Apple on Tuesday officially announced its iPhone 5 launch event. According to the invitation received by The Loop, the event will be held on October 4 at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif. campus. The event will begin at 10:00 am PT.

The new app utilizes the iPhone's camera to identify denominations of U.S. currency

A new iPhone app could help the visually impaired recognize the difference between denominations of U.S. currency. 

Austin Seraphin, a blind iPhone user, uses an app called Color Identifier to help him "see" colors around him. He has described the iPhone as "the greatest thing to happen to the blind for a very long time, possibly ever."  (Source: cbsnews.com)

Just a bit more than a year after we first laid eyes on iPhone OS 3.0, Apple is back with the latest big revision of the OS that powers the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. iPhone OS 4 is shipping this summer (iPad in the fall), and the developer preview will be out today. iPhone 3GS and new-gen iPod touch will get all the features, but some features won't make it to the iPhone 3G, original iPhone, and older iPod touches. The biggest new feature is multitasking, which Apple says is going to be the "best" implementation in the smartphone space, though it's obviously not the first. App switching is activated by double tapping the home button, which pulls up a "dock" of currently running apps, and Apple claims it can do this without hurting battery life or performance for the front app. Unfortunately, this multitasking won't be available for devices older than the 3GS and new iPod touch. Multitasking is just one of seven different new "tentpole" features, including Game Center, enhanced Mail, and more...

Notable new features for users ("tentpoles" are in bold):

Multitasking.

Spell check (like on the iPad).

Bluetooth keyboard support (again, on the iPad).

User-defined wallpaper (a jailbreak favorite).

Tap to focus when recording video, just like with photos, and a 5x digital zoom for the camera.

Playlist creation and nested playlists.

App folders for sorting apps! You can even put an app folder in the dock.

Enhanced Mail! You can have a merged inbox view, switch between inboxes quickly, and sync to more than one Exchange account. There's also threaded messaging (at last!) and in-app attachment viewing.

iBooks, just like on iPad, only smaller. You can wirelessly sync books between platforms, a la Kindle. Enterprise features, including remote device management and wireless app distribution.

Game Center. It's like Xbox Live, but for iPhone games. Includes achievements, leaderboards, and match making. It will be available as a "developer preview," and out for consumers later this year. 

Steve Jobs held a town hall meeting with Apple employees late last week following the iPad launch. Wired reports on what was said at the meeting by Steve Jobs. Two of the biggest topics included Google and Adobe.

On Google, Jobs confirms the much-reported competition between the two companies.

On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.” Audience roars.

As for Adobe, Jobs said they are lazy and Jobs blames Adobe for a buggy implementation of Flash on the Mac as one of the reasons they won't support it.

About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.

Those are the main points covered by Wired's article. Many of the details of the Wired report line up, so we believe it likely to be accurate. Some additional key points that we learned:

- Apple will deliver aggressive updates to iPhone that Android/Google won't be able to keep up with
- iPad is up there with the iPhone and Mac as the most important products Jobs has been a part of
- Regarding the Lala acquisition, Apple was interested in bringing those people into the iTunes team
- Next iPhone coming is an A+ update
- New Macs for 2010 are going to take Apple to the next level
- Blu-Ray software is a mess, and Apple will wait until sales really start to take off before implementing it.

Apple today announced that more than three billion apps have been downloaded from its revolutionary App Store by iPhone and iPod touch  users worldwide.

“Three billion applications downloaded in less than 18 months—this is like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “The revolutionary App Store offers iPhone and iPod touch users an experience unlike anything else available on other mobile devices, and we see no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon.”

iPhone and iPod touch customers in 77 countries worldwide can choose from an incredible range of apps in 20 categories, including games, business, news, sports, health, reference and travel.

Apple has announced that there are now over 100,000 titles available at the iTunes App Store. Over two billion downloads have been made, and the store is currently accessible in 77 countries. The total number of apps which have passed through the store is higher; Apple does not count deleted titles.

Though mostly symbolic, the figure does reflect the growing dominance of the App Store. Similar storefronts for Android, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices have comparatively marginal numbers of titles, reflecting both their recent inception and a lack of attention from developers. Apple's efforts have been in effect since July of 2008, when it introduced both the App Store and the necessary iPhone 2.0 firmware.