According to survey of 2,300 Japanese retail stores, the iPhone was #1 in customer popularity, beating out all of those crazy, wonky phones they sell in Tokyo with names like the WonderFetus 100 Softbank X200-900 and the Brad Pitt Special Edition E900 from Sanyo with built-in TV tuner, can-opener, and fishing lures.

George Hotz, the 20-year old hacker who originally unlocked the iPhone, has released a jailbreaking application for the iPhone 3GS codenamed “purplera1n.” It’s currently Windows-only (Windows 7 not supported), and requires the latest iTunes installed, and an iPhone 3GS with the 3.0 firmware.

Hotz mentions in a blog post that the jailbreak for Mac is “coming soon.” The iPhone Dev Team did release a unlock for 3.0 which did not work on the iPhone 3GS, but Hotz’s version does (although it doesn’t free you from your current carrier).

Welcome to the world of the future! In the future your iPhone will be able to tell you where you are and then adapt to those locations, turning things on and off (ringer, etc.), changing wallpaper (from Megan Fox to cute kittens in church), and from earth to space when you go on an intergalactic trip to free the citizens of Mars from the evil Cohaagen. Perhaps you ringtone could change to this?

Basically this is a patent for something folks have been thinking about for years - targeted messaging based on time and location. Advertisers would love this but I doubt many of us want to be reminded by our iPhone to turn off our Shout The Devil ringtone while talking to the Dalai Lama.

Boy oh boy did I love reviewing the Sonos Bundle 150. The Sonos multi-room home audio solution is superb. One wart to the system was the controller: the scrollwheel was a little cumbersome for some actions, not to mention outrageously expensive as a stand-alone component. Looks like a new touch-screen controller is due out soon, though, which should remove one complaint from my review. Or you can keep using the free iPhone controller with its touch-screen interface right now.

So I’m going through my twitter stream a while back and I see several links from some former colleagues of mine, pointing to a new iPhone app called ColorSnap, by Sherwin-Williams. So what right? There are a million (ok, fifty thousand) iPhone apps out there—what’s so interesting about this one?

Well, two things. One, it was developed by my former employer, Resource Interactive, for whom I have the utmost respect and must also disclaim. Two, it is a tool of sorts, which I seem to be more interested in these days rather than just games or social networking. I wanted to check it out.

How it works.
You use ColorSnap to take a picture of anything (a room, an object, whatever). After the image is selected and zoomed in to the right spot in the application view finder, you move your finger over that image and a small square-shaped magnifier follows your finger around and shows a detail view of the color in that part of the photo. Once you find a color with which you are satisfied, you press the “palette” button and it identifies the primary paint color you have just selected and offers two secondary colors that go with it. For example, if you have a dominant object in a room, like a giant red leather couch, you could use this tool to find some supportive secondary colors for the walls and furniture surrounding it.

Old NES controller, meet iPhone. An enterprising individual over on the iPhonefr.com forums (careful, everything is in French!) has turned one of the most iconic controllers of all time into something that holds one of the most iconic electronic gadgets of the present day.

The Wired Gang has an investigation into the hot and burny iPhones 3GS that are coming out, finding that many are getting so hot as to be uncomfortable. Once these reach a certain point they become a toasty brown and could completely fail.

In a move that should have been done years ago, the top mobile phone suppliers of Europe have all signed an agreement that micro-USB will be the standard phone charging port. Soon consumers will not have to fret over charging cables as all the phones from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, LG, NEC, Qualcomm, Motorola, RIM, Samsung, Texas Instruments, and even Apple sold in Europe will all charge via micro-USB. We’re just curious if Apple is going to finally retire the Dock Connector from the iPhone or produce some sort of micro-USB adapter to comply with this agreement.

There are more than 10,000 games on the App Store, according to Apptism. That’s 20% of all apps released on the store: how the hell do you decide which one to buy? We can’t help you there, but we can keep serving you up reviews of recently released games so you can decide for yourself. We spent the week fumbling around with 5 of them: Tradewinds 2, Castle Of Magic, Archon, Jungle Bloxx, and Pocket Gold. Read on for our impressions

While a nice, toasted brown color signalizes a perfectly done marshmallow to yours truly, it’s a bit alarming when it’s streaked across the back of an iPhone 3GS. Now, we knew that the 3G could get pretty warm, and would even warn you when it was getting dangerous.

But the 3GS appears to have a different strategy: let it get so hot that it burns the paint.

Okay, the situation surrounding the App Store and its approval process continues to get weirder and weirder.

As you may have heard, an application featuring nudity first appeared in the App Store yesterday. Today, that app was removed, which everyone presumed was a move by Apple. But the developers said that the removal was its own doing because its servers were getting slammed with picture requests. Then more applications claiming to have nude photos started appearing. And now Apple is apparently saying none of these apps will be allowed in the App Store. But that seems to contradict its own rating system that now clearly allows for nudity.

This makes no sense. To the point where I’m not sure there is anyone actually in charge of all of this for Apple. Instead, I’m starting to think this whole system is run by a group of people, all with different thoughts on the approach Apple should take with apps. And none of whom seem to communicate with each other very well.

I just came back from the official pre-launch event for the iPhone 3GS in Japan, organized by telecommunications giant SoftBank (the exclusive carrier in Nippon). The iPhone is often said to be rather unpopular in this country (which isn’t true), but even though the event began at 10 in the night, it was totally packed.

Wait, what? There’s pornography on the Internet? When did this happen? It must be, like, a new thing, otherwise I cannot understand the curiosity over a newly updated iPhone app called “Hottest Girls”. It’s $1.99, and includes pictures of women, some of whom are topless. It’s almost like living in Europe, where topless women can be found on magazine covers and advertisements.

Tokyo-based electronics company Lancerlink has announced the iJector [JP] today, an LCOS projector that you can use with your iPod or iPhone. Shaped like a dock, the device makes it possible to watch video stored on your iPod on the go via its built-on stereo speakers (3W×2ch).

Ugh. Don’t you hate when you get yourself all psyched about a new product and then you use it and realize it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to? That was kind of my experience with Gokivo, the first turn-by-turn GPS app for the iPhone, released on the heels of the iPhone OS 3.0 launch. Unfortunately, despite having some cool features, Gokivo just didn’t work as a turn-by-turn GPS solution. Though it did occasionally get me from point A to point B, there were so many bumps on the road that I found it better to simply use printed Google Maps directions.

So we just got word that HTC will be the first manufacturer to bring Adobe Flash to the Android platform with the release of its new Hero / Sense device. If you needed more proof that Android is here to stay and will not sit on the sidelines in the mobile operating systems game, this is it. If you think about it, the iPhone is now the only platform with substantial weight on the market that doesn’t boast support for Flash.

With the new Flash Player 10 just around the corner and HTC officially joining the Open Screen Project, Android, Symbian OS, Windows Mobile, and Palm WebOS will be among the first platforms to support full web browsing and access to virtually all Flash-based Web content.

There’s a long thread at Apple’s discussion board about sporadic Wi-Fi failures under iPhone 3.0. It seems that the Wi-Fi eventually poops out, resulting in no Wi-Fi connectivity even inches from the router. The only fix seems to be turning off push email.

Essentially, WiFi works fine after the phone has been freshly booted (i.e. right after a restart) - however, once it has put itself into standby mode it will no longer download data over a WiFi connection after the phone is turned on again. It remains able to find the WiFi network, but simply refuses to download data over it.