Tuesday Apple Rumors: TouchPad Challenges iPad From Beyond the Grave

Here are your Apple news items and rumors for Tuesday: TouchPad Resurrection:
Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ ) announced on Aug. 19 that it was bowing out of the
portables game, discontinuing its efforts to compete with the iPad not even two
months after releasing its own TouchPad tablet to the market. According to a
Tuesday Reuters report (via 9 to 5 Mac ), the head of HPs PC division believes
the TouchPad might not be dead at all, but merely resting . Bradley said, Tablet
computing is a segment of the market thats relevant and that the rumored sale of
HPs consumer PC business to a competitor is not a desirable alternative. Could
the sellouts of $99 TouchPads have turned around HPs approach to the market?
Sprint Sets a Date: Word on the street is that all the major telecom players in
the U.S. will support Apples iPhone come fall. Good news for T-Mobile USA and
especially Sprint (NYSE: S ), whose role as a competitor for Verizon (NYSE: VZ )
and AT&T (NYSE: T ) diminishes with each passing quarter. Previous reports have
hinted that Apple will host an event at the end of September to show off the new
iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S new high-end and cheaper models of the smartphone,
respectively with a release to follow in October. A Tuesday report at The Wall
Street Journal (via Apple Insider ) supports this prospective schedule. The
report said Sprint will hold a Strategy Update presentation on Oct. 7 with
presentations from senior management and a Q&A session. iTunes Match Sees iCloud
Brewing: Apple began public testing of one of its numerous iCloud services on
Monday night, according to TUAW . iTunes Match lets iTunes users store their
entire hard drive-bound music library on Apples servers. They then can access
those songs on any connected Apple device regardless of how much memory it has,
meaning iPhone users that have filled up their memory with Angry Birds downloads
no longer have to worry about how theyre going to listen to their complete Peter
Frampton collection at the same time. The service is similar to the CloudPlayer
music locker opened by Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN ) earlier this year. iTunes Match
officially will open for business later this fall and will cost $24.99 per year.
As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the
stocks named here. Follow him on Twitter at