We're back from this weekend's Maker Faire, the third-annual event in San Mateo, CA . Our friends at Make continue to up the ante, bringing DIYers from far and wide to show off their projects at the ultimate geek county fair.

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Italians have better coffee, better food, shorter workdays. And now their iPhones are going to be cooler than ours, too? That's unfair. But according to La Repubblica, a daily newspaper in Rome, Telecom Italia has signed a non-exclusive deal to distribute a new, 3G-compatible iPhone. It will be unlocked, and won't come with a two-year contract.

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The days of lugging around and pulling out hefty guide books could be nearing an end: The eyePhone, a program currently being developed in Europe, uses a combination of satellite information, object-recognition software and Internet data to provide information on landmarks in a scene captured through a mobile phone's lens.

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A few enterprising gamers have managed to port the popular shooter game Quake 3 onto the iPhone and iPod Touch. A YouTube video recently put into circulation shows how they've taken advantage of the devices' built-in accelerometers and touch-screen capability. Basically, you move around by tilting the iPhone or iPod, and tap the screen to blast bad guys. They've set it up so that multi-player games are possible, too.

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Apple’s flagship store in San Francisco is out of iPhones? Online orders will take five to seven business days? Retail stores around the country are reportedly running extremely low or, in many cases, just plain out of iPhones. This shortage may simply be due to Apple’s shortsighted estimate of demand. But many believe it to be an early indication that they're trying to clear product to make way for a (clouds part, sun shines, choir sings) 3G iPhone.

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At this point we've known for a while that the much-talked-about gPhone isn't actually going to be a single device, but a whole slew of them running Google's Android platform, but that doesn't mean the buzz is dying out. Now CNET says there's a new race heating up, as Google and Apple vie for the attention of independent software developers.

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The Financial Times reported yesterday that Apple is considering a plan to give people free access to its library of tunes if they pay more for their iPods or iPhones.

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A new study by market research firm M:Metrics reveals that nearly 85 percent of iPhone users access news and information on the mobile Web through their handy new gadget. That makes it the most popular gadget for doing so, according to M:Metrics.

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A group of independent software developers claims to be close to loosening Apple’s reins over the software that can run on the iPhone once and for all. Apple announced recently that it plans to start releasing software made by third party developers in June. First, though, those applications will be checked, and then sold or given away free (whichever the developer chooses) directly by Apple, either through iTunes or a virtual store on the phone itself.

But if the independent group, known as the iPhone Dev Team, has its way, that strict outline is going to be shaken up a bit.

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