News tagged ‘Google’

Yesterday Reuters reported Apple is ready to launch its long-rumored cloud-based music streaming service. The publication cites three anonymous sources who also have details on how it will work.

"Apple's plans will allow iTunes customers to store their songs on a remote server, and then access them from wherever they have an Internet connection, said two of these people who asked not to be named as the talks are still confidential".

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As you may know, last November was released RockMelt, socially improved desktop browser for Macs and PCs. The idea of its developers was to customize Google Chrome browser in a way that would allow to interact with your friends even more while surfing the Internet. Last night the mobile version of the app appeared in the App Store.

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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.

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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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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CNET.co.uk did some SunSpider Javascript benchmarks on the new iPad running iOS 4.3 and compared them with other iOS devices and a few Androids. The results are pretty impressive.

iPhone 4 and iPad with iOS 4.2 are behind both Android devices, but significantly faster with iOS 4.3 that features new WebKit 2 browser engine.

As for iPad 2, it is more powerful, it is over 50% faster than the previous iPad.

In the forthcoming Mac OS X Lion Apple will use WebKit2 in Safari web-browser. Apple’s WebKit engine was announced in April 2010. The new WebKit2 offers both speed and security improvements:

WebKit2 is a new API layer for WebKit designed from the ground up to support a split process model, where the web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process from the application UI. This model is very similar to what Google Chrome offers, with the major difference being that we have built the process split model directly into the framework, allowing other clients of WebKit to use it.

That means that Safari will be faster and more stable and if a webpage crashes or hangs, only that single tab will be affected instead the whole browser.

A new ad of Motorola's upcoming tablet Xoom on the website of Verizon Wireless shows that the device has 1 GHz dual-core processor that is "fully Flash-enabled for video-rich web". But as you can see on the screenshot above, there is a note, which shows that actually Adobe Flash is expected in Spring 2011.

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According to ABC News, today in the evening Steve Jobs is going to meet President Obama.

Google's current CEO Eric Schimdt, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt will also attend a business leaders' event, said people familiar with the meeting. The goal of the meeting was explained by White House official.

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Rumors say that Apple might expand the next generation iPhone’s screen to 4 inches to better compete with Google Android.

The component suppliers noted that the production lines for Apple's next generation iPhone have begun testing, and Apple is interesting in expanding the screen size to 4-inches to support the tablet PC market as the vendor only has a 9.7-inch iPad in the market.

Though, Apple’s prototypes for testing usually have little bit different designs than real products.

Today The U.K.'s Daily Mail also confirmed rumors on iPhone Nano, which is set to be released this summer separately from the iPhone 5. Anonymous sources were cited in the publication to reveal both already known and unknown details on the new device:

• iPhone Nano will cost $200 without a carrier subsidy or contract;
• The device will be a third smaller than the iPhone 4;
• No "Home" button;
• The handset may be delayed or scrapped.

It was also explained why the new device may be popular.

"Phone users on tighter budgets have been shunning the pricey iPhones in favour of less expernsive models which have Google's popular Android software. Apple will now hope to lure away customers from the likes of Nokia".

Besides that, the publication reported that Apple has been working on new iPhone hardware and software that would allow customers to bypass the carriers and choose a network by themselves directly from the handset.

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This week Mike Abramsky from RBC Capital Markets released another note to investors, where he said that partnership between Microsoft and Nokia can "inadvertently help" Google Android, Apple and possibly RIM.

This Friday, at conference in London Stephen Elop, who was a Microsoft's Business Division head and now is a CEO at Nokia, along with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the strategic alliance.

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Table 1
Worldwide Mobile Device Sales to End Users in 2010 (Thousands of Units)

Source: Gartner (February 2011)

Today Gartner revealed the results of another research, where it was found that Apple's achievements in 2010 had led to the situation when the company's competitors experienced reduced sales and eventually lost significant market shares.

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Yesterday research firm Canalysis revealed a new study, where it was found that last quarter there were sold 32.9 million smartphones, which are based on Google platform, including Android, Tapas and OMS. In turn, according to Reuters only 31 million of Nokia's smartphones with Symbian OS were sold over the same period of time, and that allows to conclude that Google has overtaken Nokia and became a top smartphone platform maker in the world.

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Yesterday research firm Strategy Analytics has reported that in the December quarter iPad rivals started to conquer the tablet market, which caused Apple's tablet market share to drop from 95% to 77%.

In the Q4 of 2010 Apple sold record 7.3 million iPads and thus represented 95% of the market. Android shipments in turn increased from 100,000 units to 2.1 million, which eventually significantly changed the situation on the market, the director of Strategy Analytics Neil Mawston told.

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