News tagged ‘Lion’

The Street's analyst Jason Scwarz thinks that in June Apple will show a new version of iPhone, and it will have a smaller screen size. That will be a part of a new politics that will be focused on popularization of iPad.

Another analyst Ben Reitzes from Barclays Capital expects Apple to make another splash by new iPhone form factor:

“iPad yields should improve dramatically throughout the year even if the launch starts out capacity constrained. These developments support upside to consensus forecasts for the iPad, should demand materialize like we think it can. We estimate Apple will sell almost 5 million iPads for CY10; including 1.2 million in the June quarter – which could prove conservative.

… Also, we have increased confidence that Apple will make a big splash this summer with a new iPhone form factor. We believe that the new model will launch with considerable fanfare and expect unit expectations to rise in turn.”

There are 30,000 games on the iPhone and this number is growing. People pay for games, but exactly how much do they pay? A new report from mobile app analytics company Flurry gives some impressive numbers. Flurry estimates that users spent $500 million on games in the US AppStore during 2009. This is up from $115 million in 2008. Compared to the overall U.S. console and portable video game market, the iPhone/iPod Touch now represents 5% of total video game sales. In just the portable videogame market, the numbers are even more exciting - Apple has 19% of portable games revenue.

The numbers are especially painful for Sony who had four times as much revenue as Apple in 2008 which dropped to just over half of Apple's revenue in 2009. With the iPad coming soon the iPhone OS will grab even more of that Portable Gaming revenue.

Forbes ranked Steve Jobs the 136th Richest Man in the World. He has a net worth of $5.5 billion and shares his ranking with 5 other rich men.

Carlos Slim Helu tops the list with a net worth of $53.5 billion. More information here.

Whatever the outcome of Apple negotiations with Verizon will be, estimated sales of iPhones will equal 33 million devices in 2010, analysts say.

Moreover, Scott Craig, the analyst from Merrill Lynch, claims iPhone sales in 2010 won't be affected by the outcome of Apple and Verizon negotiations.

One way or another, Credit Suisse analysts reported of 75% chance of AT&T remaining iPhone exclusivity carrier also for the next year.

Apple announced a launch date for the iPad. The result is very exciting - Apple stock (AAPL) closed at an all time high, almost 219. This puts Apple's market cap near $199 billion dollars.

After the news about Apple's lawsuit many of us have been wondering why Apple did this. Obviously, the thing is not about money as the company already has $40 billion of cash and investments. Digital Daily's editor John Paczkowski thinks the reason is a desire to extend iPhone's growing lead on the market.

"Apple is suing to make an example out of HTC and lengthen the engineering time-to-market for Android handset builders."

While other Android smartphone manufacturers will spend their time solving a problem with developing of noninfringing technologies to avoid lawsuits, Apple will continue to iterate the iPhone.

Ok, this is clear, but why Apple accused HTC now?

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Analyst Peter Misek from Canaccord Adams had issued a report about Apple. It says that iPhones sales are better than expected, but the iPad production has some "manufacturing bottleneck", that can cause a delay of the sales start.

"An unspecified production problem at the iPad’s manufacturer, Hon Hai Precision, will likely limit the launch region to the US and the number of units available to roughly 300K in the month of March, far lower than the company’s initial estimate of 1,000K units. The delay in production ramp will likely impact Apple’s April unit estimate of 800K as well. It is also possible that, given the limited number of units available in March, the launch will be delayed for a month".

He also thinks such a delay won't affect iPad sales in 2010 and 2011 (approximately 1,2 million and 3.5 million units respectively).

Since only one month remains to iPad's launch, such hardware manufacturers as SDI Technologies, Gelaskins Inc., Sanho Corp. and Griffin Technology gear up their production of chargers, sticker covers and other accessories for a new device. And it is not surprising - according to Poper Jaffray & Co, overall sales of iPod and iPhone accessories in 2009 were about $3.7 billion.

But while these companies want to release their products as soon as possible, some other accessory manufacturers are taking a wait-and-see approach. Jonathan von Rentzell, a representative for Blue Microphones commented on this:

"If you're making it for a product, you want to make sure there's a market."

Steve Jobs already showed 2 key accessories for the iPad - a case and a keyboard dock with charging function. Both of them are created by Apple and will be sold separately with iPad.

Grooveshark is a web app that allows you to listen to music on-demand through the Internet without any charge (it requires only a Grooveshark VIP subscription for $3/month). The song can be chosen from the gigantic 7-million song catalog.

Grooveshark creators claim it supposed to be released in App Store but it wasn't because Apple has been "ritually rejecting" the app for "primarily selfish reasons". TechCrunch reports there were spent months of waiting for Apple approval. After Grooveshark's patience gave out they decided to release its iPhone application via Cydia.

From now on you can download it from the Big Boss Cydia Repository.

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Shareholders meeting started at 1 p.m. EST Thursday. For almost 2,5 hours they discussed different topics and revealed some interesting information.

First of all, Apple is going to open 25 retail stores in China. As you know, the first Chinese store was built in 2008, and since then only plans about revealing another store were announced.

Secondly Steve Jobs told Apple will build its reserves to make big investments in the future. He also mentioned it is a better way of dealing with profit than paying dividends or doing stock buybacks. At this moment Apple has ~40 billion dollars in their chest.

These icons on the picture below were found by 9to5Mac in the 3.2 SDK. They seem to be a definitive evidence of video calling capability in future generations of Apple devices.

Searching for more evidence the source explored the code and also found a more direct mention of video chat in the telephony UI code:

And here is a reference to something called iChat:

So it is almost obvious Apple will bring video calling to their devices. But what will happen with 3G networks if millions of new iPhone users will start to make videocalls instead of common calls?

Microvision presented its laser pico projector SHOWXX, Moodagent creates a Genius like playlists, ScreenGuardz Privacy app can hide your information from the neighbour and Verbatim presented their new line of usb-drives with the size of a fingernail. Look further for the details.

Laser pico projector SHOWXX designed by Microvision was presented on the MWSF. It has a size of the iPhone and costs US 500$. The picture shown by the device is so small that only one person can see it. Moreover, the battery time is only 2 hours, which is obviously too short. We can only say the technology still needs to be improved so that it could be interesting for customers.

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Apple is about to reach another great result: the 10 billion songs sold through iTunes. They set up a new page with a counter similar to the one for the first billion downloads in AppStore. Apple also created a contest with a prize of a $10,000 iTunes gift card.

According to the official contest rules, participants may make up to 25 entries per day either by purchasing/downloading songs from the iTunes Store or by filling out an entry form on Apple's web site.

The prize will be awarded for the entry (either through a song download or through the non-purchase online entry) sent immediately following the download of the 9,999,999,999th song. The potential winner will be determined by the order of the entries received. In the event that more than one entrant would be a winner based on the simultaneous timing of entries, one entrant will be randomly selected from those entrants as the winner. Each entrant's chances of winning are dependent upon the number of eligible entries received.

Apple has periodically offered similar contests in the past, such as its One Billion Song contest in 2006 and a One Billion App contest last year.

Flash for iPhone has a long history. Back in March 2008 Adobe CEO announced that they start working on a Flash player for the iPhone. Last year Apple and Adobe again announced that they were working together. The problem is that we haven't seen any result of this work. This year we had iPad Flash-less introduction and very aggressive words from Steve Jobs calling Adobe lazy.

Adobe is keeping track of its download stats using a script installed on their official website. Statistics show that as many as 7 million iPhone and iPod Touch users have tried to download the Flash Player. That number is up from 3 million download attempts from iPhones and iPod Touches in June. These numbers are shocking. They clearly show that iPhone and iPod Touch users want Flash, despite Apple's decision not to support it. However don't be surprised if Apple decides to ignore Adobe once again.

Government officials are worried about iPad’s popularity, as it may prove a threat to national network infrastructure. And we're all informed by Steve Jobs that iPad will be available with AT&T unlimited 3G-internet access for only 30$.  Government warned that the device can bring wireless network to a standstill as new users may overload wireless networks. The director of scenario planning for the federal government’s Omnibus Broadband Initiative Phil Bellaria said that with iPad’s release modern networks will be overburdened by a data flow they were not built to handle.

… We must make sure that network congestion doesn't choke off a service that consumers clearly find so appealing or frustrate mobile broadband’s ability to keep us competitive in the global broadband economy.

In addition to that, analysts predict Apple can sell 2 million to 5 million units in the first year.