According to the Financial Times, Apple is finally getting ready to announce a deal with Twentieth Century Fox to offer Fox movies available for download through iTunes. The service would allow users to download Fox movies as a temporary digital “rental”. According to the source Fox is also working out a feature on their physical DVD movies that would let DVD owners temporarily transfer the movie content from the DVD to a digital player like an iPod or a computer using Apple’s DRM.

This is something that Apple has been trying to get going for a while but has met some resistance with most studios, likely for fear of losing sales due to a higher piracy rate of movies and lower costs of ownership. Another issue is the threat that this poses to video on demand services from places such as Comcast and DirectTV. Apple currently sells some movie titles on iTunes from Disney and Viacom but has not had as much luck getting the ball rolling with video as it has with online music purchases, which more that likely has led to a rental offering.

Apple has a new patent application in the European Patent Office that details out a new volume control feature to help prevent hearing loss when listening to an iPod. People that have messed around with the settings on an iPod have likely already noticed that you can already set the maximum volume for your iPod to avoid an inadvertent blasts of sound that could damage your ear. The new feature would be available in iPods and the iPhone and would take into account not only how loud the volume is while your listening, but also how long you’ve been listening to decide when the listener may have had enough.

According to the Wall Street Journal Steve Jobs has been in talks with Masao Nakamura, president of NTT DoCoMo, about launching the iPhone in Japan next. The iPhone has already made its launch overseas in the UK, Germany and France and could soon be trying its hand at one of the largest markets for mobile phones in the world.

The report says that Jobs is in talks wtih Softbank Corp. in Japan as well who could also have a shot at carrying the iPhone in Japan and of course makes some friendly competition for Jobs to deal between on an exclusive contract. If Apple ends up partnering with NTT DoCoMo, could this spark the launch of the 3G iPhone?

If you were looking to take advantage of, or get taken advantage of depending on how you look at it, the very expensive deal T-Mobile was offering for unlocked iPhones in Germany you’re now too late. A German court has ruled that T-Mobile can indeed be the exclusive operator for Apple’s popular handset in Germany by ruling against a complaint filed by Vodafone.

Apple had planned to launch the iPhone in Germany with T-Mobile being the exclusive carrier much as it did in the United States, however Vodafone filed a complaint stating that the exclusivity went against German laws to protect consumers. The complaint resulted in a temporary injunction against T-Mobile requiring them to offer the iPhones unlocked and able to connect to other operators including Vodafone. T-Mobile complied with the injunction but offered the normally $580 iPhone in an unlocked state for $1460. Despite the high price Klaus Czerwinski of T-Mobile told ZDNet UK that there were still “many sold.”

At an event dinner in California on Wednesday AT&T Chief executive Randall Stephenson said that consumers could expect the iPhone to be available on a 3G network as soon as next year. This change would solve one of the major complaints many have of the iPhone with its currently slower EDGE network.

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, has said in the past that the iPhone didn’t initially launch on the 3G network due to the restrictions the faster network put on the battery life of the phone. He also stated that the 3G capabilities may be available by late 2008, so this news in general isn’t too much of a surprise.

Apple’s iPhone, winner of Time magazine’s invention of the year, went on sale in France tonight allowing residents to finally officially get their hands on the popular media smartphone. There’s more to the significance of this launch, however.

After months of bouts between iPhone hackers and Apple developers trying to keep the mobile phone “locked” and restricted to approved carriers, the French law requires that the phone not be restricted to any single mobile operator. France is the second country having this requirement for the iPhone after it was launched in Germany earlier this month and both countries are offering unlocked iPhones.

In a recent report from MacNotes.de, unlocking an iPhone sold by T-Mobile Germany is simple, done in only a few seconds and is handled by none other than Apple’s own iTunes. Due to a temporary injunction against Apple, the company has been forced to sell the iPhones with the ability to be unlocked in Germany. Apple will also be forced to sell them unlocked in France in six months after their launch on November 29.

In case you’re not familiar with what “unlocking” means exactly, it prevents the iPhone from being “locked” to a single network provider such as AT&T in the U.S., and allows the phone to accept any SIM card. Up until now there have been a number of hacks to unlock the iPhone and allow it to be used on other networks and other countries, and Apple has been in a constant battle to thwart the hacks and keep the phone locked-in with only approved providers.

On Friday the long wait is over for many law-abiding citizens of the UK and Germany as the Apple iPhone will be (officially) sold for the first time in countries other than the United States. The iPhone will be sold through O2 in the UK and T-Mobile in Germany and surprisingly will still be lacking the fast and common 3G connection that is already prevalent with many existing smartphones in those areas. Pricing is expected to be 269 pounds in the U.K. and 399 euros in Germany, which both convert to roughly in the high $500’s USD.

The new iPhones are expected to be basically the same models that the U.S. customers have received although they will come preloaded with the OS X 1.1.2 version which has a fix for the latest hacks that allow 3rd party apps to run on it, which will make it just a little bit harder for hackers to unlock in the next go-round. Apple is likely betting that the cool dual-touch screen interface and media playing integration will overshadow the lack of high-speed data connections with 3G, and users will be satisfied with a jumping from hotspot to hotspot instead. France will be the next country to get their hands on the iPhone later this month through Orange where Apple may run into problems with French law and restrictions on locking phones to exclusive carriers.

Apple started placing new restrictions on the sale of its iPhones last week in the U.S. and reports are saying that the restriction will apply in the U.K for next months launch as well. When purchasing an iPhone, consumers are no limited to purchasing two per person and must use a credit or debit card to make the purchase. According Apple spokesperson Natalie Kerris, the restrictions are to ensure there are enough iPhones available for everyone through the holidays, or everyone that’s willing to play by the rules, that is.

“Customer response to the iPhone has been off the charts, and limiting iPhone sales to two per customer helps us ensure that there are enough iPhones for people who are shopping for themselves or buying a gift,” Kerris said. “We’re requiring a credit or debit card for payment to discourage unauthorized resellers.”

Today marks the launch of Apple’s new Leopard operating system, the tenth iteration of the software. Loyal Apple users took it on the chin when Leopard was delayed from its June launch until October to allow Apple to have the time to focus on launching its iPhone. For $129 you get over 300 new features for your desktop experience such as Time Machine (back up your computer’s contents automatically), Boot Camp (turn your Apple into a PC), a revamped menu bar that allows you to stack icons or folders, stronger encryption and firewall protection including something called Sandboxing which makes it harder for any hacker to remotely control your machine, enhanced wireless capture of images and many more doodads.

Reviews of the new Leopard are generally favorable. The Wall Street Journal software expert said “Leopard isn’t a must-have for current Mac owners, but it adds a lot of value,” while The New York Times sums up their review by saying “This Leopard has more than 300 new spots — and most of them are bright ones.” The bottom line seems to be that while Leopard isn’t a must-have for what it does offer it’s worth dropping your cash for.

Apple has released some numbers on iPhone sales and came to the conclusion that a lot more iPhones than most had suspected were actually purchased with the intention of unlocking and running on networks other than AT&T, likely overseas.

In the report, Apple guessed that as many as 250,000 of the 1.4 million iPhones sold were purchased by those with the intention of unlocking them and possibly reselling them to overseas customers to use on other networks. AT&T is currently the only approved carrier in the US to provide service for the iPhone.

After Apple iPhone developers have already had a couple of volleys with hackers who want to run 3rd party applications on the new phone Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, has today let the hacking community know that they can stop, or at least slow down for a few minutes. Jobs has announced that Apple is going to open up both the iPhone and the iPod Touch for third party application development on the device in February of 2008.

Prior to this the only way to get any third party applications on the iPhone was through an “open” platform on the Safari web browser which runs on the device and was still fairly limiting. Jobs attributed the these development restrictions to security issues stating that open development increases risks of viruses. He also states that these security risks are also why it will take until February to release an SDK for developers.

Today in an interview with the Wall Street Journal Steve Jobs said that iTunes will be reducing the price of their DRM-free tracks from the current $1.29 down to 99 cents. These songs from iTunes were launched as iTunes Plus back in May and offered a number of titles, mostly from EMI, without any digital rights management restrictions. They also came in a little higher quality for a little more money with 256 kbps AAC encoding compared to the 128kbps encoding for the rest of the 99 cent versions. “It’s been very popular with our customers, and we’re making it even more affordable,” said Jobs in the interview.

This move brings Apple’s prices a little closer to those of Wal-Mart and Amazon who both offer song downloading services with DRM-free music with some titles going for less than 99 cents. This also will make iTunes slightly more desirable compared to new players coming into the online music game such as Doug Morris and Universal Music Group who are looking to make some competition for Apple in a different way.

So an anonymous tipster sent in a purported AT&T internal inventory sheet which lists off an Apple iPhone in red with 4GB and one with 8GB. No price, no delivery date, nothing else except that this thing supposedly exists to AT&T. This is the first report that has surfaced of any kind of alternative color to the iPhone and of course it should be noted that Apple hasn’t said anything about its iPhone coming in another color besides white. Still, bear in mind the color variance of the Nano; did anyone out there really think that Apple wouldn’t release different color iPhones eventually? But why no mention of a black iPhone?

Here’s the other thing to bear in mind: will this “deep red” iPhone be out in time for the holiday shopping season?

Apple made a quiet release of a firmware update for both the iPod classic and the 3rd generation iPod nano on Saturday. The new version 1.0.2 mostly consists of bug fixes according to Apple but ended up revealing a little bit more once installed. Aside from some improvements on calender and contact synchronization MacNN reported installing the new firmware through iTunes updates and finding upgrades to the Cover Flow making it more similar to iTunes 7.4. The new firmware also had another “Ask” option added to the TV output option which allows users to turn on the TV out mode when the iPod is connected to a device capable of showing video output from the iPod. Nothing too spectacular but little surprises like these are always nice.