5 Reasons Steve Jobs Would Have Liked His New Statue + MORE iPhone News 09/28/2012

AT&T customers who bought their iPhone 5 off-contract can easily unlock their phone to work on another carrier, says a report in TechCrunch. Instead of faxing paperwork to AT&T and waiting for authorization, customers without a contract can simply connect their iPhone 5 to iTunes and restore it to unlock the device. After the restore process is complete, customers will be greeted with a message saying, “Congratulations, your iPhone has been unlocked.”

TechCrunch reached out to AT&T, which confirmed that a restore will unlock the iPhone 5 for customers who are not under a contract…

It’s time to save some of that hard-earned cash with our Daily Deals, featuring a handy list from Dealnews and our own hand-picked selections. Today, we’ve got an iMac in the mix and, as always, some sweet deals on iOS and OS X software.

Hardware and Accessories

DealGenius: [Standard Batteries] 30 Duracell AA Batteries w/ 10 Duracell AAA Batteries for $13 + free shipping.

TigerDirect: [USB Hard Drives] Seagate Expansion 3TB USB External Hard Drive for $120 + $4 s&h.

Nordstrom: [iPhone Cases] Marc Jacobs, kate spade iPhone 4/4s Cases: 50 percent off, from $17 + free shipping…

It looks like China will get the iPhone 5 sooner than previously thought, M.I.C. Gadget reports. Two models of the iPhone 5 received China Compulsory Certificate approval less than a week after it officially went on sale. Previous certifications took two months on average, with the iPhone 4S gaining its certification in December 2011 for sale in January 2012.

The iPhone 5 must also receive a MIIT network license and approval from China Radio Management before sales begin. M.I.C. Gadget suggests that sales will begin in October, but whether that’s fact or fodder for a Rumor Roundup, we’ll find out soon…

One possible reason the iPhone 5 has such great battery life is the clever way the A6 changes its clock speed. While originally thought to be clocked at 1GHz, the chip has been clocked at 1.1GHz as well as 1.3GHz by Current Editorials.

While 9to5Mac saw the chip’s speed drop as low as 550MHz, this seemed to do more with an as-yet-updated Geekbench app testing the chip (which also resulted in the 1GHz assumption). A Geekbench update seems to paint a different picture now. By all accounts it appears the chip can change “speeds,” however, resulting in better battery life and dynamically tuning itself to the demand for CPU…

Monsters Ate My Condo, developed by PikPok and published by Adult Swim, has been one of my favorite games this year so far. It’s a frenetic puzzle game that has you tossing apartment blocks into the various hungry mouths of gigantic monsters, trying to stack up the right colors and earn points all over a very weird, but wild, aesthetic. And yesterday, Adult Swim surprised us with a re-release of the game, this time called Super Monsters Ate My Condo.

The Super version leaves the basic core gameplay intact, but while the original version has an “endless mode” included, this one sticks with only the timed mode, and instead builds a more addictive progression backend on to the game…

Every time a new gadget launches with lots of pomp and fanfare, there is always someone out there that buys one just to break it. Geeks are good tearing stuff up and over the years it’s become a bit of an art form to come up with the craziest way to destroy the cool gadgets most of us lust after. We have seen gadgets ground up in blenders and smashed up in just about any way imaginable.

One thing I haven’t seen is an iPhone 5 destroyed using the power of light. The guys over at Wicked Lasers took a new iPhone 5 out-of-the-box and arranged six of their powerful 1-watt lasers to shine their green beams in one spot…

Dumpster diving. That’s the secret behind a new sculpture of Steve Jobs. 
Early last year, Los Angeles artist XVALA, nee Jeff Hamilton, used trash collected from Jobs’ home to build a sculpture of the turtle-neck and mom jeans-wearing Mac guru, complete with iPhone in hand. That’s right, the artist picked through Jobs’ trash and turned it into treasure.  
“I filter the information from a trashcan into art,” XVALA explained in a phone chat from his native Oklahoma City. “Life is turning into a techno fairytale…