Ejecutive

Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy discusses the science behind Apple’s claim that you can’t you cannot see the individual pixels on the iPhone 4 Retina display.

Another fourth-generation iPhone has fallen into the wrong hands, this time to a Vietnamese forum. They claim a Vietnamese businessman bought it in the US and bought it back to Vietnam.

This one seems closer to a production model than the one Gizmodo bought; it has a storage capacity marked on the back, the screws on the bottom are gone, and it actually boots. Looking closer at one of the photographs, it does appear that the new iPhone has a much higher resolution than older models.

Gruber on the Gizmodo prototype iPhone saga:

Imagine, say, that someone offered to sell you a unique and notable piece of stolen artwork. You pay them and take the item. You are subsequently arrested and charged with buying stolen property. What do you think your chances are of being acquitted on the grounds that you didn’t know for certain whether the item was a forgery at the time you paid for it?

Tesco Mobile have some interesting new tariffs for the iPhone, including a stingy 12 month contract at £20/month, and an “unlimited” 24 month contract at £60/month.

LambdaJive:

iSinglePayer, an iPhone application that advocates for single-payer health care reform was rejected from the App Store by Apple because it is “politically charged.” The application displays charts and bullet points about single-payer health care systems, and it allows users to call members of congress. iSinglePayer even calculates your local congressperson using GPS, and displays the amount of money donated to each congressperson from the health sector.

Fine, but then why does the App Store include apps such as the Drudge Reader and Conservative Talking Points?

Orange UK:

Orange UK and Apple have reached an agreement to bring iPhone 3G and 3GS to Orange UK customers later this year.

Not surprising given the recent rumours, and it looks like they’ll have the 3GS too. No indication of pricing, but hopefully more competition means we’ll start seeing more discounts on iPhones.

Simon Parkin has written a very detailed article for Eurogamer on the on-going legal battle between Mobigame and trademark-troll Timothy Langdell over Mobigame’s iPhone game Edge.

VentureBeat reports:

Last Thursday, 25 year-old Sun Danyong committed suicide after a fourth-generation iPhone prototype he was responsible for went missing.

This sounds like something straight from The Onion, but the rest of the article has a very grave tone:

On Thursday, July 9th, Sun got 16 prototype phones from the assembly line at a local Foxconn factory. At some point in the next few days, he discovered that one of the phones was missing. He suspected that it had been left at the factory, but couldn’t find it. On Monday, July 13, he reported the missing phone to his boss. Then, that Wednesday, three Foxconn employees searched his apartment — illegally, according to Chinese law. Accusations are flying that Sun was detained and physically abused during the investigation, although this has not been substantiated (possible evidence: there’s this somewhat garbled and potentially faked instant message exchange from Sun shortly before his death).

What is known: On Thursday — a little after 3 a.m. according to surveillance videos in the apartment building — he jumped out of a window in his apartment building to his death.

A recent cover painting for the New Yorker by Jorge Colombo boosted sales of the Brushes iPhone application to 2700 in a day.

On Monday, Mr. Sprang said the application had its highest selling day since it was first released into Apple’s App Store in August, with 2,700 copies at $4.99 apiece flying off the virtual shelves.

“That’s even bigger than when Apple featured the application on iTunes,” said Mr. Sprang, who estimated that on average the application sells roughly 60 to70 copies each day.

Colombo used Brushes to make the cover

Then try and try again, at least with submitting your iPhone application to Apple’s App Store.