Archive for January 18th, 2012

Fortune's Adam Lashinsky has written a new book entitled Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired -- and Secretive -- Company Really Works. The book is an unauthorized look at the inner workings of Apple.

Fortune offers one tidbit from the book today, profiling Senior Vice President for iOS Software Scott Forstall as Apple's current "CEO-in-waiting". Last October BusinessWeek also suggest that Forstall could be next Apple's CEO, portraying him as an aggressively ambitious "mini-Steve".

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Apple has filed a new suit in the Dusseldorf Regional Court against Samsung. The suit cites multiple patented designs owned by Apple in Europe. This time the company asked a German court to ban the sale of the Galaxy S II and nine other smartphones, along with five tablet models, including the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and its redesigned version the Galaxy Tab 10.1N – Samsung's attempt to overcome ban on tablet sales. As far as you remember, Samsung redesigned the tablet and renamed it. Those changes were apparently enough for the court in Germany, which indicated last month that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is not likely to be banned from sale. The suit also targets Samsung's Galaxy S Plus in addition to the Galaxy S II.

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Pod2g has posted a photo confirming the successful untethered jailbreak of the iPad 2 on iOS 5.0.1.

Recently pod2g posted a video showing the successful untethered jailbreak of the iPhone 4S on iOS 5.0.1.

Release of the jailbreak is expected in a few days. We'll let you know as soon as it is available!

AllThingsD reports on a survey made by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) which analyzes the impact of the market for iPhones that are given away or resold when users buy the latest models. The survey looked at users upgrading to new iPhones beginning with the launch of iPhone 4S in October and found that 53% of those customers had returned their used iPhones to the secondary market.

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iMore dug through the recently released third beta of iOS 5.1 and found evidence showing that Apple could add a deeper iPhone and iPad integration with Facebook into a future operating system update. In one screenshot shown for the iOS Contacts application, there is an option to enter a person's Facebook user name right below their Twitter account. The same deeper integration was provided for Twitter that was one of the most-touted features of iOS 5, which was publicly released last October.

Deep integration with the social networking service allows users to quickly post Web links from Safari or pictures saved in the Photos application to Twitter. Presumably, future iOS integration with Facebook would offer similar functionality, making it easier for users to share information with their friends on the popular website.

The pre-release build of iOS 5.1 also reportedly includes references to new iPad models that are named in the code such as "J1AP" and "J2AP." The references corroborate with rumored code-names of "J1" and "J2" that were first reported last November, when it was said that Apple was secretly working on two new iPad models.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Roger Rosner is the executive in charge of Apple's digital textbook tools. Rosner is a Vice President for Productivity Applications at Apple, such as Pages, Numbers and Keynote. He joint Apple in 2001, prior he was CEO of Bluefish Labs, a software development firm that Apple purchased.

Prior to working on the textbook service, Rosner was in charge of Pages, Numbers and Keynote -- Apple's iWork suite of office applications. Jessica Vascellaro writes for the WSJ:

Mr. Rosner's involvement is a sign of how strongly Apple intends to emphasize textbook creation, in a move to change the type of educational content that exists on the market. It also underscores how as textbooks—and all media—goes digital, it is increasingly important for tech companies to get media companies to create digital content with their software or in formats compatible with their services and devices.

Whether Mr. Rosner, whose LinkedIn profile pegs him at Apple for more than a decade, will take the stage on Thursday remains unclear. If so, audiences may remember him from Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference this past June, where he demonstrated features of iCloud, the company's online syncing and storing service.

DigiTimes reports, citing its sources, that Apple has decreased shipments of iPad 2 displays from 16 million panels in the third quarter to 10 million panels in the fourth quarter of 2011 and to 7-8 million panels in the first quarter of this year. This means that by the end of this year the production of Retina displays for iPads 3 with resolution of 2048x1536 pixels will surpass that of panels for iPads 2.

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