iPhone - iPod

Apple iPhone gained one percentage point share in the US smartphone market while BlackBerry lost a point in the last three months of 2009, said comScore.

The researchers reported Monday that BlackBerry remains the most widely used smart phone system in the US, with 41.6 percent of the market - one point less than in the previous quarter.

Apple gained 1.2 percentage points to reach 25.3 percent of the US smart phone market.

Microsoft took 18 percent of the market, followed by Palm with 6.1 percent and Google with 5.2 percent.

Motorola remained top US handset hardware maker in the quarter, with 23.5 percent market share. Its closest competitors, LG Electronics and Samsung, made 21.9 percent and 21.2 percent of all phones used in the US, followed by Nokia Corp. and RIM.

MacRumors found a job posting on Apple's website announcing that they are looking for a "Performance QA Engineer, iPad Media".  In the Job description, they say:

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.

…and...

Good solid knowledge of photography, various video and audio media formats. Knowledgeable with lighting, whether artificial or ambient and how it affects image quality.

...Which seems to indicate that future iPads (or current iPads with features not yet unveiled) will have cameras and the ability to capture video and still images.

According to Valleywag, Steve Jobs laid into The Wall St. Journal's online executive editor Alan Murray who sent out a simple tweet from his loaner iPad.  The reporter, tail between legs, deleted the tweet and gave the following statement:

I will say that Apple's general paranoia about news coverage is truly extraordinary— but that's not telling you anything you didn't already know.

True.

RealNetworks climbs back onto the agenda today, announcing the release of a beta of RealPlayer SP for the Mac, the latest version of the company’s multimedia playback solution.

RealPlayer SP clearly wants to live at the side of the dominant iTunes ecosystem. While RealPlayer 11 let users download videos, including those from YouTube, to the computer; this version lets you convert those clips into a format that’s suitable for playback on the iPod, iPhone, Apple TV and many other smartphones and media playback devices.

The software will encode assets into a range of formats, including H.264, 3GP, MP3, and AAC.

The RealPlayer Converter includes presets for a slew of devices. When converting for Apple hardware, it pops the conversions inside your iTunes library once conversion is complete.

A range of social networking features are also in the mix - dedicated buttons let you share video links to the likes of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

"Nimble" pricing on the iPad is baked into Apple's initial $499-$829 iPad cost matrix according to Credit Suisse analyst, Bill Shope (via the WSJ), who met with Apple executives  last week.  

Apple seemed to indicate it would respond with price cuts if demand for the device wasn’t revving up the way it liked. “While it remains to be seen how much traction the iPad gets initially, management noted that it will remain nimble (pricing could change if the company is not attracting as many customers as anticipated),”

The iPhone Dev-Team has introduced PwnageTool 3.1.5 for Mac OS X which now supports Apple’s recently-released iPhone OS 3.1.3.

“Phone 3GS users (regardless of unlock) should stay away from this and all 3.1.3 jailbreak tools unless you know you have your “SHSH hashes” backed up via Cydia. That’s because if you make a mistake you may find yourself stuck at official 3.1.3 with no way to jailbreak or come back down to 3.1.2 to jailbreak,” the developers warn.

“If you really truly feel that you need to update, [PwnageTool 3.1.5] creates a custom 3.1.3 IPSW for you to restore to on your iPhone 2G, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS with early bootrom, iPod touch 1G, and iPod touch 2G with early bootrom,” the iPhone Dev Team says in its recent blog post.

“If you don’t know if you have an early bootrom or not, please avoid updating until you learn more,” they also warn. Jailbreaking your iPhone voids your warranty and more.

Tapulous has launched its latest iPhone/iPod touch gaming title, this time teaming up with the Black Eyed Peas (Boom Boom Pow, I Gotta Feeling, and Meet Me Halfway) to introduce Riddim Ribbon. Downloadable levels from Tiësto, Benny Benassi and others are also promised.

Looks like Apple’s got a chance of eclipsing Nintendo in the gaming space, with developers flocking to the iPhone at the relative expense of the Wii.

Apple may have (blind?) faith in their carrier, but the FCC certainly does not.  In a blog post earlier this week, Phil Bellaria - Director, Scenario Planning, Omnibus Broadband Initiative, stated that the iPad had set off a new round of concerns that the carriers might be overselling themselves at the expense of its customers:

Apple’s iPad announcement has set off a new round of reports of networks overburdened by a data flow they were not built to handle.  These problems are reminiscent of the congestion dialup users experienced following AOL’s 1996 decision to allow unlimited internet use.  For months users had trouble connecting and, once they did connect, experienced frequent service outages.  The FCC even held hearings on the problem. 

Another classy one from AT&T:

Ars contacted Sling to see what exactly they did to optimize their code for it to get accepted by AT&T.  They said there had been no changes since the original submission over a year ago and that it had always been optimized for 3G network streaming.  

"We didn't change anything," Sling Media's John Santoro told Ars. "AT&T never discussed any specific requirements with us."

Santoro explained that SlingPlayer Mobile has always contained code to adapt the stream quality to the given network conditions. AT&T has been in discussions with Sling since it was first released last year, but AT&T never asked the company to make specific modifications. No changes were made to the app's 3G streaming capabilities between its being barred from AT&T and now.

That makes AT&T a big fat liar.  From their press release yesterday: