Archive for 2010

An Italian blog ispazio.net had recently acquired photos of iPhone 4G screen and frame. They say it's real because the pictures were taken from reliable sources.

The iPhone looks very similar to the prototype found by Gizmodo. The frame has the same front-facing camera and corners. Screen connector looks bigger than before, which confirms that there will be more connections to the motherboard and as a result - more pixels than in the current models.

The blog also say its iPhone has LCD display. The current Apple's models also have LCD, but most of the company's competitors already use AMOLED displays in their phones.

According to TechCrunch, Wireless Quattro had recently contacted iPhone app developers to introduce their new "Verification of iTunes Purchase" program. The company is an Apple subsidiary,and it currently develops forthcoming iAd program.

ViP helps developers to promote their apps in App Store via ads which appearing in iPhone apps. With this feature they can track download conversion rates in real-time. Such information is proprietary to Apple, so Quattro promotes the product and its "exclusive integration with the App Store", because such a feature is unavailable to other ad networks, and such information mentioned in the e-mail:

"Verification of iTunes Purchase uses no SDK or server-side integration — this cannot be duplicated by any of our competitors".

Other advertisement companies such as Google's AdMob can only estimate conversion rates, but such data cannot be as precise and detailed as Quattro's one. For enabling conversion tracking every developer that uses AdMob must integrate the company's advertising API into his code.

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Here is a quick tutorial from CNet about turning iPad WiFi into an iPad 3G:

Dropbox is a great service similar to Apple’s iDisk. It lets you store your files on a server and immediately share your pictures, documents and other files across different computers and phones. Users can get 2Gb of server storage for free. There is an app for desktops, iPhone and other phones. recently a special version for iPad was released.

You can register and download the application for your desktop computer here (Windows, Mac and Linux). Here is a link to a free iPhone/iPad application in AppStore.

With DropBox on the iPad you can:

• Access your Dropbox on the go.
• All the contents of your Dropbox are available for viewing.
• You can even stream music and movies in your Dropbox straight to your iPad.
• Upload files and sync them to your Dropbox.
• Upload photos from your iPad and email its public link to a friend in less than a minute.
• Export files to other iPad apps.

Okay, maybe iPad is not good as a skateboard, but maybe there will be more sense if it will be zapped in microwave?

Kenny Irwin, also known as dOvetastic, fries everything from gas masks to 1960s telephones in a professional grade microwave. Why? He thinks it's an art.

Recently he bought an iPad 3G 64 GB to make another test. The result may be seen on the 10-minute video above, was considered by YouTube as "may contain content inappropriate for some users".

How many more tests will be made to iPad to understand it's a hi-tech device and not a piece of metal alloy?

Chad Knight and Jeff King, who are professional skateboarders, purchased a brand-new Apple iPad and decided to check if it can replace the standard skateboard. Another crazy test - on the video above!

Latest information from several resources reveals that the third beta of iPhone OS 4 has an ability to capture video at 1280x720 resolution instead of the standard 640x480. That is confirmed with following preset values that were found in new API improvements:

AVCaptureSessionPreset640x480
AVCaptureSessionPreset1280x720

It was long rumored that iPhone 4 will have 5MP camera, LED flash, another front-facing camera for making video conferences. IF the HD resolution will be supported indeed, iPhone's old alias "iPhone HD" will be finally confirmed.

According to a web-resource DigiTimes.com (which in turn cites Chinese newspaper Economic Daily News), panels for the iPhone 4G will be also provided by Chimei Innolux, which will join existing Apple's partners Wintek and TPK Touch Solution who have been supplying some parts for iPhone 3GS. The companies will take 15, 40 and 45 percents of total orders respectively.

All of the assembly responsibilities will be allegedly taken again by FoxConn, a company that has already had the successful similar experience with iPhone 3GS. The company already began receiving components for the iPhone 4G in April, though there is no information yet about the date of assembling it for final products.

The report also reveals that camera modules will be produced by Largan Precision (80%) and Genius Electronic (20%). TXC will continue to produce quartz components and its share will rise from 15% to 40%.

Next-generation iPhone is expected to be announced on Apple's annual WorldWide Developers Conference keynote, which will take place at San Francisco's Moscone West on June 7-11. It is rumored that the iPhone 4G will be available for sale soon after its announce.

Famous anchorwoman Ellen DeGeneres had to apologize to Apple after airing a fake iPhone commercial that scoffed at the device's finical touchscreen.

Ellen said Apple just didn't find it funny - and it's a common thing for a company with reputation of being extremely protective of its brand.

"I just want to say that I'm sorry if I made it look like the iPhone is hard to use. It's not hard to use. I have an iPhone. Portia has an iPhone. I just learned how to text on an iPhone. It’s the only phone I can text on. I love it. I love my iPad. I love my iPod. I love iHop. So everybody at Apple - Steve Jobs, Mr. Macintosh. I apologize. I'm sorry. I love this stuff."

The Berkeley hotel in London now offers its guests... an iPad! It will be proposed only to those clients who will stay in certain suites during their visit. It is supposed that iPad will be able to suggest places for visit and help to plan an itinerary.

"From Le Monde to the Wall Street Journal, your local newspaper will be available at breakfast and quickly checking the opening times of Christian Louboutin on Motcomb Street has never been more convenient. A wide range of games, videos and comic books is available for children and our experienced Concierge team has created their personal Top 5 of must-visit places – shops, exhibitions, local attractions and some hidden gems – which are clearly mapped so that you can plan your itinerary."

If you're going to visit London and would like to stay in Berkeley you should take into account that the night spent in this hotel will cost you $2804.

Ryan Tate from Gawker quoted people closed to the matter who said that Steve Jobs is dissatisfied with the free app New York Times Editor's Choice. The reason is that it has a limited content of the daily NYT.

The story started when some time ago Amazon made a deal with Times and received exclusive rights on its full content. So now if you have Kindle you should pay to gain full access to the NYT edition. The same full content is also available on the web and it's free. Moreover, the deal apparently implies that other competitors may have the full text but they must sell it at a higher price.

Few days ago the New York Times decided to raise the subscription price on the Kindle, from $13.99 to $19.99 per month. That was no wonder because the NYT warned before that they want to charge readers nearly $20-30 per month. With such a deal Apple was left with a truncated version of the NYT for the iPad. Ironically, the same version for iPhone remains to deliver the full content.

Obviously, that is the reason why Apple has been ignoring the NYT iPad app recently. It is even not listed as a "noteworthy" or "favorite" in the App Store. User reviews are also mainly negative and many people ask where the full content can be found.

Lately Apple has released a third beta of the iPhone OS 4. It is specified as build 10M2247 and available for registered developers. Previous beta release was issued two weeks ago. The situation looks familiar as last year iPhone OS 3 had also gone through 5 beta cycles before it was publicly announced.

Currently the new update is unavailable due to installation problems, but those of the developers who successfully downloaded and installed it have already revealed what's new in the release.

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According to a report by Marketwatch (which in turn refers to a figures revealed by Strategy Analytics), smartphones now take 18% share on the market of all mobile phones.

"Sales are driven by healthy operator subsidies, competition between vendors, and a rising number of cheaper models built around operating systems such as Google Inc's Android and Nokia Corp's key smartphone platform Symbian."

It is interesting that different smartphone makers sometimes compete on different markets. Strategy Analytics reveals that Nokia shows good results in India and China while Motorola focuses more on US.

As we wrote before, Motorola raised up its profits after producing its Android-based Droid/Milestone, which is frequently called the closest rival to Apple's iPhone.

Nokia's purpose is to gain the leadership on the markets that are only emerging. In the first quarter the company has 21.5 million smartphones sold, but these are mostly cheap models that were shipped primarily to South America and China. North America remains a "problem child" for Nokia. The company's sales make 40% of all the sales in this quarter.

RIM has 10.6 million BlackBerries sold and takes second place with its 19.7% share.

Globally Apple has 16,4% market share in selling smartphones in this quarter and became a mobile vendor number one in the US. The company made record 8.8 million iPhone sales. Among all mobile phone makers Apple hold 3% global market share.

The picture above reveals that World of Warcraft was launched on the iPad. We don't know does it work correctly because there is no video yet, but there is information that the game was launched via Gaikai.

Gaikai is a service that allows you to play games in a browser, directly from the cloud. The scheme is pretty simple - the service runs and hosts the games and then streams it to the user using Silverlight, Java or Flash. As you know, iPad doesn't support Flash but somehow WoW works through Gaikai.

Gaikai and its competitors (OnLive and OTOY) are still in beta, but when it'll reach maturity there is a big chance to successfully use it for playing graphically intensive games on different devices including iPad.

Today Steve Jobs revealed that last Friday Apple's iPad reached one million sales:

"One million iPads in 28 days -- that's less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with iPhone. Demand continues to exceed supply and we're working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers."

The company also revealed next facts:

• 12 million apps for iPad were downloaded from the App Store already;
• 1,5 million e-books were downloaded from the iBookStore;
• 5,000 applications were created specifically for the iPad (the number of apps for iPod touch and iPhone is more than 200,000)

There were no information revealed about a breakdown of 3G vs. Wi-Fi-only sales, but one analyst told that on Sunday 49 of 50 retail stores were sold out of both models.

Piper Jaffray's analyst Gene Munster predicts that the Wi-Fi iPad will be more popular and will take 60% of sales while iPad 3G-capable model will carry only 40% of overall sales. He also believes that Apple has already more than 1 million iPads, which proved to be true.