As part of its quarterly earnings release today, U.S. Cellular announced that it will begin carrying Apple products later this year, although the carrier offered no additional details on its plans. "We have a number of strategies in progress to increase loyalty and attract more customers, including our announcement today that we will begin offering Apple products later this year

Apple has posted a new contest on the App Store [ Direct Link ], offering a $10,000 gift card to whomever downloads the fifty billionth app from the App Store, similar to previous promotions. Apple said during its most recent earnings call that the company has surpassed 45 billion app downloads.

A new national stolen phone database is having little effect on smartphone thefts in the U.S., according to an article in The New York Times . The country's four major carriers all contribute to the database , which lists stolen phone ID numbers that should not be activated on domestic networks. However, the database appears to be ineffective for several reasons

As noted by The Verge , Intel late yesterday released details on its next-generation integrated graphics offerings arriving as part of the company's Haswell processor lineup.

T-Mobile's acquisition of MetroPCS was finalized today, but the merger will not bring the iPhone to MetroPCS customers in the near future. T-Mobile CEO John Legere, who spoke to AllThingsD , said it is possible that MetroPCS might be able to offer the iPhone at some point, but no plans are currently in the works.

Samsung and Apple will be heading back to court in November for a partial retrial, reports FOSS Patents . The trial follows judge Lucy Koh's March ruling that struck $450 million from the $1 billion in damages that were awarded to Apple last August, on the premise that the original damages may have been miscalculated by the jury

Echoing recent reports about a redesigned 'flatter' user interface in iOS 7, 9to5Mac says the next version of the operating system will lose "all signs of gloss, shine and skeuomorphism" . Jony Ive took charge of all Apple's user interface teams last October following a management shakeup .

Former Xerox CFO Luca Maestri officially joined Apple as Corporate Controller in late February and a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission published earlier today reveals that he received 38,091 restricted stock units (RSUs) in March of this year. As with most RSUs handed out by Apple, these carry staggered vesting dates with 1/8 of the total number of units converting to actual shares every six months over a four year period.

As noted by The Verge , a strange iMessage bug is causing the final word of certain phrases sent via Messages to an iPhone to be invisible to both the message sender and the recipient. When the following two phrases are sent using iMessage, the last word is not displayed on the iPhone: - I could be the next Obama (with a space after Obama) - The best prize is a surprise Both messages look complete when they are being composed, and the full text shows up in notifications, but within the Messages app itself, the words Obama and surprise are both invisible

Apple started running a new iPhone ad this evening entitled "Camera".