Picsel Technologies and Picsel Research, both based in the UK, have filed a lawsuit against Apple in the Delaware US District Court. Picsel alleges that Apple is illegally using patented screen rendering technology in the iPhone and other devices.

The company has apparently licensed its technology to companies such as Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Palm, Samsung, and others representing 250 million mobile devices worldwide. The technology in question speeds up rendering to make actions like panning and zooming appear smoother.

Apple does not approve of your sense of humor. That is unless you're downloading one of the 80+ iPhone apps related to farting, belching or puking. Next time you're sitting down to watch the cable television show South Park, make sure you have permission from Papa Jobs. The South Park crew was working on an iPhone/iPod Touch app for the AppStore but has now been forced to abandon its work on the project.

Rejected twice from the AppStore for being potentially offensive, the South Park application was already receiving glowing reviews last fall. For fans of the show, the app would have offered a multitude of clips, news, and wallpapers. There was even a feature to associate popular South Park characters to people in your contacts list.

We've already reported in this forum about the patent awarded to Apple for a "Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics." Well it seems they've already flexed their muscle with Google during the development of Android.

Guess what's back in the news. If you guessed a $99 iPhone then you just won the prize. Analysts at Royal Bank of Canada Capital Markets are predicting some changes in the Apple iPhone lineup this summer. However, the $99 iPhone predicted by Mike Abramsky doesn't resemble some of the earlier mockups of an iPhone "Nano" we've seen previously.

As you can see by the specifications above, the cheaper and highly subsidized version of the iPhone would have similar dimensions as its current model counterpart. The main differences would be lack of 3G or GPS support and a less expensive (and less included bandwidth) data plan. Along with the introduction of the basic model, Abramsky and others expect that Apple will also introduce an upgrade to the full-featured iPhone 3G.

It's official. Google Book Search has gone mobile! This means your iPhone just became a library overnight. There are over 1.5 million books available for reading while connected to cellular data or Wi-Fi networks in the US. Due to copyright restrictions only about one third of these titles are available outside the US.

The mobile version of Google Book Search has all of the classics of literature that have been available through the main site, however texts have been optimized for swift downloading and ease of use. Using optical character recognition (OCR) software, Google has converted the works into plain text.