News tagged ‘U.S.’

Apple today announced financial results for the fourth fiscal quarter (third calendar quarter) of 2009. Apple posted revenue of $9.87 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.67 billion, or $1.82 per diluted share, compared to revenue of $7.9 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.14 billion, or $1.26 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 36.6 percent, compared to 34.7 percent in the year-ago quarter, and international sales accounted for 46 percent of the quarter's revenue.

The numbers represent the most profitable quarter in Apple's history and include record-breaking Mac and iPhone quarterly sales.

Conference Call Notes

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Apple has just released a new firmware version 3.1.2 for all the iPhones and iPod Touches. Weights around 300 MB. Here is the changelog:

This update contains bug fixes and improvements including the following:

• Resolves sporadic issues that may cause iPhone not to wake from sleep
• Resolves intermittent issue that may interrupt cellular network services until restart
• Fixes bug that could cause occasional crash during video streaming

Also, the iPhone OS 3.1.2 update for iPhone in U.S. is accompanied by an update to AT&T's carrier settings file, which brings the settings to version 5.6.

You can download firmware 3.1.2 here or via iTunes. We strongly recommend users who want jailbreak or unlock NOT to upgrade, just wait for new utilities.

iPhoneclub reports that four regional versions of TomTom iPhone navigation application have appeared in Apple's New Zealand App Store: U.S. & Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.We are expecting TomTom to appear in other AppStores.

Pricing is as follows (Users should set their iTunes Store to "New Zealand" prior to clicking the App Store links.):

• - U.S. & Canada (App Store link): NZ $124.99 (US $84.41)
• - Western Europe (App Store link): NZ $179.99 (US $121.55)
• - Australia (App Store link): NZ $104.99 (US $70.90)
• - New Zealand (App Store link): NZ $119.99 (US $81.03)

The App Store application prices include only the iPhone application and not the companion car kit.

via iPhoneclub

Google on Wednesday rolled out the My Location feature for Google.com on the iPhone. Now, when you visit Google.com from the Safari browser of an iPhone sporting 3.0 software, you'll be greeted with a hyperlink urging you to enable My Location. Enable it and let Google see your location, when you search it'll now show you stuff nearby that matches, like coffeeshops, restourants, gas stations, etc.

Search with My Location for Safari currently works for English speakers in the U.S. and U.K., with multilingual and multinational support coming soon.

Here's a quick video on how it works:

Sakhr is a translation company with big clients like the U.S. Department of Defense and Homeland Security. They specialize in English/Arabic translation, and this demo of their iPhone/Blackberry app (not publicly available) looks like the Holy Grail of translation software.

You hold a button, say a phrase and the software captures the information through speech recognition. The text is then translated into either Arabic or English (in the cloud, we believe) and then read aloud so mispronunciation is not an issue.

Voice recognition is a hard part. But if an app works even with 85% accuracy, that's close enough for most tourists—even if soldiers could find the mistakes a bit more costly.

via gizmodo

U.S. Patent Office has awarded Apple the patent on their application titled Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics.

358 page patent application incorporates patent applications filed as far back as September 2006. The application details the implementation of Multi-Touch on the iPhone alongside numerous diagrams of the device itself. Steve Jobs is prominently listed amongst the inventors along with other notable individuals such as Scott Forstall and Wayne Westerman.

via macrumors

NEW YORK (AP) -- Best Buy Co. will start selling the iPhone on Sept. 7, becoming first U.S. chain to do so outside of Apple Inc.'s and AT&T Inc.'s own stores.

The announcement by Best Buy expands the availability of Apple's vaunted phone to 970 full-size stores and 16 smaller Best Buy Mobile stores. It's also a coup for the Minneapolis-based chain, which has been upgrading its cell-phone departments.

Last week, Best Buy announced it had completed a two-year conversion of its stores to include upgraded cell-phone departments under the Best Buy Mobile brand. It has upgraded its computer systems to handle cell-phone activation and spent 250,000 hours training its employees.

via cnn