Last week it was reported that Sony was actively working on changing the way users view and interact with content on its TV sets, with company’s CEO Howard Stringer acknowledging that they was seeking the way to compete with Apple’s ecosystem that is planned to include TV sets in the near future.

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The New York Times published an article by Nick Wingfield where Apple’s growth in enterprise sector of the market was revealed, noting that the current Apple’s CEO Tim Cook is "more at ease" meeting with enterprise customers, while Jobs disliked working with businesses.

"While corporate technology buyers say Apple does not try to hide the fact that consumers are still its top priority, they note that the company has gotten easier to work with in recent years, adding features to its devices that make them more palatable to business," author Nick Wingfield wrote.

Under Jobs guidance corporate customers were often rubbed the wrong way. Tim Cook, even before being appointed Apple’s CEO, was said to engage in more communication with the company's enterprise clients.

"(Cook) met more frequently with corporate customers and seemed to appreciate their needs, even if he did not deviate from Mr. Jobs's views about making consumers the priority when making Apple products," the report said.

Apple's new success in the enterprise belongs largely to the iPhone and iPad. According to the recent reports, 93 percent of Fortune 500 companies are deploying or testing the iPhone, while 90 percent are deploying or testing the iPad. Macs also have found its place in enterprises. Moreover, as it was found out, Mac business users are more productive than their PC counterparts.

On Tuesday Apple held a meeting with five Chinese environmental protection groups in Beijing. While a three-and-a-half hour meeting Apple and representatives from Chinese companies were discussing domestic supplier pollution and reports, criticizing the company for using loopholes in the system.

The representative of EnviroFriends, Li Li, who took part in the meeting, claimed that the company continues to put the burden of responsibility for pollution on its suppliers. But Apple refuses to reveal its suppliers, thus, the groups decided to carry out their own research to discover suppliers working with Apple. During the meeting Apple admitted that 15 out of the 27 suppliers accused of excessive pollution were suppliers for the company.

"Apple said they had already spoken to 11 supply firms and asked them to reform, and they’re in the process of initiating communications with the other four," Li said.

"Apple is committed to driving the highest standards of social responsibility throughout our supply chain. We require that our suppliers provide safe working conditions, treat workers with dignity and respect, and use environmentally responsible manufacturing processes wherever Apple products are made," said spokeswoman Carolyn Wu.

Remind you that this year Greenpeace ranked Apple as the fourth-greenest device maker, up five spots from last year.

German site Macerkopf reports that Apple is working on two software updates for iOS 5 to fix battery issues and to add new features to Apple’s voice recognition assistant Siri. Macerkopf tells us:

iOS 5.0.2 coming very soon, solving the battery bugs. Should arrive before the end of next week. Apple is working hard on the update. In addition Apple is working on the first big iOS 5 Update (iOS 5.1), bringing some Siri-extensions. Also the Siri hardware-control is in work "take a picture", "make a video", "switch on/off WiFi", "switch on/off BT" and more.

The new update will be iOS 5.0.2 and is expected to be released next week to address continued battery life issues even after last week's release of iOS 5.0.1 that was also targeted at solving battery issues. But there are still no signs of developer testing for an iOS 5.0.2. The other update Apple is working on to improve Siri functionality on the iPhone 4S will be probably dubbed iOS 5.1. The update seems to be released earlier next year. Apple may add new languages and expansion of maps and local search to new countries in the update.

This is step-by-step instructions on how to perform tethered jailbreak of your iPod Touch 4G on iOS 5.0.1 firmware using RedSn0w 0.9.9b8 for Windows.

Tethered jailbreak means that each time you restart your device you will need to connect it to a computer and run redsn0w.

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This is step-by-step instructions on how to perform tethered jailbreak of your iPod Touch 3G on iOS 5.0.1 firmware using RedSn0w 0.9.9b8 for Windows.

Tethered jailbreak means that each time you restart your device you will need to connect it to a computer and run redsn0w.

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This is step-by-step instructions on how to perform tethered jailbreak of your iPad on iOS 5.0.1 firmware using RedSn0w 0.9.9b8 for Windows.

Tethered jailbreak means that each time you restart your device you will need to connect it to a computer and run redsn0w.

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After Amazon put its Kindle Fire on sale, one question arose: Which tablet is faster, iPad or Kindle Fire? Wanting to figure it out, iDownloadblog compared the two devices with each other.

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Analyst Brian Marshall with International Strategy & Investment Group claims that apple may finally pay its shareholders dividends, despite the company’s long resistance. Most investors do not believe Apple will initiate a dividend policy in 2012, but if the company will, it may gain an additional $4 billion in investments.

At the moment the current Apple’s CEO Tim Cook is reorganizing the company, so he may probably make an effort to optimize capital structure and start paying dividends Apple’s shareholders. Brian Marshall believes that Apple could "easily" implement a dividend yield of 250 base points, amounting to about $2.40 per quarter.

Apple’s previous CEO, Steve Jobs, didn’t support the idea of dividend distribution and preferred to invest in strategic opportunities such as last year purchase of Siri (Apple paid about $200 million).

"We strongly believe one or more strategic opportunities will come along we're in a unique position to take advantage of," the late Apple CEO said in 2010. "We don't let the cash burn a hole in the pocket or make stupid acquisitions. We'd like to continue to keep our powder dry because we think there are one or more strategic opportunities in the future."

Qualcomm has announced availability of its Gobi 4000 chips for HSPA+ and 4G LTE capable devices, which will quite possible ship in a next LTE-capable iPad.

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Bloomberg reports that Samsung has won an early trial date of March 2012 for its case against Apple in Australia. Noteworthy, the judge accepted that proposal over Apple's opposition that requested a trial date of August 2012.

Australia Federal Court Justice Annabelle Bennett today ordered that a trial on Samsung’s claims be held in March. Cupertino, California-based Apple had opposed an early trial, with its lawyer Stephen Burley saying the company needed more time to prepare the case and favored a hearing in August.

Samsung, the world’s biggest maker of smartphones last quarter, dropped its bid for a temporary injunction barring Apple from selling the iPhones and iPad 2 and instead is seeking an early hearing. The Australian trial will be a prelude for Samsung in its U.S. case before the International Trade Commission on similar claims, which Burley said will be heard in May and June.

With the trial set for March 2012 Samsung may also add to its case against Apple new devices such as iPad 3 that is rumored to be released early 2012. The case is currently targeting the iPhone 4, iPad 2, and iPhone 3GS in Australia.

According to the results of worldwide mobile phone sales for the third quarter of 2011, released yesterday by the research firm Gartner, Apple's share of the total mobile phone market came in at 3.9% for the quarter, down from 4.6% in the previous quarter. However, Apple still takes fourth place behind Nokia, Samsung, and LG.

Apple shipped 17 million iPhones, an annual increase of 21 percent, but down nearly 3 million units from the second quarter of 2011 because of Apple's new device announcement in October. Gartner believes Apple will bounce back in the fourth quarter because of its strongest ever preorders for the iPhone 4S in the first weekend after its announcement. Markets such as Brazil, Mexico, Russia and China are becoming more important to Apple, representing 16 percent of overall sales and showing that the iPhone has a place in emerging markets, especially now that the 3GS and 4 have received price cuts.

iOS share slipped from an 18.2% in the second quarter to 15.0% in the third quarter. Android and Nokia with its soon-to-be-defunct Symbian platform are now leaders of the market. During the quarter, Android’s share increased by 52.5%, more than doubling year-over-year.

But Android dominates the worldwide smartphone market by units while Apple by profit. Some researches show that Apple now takes more than a half of the industry's profits.

A team of developers called Applidium has announced that they managed to investigate how Siri, exclusive service available on the iPhone 4S, talks to Apple servers. Applidium notes that iPhone 4S uses standard HTTPS network requests to communicate with Apple's servers, but sends data using an "ACE" command rather than regular web GET requests. Moreover, each Siri request involves a unique identifier based on UUID. Such identifier prevents access of unauthorized devices to Apple’s servers. User’s requests are compressed with the Speex audio codec optimized for VoIP. Applidium discovered that iPhone, to provide Siri’s voice recognition, should support at least Siri's basic voice recognition features, but Apple doesn’t plan to port such capabilities on earlier iOS 5 models.

So far, Applidium's investigation has revealed that Siri packages requests in compressed property lists, but further exploration of the protocol is hampered by a number of issues, including the complexity of requests, the fact that they are tied to a hardware key, and that they are subject to change.

Noteworthy, Apple could at any time stop supporting a particular hardware identifier, if it is suspected of being used to exploit its servers, and change way of data transmitting.

Applidium says "anyone could now write an Android app that uses the real Siri! Or use Siri on an iPad!" But you will need a real unique user key of an actual iPhone 4S.

This is step-by-step instructions on how to perform jailbreak and unlock of your iPhone 3GS on iOS 5.0.1 firmware using RedSn0w 0.9.9b8 for Windows.

If you need unlock Redsn0w will provide you with choice of updating your baseband to 06.15. If you have new iPhone 3GS that was made after 35 week of 2011 upgrading modem will not help to unlock.

Important: official ultrasn0w unlock is not yet ready for iOS 5.0.1. You will need to wait for ultrasn0w update. For now only jailbreak! There is a workaround described here.

Important: If you need unlock and have 05.13 baseband or lower - do not update to Apple firmware, use RedSn0w or Sn0wBreeze to create custom firmware!

Tethered jailbreak means that each time you restart your device you will need to connect it to a computer and run redsn0w.

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This is step-by-step instructions on how to perform tethered jailbreak of your iPhone 4 on iOS 5.0.1 firmware using RedSn0w 0.9.9b8 for Windows.

Tethered jailbreak means that each time you restart your device you will need to connect it to a computer and run redsn0w.

Read the rest of this entry »