What could possibly be cooler–at a trade show or swap meet–than processing credit card payments via your iPhone or iPod Touch?  Engadget reports that a company called Square is developing just such a solution–with a magstripe reader that plugs into the headphone jack, yep the headphone jack, of the iPhone. It’ll even capture signatures that look like they were written with those fat preschool crayons.

Tags: card reader, credit card, merchant, payment, processing, swipe

Forget about battery life and brightness for a moment and think about how helpful (or just plain cool) it would be to have a video projector built-in to your iPhone or iPod.  According to Digitimes, a pretty reputable tech manufacturing rag, Apple has commissioned Foxconn (one of the companies responsible for making current iPods and iPhones) to develop the technology to do just such a thing.  According to the quoted source,  projector-enabled sets will be available for the end of 2009.  Almost makes you wish you hadn’t re-upped with AT&T to get that 3gS doesn’t it?

Tags: 3g, 3gs, digitimes, foxconn, iphone, ipod, micro-projector, project, projection

The idea of an FM receiver in the iPhone has excited many a commentator over the last several years, because sometimes, you’ve got to set aside podcasts and iTunes and just listen to the radio.  The hyperlocal nature of terrestrial radio makes it a cultural staple, yet it’s conspicuously absent from the iPhone.  Apparently, that may be changing when iPhone 3.0 hits some time in the next 8 - 10 months.

And how about song-tagging, so you can purchase the currently-playing song from iTunes.  Some folks think High Definition (that is, digital) Radio is required to do this.  Actually, the text labels embedded in most FM broadcasts should be sufficient to drive links to iTunes Music Store…. if this was Apple’s style.

iHeartRadio and similar apps already pipe HD-quality data into the iPhone (over 3G)–and those don’t offer links to the iTunes store. If an FM chip is coming in iPhone 3.0, it will probably be used first and foremost for navigation-related features like traffic advisories and weather, and if we get radio out of the deal (like on some of the Nokie N-Series phones), then it will just be a happy little bonus.

Me, I’ll take photo messaging and a camcorder app, please.

Tags: camcorder, fm, gps, hd, hd radio, iphone, itunes, navigation, nokia, radio, software, video

In this case, it’s on a t-shirt, which you can buy (of course).   Inspired by DaVinci and H.G. Wells, the steam-powered iPhone probably doesn’t *quite* have the appeal of our 3G unit, but we have a feeling these guys are going to sell a lot of T-shirts.

Coincidentally, there’s an entire market based on wearable goofiness. I happen to own a t-shirt that has a picture of a salad-munching brontosaurus.  Under the bronto is a slogan, “Never Forget.”

Tags: clothing, goofy, iphone, isteamphone, t-shirt, tshirt

The iPhone blog posted a picture of a home-brew iPhone stand made with pencils and rubber bands.  While we’re not altogether excited by the loss of productivity involved in the conception of this silly home-brew device, we are impressed with the ingenuity of its office-dwelling inventor.

But the accessory that takes the cake for silly-ness has got to be the iShelf, a stand for music CDs that holds the up so that they look like the images in a cover flow view on the iPod.  Hehe, can’t say we’ll be buying one of these any time soon.

Tags: accessories, cover flow, homebrew, iphone, ipod, ishelf, itunes, stand