ReadWriteWeb posts about Ben & Jerry’s, the ice cream company, releasing an Augmented Reality feature as part of their Scoop of Happiness iPhone app to increase consumer engagement (or should we say enthrallment?). What’s unique about this particular AR implementation is that it doesn’t require custom QR codes or other customization to be printed on the packaging to unlock the animation. All you need is to run the app and point it at the lid of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream carton and the app automatically recognizes the printed logo of the flavor. Collect all four and you unlock custom wallpapers for your phone.

Will automatic logo recognition become the norm? The video below imagines a world where this is the case.

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

After looking at the video below, which shows off the signature Apple User Interface, it’s very clear to me what Apple is doing here. The iPad is not a computer, it’s not a replacement for your netbook, notebook, or desktop. The iPad is a $500 entry into book publisher’s most lucrative category, the coffee table book.

Pay particular attention to the UI gestures that drive the photo album app. Forget those old photo albums you have lying around. We’ve all gone digital anyway and it was always awkward to hand a visiting relative a laptop to look at photos of their grand-kids. Projecting them onto the TV, despite the good intentions, always felt like the 21st century equivalent of the dreaded carousel projector slideshows that neighbors used to inflict on each other to back in the Sixties.

Early media tech media coverage panned it and I don’t blame them, the iPad is no replacement for your computer. This device, as the iPod before it, was not designed for the techie. The iPad is not a computer, it is an animated book, an upgrade to the static kind. The iPad is going after the coffee table, photo album, scrapbooking markets all rolled into one. It’s appeal is to those that like to curate and display. It’s a glass showcase for your memories which are, more often than not these days, in digital format.

And it plays games.

- video from engadget.com

Gizmodo has the goods on the Courier Tablet while Wired’s Gadget Lab has the summary (and hilarious mockup) of something iLounge is calling an the iPad.

Either way, folks are looking for a way to innovate beyond the touch screen and netbook form factor. I’m not so sure this is the solution. If it’s going to be this big anyway, what’s the big objection to a keyboard?

Great story of how Kevin Miller tracked down his stolen iPhone using Mobile Me’s Find my iPhone app.

While Kevin’s friend walked the streets of Chicago with a broadband modem-enabled laptop, they homed in on the actual person who had taken their phone and confronted them.

“Have you got it?” I asked as I marched up to the guy, acting far more intimidating than I felt. Our iPhone-pilfering friend apparently works at the sketchy bar, and as he fished around in his bag, he gave a questionable alibi about having found the phone, intending to return it, but being intimidated by “all these scary-looking messages” that kept popping up on the display. “Um, yeah, those were from me,” I replied curtly. He pulled my phone out, totally unharmed, and handed it over. I resisted the urge to giggle.

Kevin acknowledges that this wouldn’t have been possible if the phone’s battery died

I’d been amazed that the phone had enough battery life to make it through the night and still beam its location; the moment its battery was dead, then it would be game over for our little scavenger hunt. I unlocked my phone and saw almost 20 missed calls. And then, at that very moment, the iPhone shut down and displayed the “Connect to power” icon. My phone’s battery literally hung on until the second it was in my hand. I wuv you, iPhone.

Beautiful.

UPDATE: There’s a Nokia version of this product too – a bit more geeky but if you know what you’re doing, quite powerful.

One of the things that just seems crazy to me is that the iPhone cannot run applications in the background. The iPhone developer site explains:

If you are running an application such as AOL Instant Messenger on your iPhone, everytime you receive a call or browse away from the application you would be signed out, you would lose any unread messages, and your conversations would end.

Watching Stephen Colbert last night, it hit me. The iPhone is the internet in 1997!

Featured at last week’s Japanese iPhone Developer’s reception hosted by Six Apart I saw Finger Piano, a cool little app that allowed you to play the piano on your phone. As the bars move down towards the keys, you press them to carry the tune.

The thing I like about this video? The fact that it requires a friend to play.

In the absence of any real substantive announcement from today’s MacWorld, people are talking up a fictional device announced by The Onion, the MacBook Wheel. I’m assuming you’ve already seen the video but here’s a screenshot of the predictive sentence feature with some choice samples.

Steve Jobs ain’t no dummy. Robert Cringely writes,

Apple introduced the iPhone at $599 to milk the early adopters and somewhat limit demand then dropped the price to $399 (the REAL price) to stimulate demand now that the product is a critical success and relatively bug-free. At least 500,000 iPhones went out at the old price, which means Apple made $100 million in extra profit.

Had nobody complained, Apple would have left it at that. But Jobs expected complaints and had an answer waiting — the $100 Apple store credit. This was no knee-jerk reaction, either. It was already there just waiting if needed. Apple keeps an undeserved $50 million and customers get $50 million back. Or do they? Some customers will never use their store credit. Those who do use it will nearly all buy something that costs more than $100. And, most importantly, those who bought their iPhones at an AT&T store will have to make what might be their first of many visits to an Apple Store. That is alone worth the $50 per customer this escapade will eventually cost Apple, taking into account unused credits and Apple Store wholesale costs.

- The Puppet Master 

Not only that, think of all the free publicity this stunt created. All eyes will be on what gets put into the next version of the Apple OS, due to ship next month. . .

Turns out Forbes columnist, Daniel Lyons, was the one behind Fake Steve Jobs’ blog. Brilliant timing too (heh), his satirical novel written in the voice of Mr. Jobs is due to hit the shelves in October. He was outed by a reporter at the New York Times who received an advance copy of the book for review.

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Steve Rubel points to an interesting development of Apple’s iTunes client.

The addition of PDFs to iTunes is more than just a mildly interesting occurrence. iTunes, as a ubiquitous cross-platform app, has its own embedded browser that powers the music store. It’s conceivable that Apple could turn iTunes into a dedicated RSS reader that operates like Safari and become a clearing house for all subscription-based content. In addition, wireless is on the way according to this patent filing.

Taking this a step further, it’s also highly possible that if iTunes enhances its DRM to include other enclosures it will move into e-books and or e-magazines. Oh, and where might those eBooks be consumed?

- via Micropersuation

I’d take this one step further. One of the more lucrative lines of business for the news business is the timely delivery of profiled news. Could iTunes become a platform for newspapers to delivery their premium content to subscribers? With a built-in browser and DRM, the iTunes client becomes much more attractive than email or even some of the current branded RSS readers such as the one available from USA Today.