News tagged ‘Lion’

As you remember, tomorrow is the day when the WWDC officially starts, but some guy named Adam Jackson made photos of inner banners at Moscone Center in San Francisco (where the conference is held).

As you can see from the photos, the main banner features the slogan “The center of the app universe”. Other banners are focused on iPhone OS and its new features. One of them reveals applications Evernote, Bento and Air Sharing gathered in one folder named “Productivity” and the slogan “Drag. Drop. Organize”.

Other banners emphasize the popularity of Apple’s App Store. “4 Billion Apps Downloaded”, «200,000 Apps on the App Store» - these are the slogans found on the photos.

The last banner has the word “appvertise”, which means it is focused on iAds, new advertising technique in iPhone OS 4.

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According to new MobileTech World report, Microsoft had presented its new goal at ReMIX event in France. The company wants to sell 30 million devices with Windows Phone 7 OS by the end of 2011.

Garter revealed that Microsoft had only 16,5 million mobile devices sold in 2008, though later Steve Ballmer claimed there were 20 million. That same year Apple exceeded its goal with 11,4 million iPhones. At the beginning of 2010 it was only 8,8 million iPhones and 3,7 million Windows Mobile phones sold.

It is also known that Microsoft will present its Windows Phone 7 (which is incompatible with previous Windows Mobile OS) in the end of this year, which means the company will have a year to gain its goal. Currently the company has no library of apps, no really installed base of users and only two retail stores.

An open letter was revealed these days by a big group of Chinese sociologists, where it is said that Foxconn employees continue to commit suicides because of a situation with China's migrant workforce. The latter has tremendously increased recently, and such workers are often isolated from their family and friends and instead of looking for good jobs they work and get paid too poorly to settle in new cities. Moreover, they have a limited access to healthcare and education.

"We have made them live a migrancy life that is rootless and helpless, where families are separated, parents have no one to support them, and children are not taken care of. In short, this is a life without dignity."

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RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky believes that approximately 600-700 thousands of iPads will be sold in June overseas. If he's right then the iPad will definitely become more popular that Mac as only 500,000 Macs will be reportedly sold in June.

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Recently AdMob revealed a new metrics report that studied the numbers of iPhone OS and Adroid devices throughout the world. The company emphasized it was looking only at the devices that were at least once connected to the AdMob network:

"These unique device numbers are from the AdMob network only and reflect the adoption of our products and business operation. We don’t know what percentage of the total universe of iPhone and Android devices AdMob reaches. However we believe the data is useful on a relative basis given the large sample size of devices in our network."

So here are the main facts and conclusions along with figures:

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Yesterday The New York Times had posted a Brad Stone's report that reveals interesting information on the online music market investigation started recently by US Department of Justice.

The story started two months ago, when Amazon began to seek music labels that would allow company to sell their new songs day earlier than everyone else in exchange for exclusive "MP3 Daily Deal" promotion on the Amazon's site (according to BillBoard). In answer to that Apple asked labels to refuse Amazon or the company will not provide marketing support to those of songs that appeared in Amazon first. Such negotiating tactics attracted the attention of DoJ and now, as the NYT reports, it started inquiries with different music labels to confirm the information.

Currently Apple has 69% of online music market, while Amazon holds second place with its 8% share.  Since 2003 Apple sold more than 10 billion songs and thus provided significant revenue for the music industry.

Yesterday Dell officially announced its first 5-inch Android tablet. The announcement was made on the company's official blog.

So the device is now called the Streak. Previously it was shown at Consumer Electronics Show 2010 as a concept and called the Mini 5. The tablet has a 800x480 pixel capacitive multitouch screen, 1GHz Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm, VGA front-facing camera for video chatting, 5MP autofocus camera with LED flash, removable battery, 3.5mm headphone jack, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and MicroSD-card support. The Streak runs a customized version of Android OS with multitouch support and "Dell UI enhancements".  The system allows accessing to 40,000  apps in the Android Market, navigation with Google Maps, support for Google Voice and Microsoft Exchange Connectivity.

Blogger from the Round Rock company in Texas Lionel Menchasa thinks the Streak may be very perspective:

"I've been at Dell for 16 years, and I don't think there's ever been more buzz around a single Dell product than this. In my view, that's for good reason. Hardware and design-wise, this thing impresses. Add the ever-increasing capability that Android brings to the equation, and you've got a mobile device that offers a ton of flexibility while looking cool in the process."

The device will be shipped to the UK on June 4 and will be exclusive to the O2 network. Still there is no information on prices, data plans and American partners, but Menсhasa said everything will be soon announced.

In a video above one of the device developers Kevin Andrew tells and shows how useful the Streak may be in the everyday use.

Today Katy Huberty, who is an analyst at Morgan Stanley, revealed a survey for investors that found out interesting forecasts about Apple. It is said that 58$ of all iPhone customers are going to upgrade their mobile device in 2011. In 2008 there were only 18% of them. That means that Apple will sell 18 million more iPhones in 2011. Such a big demand in turn can cause a 50$ drop in prices or $20 in case of service plans costs.

Morgan Stanley also predicted that Apple stock will rise to $310 and even to $400 if Apple is going to be more aggressive in its pricing policy.

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According to Digitimes senior analyst, Ming-Chi Kuo, the iPhone 4G (iPhone HD) manufacturer Foxconn will ship at least 24 million units of the device this year. The shipments will start in June.

4.5 million units are scheduled for the first half and 19.5 million units for the rest of 2010. Apple is expected to present the new iPhone on June 7, 2010 during Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference.

The new device will adopt IPS (in-plane switching) panels with FFS (fringe-field switching) technology and a 960x640 resolution, Kuo said, noting that LG Display and Prime View International are the panel suppliers. By incorporating FFS technology, which enables a wider viewing angle and clearer visual quality under in sunlight, Apple is aiming to improve the handset's e-book reader features and promote its iBooks Store.

As for internals the iPhone 4G will run on the Arm Cortex A8 processor and will have 512MB memory module from Samsung Electronics, doubling the memory capacity to enable better multi-tasking.

iPhone 4G will have a bigger battery supplied by Simplo Technology and Dynapack International Technology. This will be achieved by reducing the panel width by 33%.

Yesterday we posted information about smartphone sales in the last quarter 2010, and as you remember Android-based phones become more popular than iPhones. Now it became known that Apple's spokespeople commented on this data.

In its research NPD group studied over 150,000 completed surveys, that were undertaken online every month in America. Apple's representative Natalie Harrison thinks it is not enough data to make precise conclusions:

"This is a very limited report on 150,000 U.S. consumers responding to an online survey and does not account for the more than 85 million iPhone and iPod touch customers worldwide."

It is unknown why Harrison mentioned iPod touch when discussion was about smartphones market, but according to Reunters last week Harrison had referred to the IDC research. The latter also reveals that Apple losing its positions, but this time worldwide, with Nokia and BlackBerry sales ahead in first and second spots respectively.

Examiner reports that Apple made a deal with Lady Gaga under which she will appear in the commercials that will push the upcoming iPhone 4G.

Lady Gaga is 24-year old superstar who has already sold over 10 million albums worldwide. She is known for her unusual way of introducing herself.

9to5mac inquired Lady Gaga's representatives to confirm whether rumor is true or not, but they declined to comment saying "...It's a 'no comment' for us".

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.

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.

This spring quarter Motorola had reportedly sold 8.5 million phones, which makes it the second biggest US phone maker after Apple that sold 8.8 million iPhones in the same period.

According to a Forbes report, one year ago Motorola had better results - 14,7 million phones sold. But the profit this year is down only by 9% because the company had changed its strategy and now successfully sells more sophisticated smartphones instead of cheap phones.

Motorola had best selling results four years ago when it was selling Razr model. In 2006 it was releasing 46 million phones per quarter. But these days mobile providers push companies to deliver cheap phones and because of it Motorola's profits are falling down.

The company  had big plans on its Milestone/Droid device which ships with Android OS. It was heavily promoted by Motorola and Verizon as the best Android phone available, but the company sold only 2.3 million devices in the spring quarter, which is only 27% of the total phones sold.

This week Apple announced that it will shut down its previously acquired music service Lala on May 31. If you'll try to register there as a new user, you'll see a message box:

"Lala is shutting down. The Lala Service will be shut down May 31, 2010. Unfortunately, we are no longer accepting new members."

If you're an existing member of Lala, you'll be able to use the service until May 31. But since today you'll have no access to Web songs, gift cards (any unredeemed must be utilized) and wallets, and your credits will be automatically passed to iTunes. It is also announced by Lala if customer will request a check by May 31 they will write it.

Apple purchased Lala last year for $85 million. It was announced that this service will play a significant role in iTunes strategy. Lala's difference was that user was allowed to upload music from their hard drives and then listen to it from the service. Maybe now this function will be implemented in iTunes.