News from category ‘Other’

A couple days ago Apple released its own application for showcasing the best iAd advertisements. Noteworthy that iAd Gallery have already caused debates on the Internet about it features set that is rather limited. The Gallery only lets users to browse different iAd campaigns. Simply said, it’s a free iAd collection for iPhone. Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider noted that iAd Gallery may be violating Apple’s own guidelines for iOS apps and should have been rejected by Apple itself. In the 2.13 section of the guidelines, the company explains:

Apps that are primarily marketing materials or advertisements will be rejected.

iAd Gallery indeed is based on marketing materials. The truth is, of course Apple won’t reject its own app even if it violates one of the Guidelines.

The new numbers saying how many iPad 2 units Apple received from its suppliers in March were recently revealed.  A report claims that Apple received between 2.4 million and 2.6 million of the iPad 2 units in March. Given regular stock-outs of the iPad 2 in March, Apple presumably sold through the entirety of shipments it received. That would mean Apple sold at least 2.4 million units in March. Moreover suppliers noted that sales of the iPad 2 are running faster than the first-generation device. For comparison, the first-generation iPad took 28 days to reach its first million sales. Apple has been silent about sales of the iPad 2 since the device launched in the United States early last month.

Apple is rumored to announce the new Final Cut Pro on April 12th during the 10th annual SuperMeet. Canon, Avid, and Autodesk will not be presenting on the event. In January Hardmac proposed that Apple was testing a beta version of Final Cut Pro, and that it was slated for a late March or early April release date. Moreover Final Cut author Larry Jordan  writes on his blog:

I’ve Seen The New Version of Final Cut Pro… and it’s a jaw-dropper. Last week, Apple invited a few folks, including me, to a short meeting in Cupertino where they previewed the up-coming version of Final Cut Pro. While I am under NDA and can’t talk about what I saw, I CAN tell you the meeting happened and that it showcased the new Final Cut Pro.

Yesterday Apple launched its new iPhone application, iAd Gallery, for showcasing the best iAd campaigns on iOS. The application consists of several iAds for iPhone, you can browse by advertiser, category or ad feature.

The iAd Gallery is a celebration of advertising, featuring iAd campaigns from some of the world’s best brands and their advertising agencies. The iAd Gallery gives you easy access to a selection of the fun and informative ads that have run in some of your favorite apps. Use the Browse feature to discover ads you haven’t seen, or to find those you want to see again. Even lets you tag your favorites to a Loved section that’s all your own.

Apple reportedly asked Toyota to remove from Cydia its exclusive theme created by Toyota's advertising company Velti for promotion of its new vehicle and available for jailbroken iPhones.

Scion, a brand of vehicles manufactured by Toyota, recently developed a custom iPhone theme specifically for jailbroken devices, submitting it to us for hosting in Cydia.

As far as we know, Apple is strongly against jailbroken devices but this advertising campaign may somehow help to legitimize the jailbreak community and also place it in direct competition with Apple's own iAds network. Apple apparently heard about the campaign and has asked Toyota to pull it.

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Cydia is the well-known alternative App Store for jailbroken devices, now installed on 10-15 million iOS devices accounting for roughly 9% of the total iOS userbase worldwide, according to the latest numbers shared by Cydia’s creator and main developer, Jay Freeman aka Saurik.  1.5 million users log in Cydia on a daily basis. So it’s not surprise that such large companies like Toyota have seen  the potentialities of the Cydia and now wish to promote their brand and products via Cydia or invest into an advertising campaign.  They’re simply looking for new ways of promoting their products, for example, Scion, Toyota affiliate, already created the theme for jailbroken devices in order to advertise their new 2011 tC vehicle.

Taiwanese site Apple.pro reports that the seventh-generation iPod nano presumably set for introduction later this year may retain its current smaller form factor but still add a rear-facing camera once again. The photo above claimed to be the rear case for the next-generation iPod nano with a camera hole in an upper right corner.  The camera seems to take up some space occupied by the battery, so the new device may use a smaller battery or its components could be shifted to accommodate the camera.

Market research firm comScore released details of the smartphone market share for the November 2010 – February 2011 period. The company surveyed more than 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers and found out that Samsung the top cellphone manufacturer with a 24.8% market share.  Apple ranked 5th place with a 7.5% share in February, up 0.9% from November 2010. As comScore notes Apple saw the “strongest gain” thanks to the release of the Verizon iPhone 4, which was the “most acquired handset in the month of February” in the United States. Though, among the mobile operating platforms Google’s Android system demonstrates the strongest growth.

69.5 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in February 2011, up 13 percent from the preceding three-month period. Google Android grew 7.0 percentage points since November, strengthening its #1 position with 33.0 percent market share.

Yesterday, on April 3 the Apple’s iPad celebrated its first anniversary. 365 days ago the original iPad went on sale in the United States. The Apple’s “magical device” that was smaller than a laptop but bigger than a smartphone, was exactly what many people had been looking for. Moreover, the iPad created a new market of devices without physical keyboard with large Multitouch screen.  iPad for Apple was a terrific commercial success. The company sold more than 15 million devices, and over 75, 000 native applications via the App Store. The iPad became an iconic device, and now there are long lines around the globe to get the chance of buying an iPad 2.

As you may already know, this Thursday Acer CEO Gianfranco Lanci resigned his office after the company's decision to reorganize itself in order to increase its share on the tablet market. The permanent successor should be found by the end of April.

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This week another lawsuit had been filed against Apple. This time H-W Technology LC accused the company of violating its patent No. 7,525,955, entitled "Internet Protocol (IP) Phone with Search and Advertising Capability".

The latter was filed in 2004, and granted in April of 2009 by U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The invention describes a handset with the unique ability to "converge voice and data within a single terminal", which would allow users to "receive information and offers from merchants and to complete a transaction with one of said merchants without having to generate a voice call".

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Yesterday Apple released the second developer preview of Maс OS X Lion for testing purposes. The new Build 11A419 is not a Gold Master Candidate build, as it still contains many known issues that need to be fixed. Changes included in the update are currently unknown. It seems that the update is aimed at allowing developers to download future updates. Nevertheless, TechCrunch reports that this is indeed the "golden master candidate" build it discussed over the weekend and that the company is simply not going to push out a final release candidate until around its Worldwide Developer Conference in early June.

Yesterday Apple posted on its website an announcement saying that it will reveal its earning for the second fiscal quarter of 2011 and host a conference on April 20th. The company is expected to provide sales numbers for the iPad 2 and the Verizon iPhone, which was initially rumored to have sales “below Apple’s expectations”.  During the conference the company plans to discuss financial results of its second fiscal quarter. The conference call starts at 5:00 PM Eastern / 2:00 PM Pacific after release of financial results which typically comes around 4:30 PM Eastern.

iPad 2 antenna: GSM (top), CDMA (middle), and Wi-Fi (bottom)

iFixit announced that they completed the teardowns of the GSM and CDMA models of iPad 2. Wi-Fi version of the iPad 2 was torn down on launch day. The GSM model has the micro-SIM card slot along the upper left edge to provide the device with subscriber information. On the CDMA version such information stores directly on the WWAN board inside. The CDMA iPad offer slightly different antenna configurations, it has an additional antenna and an integrated GPS receiver. What’s really curious is that the 3G version of iPad 2 has the older Infineon 337Se833 baseband chip rather than a dual-mode Gobi chip found inside the CDMA iPad 2. Maybe it was a supply issue or an engineering decision designed to cut costs a bit.

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Amazon has announced its own Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player to store and distribute music, video, photo content via the cloud.  These services allow customers to securely store music in the cloud and play it on any Android phone, Android tablet, Mac or PC, wherever they are. Customers can easily upload their music library to Amazon Cloud Drive and can save any new Amazon MP3 purchases directly to their Amazon Cloud Drive for free.

In other words now Amazon is offering the following services to its customers:

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