iPhone 4 is less than 10mm thick and has more detailed screen, front-facing camera, gyroscope and faster processor like iPad

Steve Jobs revealed the fourth version of Apple’s smartphone, the iPhone 4, tonight and said the company was bringing its ebook application, iBooks, from the iPad tablet onto the iPhone.

In a move aimed at cornering the ebook market, Jobs unveiled the new version of the iPhone and showed off its display – which he said could show content so clearly it was virtually indistinguishable from text on paper.

That is a clear threat to Amazon’s ebook reader, Kindle, which has struggled to win approval from book publishers despite being launched years before the iPad, which only went on sale in April.

“Five out of six publishers tell us that sales of their ebooks [through Apple] are at 22% right now,” Jobs told the company’s annual event focused on new technology in San Francisco.

While Amazon has declined to offer sales figures for the Kindle, despite starting international sales last year, Apple has announced sales figures for its iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad at every opportunity. Jobs told the audience that the 100 millionth of those devices would be sold this month.

That presents a huge opportunity for book publishers looking for a platform where they can control prices. Amazon has tried to set prices for ebooks against publishers’ wishes, while Apple has given them freedom to set charges; it takes a slice of the retail prices in return for hosting them on iBooks.

The iPhone 4 is less than 10mm thick compared with 12mm for its predecessor last year, the iPhone 3GS. The screen has roughly four times as much detail as before. There is also a front-facing camera, which could be used for videoconferencing, in addition to one on the back for pictures. Jobs called it “the biggest leap since the original iPhone”.

Apple is the biggest technology company by market value, having passed Microsoft at the end of last month. Though its shares fell by 1.5% before Jobs began speaking the company’s stock has already gained more than 20% during 2010.

The iPhone 4 will be sold in the UK through O2, Orange and Vodafone. It includes a gyroscope and a faster processor similar to that in the iPad. It also offers longer battery life, Jobs said, and uses a ceramic case, giving it improved signal reception.

“You’ve gone out into the wilderness to start a new life,” said Brian Reynolds, Zynga’s chief game designer. “You’re actually raising a virtual family on the frontier.”

“You can add a frontier spouse, create little child avatars,” Reynolds, who led the development of FrontierVille, told AFP.

Zynga claims more than 230 million monthly active users of its games, which include “Mafia Wars,” “Treasure Isle,” “Zynga Poker,” “Cafe World,” “FishVille” and “PetVille” in addition to “FarmVille.”

FrontierVille shares some similarities with FarmVille but provides “a fresh game play experience in a new setting and some really new interesting ways to interact with your friends,” Reynolds said.

“The heart of social gaming is your ability to play them with your real friends on Facebook,” he said. “You can tend their crops, feed their animals — boost your reputation by helping your friends.”

“We’ve created the idea of much more of a living world than maybe there was in social games past,” Reynolds said.

“It’s not going to be exactly the way it was every time you come back to it,” he said. “Weeds will actually grow. Little trees grow into bigger trees.

“There’s a sense that the world is alive,” he said. “There’s animals hiding in there, there’s snakes and bears and groundhogs.”

Reynolds said FrontierVille would first appear on Facebook before possibly moving to other platforms.

“We always tend to start them on Facebook,” he said. “Things like the iPhone represent a logical progression if the game is really popular.”

The purchase of virtual goods by game players accounts for 90 percent of Zynga’s revenue, according to the San Francisco-based company, which was founded in 2007.

Long lines snaked down streets in London, Paris, Frankfurt and Tokyo as eager buyers vied to wield their credit cards. Screams and cheers rose from the crowd in central London as students, professionals and self-proclaimed computer geeks clutched boxes containing the slim black device.

“If I was a music fan, it would be like the launch of a Lady GaGa album in the U.S.,” said comedian Stephen Fry, known in Britain as a champion Tweeter.

Apple Inc., based in Cupertino, California, said earlier this month that it had sold 1 million of the devices in the United States in just 28 days. The company started taking orders for the iPad abroad on May 10 after pushing back its international delivery target amid extreme demand at home.

The computer looks like a larger version of Apple’s iPhone and can be used to send e-mails, draw pictures and play games. It is also seen as a potential savior of the struggling newspaper industry, because it can be used as an electronic reader.

Publishers have seized upon the device as an opportunity to finally make large numbers of readers pay for online content.

In hopes of better times, Britain’s Financial Times newspaper launched its iPad version at a swank press event at a hotel overlooking Lake Geneva in Switzerland, claiming the app has already been downloaded over 100,000 times in the United States.

Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com. said 20 percent of new digital subscriptions to the paper came from iPad users last week.

“I think it’s going to be an extremely lucrative device for us,” he said.

It might go against conventional wisdom, but a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project is adding fuel to the argument that young people are fast becoming the gurus of online reputation management, especially when it comes to social networking sites.

Among other things, the study found that they are most likely to limit personal information online — and the least likely to trust free online services ranging from Facebook to LinkedIn and MySpace.

Marlene McManus, 21, is among those young adults. On the job hunt since graduating from Clark University in Massachusetts, she’s been “scouring” her Facebook page, removing photos that contain beer cups and any other signs of college exploits. She’s also dropped Twitter altogether.

“I have to present a public face that doesn’t have the potential to hurt my image,” McManus says.

She has seen otherwise upstanding adults, well past their 20s, sharing compromising photos and questionable rants with too many people online. “I get embarrassed for these people and sometimes just want to shake them,” she says.

In this instance, adults over the age of 30 might do well to listen. The Pew study and a mounting body of new research is showing that the very generation accused of sharing too much information online is actually leading the pack in online privacy.

The Pew study found, for instance, that social networkers ages 18 to 29 were the most likely to change theprivacy settings on their profiles to limit what they share with others online. The percentage who did so was 71 percent, compared with just 55 percent of the 50- to 64-year-old bracket. Meanwhile, about two-thirds of all social networkers who were surveyed said they’ve tightened security settings.

The survey also determined that:

• about half of young people in that 18-29 bracket have deleted comments that others have made on their profile, compared with just 29 percent of those ages 30 to 49 and 26 percent of 50- to 64-year-olds. The numbers were similar when it came to social networkers who removed their names from photos that were tagged to identify them.

• When asked how much they can trust social networking sites, 28 percent of the youngest adults surveyed said “never.” A fifth in the 30-49 bracket said that and just 14 percent of those ages 50 to 64 agreed.

The Pew report, which was released Thursday, was compiled from telephone interviews conducted byPrinceton Survey Research International between Aug. 18 and Sept. 14, 2009, among a sample of 2,253 adults. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.

Mary Madden, the Pew researcher who was the study’s lead author, says the findings partly reflect the fact that young people have been using social networking longer than their elders, thus making them more experienced in dealing with its intricacies.

But she says young people also are at a point in their lives where, like McManus, they’re looking for work and just starting to develop a name for themselves.

Consider also that the study found that a quarter of online adults said their employers now have policies about how they portray themselves online.

“Young adults have, in many ways, been forced to become experts in their own form of social revision,” Madden says.

They’re also an extremely “brand conscious” generation, says Fred Stutzman, a doctoral candidate at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina who co-founded ClaimID.com, a free online identity management service that he now uses as a research project.

“Increasingly, it’s the advice that young people get from counselors and elsewhere: `You need to have your own brand and you have to watch that brand,’” Stutzman says.

He jokes that older people don’t care as much because “if you’ve got a pension, you can pretty much say what you want.”

There might be a bit of truth to that. The older you get, the less you have to worry about applying to college and attempting to move up the career ladder.

Stefanie Juell, a 28-year-old in Westchester County, N.Y., has become increasingly aware of this. So she recently opened an extra Facebook account after her supervisor and people she’d met through work started to friend her on her personal account.

“You don’t exactly want to reject your supervisor,” she says. “Nor do you want him or her to see everything that your friends write on your wall or the pictures that people tag of you.”

So now, she uses that new professional Facebook account for her job in alumni relations at a small liberal arts college. In the evening, she shifts to her long-standing personal Facebook account, which has its security settings set as tightly as possible.

“It’s important to separate,” she says, “and to maintain a work-life balance.”

Apple, maker of the Macintosh computer, the iPod, iPhone and iPad, surpassed US software giant Microsoft this week in terms of market value and now trails only Exxon Mobil and PetroChina in market capitalization.

Apple’s market capitalization — the number of shares outstanding multiplied by the stock price — at the close of trading on Wall Street on Thursday was 230.53 billion dollars compared with 227.86 billion dollars for Microsoft.

Apple’s annual net profit, however, continues to trail that of Microsoft — 5.7 billion dollars compared with 14.6 billion dollars last fiscal year — as Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer noted in New Delhi on Thursday.

“It is a long game,” Ballmer told reporters. “Certainly there is no technology company on the planet that is as profitable as we are.”

Microsoft may indeed be more profitable, but investors are increasingly betting on Apple and its string of must-have consumer gadgets.

“It’s really hard not to be upbeat on Apple,” said Standard and Poor’s analyst Clyde Montevirgen, pointing out that the Cupertino, California company’s sales and profits rose even during the economic crisis.

Apple’s ascendance can be directly traced to Silicon Valley legend Jobs, who Fortune Magazine last year crowned the “CEO of the Decade.”

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Both stocks ended down after a late-day sell-off, but Apple emerged ahead with a market value of about $222 billion, compared with Microsoft’s $219 billion, according to data.

Apple shares closed down 0.4 percent at $244.11 on Nasdaq, while Microsoft fell 4 percent to a seven-month low of $25.01.

Shares of Apple are worth more than 10 times what they were 10 years ago, as it has profited from revolutionizing consumer electronics with its stylish, easy to use products such as the iPod, iPhone and MacBook laptops.

The last time Apple had a higher market value than Microsoft was December 19, 1989, according to a UK-based news agency.

Microsoft, whose operating system runs on more than 90 percent of the world’s personal computers, has not been able to match growth rates from its hey-day 1990s. Its stock is down 20 percent from 10 years ago.

Apple, which struggled for many years to get its products into the mainstream, resorted to a $150 million investment from the much larger Microsoft in 1997 in order to keep it afloat. At that time, Microsoft’s market value was more than five times that of Apple.

Microsoft still leads Apple in sales. In the latest quarter, Microsoft reported $14.5 billion in revenue compared with Apple’s $13.5 billion.

Cupertino, California-based Apple is now the second-largest company on the Standard & Poor’s 500 index by market value, behind energy behemoth Exxon Mobil Corp.