Archive for January 16th, 2011

Three new iPad offerings appeared on Best Buy's site. All three models described as "APPLE COMPUTER INC. - APPLE IPAD SKU WIFI" and availability listed as "coming soon". Two of the models carry price tags of $599.99, while the third comes in at $699.99. No other information beyond the scant details included on the product pages is available, and thus it is unclear if these listings are intended to reflect second-generation iPad models, some sort of internal SKU shift on existing models, or perhaps simply an error on Best Buy's part.

There's been a lot of talk about a "Retina" display for the next generation iPad. Based on Apple's marketing efforts for the original "Retina" display, it would suggest a DPI (dots per inch) greater than 300 to exceed the abilities of the human eye. Images accidentally left in iBooks 1.1 and 1.2 reveal that the iPad 2's resolution is likely double that of the current model. As shown above, the App's bookmark icon included versions for the iPad, the iPhone and the iPhone Retina Display (iPhonex2). It, however, also included one additional version labeled "iPadx2". Sure enough, this is exactly double the resolution version of the iPad icon and is distinct from the other versions. The most likely explanation for this added graphic is plans for a double-resolution iPad. Apple has since removed this extra artwork in subsequent versions of iBooks. The current iPad uses a 1024x768 resolution. Doubling this resolution would result in a 2048x1536 resolution at a 260 DPI.

On November 16, 2010 The Beatles came to iTunes. Two weeks after the initial release, Apple announced 2 million songs had been sold.  And recently Apple has informed The Loop that the iTunes Store exceeded 5 millions of Beatles songs and 1 million Beatles albums sold worldwide. "Abbey Road" is the current best-selling Beatles album in the U.S., while "Here Comes the Sun" is the currently best-selling Beatles song. The Beatles reportedly earn between 18 to 22.5 cents per track sold on iTunes. With five million individual tracks sold so far, that equates to a cool $900,000 to $1.125 million profit for The Beatles for just seven weeks of sales.

This week James Choi, who is a marketing strategy and planning team director at LG, have an interesting interview to Pocket-lint, where he expressed his disappointment about Microsoft's Windows Phone 7:

"From an industry perspective we had a high expectation, but from a consumer point of view the visibility is less than we expected".

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