News tagged ‘USA’

Recently Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook and Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer had a financial conference call with the press and analysts. Here are some interesting facts we gained from the conversation:

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Dan Primack from Pehub.com reported yesterday that Google acquired Agnilux. The latter is a startup company in San-Jose comprised of former Apple, P.A. Semi, Cisco and TiVo employees. It is intriguing that there almost no public information about the reasons why Google bought it and what Agnilux has recently been working on. One of the Google representatives confirmed the information but didn't comment it on.

Agnilux's website is currently unavailable, so we have no information about the company. But because of former P.A. Semi employees it seems like Agnilux may be working on a new chip that can be a rival to Qualcomm's SnapDragon or Apple's A4 SoCs. But, according to an investigation made by New York Times in February, one of the employees named Mark Hayter said:

"We want to make a splash. We don't want our manufacturer to take our intellectual property before we're ready".

So it looks like the company's main purpose in kept in a big secret. But it is known that later NYT heard from another Agnilux employee that the company is working on server and has a partnership with Cisco. Well that might be interesting to Google whose thousands of servers till this moment have been made by the company's engineers but not purchased.

One of the developers named Vimov made some quick math and figured out that in two years the iPad apps market will probably be worth at least $1 billion by 2012. It can even be much higher if the iPad will gain the same success as the iPhone had a year ago.

Vimov, who developed the Weather app for iPad, says Apple makes $136 million in a year from the first thousand of apps available for the 500,000 iPads that have been already sold in the US.

“If the iPad App Store were to be like the iPhone’s, then 40-60% of the sales would occur internationally, so on average that figure would rise to become $272 million per year.”

As you remember, the iPhone helped Apple to gain 4 billion downloads in 19 months.

PadGadget did some research of the the iTunes database last night and found that Apple has already approved and listed several iPad apps in the AppStore. The names use HD (High Definition) in the title to signify the bigger 9.7 inch, 1024×768 pixel iPad display. Here is a quick list of what was found:

• Ammoin HD
• Azkend HD
• Flight Control HD
• Grind HD
• HD Recovery
• Labyrinth 2 HD
• NBA Hotshot HD
• Numba HD
• Plants vs. Zombie HD
• Sparkle HD
• Worms HD

You won’t find any of these iPad titles using your standard iTunes browser, you need to use Apple’s more recent web interface to find the new titles mixed in with the thousands of regular iPhone and Touch titles.

UPDATE: Apple has corrected the iTunes Preview site and HD iPad titles are no longer listed.

Fortune has two sources saying about the number of iPads that will be pre-sold by Friday.

Venezuelan analyst and blogger Daniel Tello, who tried to track order numbers that were submitted by internet volunteers, said:

“I think sometime during Friday, perhaps before noon, the counter should roll to 200,000 units pre-ordered.”

Boy Genius counted 222 retail locations in the USA with 700 in-store pick-up reservations for the first week of pre-orders. Fortune believes it is almost the same rate as online.

Summing the numbers of online and offline pre-orders we'll have almost 400,000 iPads to be pre-sold for only 7 days!

New page featuring iBooks for iPad has been rolled out on the Apple's official site. The app will be available as soon as the new device will be launched (the official date is April 3rd). Apple confirms iBooks will use the open ePub standard and the same version of FairPlay DRM that continues to be applied on video content distributed via iTunes.

iBooks will allow users to switch portrait and landscape modes, change fonts and text sizes and even tap on words to see its definition from Wikipedia or built-in dictionary. It is compatible with VoiceOver functionality that makes content to be read aloud automatically.

For some time iBooks will be available only in USA, but as we know Apple already seeks for professionals to expand their book business internationally.

Apple announced today the date when iPad will go on sale in the USA - it is April 3rd. Models with 3G-module will be available in late April. Preorders for all iPad models will start on March 12th.

Apple today announced that its magical and revolutionary iPad will be available in the US on Saturday, April 3, for Wi-Fi models and in late April for Wi-Fi + 3G models. In addition, all models of iPad will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April.

Beginning a week from today, on March 12, US customers can pre-order both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G models from Apple's online store (www.apple.com) or reserve a Wi-Fi model to pick up on Saturday, April 3, at an Apple retail store.

Earlier we wrote that Apple is planning to expand their iBookstore service internationally. Well, in their press-release Apple noted that iBooks will be available for other countries "later this year".

On the iPad's presentation Steve Jobs noted that the iBookstore will be available only in the USA at launch. But few days ago new Apple job listing confirmed that company is planning to extend its book-selling business to other countries. Their new vacancy for manager of "Asia Pacific & Canada" iBooks divisions shows that in the nearest future their efforts will be concentrated primarily on Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

The role includes: working with management, regionally and in Cupertino to determine strategies and priorities for iBooks in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other countries; identifying content providers to target, establish and develop relationships; working with legal and production teams to finalize relationships and secure content; and coordinate launches with partners, production, and marketing. This role will also be responsible for marketing the books offering on the iBooks store by coordinating with Apple's production teams, the marketing team, and the production and marketing teams of partners.

The successful employee will work in Sydney, Australia or Markham, Ontario.

It is possible that Apple looks for the possibilities to expand in other countries, though there are no open positions for that at the moment.

We really thought that Korean sausages era will be ended after the presentation of capacitive gloves on MWSF2010. But no such luck! They're back - reborn and improved!

CaseCrown present a sausage-like stylus for only $0.99 (dropped from $3.99 regular price). The product is compatible with any iPhone and allows you to keep your gloves on when it is cold outside. You can purchase it here.

We're back on reporting about the apps and gadgets presented on the MWSF 2010. Now we'll talk about iV Plus - the solution to turn your iPhone into remote; FloTV - the service to watch TV in the USA; Square Up service to pay for everything you need only with your credit card and iPhone; and Wissair's USB DisplayDock Set will get the screen from your laptop to the HDTV-set wirelessly.

U-Socket turned to be out a very interesting solution, but FastMac was found to offer something more. The thing on the pictures below is called The iV Plus. It helps to manage a set of your home devices and consists of IR Remote, Battery Pack, Flash LED and case that wraps around the iPhone. FastMac will also provide free Universal Remote software to work with this creation. The iV Plus will be shipped expectedly in the second quarter of 2010 for $130.

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From now on sausages are not the only substitutes for human fingers; Electrorack presented an interesting rack enclosure for Xserves; Shake allows you to listen music without earphones; U-Socket solves a problem of USB-rechargable devices.

As you remember few days ago we wrote about sausages as the best substitutes of human fingers for iPhones. Well now it is not. Two companies at once presented their capacitive capable gloves that allow you to use iPhone even when it's cold. iTouch Gloves offered high end leather gloves (start with  $99.95, on the left side) and Telefingers offered thinner, less stylish and cheaper solution (for only $15, on the right side).

That really looks like oversized Mac Pro, but indeed this is a rack enclosure for Xserves and RAID configuration presented by Electrorack. The latter also offers a variety of other server racking solutions.

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This video was found on one of the Korean sites. And its pretty hard to describe the feelings you experience when watching this movie. The first question to ask yourself is probably why he uses sausages instead of his fingers? But here is an explanation:

According to the Korean portal Hani.co.kr the sausages are the best substitutes of human fingers for iPhone. If your fingers are too sweaty for continual touchscreen use then sausages are the only solution for your problem, because neither gloves nor stylus will work on the capacitive iPhone screen.

We don't know about how many Koreans have sweaty hands, but we have an information that sausage sales in that country increased by 39% over the same period last year. Obviously, the sausages become a usual practice in Korea.

Here is our live blog from Apple's event:

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Google today announced the launch of its Nexus One smartphone. It is based on the Android 2.1 operating system and offers 800x480 screen, 5 megapixel camera with flash,  Qualcomm's 1 GHz Snapdragon processor. The Nexus One offers 512 MB of Flash and 512 MB of RAM, and ships with a 4 GB Micro SD card with support for cards up to 32 GB.

Nexus One is initially available from the Google web store in the US without service for $529 or starting at $179 with a two-year contract from T-Mobile USA. In the near future, Verizon Wireless in the US and Vodafone in Europe plan to offer similar service plans.

Here is the full list of hardware and software features:

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Today DevTeam released an ultrasn0w update that fixes a bug for those who run it on firmware 3.1 and 3.1.2 with the 04.26 baseband. This bug was about a missing carrier name in the upper left-hand corner of your home screen. The update is avaliable in Cydia (repository http://repo666.ultrasn0w.com).

We remind you, that ultrasn0w 0.92 doesn't work with baseband 05.11.07!

[Update]: if your 3G or EDGE connection isn't working try manually clearing and re-entering your APN.

[Update 2]: Carrier logo fix confirmed (by order of tweet):
USA, Thailand, Austria, Trinidad, Germany, China, Kuwait, Serbia, Poland, France, Nigeria, Egypt, Pakistan, Ireland, UK, Turkey, Sweden, Switzerland, Malaysia, Hungary,The Netherlands, Bahamas, Jamaica, India,
Israel, Belgium, Canada, Portugal, Denmark, Costa Rica, Italy, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Japan, Mexico, Venezuela, UAE.