As has been long rumored , China Telecom announced today that it has signed an agreement with Apple Inc to sell iPhones in China. China Telecom will start taking preorders for iPhone 4S on March 2nd with sales beginning on March 9th.

Japanese blog Macotakara today reports that it has learned from a "reliable" source that Apple is targeting another September or October release for the iPhone this year, continuing a shift away from the mid-year launches seen prior to 2011 and yielding an approximately 12-month upgrade cycle for the iPhone 4S. The report also claims that Apple intends for the later timeframe to be part of Apple's long-term plans for iPhone launches. According to Asian reliable source, next iPhone will be released in September or October , and this cycle seems to be kept for years

As noted by CNET , Apple today updated its environmental site with updated data for 2011, revealing a few tidbits of new information about the company's work on energy usage and other topics. Apple's data center in Maiden, North Carolina Among the additions is a brief discussion of the company's massive new data center in Maiden, North Carolina, which Apple touts as being the only such facility of comparable size to earn LEED Platinum certification. The company also notes that the solar farm being built across the street from the facility will be the largest user-owned solar array in the United States, registering at 20 megawatts

Over the weekend, ABC announced that it had been granted exclusive access to Foxconn's factories in China where the company assembled products for Apple, with the segment scheduled to air on a special edition of Nightline on Tuesday night. ABC has now posted a preview of the segment , along with a teaser video from Nightline co-anchor Bill Weir. Apple promised complete access, no dog-and-pony, no Potemkin Village, but they denied my repeated requests to interview Apple CEO Tim Cook or the senior vice president of industrial design, Jony Ive

Last week, a Digitimes report claimed that Intel was going to delay mass availability of its new Ivy Bridge processors until after June. Ivy Bridge represents the next generation processors from Intel and are expected to power any new Macs in the coming few months

A forum post at Chinese site WeiPhone offers a photo of what is claimed to be the iPad 3's logic board showing an "A5X" system-on-a-chip. Apple is expected to introduce an upgraded processor and graphics package for the iPad 3, with the assumption being that it would be called the A6 after the A4 initially appeared in the original iPad and iPhone 4 and was succeeded by the A5 in the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S

NextMedia / Apple Daily claims to have received the following photos and information through "special channels".

CNet reports that Apple has settled a class action suit over the iPhone 4's antenna. The settlement comes from 18 separate lawsuits that were consolidated into one

Apple has posted a new feature on its site promoting a countdown to 25 billion downloads for the App Store. As of today, nearly 25 billion apps have been downloaded worldwide.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google and several other advertising agencies have been discovered to be circumventing privacy protections in Apple's Safari browser for iOS devices in order to track users through ads on numerous popular websites. Google implemented the technique in order to embed +1 buttons on its ads, tricking users' systems into allowing cookies by using an invisible form submission to make Google's third-party cookies, which are blocked by Safari, appear as first-party cookies that are allowed. To get around Safari's default blocking, Google exploited a loophole in the browser's privacy settings