Just like Apple did with the iCloud system backup service, Apple has announced that they will reset iTunes Match iCloud libraries on Monday, September 26th. The above image has just appeared in iTunes, noting the reset, and Apple has also begun emailing iTunes Match subscribers. Interestingly, Apple says in this email that it “has become necessary” to reset iTunes Match libraries in order to improve the service’s reliability and overall quality.
Apple says that the reset will occur at 9 AM PDT / 10 AM PST and says that all users of the iTunes Match service will need to turn off iTunes Match on both their Macs and iOS devices. Songs stored on your devices, but not directly on the cloud, will not be affected. Apple will be conducting this reset as part of their final preparations for an early to mid-October launch of iCloud and iOS 5. Final iCloud details will likely be announced at an October 4th iPhone 5 event. The e-mail to iTunes Match subscribers is after the break…
Apple’s flagship Store in Hong Kong just opened in the IFC Center this morning (Hong Kong time). The new Store certainly seems like a pretty big deal to the locals who’ve been lined up for days.
Early this week we published pictures of the beautiful architecture at this new Store. Below, you’ll find some of the videos uploaded around the web showing the excitement in the air at launch:
UPDATE [Monday, September 26, 2011 at 11:30am ET]: The Sammy Hub blog pointed out that Samsung has replaced all the wrong icons by an “S,” as seen in another image after the break.
Spotted by the folks over at CNET, an Italian Samsung store actually has Apple logos in the backdrop. You’ll noticed circled that there are App Store and Safari logos. Alright we’re just going to put this out there, Samsung — what the hell happened here? With all of the legal proceedings going underway, we’d think Samsung would try to step away from this kind-of thing.
Google Plus (iTunes) iOS users will see a big update in their App Store today with lots of new features and improvements that were detailed earlier this week. Most notable is the ability to start and join video hangouts from a mobile device. In brief testing on both an iPhone 4 and an Android device on Wi-Fi, the Video conferencing worked great. It should work over 3 or 4G but the results obviously won’t be as good. Also, this version changes Huddles to Messenger and you can now send picture files through the messenger application.
As noted by The Next Web, Twitter has announced two developer conferences coming up on October 12th, in New York and London, to discuss Twitter’s integration into iOS 5. Twitter’s Jason Costa describes the event:
There’s a lot going on in the ecosystem and we’d like to take this chance to share the highlights with you – including the latest developments with the platform, areas of opportunity that we’re seeing, and a heavy focus on the iOS 5 Twitter integration for developers. We’ll also be holding a Q&A session with members of the platform team, plus time to hang out with each other.
If rumors are true, these events will be shortly after the announcement of the iPhone 5 or/and iPhone 4S, and most likely after the release of iOS 5. There’s only 150 spots for developers, so grab your spot fast! Expand Expanding Close
MacRumorspoints to a new service by Comcast which appears to mirror the functionality of a Slingbox or EyeTV, allowing a cable box to ‘Sling’ the video to an iPod around the house.
Currently, Xfinity customers can use the Xfinity TV app to watch On Demand programming, search TV listings, and schedule DVR recordings.
There is no indication of release dates or availability, but AnyPlay will be available in limited markets at first, and spreading to all Comcast customers eventually.
This is in contrast to their current app which streams on-Demand video over the internet to iPads which are on Comcast IP addresses with adjacent cable service. Other US cable companies like Time Warner and Optimum offer Apps which stream many channels.
Check the red area above right for why this isn’t going to be very fantastic.
If you want this kind of functionality right now, but not tied to a cable company and their stipulations (and the ability to stream to devices outside your home without an extra cost), look into Slingboxes or El Gato’s EyeTV.
Spotify, a popular music streaming service from Sweden, arrived in the United States mid-July on an invite-only basis. Today, Spotify goes live for everyone nationwide, no invitation required. Users can now sign up for an account at Spotify.com and use a mobile app for Android or iPhone to stream music over wireless and cellular networks to their phones, tag songs for offline viewing, favorite tracks, share them with friends and more. What’s best, you needn’t sign up for a paid Spotify account. Thanks to a new partnership with Facebook that Mark Zuckerberg announced at the yesterday’s developer conference (more in the clip below), anyone signing up with their Facebook account gets six months of unlimited listening. What happens when the six-month free period expires?
If all of the rumors are true, Amazon has a 7-inch “media tablet” that runs a forked version of Android and will connect to all of Amazon’s services, including its Appstore, Movies, TV, Music and of course eBooks. It won’t be true multi-touch but the rumored price is half of the iPad’s (just like the screen) at $250. Who is making this for Amazon? Foxconn of course.
If Google and Apple were to merge, their respective Android and iOS mobile software would seize well over three-quarters of the world’s platform share in smartphones, per latest Millennial Media’s “Mobile Mix” mobile device usage share report. Separately, Android and iOS held 54 percent and 28 percent share in August. Millennial now includes data from smartphones, tablets, e-readers and gaming devices so direct comparison to their smartphone-focused July study is meaningless.
Apple continued to be the leading device manufacturer on our network in August, representing 23% of the Top 15 Manufacturers impression share (Chart A). Apple iPhone maintained the number one position on the Top 20 Mobile Phones ranking with 13% of the impression share.
Nearly one-third of devices on all carriers used wireless hotspots. Verizon Wireless and Sprint had 18 and 14 percent carrier mix, respectively, followed by T-Mobile USA and AT&T with eight percent each. Games, music and entertainment remain the most popular app categories. iOS represented 41 percent of the app platform mix and Android 49 percent. On Android, News apps rose by 26 percent month-over-month. Go past the fold for a bunch of pretty charts and more explanation.
Ars Technica points us to source code from the latest version of the LLVM-based default compiler within Xcode showing what appears to be support for Marvell’s ARM compliant Armada XP processor. Of course this has lead to speculation that Apple is potentially considering the processors for next-gen iOS devices, but as Ars points out, even the least exciting scenario would mean good things to come: Expand Expanding Close
According to an article in Dutch-language Nu.nl, Samsung is stepping up its legal response to Apple’s copycat accusations in courts around the world. Poor machine-translated article implies that Samsung is seeking in the Netherlands to ban Apple’s mobile products which sport 3G capabilities, which includes iPhones and 3G iPads. Samsung did not confirm any such lawsuit, but The Hague court confirmed Monday the existence of a lawsuit between Samsung and Apple. The article references a Webwereldstory.
Ironically, Apple hit Samsung in the same court last month, managing to secure a ban on imports of Galaxy-branded phones and tablets. It was a strategical attack because Samsung maintains a distribution centre in the country for the entire European Union market. Meanwhile, a court in Germany lifted the EU-wide ban, except in Germany, because Apple doctored court images in order to make the Galaxy Tab 10.1 appear more iPad-like.
Scenes from Shanghai this morning, where Apple opened its third store. Photos by reader Jeffrey. Click for larger.
Apple’s enormous and beautiful Nanjing East store in Shanghai opened doors to business this morning. If the images depicting the enthused crowd are anything to go by, this could become one of Apple’s top revenue stores. The Nanjing East spot is Apple’s third retail store in Shanghai and sixth in mainland China, if you include the upcoming monster store in Honk Kong’s IFC center. The Nanjing East spot is located within the massive wide building located at the corner of Nanjing Road East and Henan Zhong Lu.
Apple couldn’t have chosen a better place to build this store: It is within walking distance of the city’s famous skyscraper panorama and right within The Bund, a major tourist attraction consisting of the wide avenue of historic buildings. It spawns four levels of retails and the fifth level for backend operations. Sales are on a ground floor, a second floor for product demos, sales and training, while the third, fourth and fifth floor house backend operations and support for business customers.
In addition to the Nanjing East store, Apple will tomorrow open six new stores on four continents: Canada (the Metrotown store), Australia (the Westfield Hornsby store), France (the Parly 2 store), Italy (the Centro Sicilia store) and the United States (the New Haven store). In total, Apple will end the September quarter with 27 store openings, just three stores shy of its self-proclaimed goal of thirty new stores by the end of September. Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt dug up two video clips of the Nanjing East store opening, included below (the other video is right after the break).
In spite of our best hopes, 9to5Macis hearing from multiple sources who have ties to Apple and its manufacturing partners that the company is facing continued design and production delays that might push the teardrop iPhone 5 out until 2012. Today, DIGITIMESweighs in on the issue with additional information which reinforces what we’ve been hearing, putting the blame on touch panel maker Wintek which reportedly supplies one-quarter of iPhone 5 touch panels. According to the publication:
A defect has presented in some iPhone 5 touch panels produced by Wintek which may affect the ability to meet initial shipment targets for the launch which is expected in October, according to iPhone supply chain makers. In response, Wintek simply indicated that all of its products are being delivered on schedule.
The publication goes on to describe the “delayed bubble” defect which the source warns is difficult to avoid if it isn’t detected early on during the process of laminating touch panels. Sources assure the publication that Wintek “is expected to remedy the defect quickly” given that iPhone 5 and iPhone 4 utilize the same touch panel manufacturing procedures.
The report contradicts this story, also from DIGITIMES, calling for 150,000 iPhone 5s being produced every day by Foxconn, waiting for iOS 5 to be finalized and preinstalled on the devices before shipping can commence. In the light of today’s rumor, however, it is possible that the iPhone 4S production has been in full swing rather than iPhone 5 and newest Otter Box cases would certainly reinforce this thinking.
Apple facing manufacturing difficulties isn’t unheard of. Remember white iPhone 4? It took the company eight months to figure out how to make it work so that light leakage doesn’t degrade camera performance. Also, Antennagate anyone? Let’s not forget that Apple’s products are “very difficult to make” and that’s from Terry Gou, the CEO of Apple’s long-time contract manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn. For all we know, Gou might have been referring to iPhone 5 when he made that comment back in June.
Anand, as per usual, does one of the more in-depth reviews we’ve seen of the Thunderbolt Displays. Some interesting notes:
The Thunderbolt Display uses less power than the previous Cinema Display at its dimmest setting (likely just panel efficiency variance) and draws a bit more at max brightness.
Pegasus hardware seems to cause serious audio issues which corrupts sound while large file transfers are happening. Expect a fix.
There are some nuances with display daisy chaining. For instance, in one configuration Anand had to put a Promise RAID array between the two displays in a daisy chain to get them to work.
Next year’s Ivy Bridge will bring more Display options to Macs (and likely USB 3 since the controller is built into the Intel chipset). The future may also hold displays with GPUs built in.
If you are considering getting one of these displays, check out the full review which was very favorable overall. MacConnection also has the lowest price we could find on the new Thunderbolt display at $979.
Update: Macworld put up a review this morning as well. 4/5 Stars.
