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Well, it's that time in the Apple product lifecycle again. As the company begins ordering components for whichever device it's planning on releasing next and details begin to leak out hearsay and rumors among Apple enthusiasts solidify into something more substantial.

Indeed, the tech blogosphere is abuzz this morning with talk of an 8 GB iPhone that may launch as soon as the end of next month. Apple's suppliers have been manufacturing a version of the iPhone 4 with an 8 GB flash drive, which is expected to be available at a lower price point according to Reuters.

In the not-too-distant future, iPhone users may be navigating around using an augmented reality interface that overlays all kinds of data relevant to their immediate location, as well as turn-by-turn traveling directions from one location to another.

Instead of navigating as a little blue dot along a purple line on a 2D, birds-eye-view map, think of the future version of the iPhone's native Maps and Compass apps as something a bit more like Google Street View meets Yelp's mobile augmented reality feature Monocle.

Google has updated its powerful search app for iOS with a quicker way to filter results by type, as well as with support for pre-loading Instant Pages, which was recently added to the Chrome desktop browser. The update also adds a more intuitive, gesture-based help screen for figuring out the few key interface elements. It's a universal app for iPhone and iPad available now in the iTunes store.

Last week, we reported on a leaked blog post from Google indicating that a new native search app is coming to Android as well, but that update still hasn't been released.

News360, a news reader app available on most mobile devices and tablets, has just announced version 2.0, which adds a layer of personalization to the news shown to each user, whereas it was just an aggregator before. The update also launches a beta Web version of the service, so you can use it on the desktop. Finally, the new version adds a timeline view, which allows you to track a story's development over time.

When News360 launched, it simply pulled in coverage of stories from multiple sources, like Google News does, as well as Twitter discussions of the topic. It offered a few ways for users to go more in-depth, with image galleries, great definitions of terms and the ability to manually add more personalized feeds by topic. It certainly provided more content than a human-curated service, like Newsy, but it lacked that human quality of editorial discernment. The new personalization layer in News360 is still automated, but it harnesses the user's own human qualities.

Google continues the slow rollout of Google Plus to iOS with its new update, version 1.0.2.1966, which adds settings for Huddle, better notifications when you're added to circles, iPod touch and iPad support, as well as performance and stability improvements. To be clear, there is no iPad app for Google Plus. The iPhone app was restricted from running on the iPad before, unlike most other apps. Today's update allows the iPhone app to run on an iPad, as well as on the iPod Touch, which was not supported before.

Apple has begun disabling iPhones, iPads and iPods running the preview version of iOS5 if those devices are not actively being used to develop applications, according to a post on 9to5Mac.

The company typically gives developers early access to the next version of its mobile operating system so that they can prepare and test apps for it. Some iOS developers have been selling unique device identifier (UDID) slots to non-developers so they can gain early access. Up to 100 of these slots are available to developers who pay $100 per year for an Apple developer account.

In our continuing tradition of rounding up new mobile application releases we found interesting and/or exciting over the past month, we present you with this new list of apps for July 2011. This month, we found a lot of great new iPhone apps, some Android and tablet apps, and a bunch of "notable" application updates.

As always, share your thoughts on those we missed in the comments below.

Photo sharing app Instagram announced today that its users have posted over 150 million photos in the nine months since it launched. The free iPhone app, which lets users quickly snap square photos and apply a variety of preset filters for ambience, was one of our top 10 startups of last year, and we've watched its meteoric rise with great interest because, according to conventional wisdom, it shouldn't have happened.

Are you an iOS developer thinking about dipping your toe into the Android pool? If so, you should read developer Nick Farina's post about his experience developing on Android after developing on iOS.

Farina compares the development environment (he writes that you'll hate Eclipse at first, but once you get used to it "you'll enjoy some seriously amazing, productivity-boosting code completion, refactoring, and automatic fixing."), provides slick side-by-side code comparisons (spoiler: Java and Objective-C look a lot alike) and addresses the fragmentation issue.

All the way back in January, we speculated that Apple would introduce its then recently acquired facial recognition technology into the upcoming iPhone 5. Now, it seems that prediction has come true - and not just for the iPhone 5, but for any iPhone capable of upgrading to the new mobile operating system iOS 5.