Apple appears to be cooking a new and exciting feature for iPhone, it’s call speech to text. Imaging having to do away with sometimes annoying keyboard and just spell a text message, email or whatever text you want and your iPhone will do the rest. Cool huh?

According to a recent patent, Apple is working on speech to text technology for it iPhone and iPod devices.
The Baltimore Sun included the following diagram of how the text to speech system would work when wording an email.

From the patent filing

The speech recognition module can analyze the speech data to derive text data, the text data comprising sequence information associated with each of a plurality of words associated with the speech data. The text composition module can receive the text data and combine the text data with the non-speech data based upon the sequence information. The text composition module can thereby produce combined text data derived from the text data and the non-speech data. The interface can transmit the combined text data to the mobile device for presentation to a user of the mobile device.

It has been long tough that iPhone is available on China, although it’s not true. This is probably the reason why the Hi-Phone or HiPhone is still a big hit over there. This is about to change after China Unicom signed a 3 years deal with Apple to finally bring the iPhone to massive Chinese market. China Unicom will be able to over 2 types of iPhone to whooping 141 millions customers. Specs and price of the iPhone is not yet revealed and we are wondering how Apple or China Unicom will be able to market such an expensive gadget.

The lastest news suggest the deal may not be exclusive to China Unicom, as it’s the case in other countries.

Microsoft is looking to target iPhone users to boost it Bing search engine. The aim is allow developers to access Bing results using Microsoft API.

On Thursday, Microsoft announced an SDK built to allow iPhone app developers to enable their apps to access Bing search engine. Using the SDK developers will be able to retrieve images, videos and news from Bing results.

Currently, Google is the default search engine on iPhone Safari. Users can change this default to Yahoo. Bing can only be accessed using the traditional way by typing the URL and then the query.

Microsoft SDK dubbed Cocoa Touch will allow developers to include Bing search results in Mac systems too.

iPhone and iPod user in Britain, France, Holland and Sweden reported that Apple’s most popular portable devices became combusted in the sunshine and cracked in the weather.

All this started after a French teenager has been injured when his girlfriend’s allegedly started crackling and exploded.

The European Commission asked Apple to shed any lights on the causes and provide feedback.
Apple is currently investigating the matter. An Apple Spokesman said “”We are aware of these reports and we are waiting to receive the units from the customers. Until we have the full details, we don’t have anything further to add.”

Reports of iPhone overheating is not new. We have previously reported a warning that can be seen when the device exceeded it expected operating temperature.