More than 3 years after Steve Jobs announced the iPhone on the stage at Macworld 2007, Apple has finally secured the trademark. iPhone is a registered trademark of Apple Inc. – officially as of Feb 09, 2010. The registration number is 3,746,840.
The procedure, as you can see, required a lot of time, becasue Cisco in the US and Comwave in Canada were marketing VoIP products under the same name.
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.
T3 is reporting that Mike Tedesco, Microsoft's Senior Product Manager for WindowsBU, stated that a version of Microsoft Office for the iPad is "something that we're looking at." Tedesco added that he couldn't make any official announcement today, but from the sounds of things, Microsoft is at least considering a version of Office for Apple's newest creation.
Bringing Office over to the iPad would go a long way toward establishing it as a legitimate productivity device.
Sherif Hashim has discovered an exploit which may allow unlock of the latest iPhone OS 3.1.3 baseband 05.12.01. Such unlock utilities for previous baseband versions were called blacksn0w, ultrasn0w и and yellowsn0w. MuscleNerd, the member of DevTeam, has already confirmed it is working. So the timing of the unlcok release is totally up to them right now.
Here is an official update from DevTeam:
"We’ve started to look at his crash but it’s a long road between any given crash and a fully working unlock, and we couldn’t put an ETA on it even if we wanted to. It’s not even guaranteed that an working unlock will come from this particular crash — it’s just too early to tell."
A new job offer on the official Apple website gives one more evidence that in future the iPad and iPod Touch will have a camera and will be able to record video. In particular, Apple is looking for an engineer for the team "Media Systems" who will test the possibility to take pictures, playback and record audio and video:
The Media Systems team is looking for a software quality engineer with a strong technical background to test still, video and audio capture and playback frameworks. Build on your QA experience and knowledge of digital camera technology (still and video) to develop and maintain testing frameworks for both capture and playback pipelines. You will work together with the development team to ensure quality. Your focus will mainly be on performance testing and developing performance measurement test tools. You will be responsible for the development and maintenance of methodical testing strategies and accompanying test documentation. Day to day activities will include developing and conducting functional/system/regression testing.ad-hoc testing; creating and tracking high quality bug reports; and reporting on project progress.
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.
Giles Turnbull from the CultOfMac noticed one interesting thing in the video of Apple’s official iPad announcement event.
At 1:04 of the video (the picture above) Phil Schiller demonstrates the new iWork for iPad. On the picture we can see a Keynote and visible in the left corner of the screen button called “My Presentations”. When he moves on to Pages, “My Documents” can be seen clearly. And it really reminds of Windows 95!
Still it is not clear, is this just a Pages feature or maybe a system-wide folder that can be used by other apps. And eventually, “My Documents” may only be a working title with a possibility to be renamed when iWork for iPad will actually be released.
The official Mobile Spectator Guide for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games is now available for iPod Touch and iPhone. It can be downloaded for free from the App Store.
This application is a location-aware schedule that details more than 2,000 sport and cultural events taking place for 17 days between February 12 and 28, 2010.
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.
So this is a minor update, which fixing only the accuracy of the 3GS battery meter and the stability of some third-party app launches. This update is avaliable via iTunes.
New firmware 3.1.3 also introduces a new version of the baseband, the 05.12.01. So if you need unlock do not update! DevTeam also warns us:
If you care about your jailbreak and unlock, don’t update your device - 3G and 3G(S) owners should pay particular attention to this warning.
PwnageTool and redsn0w are not yet compatible with 3.1.3
Experimenters show that the latest version of redsn0w 0.9.2 is able to jailbreak iPhone 2G, iPhone 3G and iPod touch 1G. Just point it at the 3.1.2 IPSW (download here) after doing update or restore to firmware 3.1.3. Sounds like DevTeam will release an updated version of redsn0w that will handle firmware 3.1.3 officially. They say iPod touch 2G with firmware 3.1.3 is also jailbreakable.
Users report that unlock software, blacksn0w and ultrasn0w, doesn;t work with the new baseband.
First of all, now the app can finally remember your password while you're making your purchases. Also some problems with syncing Podcasts and Smart Playlists with iPod were solved. An update contains some improvements in stability and performance. Also it fixes a few minor issues and bugs.
iTunes 9.0.3 is available now for update from the software update mechanism in Mac OS X and Windows or on the official site.
After the iPad announcement the pre-orders for the Joojoo went up, said Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan in an interview with SGEntrepreneurs. Though he did not reveal any actual numbers, Chandra did drop some interesting details. He hinted that his company will soon announce a partnership with a "major mobile phone player", which has a “significant” market share in Southeast Asia. This “player” will also probably take care of the Joojoo manufacturing cost. And yet there is no information about the shipment date for the Joojoo, which still stands 8-10 weeks.
The Joojoo is a Linux-based tablet PC designed for Web surfing by the TechCrunch resource. Some photos from the official site are listed below.
Apple has finally opened an official YouTube Channel. Now all users can easily watch and embed official Apple videos.
There are total 5 videos avaliable right now - the iPad video and the entire Keynote split into 4 videos. All the videos are avaliable in high quality (HD 720p):
Here are the official iPad photos from Apple. On one of them you can see iPad WiFi+3G model - it is with a black horizontal bar on the top. Let's watch the gallery:
Engadget has received some very interesting photos that could refer to the Tablet from Apple that will be presented today.
Okay, we obviously can't confirm this, but we just got two very interesting images of what certainly looks like a prototype Apple tablet.
The device appears to have a very iPhone-like Maps application with UI elements consistent with the current iPhone. Obviously, the screen is much larger with a much larger viewing area. There appears to be a home button at the bottom of the device, and a Wi-Fi signal near the top with "No Service" indicating no cellular service at the time the photo was taken.