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You know those advertisements for fancy high-end cars that can tell you when you're getting to close to another car, or perhaps, a runaway shopping cart? Cool stuff, right? If you're like me, you probably wish you could have features like these on your run down nine-year-old Ford Escort. Well, thanks to a new iPhone app, you can come pretty close. Using augmented reality (AR) technology, imaGinyze's Augmented Driving app can enhance your heads-up driving experience with safety information and warnings.

12seconds.tv, an online video service that lets users upload short video clips, just announced its new iPhone application. While the first 12seconds app could only send still pictures and audio, this new version can finally also send real video from the new iPhone 3GS to 12seconds' online service. To post a video, users of 12cast (iTunes link) simply record a new video in the app (no longer than 12 seconds), give it a title, and hit the send button. In addition, users can also send any pre-recorded videos right from their library to 12seconds.

George Hotz (aka "geohot") recently made a name for himself when he released a software utility called purplera1n that gave Windows users the first usable iPhone 3GS jailbreak. The reason why this became such big news was not just because he had produced the first jailbreaking tool for the new iPhone, but because he had beaten the iPhone Dev Team to the punch. (The Dev Team is the group of developers who release the utilities to unlock and jailbreak iPhones and iPod Touches.)

Now it seems Hotz is at it again. Although this time around he's not first, he is claiming that his new software, "purplesn0w," is a better unlocking tool for the iPhone 3GS than what the Dev Team has put out.

There's a fascinating new Twitter app in development called TwittARound, an augmented reality Twitter viewer for the iPhone 3GS. With the app, you can see live tweets around your location and you can even see how far away they are. To accomplish this, TwittARound uses a combination of the iPhone's compass and its accelerator-enabled GPS to determine the location of tweets and then layers those on top of a live video feed. The end result is a Twitter AU experience that looks incredible...at least in the YouTube video. Unfortunately, there's a big problem with this amazing new creation: Apple won't allow it in the App Store.

Apple has always had a tendency to hype up its statements about the speed of its devices by using just the right benchmarks and just the right products to compare them to. When it comes to the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 3.0 update, however, it looks like Apple might actually have understated some of the speed gains it advertised. Medialets, a mobile advertising and analytics company, ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark on the iPhone 3G with the old and new OS versions, as well as on the 3GS. In Medialets' tests, the speed of the iPhone 3G with the 3.0 almost tripled, and the new iPhone 3GS is another 3 times faster in completing the SunSpider benchmark than the 3G with the 3.0 release.

48 hours after the release of the much-anticipated iPhone 3GS and its new 3.0 software, people are just beginning to put it through its paces and report on their reactions. Norwegian consumer generated media (CGM) analysis firm Integrasco has been monitoring several social media outlets including Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and YouTube and has produced a product launch report. Early adopters have started sharing first-hand quality and performance feedback for the 3GS at twice the volume normally observed on a monthly basis for this product category. Reviews are mixed, but mostly positive.