFID transponder, which would save space since no other RFID antennas would be necessary. Such a reader would perhaps even allow for eventual replacement of employee security badges, such as those worn by Apple employees on the Cupertino campus. One could simply swipe their iPhone to enter a secured area. Other uses include the obvious credit and debit card payment systems and data sharing features, such as when you want to quickly swap contact information with others.

-AT&T reports best-ever first quarter for smartphone sales with 5.5 million, 60 percent of them are iPhones.

-If you travel around with an iPhone in your pocket or an iPad 3G in your bag, Apple knows everywhere you’ve ever been since the moment you started using your device. Even worse, it stores that information in a non-encrypted file structure that is synced with your computer every time you plug your device into iTunes. The iOS privacy revelation was discovered by security researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warren, who have released a piece of software callediPhoneTracker to display where your iDevice has been just by examining the files on your machine stored in the “consolidated.db” file.
Why has Apple started storing these details starting with iOS 4? Is it to support an upcoming feature in MobileMe or iOS 5? What do you think?