News tagged ‘app’

According to a web-resource DigiTimes.com (which in turn cites Chinese newspaper Economic Daily News), panels for the iPhone 4G will be also provided by Chimei Innolux, which will join existing Apple's partners Wintek and TPK Touch Solution who have been supplying some parts for iPhone 3GS. The companies will take 15, 40 and 45 percents of total orders respectively.

All of the assembly responsibilities will be allegedly taken again by FoxConn, a company that has already had the successful similar experience with iPhone 3GS. The company already began receiving components for the iPhone 4G in April, though there is no information yet about the date of assembling it for final products.

The report also reveals that camera modules will be produced by Largan Precision (80%) and Genius Electronic (20%). TXC will continue to produce quartz components and its share will rise from 15% to 40%.

Next-generation iPhone is expected to be announced on Apple's annual WorldWide Developers Conference keynote, which will take place at San Francisco's Moscone West on June 7-11. It is rumored that the iPhone 4G will be available for sale soon after its announce.

Famous anchorwoman Ellen DeGeneres had to apologize to Apple after airing a fake iPhone commercial that scoffed at the device's finical touchscreen.

Ellen said Apple just didn't find it funny - and it's a common thing for a company with reputation of being extremely protective of its brand.

"I just want to say that I'm sorry if I made it look like the iPhone is hard to use. It's not hard to use. I have an iPhone. Portia has an iPhone. I just learned how to text on an iPhone. It’s the only phone I can text on. I love it. I love my iPad. I love my iPod. I love iHop. So everybody at Apple - Steve Jobs, Mr. Macintosh. I apologize. I'm sorry. I love this stuff."

The Berkeley hotel in London now offers its guests... an iPad! It will be proposed only to those clients who will stay in certain suites during their visit. It is supposed that iPad will be able to suggest places for visit and help to plan an itinerary.

"From Le Monde to the Wall Street Journal, your local newspaper will be available at breakfast and quickly checking the opening times of Christian Louboutin on Motcomb Street has never been more convenient. A wide range of games, videos and comic books is available for children and our experienced Concierge team has created their personal Top 5 of must-visit places – shops, exhibitions, local attractions and some hidden gems – which are clearly mapped so that you can plan your itinerary."

If you're going to visit London and would like to stay in Berkeley you should take into account that the night spent in this hotel will cost you $2804.

Ryan Tate from Gawker quoted people closed to the matter who said that Steve Jobs is dissatisfied with the free app New York Times Editor's Choice. The reason is that it has a limited content of the daily NYT.

The story started when some time ago Amazon made a deal with Times and received exclusive rights on its full content. So now if you have Kindle you should pay to gain full access to the NYT edition. The same full content is also available on the web and it's free. Moreover, the deal apparently implies that other competitors may have the full text but they must sell it at a higher price.

Few days ago the New York Times decided to raise the subscription price on the Kindle, from $13.99 to $19.99 per month. That was no wonder because the NYT warned before that they want to charge readers nearly $20-30 per month. With such a deal Apple was left with a truncated version of the NYT for the iPad. Ironically, the same version for iPhone remains to deliver the full content.

Obviously, that is the reason why Apple has been ignoring the NYT iPad app recently. It is even not listed as a "noteworthy" or "favorite" in the App Store. User reviews are also mainly negative and many people ask where the full content can be found.

Lately Apple has released a third beta of the iPhone OS 4. It is specified as build 10M2247 and available for registered developers. Previous beta release was issued two weeks ago. The situation looks familiar as last year iPhone OS 3 had also gone through 5 beta cycles before it was publicly announced.

Currently the new update is unavailable due to installation problems, but those of the developers who successfully downloaded and installed it have already revealed what's new in the release.

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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.

Finally the jailbreak for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch from the Dev Team is available for download. It's free and untethered and it's called "Spirit". The jailbreak supports every iDevice with firmware version 3.1.2, 3.1.3 or 3.2.

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Few days ago John Batelle from the Searchblog wrote an interesting post about his thoughts on Siri, an app that was recently acquired by Apple. His says with devices like iPhone or iPad we starting to use apps more than browse the Internet. Apple understands that and looks forward to increase its share on a market of apps. And Siri is a wonderful choice - its perspective, functional, unusual enough for nowadays. With cash that Apple has, it doesn't need strong and focused reasons to make such a deal.

Batelle's another thought is that with Siri Apple may become a rival to Google. Just imagine yourself saying to the app "Chicago rental car» and after that it answers:

"...You don't need to rent a car. You can use the Chicago Transit. Here's an app for it. You can get from the airport to everywhere you want to go without having to rent a car. Plus, you'll save $150 which we know is a goal of yours because you've been interacting with the Mint application..."

The idea of searching the information will also be implemented in applications we will use. And if we'll get used to it, it will seem to be much more convenient than launching a browser and typing something into the search pole.

As you already know iPad 3G became available this Friday. Well iFixIt already obtained it and found out what are the differences between its 3g and Wi-fi versions. Here is what they've revealed.

iPad 3G has a black plastic window for better antenna reception. It also changes the way to open the device - you'll need to start separating from the right side and then go to the top and bottom of it.

iPad 3G has five antennas:

1. One antenna is in the plastic window to handle the cell reception.
2. Another antenna is attached to the LCD frame with the same purpose.
3. GPS antenna is also situated in the plastic window.
4. Wi-fi antenna is in the Apple logo.
5. Bluetooth antenna is situated on the left of the dock connector.

To make 3G connections iPad uses the same baseband processor as in iPhone 3GS, and presumably it's the Infineon 337S3754 PMB 8878 X-Gold IC. For GPS connections device has a Broadcom BCM4750UBG Single-Chip AGPS Solution.

More photos of separated iPad 3G are posted below.

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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.

As you remember, this Thursday Steve Jobs wrote a letter about his thoughts on Flash. In responce to such a public attack Adobe decided to give its employees mobile phones running on Android OS which support Flash.

CNet reports it has information from three sources close to Adobe that the company is going to give Android phones, but the exact model is not specified yet (though HTC phones and Google Nexus One were mentioned). There is also no information about whether Adobe is going to give devices to all 8,600 employees or just to developers.

Flash 10.1 will be presented in May at Google's I/O conference. Every its attendee will receive Motorola Droid or Nexus One from Google.

Wow! Hours after iPad 3G sales launch and it has already been jailbroken! Below is a video of MuscleNerd where jailbroken iPad 3G runs Cydia.

MuscleNerd used the jailbreak called "Spirit". It's a tool that makes untethered unlock of iPad, iPod Touch 3G and iPhone 3GS and DevTeam promises it will be available soon. Stay tuned for further instructions how to save your SHSH Blobs and then use Spirit to jailbreak your device.

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This week's sensation was a Steve Jobs' letter published officially on Apple's site. If you didn't read it or want to remind it to yourself, here are its main tent poles:

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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.