New $100,000 pilot program is now under its way at two Hancock County elementary schools to allow hundreds of kids to have iPads and start doing math, reading books and other school assignments. The program is sponsored with the help of federal grant money and teachers are already concentrated on complete customizing the Apple's tablet experience for every child.

With this new plan students at Allen T. Allison and Weirton Heights elementary schools will be able to send papers via email directly to teachers, as every classroom will be provided with a WiFi connection. The teachers are aimed to make iPad as useful as it can be in students' daily work.

Frank Cary, who is a Weirton Heights Principal, is thrilled with this program:

"They're tired of the paper. This is exciting. It's got color. It brings it to life".

Last week two hands-on videos have been posted on YouTube revealing the new Sony Ericsson's 'PlayStation Phone'.

As it can be seen from the video, the device called Zeus has slide-out physical controls like in Sony PSP but with rumored multi-touch touchpad, 4-inch display and runs on Android "Gingerbread" 2.3.

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Apple surprised everybody when it decided to discontinue its Xserve line on November 5th.  The company officially offered a faster Mac Mini and the Mac Pro, both with Snow Leopard Server installed, as the replacement of the Xserve. IT professionals who maintain data centers small and large claim that these aren’t complete solutions compared to the density of the Xserves. About a third of Xserve shops will be migrating to other hardware within the year.  Some Apple’s System Engineers assure that Apple has another solution in the pipeline beyond what they’ve announced.  Nobody knows what it could be, because Apple builds its own A4 processors, running in parallel, and a data center for cloud services.

Some new promo materials appeared in Apple Stores around the United State. They have an interesting signage which claims that the white iPhone 4 will be available Spring 2011. That confirms an earlier report.  Though, we may hear rumors about the fifth-generation iPhone handset, which also is expected to be released spring 2011. Steve Jobs will most likely announce the device at WWDC ’11. Many believe that Apple sooner will simply release a modified version of the iPhone 4 or a white version of its fifth-generation handset than the white iPhone 4.

Graviboard is an upcoming interesting iOS jailbreak application, which will be soon available in the Cydia Store for $2.99. The application allows iDevice owners to set their icons free by abolishing the gravity that holds them on their places on the Springboard. You may drag these “floating” icons around the screen, and there still might open the apps by touching.

Everybody knows that the iPhone Springboard can’t be turned in landscape mode. Apple wants you to hold the device in portrait mode only. But some apps, like Mail, support the horizontal orientation. So, Cydia developers offer us the alternative solution, a new hack available in Cydia called “SBRotator” ($1.99). If you change your iPhone’s orientation, using the app, the Springboard will just follow it. But Springboard orientation change requires a proper layout change too. SBRotator puts an extra tab which enables you find the configuration that best suits your needs. Moreover, the program allows you to resize icons for landscape mode.

This week 9to5Mac reported that an American clothing and accessories retailer Gap was using Apple's iPod-based POS system in a few of its Old Navy stores. The blog wrongly decided that Apple started to market the custom mobile software used in its own retail stores, and that Gap became a retailer which helps the company to test pilot it.

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Apple added 12 more patents to their lawsuit against Motorola. So, the total number of patents that Apple accuses Motorola of violating reached 24. Motorola claims that Apple infringed on 18 of its patents that include 3G, GPRS, 802.11 wireless and antenna design and accused Apple in refusing to pay a license. Apple’s motion to add 12 more patents to the lawsuit is just counter-suit against preemptive request filed by Motorola in October, which reference 11 patents 11 patents that Apple used in its suit against HTC but not Motorola.

Apple was called the "world's most-sued tech company" since 2008. For example, in 2009 27 patent infringement lawsuits were filed against Apple. Of course, responding to those claims takes lots of time and money.

Michael Katz, the 60 years old Florida man, believes that he was subjects of discrimination. He was denied to be promoted when he worked at an Apple’s retail store because of his age. Now he is seeking back pay and damages in excess of $15,000 from the Cupertino, California, company. He began working in Apple in 2006 when he was 60. Although he expressed his desire to be promoted and there were available positions, each time he was denied. His younger colleagues were selected. They were at least 15 years younger than him. As lawsuit claims, Katz was not given any explanation for his repeated denial of promotion opportunities.

Today Peter Kafka, who is a journalist writing for MediaMemo blog, reported that publishers and Apple cannot still come to an agreement on subscriptions for iPad content in the App Store.  The reason is still the same - publishers want to provide personal data about subscribers to advertisers, while Apple doesn't want to do this.

However, Apple proposes an alternative to the publishers, notably an opt-in form which will allows subscribers to choose whether publications can get an access to a "limited amount of information", which includes user's name, e-mail and physical mailing address, or not.

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You had spent minutes or even hours organizing your countless applications into Folders and finally noticed that folders gone and your apps exploded back across your Home Screen. Not surprising! Unfortunately, the disappearing folders had been noticed already in iOS 4 came out in June. So we see that the bug wasn’t fixed. Since it’s been around for several months and is still around after iOS 4.2 release it’s hard to understand the cause. Some users have experienced it after updating to a new version of iTunes, others after updating their applications on-device or doing hard resets.

Yahoo! has placed the iPhone 4 on the top of obsessions of 2010 and the iPad is the number 3. Facebook came in at number 6. Though, the numbers are not a huge surprise. What is surprising is that the iPhone 4 became the first number after early controversy of the lost/stolen prototype and rumored “Antennagate”. Despite of all doubts the iPhone 4 is the most popular smartphones of the year in terms of sales and reviews.

Today comScore released its monthly smartphone mobile report, which shows again that the Android OS gains more and more points at the smartphone market, while RIM's BlackBerry and Apple's iOS continue to lose its positions. The report is based on the smartphone usage over a period between July and October of 2010, and shows that there 60.7 million people with smartphones in the USA, which is 14% more than three months before. According to comScore, every fourth mobile subscriber uses smartphone.

Other facts:

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Ticondegora Securities analyst Brian White and his team are touring Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, and China this week. In Taipei he met with a few suppliers and heard from them that miniature embedded pico projectors and mobile digital TV will presumably become major selling features in the next-gen smartphones.

Though iPhone were not mentioned among these smartphones, in his note to investors White assures such features would be interesting for Apple to implement in "iPhone 5", which is expected to be released traditionally in June of the next year.

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Caris & Company analyst Robert Cihra today published a note to investors where he appraises Apple's growth as "stunning" and says that iPad will cause approximately 50% of all growth for the company in 2011.

He explains that Apple's success was reached by effective approach through innovation, while the company's competitors are lost "in a sea of otherwise commoditized hardware".

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