[UPDATE: While I was working on this post, Apple decided to approve the Tweetie update in question after all, as I suspected it would. Good news. But I think the post remains relevant.]
[WARNING: Actually, I don’t swear in this post, but there are 150+ examples of one particular bad word in it. A very, very bad word. Mostly with asterisks, but three uncensored instances at the very end. Cover your little ones’ eyes; keep this post out of U.S. states with laws against public cursing. Thank you.]
This is just embarrassing. A new version of Tweetie, the most popular Twitter client for the iPhone–and probably the best-regarded one, too–has apparently been rejected from Apple’s App Store on the grounds that its trends feature, which can display popular Twitter hash tags, showed a hash tag that happened to be the F-word at the time that the app was in for review at Apple. Never mind that the trends feature isn’t new to Tweetie, and that other iPhone Twitter clients have it. Or that every Twitter client may display dirty words if they show up in Tweets. Or that there’s no imaginable obscenity that the phone’s Safari browser isn’t capable of displaying if you know where to go, or happen upon examples accidentally.
This we know: Apple likes to release products which, in terms of general polish (if not features and reliability) feel as close to perfect as possible. This we can assume: It only gets there after making plenty of imperfect prototypes. And here’s what seems to be a rare glance of the process at work: 
Every time I buy anything at Best Buy, the cashier asks if I’m a Reward Zone member. And every time, I say no. (If I added any more cards to my wallet, it would burst.) But here’s a benefit of Reward Zone that, for some folks, is pretty compelling: Members can save up to $100 on an iPhone until next Saturday. There are 
I had a good time at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but as big and bustling as the show was, it did feel a little like a donut: It was defined by a large hole at its center. That hole would be Apple, the one significant phone manufacturer who–as is its wont–chose not to show up.
Part of the big news from day one at Mobile World Congress was that there was no big news involving Google’s Android mobile operating system: None of the 
Phones. More phones. Phones that look a lot like iPhones, except for the ones that don’t. Phones that may never show up in the good old US of A. Phones that are full of style, and ones that seem to be devoid of discernible personality. That, in short, was my Monday at 
Special Mobile World Congress edition!
After LG did its phone watch demo, it focused most of its Mobile World Congress press conference on its new Arena phone–especially its interface, which LG calls S-Class. It looks reasonably slick, and features innovative 3D navigation, with a rotating cube you can touch to…oh, let’s not pretend. The most striking thing about S-Class is the degree to which it mimics the iPhone, down to the rows of icons (some almost identical to iPhone icons) on a black backdrop. There are some places where LG may have introduced certain improvements to Apple’s idea–S-Class goes into landscape mode when you rotate the phone, and you can swipe one row of icons at a time to bring more into view–but it deals very heavily in the sincerest form of flattery.