The HyperMac from Koyono aims to keep your notebook and iPhone charged when you don’t have access to a power outlet. If they had swappable batteries, this wouldn’t be an issue. Apple, however, decided that no one actually wants to change batteries on the go anymore; that’s a last gen feature. That’s fine. The HyperMac looks like it should get the job done.

Not that this should surprise anyone, but Apple has sold only 5,000 iPhones since last week when it officially launched. The phrase “officially launched” is key, since people there have been able to buy the iPhone on the gray market for some time now. And it’s a superior phone on the grey market, since the official phone doesn’t have Wi-Fi. That’s right: a smartphone nearly in 2010 that doesn’t have Wi-Fi.

Apple is finally getting rid of the ass-ugly Winmo-based handheld checkout systems in its Apple Stores. After all, the devices themselves were always kind of an ironic statement to the vast adaption and usefulness of Window Mobile. But those will soon be gone and the checkout systems will use an iPod touch with a card scanner snapped onto the back. Oh, and yeah, it’s a whole lot sexier than the Winmo version and just looks like an iPod touch external battery/case.

Riddle me this: would you pay Apple $30 a month for unlimited access to TV, presumably coinciding with the actual network air time or shortly thereafter? Interesting, non?

PKafka has talked to some industry execs who have been approached by Apple in preparation of just that sort of thing. You pay $30 and get TV – on demand. The Apple TV would ignore the DVR market completely, instead becoming a sort of subscription-based cable TV service.

It’s time to put on the Swami hat and predict just what we have in store for 2010 and beyond. Considering all of the movement in the gadget world in the past few months, I’m fairly sure most of this going to be accurate. Given the current status of some of these technologies, it’s hard to prognosticate very far out but there are a few things that have become apparent over the past year, especially the rise of Android and our expectations for the iPad.

Without further ado… the envelope please:

Apple TV -> 27-inch iMac -> Wall Mount for 27-inch iMac

It’s sad but true: Apple doesn’t care about Apple TV. All the real brain power is going to the desktop and laptop and probably onto the iPad. They’ve made it clear with the 27-inch iMac that they can make a high-resolution screen and powerful computer inside of a case the thickness of a college textbook. Who needs a TV, let alone an Apple TV?

The obvious conclusion here is that the 27-inch iMac becomes a real Apple TV. The Mac Mini already makes a great multi-media system and a quick update to FrontRow, now considered abandonware, may make it a great 10-foot interface.

It isn’t the first, and I assume it’s not going to be the last either.

Apple and AT&T are facing a new putative class action from an iPhone user who alleges that the companies misrepresented the phone’s MMS (multimedia messaging service) capabilities.

Clyde Bernard Franklin filed the complaint (case 1:2009cv00704) in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama on behalf of all Alabama residents last Wednesday.

Japan went crazy over the iPhone when it made its debut in summer last year, but China as another big Asian market for Apple seems to react differently. The iPhone officially launched in China today, offered by China Unicom, one the country’s three big cell phone carriers. But our friends over at major Chinese news portal 163.com are reporting [Google machine translation] that not too many people were actually queuing up to get one, at least in Beijing.

Writing about patents really ought to be banned, since so many companies file so many patents every year that it’s silly to cherry pick this one or that one, drawing attention to something that may never exist. Be that as it may, today an Apple patent was discovered that shows a wireless headset that includes a media player. Think of it as “a Bluetooth” with a built-in MP3 player.

Yeah ok it isn’t that Apple Tablet. But this is a picture, taken around 1990, of the Apple Pen Mac, a little known and never launched Apple tablet project. As far as we can tell there is no other image of this device anywhere on the Internet, and very few references to it at all.

The Pen Mac was a fully functional Mac computer (it even played the Mac startup chime) with a pen based touch screen. The screen itself was identical to the Mac Portable, but with the addition of pen touch. And of course the case was a lot smaller than the Mac Portable. The Pen Mac was supposedly not much more than one inch thick. Users could plug in a keyboard and mouse or easier input.

Holding the Pen Mac in the picture is Glam CEO Samir Arora, who told me about the device over dinner a couple of weeks ago. Arora worked at Apple on the project, eventually going to a spinout company, Rae Technology, which was designing applications for the Pen Mac. Rae Technology eventually morphed into NetObjects.

The Pen Mac project was led by Paul Mercer but was eventually axed in favor of the Newton. Then Apple CEO John Sculley wanted a PDA, not a tablet. From a 2006 NY Times article:

Keep in mind, 100,000 approved apps doesn’t mean 100,000 GOOD apps, but according to the App Shopper, a major milestone has been hit. There are a few technicalities though.

Okay, so Apple just updated the Mac Mini, iMac, and totally redesigned the white MacBook. But what about the MacBook Pros? PC manufacturers are already stuffing Intel Core i7 and i5 CPUs into their flagship notebooks, but the MacBook Pros are still rocking Core 2 Duos. That might change soon according to the OS X 10.6.2 update.

As many of you are aware, Nokia filed a lawsuit against Apple last week in the Federal District Court in Delaware. Nokia’s complaint alleges that Apple has infringed on 10 of Nokia’s patents for various, “fundamental” GSM, UMTS and wireless LAN (WLAN) technologies. In particular, the patents cover wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption. Nokia believes that all 10 patents have been infringed by all Apple iPhone models shipped since the iPhone was introduced back in 2007.

This brings up the question: Why wait until now, Nokia, to sue Apple? Clearly, without speaking directly to Nokia’s legal team, all of the following is pure (albeit educated) conjecture. Nonetheless, with intellectual property (i.e. copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets) becoming increasingly important and relevant to (technology) companies around the globe, it is worth taking a few minutes to explore some of the possible motives/strategies behind Nokia’s latest legal muscle flexing.

Oh, PC. Your hijinx extend back so far that in those days, you had long hair! Apple wins again!

While this newest Apple ad (about which I am being paid millions to post) is entertaining in a sort of superficial, nudge-nudge amirite kind of way, I don’t think it’s really as compelling as most of the other ads, even as lacking in facts as those were. I guess these ads are so simple to make that they can afford to just run with every idea, no matter how vague or half-baked. In the end, I think all this one is going to do is pique viewers’ curiosity about Windows 7 — that is, if they haven’t already dismissed it out of hand.

You can almost hear Steve Jobs flipping out right now. Psystar, notable for its efforts to sell generic PCs with Mac OS X pre-loaded, has just released something called Rebel EFI. It’s software that allows you to instal Mac OS X on generic PCs without having to Hackintosh said PC. (Hackintoshing isn’t for the weak of heart!)

Update: Psystar’s site is down but here are the installation instructions if you managed to grab the trial version in time. Anyone manage to get it to work yet?

Mac users will need to wait a little longer until Apple officially supports Windows 7 through Boot Camp. A support document published today indicates that Apple Genius will be able to help you sometime before the end of the year. No worries though, many, including our own Nicholas, have already found out that even beta versions of Windows 7 currently run fine through Boot Camp. If you run in to a snag, a bit of Google’n or a local 13-year old can probably resolve your problem.