Archive for August 24th, 2011

According to a survey from retail analysis company RetailSails, Apple is the best in retail sales per square foot among 160 top U.S. retailers. As the table above shows, Apple is nearly two times better than its closest competitor Tiffany & Co, and nearly five times better than its closest technology related competitor GameStop. It is impressive that Apple managed to become the best having much less experience ( ten years) than most of its competitors included in the survey.

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According to The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. third largest carrier Sprint will offer iPhone 5 this year. Also the report says that Sprint, AT&T and Verizon will release the iPhone 5 simultaneously in "mid-October". At the same time Sprint will also offer the iPhone 4, as a person familiar with the matter said. AT&T has exclusively carried iPhone in the U.S. until Apple launched a CDMA iPhone 4 for Verizon earlier this year.

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This Saturday Apple plans to open other three stores, continuing its push to open a total of 30 new stores between July and September. Two stores will locate in the United States and one – in France.

• Carré Sénart (Paris, France): The store is Apple's fourth in the Paris and eighth overall in France.
• Northlake Mall (Charlotte, North Carolina): The store will be the second in Charlotte and fifth in North Carolina.
• The Promenade at Chenal (Little Rock, Arkansas): The new store is Apple's first in Arkansas.

After the opening will leave just six states (Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming) without Apple Stores.

The most long-standing rumors regarding Apple's future products are rumors about television sets. The Australian site Smarthouse reported last month that Apple was in discussions with LG about producing a panel for a 55-inch TV based on OLED technology.

The Korea Times now reports that these rumors are groundless.

“It’s true that Apple has keen interest in TV, allowing users to stream music, videos and TV shows via iTunes, though that needs some iPhone and iPad integration, however, Apple is still pessimistic about using OLED displays,” said one source.

“Because Apple is worried over higher costs and technology-related issues linking to large-sized OLED displays, it is groundless that Apple has asked LG Display to supply its OLED screens for its upcoming televisions,” added the source.

Sources also added that Apple is likely to stick with more proven LCD technologies for any such television products.

“Apple has no interest in using OLED screens on its popular devices. The upcoming iPad 3 will also adopt picture quality-enhanced LCD screens, while the next iPhone will follow suit. Three or four more years will be needed to see OLED-embedded digital devices from Apple,” said a top-level executive from one of Apple’s suppliers.

iH8Sn0w released Sn0wBreeze 2.8b6, which adds support for the latest iOS 5 beta 6 firmware.

Sn0wBreeze is a quite useful jailbreak utility. It creates custom firmware and allows users to preserve baseband for unlock. This new version also adds hacktivation and removes UDID developer check. This means that you can try iOS 5 without developer account from Apple.

You can download Sn0wBreeze 2.8b6 for Windows here.

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