Hub Innovations founder Jaime Smith didn’t set out to become a consumer product designer, but found himself hosting a booth at 2012 International CES. At CES 2012 he showed the REV360 rotating iPad case, Prizm tablet and phone stand, and iPhone back-plate case.

Apple started notifying iPhone 4S pre-order customers today that they can expect to receive the device by October 14th, the official on-sale date for the iPhone 4S in the U.S. The company sent out official Shipment Notification e-mails, along with UPS tracking numbers and estimated time of delivery. And If you placed an order last Friday on Apple’s website, if wouldn’t surprise us if a few of those packages get in the hands of customers a bit early.

Rumors of an iPhone 5 Apple event have been circulating for a while, but we haven’t had any concrete evidence of when will Apple will be holding the event…until now. According to AllThingsD.com, Apple will unveil it’s new iPhone by October 4th, and it will be made available for purchase a few weeks after the announcement.

Due to a recent ruling from the Library of Congress (who has power to add exceptions to certain copyright laws), Apple may have a difficult time taking a stronger stance against jailbreaking of their devices. According to the New York Times, this ruling would mean it is now “… legal to bypass a phone’s controls on what software it will run to get ‘lawfully obtained’ programs to work.”

In various models, the iPhone has been on the market for about three years now. However, in that time they’ve managed to go from the initial announcement and launch of their first phone to a must-have device for any tech geek and Apple fanboy. They’ve even managed to completely embarrass RIM, Nokia, HTC, Sony Ericsson, and others. According to data from Goldman Sachs, Apple, in the light blue, has clearly surpassed all the other companies combined in terms of handset profit.

Well, of course he did! It’s an Apple product, so who else would have a full review before the product’s available? Gizmodo? Ha! David Pogue? Well…perhaps. But this time, it’s Mossberg, and he’s mostly quite impressed. Walt breaks the review down into six categories: Design, Screen / Voice / Battery / Camera, FaceTime, Multitasking, Folders, and The Big Downside. I’ll let you just go ahead and guess what last one is. [Hint: It has nothing to do with Apple or the iPhone hardware itself.]

iOS 4 is finally here, and it is certainly worth the upgrade. Or is it? Regardless of whether you are updating your device, iOS 4 certainly does have plenty of great, new features…as long as you have an iPhone 3GS or will have an iPhone 4. Perhaps one of the biggest let downs about this version of the iOS is that multitasking is being left out of first gen iPhones and the iPhone 3G.

In a press release out of Cupertino this week, Apple announced it is suing HTC for patent infringement in 20 different cases. According to Apple, the patents in question deal with the iPhone’s user interface, underlying architecture and hardware, meaning that HTC is being attacked from all sides on this one. While the specific patents aren’t mentioned, this could become a long battle for HTC to stay above water if it turns out Apple’s case is well presented.

Bill Gates obviously no longer works at Microsoft, but he does still have quite a loud voice when it comes to the tech community considering what he did to build the empire that is Microsoft. In an interview with Bill Gates where he was asked what he thought about Apple and their new iPad, Mr. Gates answered with an interesting remark, in my opinion…

Despite being around for a while, the image above of the possible fourth generation iPhone has gone relatively unnoticed thanks to the iPad announcement. However, according to both Engadget and AppleInsider, the photos come from a pretty credible source. Furthermore, I noticed that the larger frame around the iPhone in the image is very similar to the one we saw in the leaked iPad photos that turned out to be correct.