Jordan Kahn

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ-xC3g0duA]

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about Apple’s new Assistant which is expected to be one of the headlining technologies shown off at the October 4th event.

The video above is the work of artist Jan-Michael Cart who was contacted by MacRumors to put together this concept video of Apple’s new iOS 5 feature that we detailed just a few weeks ago.

Below is another artist rendition showing off what the Assistant interface might look like based on sources with “knowledge of the feature”. We can verify that these are relatively accurate including the purple swirl around the mic which our source saw in a prototype device. Remember this can also be used from the lock screen as well.

Last night we detailed that Apple’s new iPhone will come in three different configurations –including a likely 64GB model – in addition to the 8GB iPhone 4 which hit Apple’s inventory database last week.

Three weeks after the previous beta, Apple just pushed out iTunes 10.5 beta 9. This leading up to their iPhone media event slated for October 4. The beta will be required for devs interested in trying out the upcoming iTunes Match service and of course includes the usual list of known issues.

MacRumors provides us with the list of known issues from the release:

– “Scan and match” feature is not yet complete. Some users’ tracks may not be recognized by iTunes Match even if the tracks are available in the iTunes Store, and those tracks will be uploaded to the users’ iCloud storage. Some tracks may also be mis-matched to a different version of the same song on the iTunes Store. 

– Music can only be added to iCloud from one computer at a time. 

– Updating an iOS device to iOS 5 beta 7 may result in music failing to play. Users should turn off iTunes Match in settings and then turn it back on to restore functionality. 

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You didn’t think Apple was going to bring iTunes music and movie stores to EU countries without also giving them the new Apple TV to watch all that new content, did you? MacRumors claims to have got word seven new EU countries will be getting their hands on Apple’s set top box come October 4th, the same day as the new iPhone event.

All-new Apple TV Now Available for Order in Seven New Countries

We are delighted to announce the all-new Apple TV, with an enhanced user interface and a breakthrough price point, is now available to order in Belgium, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland.

The countries included in this initial launch– Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Finland, Norway, Luxembourg, and The Netherlands. The report also notes Finland is set to get the Apple TV at €119 including VAT, with an optional €29 AppleCare package. It looks like Apple is finally starting to take its hobby business more serious and perhaps this long overdue EU rollout signals bigger things to come in the near future. It’s possible we could hear more about the iTunes and Apple TV expansion at Apple’s iPhone event on Tuesday.

According to Reuters, Foxconn’s new manufacturing plant in Brazil may be in jeopardy due to the company’s “crazy demands” related to tax breaks, lack of a skilled workforce, and the logistics of necessary infrastructure. The report claims after talking to government officials, “it is unclear whether the project will ever get off the ground”.

“The talks have been very difficult, and the project for a Brazilian iPad is in doubt,” one official said. “(Foxconn) is making crazy demands” for tax breaks and other special treatment, the official added.

Brazilian Minister of Science and Technology Aloizio Mercadante says the planned $12 billion investment might become a little less than originally expected. Reuters even suggests it’s possible Foxconn may only assemble iPads in Brazil using parts made elsewhere, rather than producing components onsite:

“One option could be for Foxconn or a Brazilian partner to simply assemble foreign-made parts to the iPad, rather than producing screens and other components locally. Other steps could also be taken to reduce the project’s scale, which may simply have been too ambitious for all parties.”

The project, which was initially set to begin production in July, was pushed back to November due to similar concerns. On September 14th, we told you Aloizio Mercadante confirmed that iPads made at Foxconn’s new plant in Jundiaí, near São Paulo, would hit the market by December. It’s unclear now whether or not the deal will fall through.

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The images above and below aren’t just photoshopped mock ups of the iPhone 5, but actually images of a physical, homemade iPhone based on case leaks, known hardware components, and rumors.

Ben Miller over at BenM.at put together the prototype, equipped with glass for the display and machined from a block of aluminum, Ben describes the process of creating it as similar to the iPad.

The prototype takes the rumored teardrop and rounded back design into account, going from 6.86mm thick at the top to 5.33mm thick at the bottom. It’s also 59.94 mm wide, which is a bit wider than the 58.6 mm wide iPhone 4. You’ll also notice the rumored oval shaped Home button. More images after the break and you can also check out a video here.

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According to a poorly translated report from Macotakara, China Unicom’s Deputy Director of Research has confirmed an iPhone 5 with HSPA+ capabilities (21Mbps) during a keynote at Macworld Asia 2011. The image above is from the presentation via PC Watch.

Japanese IT News Site ” PC Watch “Tells That, Research vice president of China Unicom , Huan Wenliang, told iPhone five Will Support W-CDMA based high-speed Data Transfer standard HSPA Evolution “HSPA +” (21Mbps) at Keynote speech in Macworld Asia 2011.

We’ve heard rumors that Apple is in early testing of LTE-capable test devices, and we know AT&T has already started rolling out their HSPA+ tech and even marketing HSPA devices as “4G”.

Curiously, the Qualcomm Gobi MDM6600 chips found in the Verizon iPhone support HSPA+ data rates of up to 14.4 Mbps. Analysts are expecting a 4G LTE iPhone in 2012. (via MacRumors and MacPost)

Well known iOS accessory maker Griffin Technology just announced the TechSafe Case for iPad 2, a protective polycarbonate case equipped with a 4-digit combination-lock and cable  system for tethering the device to an anchor point.

“The TechSafe Case is the ideal solution to protect your iPad 2 while on the go,” said Matt Brown, Director of Category Management at Griffin Technology. “It takes only a few seconds to lock down your iPad, and it removes any opportunity for theft.” 

Much like the Kensington SecureBack Security Cases we told you about a couple weeks back, the TechSafe Case is of course best suited for schools, offices, and other public settings where potential theft or damage is a concern. The design is a little more subtle than the SecureBack case, and at first glance seems like it would be more secure.

The case also has the typical foldout stands, one for “typing and tapping”, and the other for viewing content in landscape orientation. You also have easy access to the 30-pin connector, volume rocker, and power and home buttons. Griffin will even store your 4-digit code on their website in case you forget it.

You can grab the Griffin TechSafe Case for $79.99 on Amazon. The price is comparable to Kensington’s SecureBack case which goes for $79-$89. More images after the break.

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A study today from independent ad network InMobi gives us insight into the number of smartphone users currently planning on buying the new iPhone 5. The report claims 41% of current mobile users in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico plan on making the upgrade, this in comparison to Nielson’s latest numbers which as of August put Apple at 28% of the U.S. market.

We know the introduction of a new iPhone next week will eventually begin to sway the numbers in Apple’s favor. InMobi’s study shows 50% of the 41% of users planning on making the upgrade will do so in the first six months following launch.

The report does provide numbers if Apple were to only introduce an iPhone 4S upgrade (akin to the 3GS). In this scenario, the study finds only 15% of mobile users plan on making the switch.

Of those interested in making the jump to an iPhone 5, the study found 52% of BlackBerry users, 51% of current iPhone users, and 27% of Android users, plan on upgrading. When it comes to an incremental iPhone 4S upgrade, 28% of BlackBerry owners still intend on making the purchase.

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Image credit: Ben Buffone

Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster is reading into the “let’s talk” portion of the headline from invitations sent out today for Apple’s upcoming October 4th media event. In fact, he thinks it’s indeed a clue to the new iPhone’s Assistant feature that 9to5Mac told you about first.

 “In the past,” Munster writes in a note to clients, “Apple has used its invitation to include cryptic hints as to what it will announce. The phrase on this year’s invite, ‘Let’s talk iPhone’ may be a simple play on words, but may also refer to new speech-based features for the iPhone.”

Some have also speculated the red “1” badge on the phone icon of the invitation as hinting at only one device being launched, rather than two variations. Munster thinks two iPhones will be launched on October 4th, however he doesn’t expect the low-end, inexpensive model that has been rumored. Rather, he expects a full-fledged iPhone 5 that will sell at the $199/ $299 price point, in addition to a refreshed iPhone 4 (or iPhone 4S) for $99:

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Stocks of Apple’s component suppliers are experiencing increases stemming from today’s announcement confirming a next-gen iPhone related media event for October 4th.

Among them, Qualcomm, expected to provide the device’s GSM and CDMA compatible Gobi baseband chips, is up 3.9% as of this report. Broadcom Corp., providing wireless chip related components is up 3.5%, Gorilla-glass maker Corning is up 5.92%, and CMOS image sensor supplier OmniVision Technologies Inc. is up 3.4%.

Nuance Communications, Inc. is also up 5%, which many are speculating is due to the new iPhone’s Nuance-powered speech-to-text feature and the implications of the “Let’s talk iPhone” slogan on the iPhone event invites.

Other stocks from lesser known power amplifier component makers including Avago Technologies, TriQuint Semniconductor, and Skyworks Solutions were all also on the increase as of this report.

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T-Mobile’s CMO Cole Brodman recently published a letter addressing customers regarding the iPhone. While yesterday he confirmed the carrier would not be receiving the new iPhone come October, he described their desire to offer a “no-compromise iPhone experience” to current users:

“We’ve heard from many customers who love their T-Mobile service, but are disappointed that we don’t carry the iPhone. To these customers, first, thank you for your business. Please know that we think the iPhone is a great device and Apple knows that we’d like to add it to our line-up. Today, there are over a million T-Mobile customers using unlocked iPhones on our network. We are interested in offering all of our customers a no-compromise iPhone experience on our network.”

Of course the ability to capitalize on the over 1 million iPhone users currently on T-Mobile’s network that purchased the device elsewhere would be a huge advantage. Brodman then points out the carrier’s other offerings with the recently launched Galaxy S II and notes Android is outpacing iPhone in “consumer adoption, market share and capabilities like support for faster 4G networks”. He did, however, reiterate the carrier’s desire to get an iPhone in their lineup yesterday saying it’s in Apple’s hands now and that they are waiting for “that call”.

In a new study from Nielsen for the month of August, Android is continuing to grow reaching 43% of all smartphone owners, up from 40% in July. This in contrast to Apple’s 28% share, which according to Nielsen, has been static since June.

It’s important to note, however, that Android’s increase was largely due to the decline of the “other” category, which fell from 13% to 11% thanks to poor performance from Microsoft and Palm. RIM also lost share falling 1 percentage point to 18%, which contributed to Android’s rise as well. Of course this was also the first summer where Android wasn’t met with a new iPhone to compete for new smartphone acquirers.

The report is quick to note that the introduction of a new iPhone next month could easily sway the numbers in Apple’s favor, at the very least for recent acquirers, which the survey put Apple at 28% in comparison to an impressive 56% for Android during the month of August.
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Sources close to Apple’s manufacturing and supply chain (via DIGITIMES) claim Apple, along with others from the “non-Apple camp”, is prepping to produce devices that include curved glass, specifically touchscreens, in early 2012.

“…Apple reportedly also has bought glass polishing equipment for its suppliers in preparation for the production of devices fitted with curved cover glass. Lens Technology, Fuji Crystal, G-Tech are said to be major cover glass suppliers of Apple. While Lens and Fuji focus on iPhones, G-Tech supplies mainly for iPad.”

The report notes that other companies were expected to use curved cover glass in “attempts to gain a competitive edge” over Apple in the current iPhone and iPad dominated smarpthone and tablet markets. We’ve certainly heard of the company’s plans for curved glass in Apple’s retail stores and their new spaceship campus, but only heard rumors and speculation regarding possible consumer product applications.

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:

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Adding some validity to the possibility of a new iPhone branded “4S”, @chronicwire has just posted the images below showing the iPhone 4S branding on what looks like legit packaging for a new Otter Box iPhone case.

Another couple if you head down south. Notice the changed volume buttons that may or may not be indicative of a volume button to camera shutter feature.

LEAK: Photo of the back of the package showing the iPhone 4S case, depicting new volume buttons, and on the right side. New soft-looking volume buttons being on right side of iPhone 4S can probably be attributed to the “volume button to take pic” iOS5 feature

Update (Sept 23rd): TUAW talked to Otterbox who clarified:

She explained that the ad reflected the current conversations going on in the blogosphere. “Like many, we are watching the rumor sites and using information to plan ahead as much as we can.” Otterbox promises support for whatever iPhone debuts, but they’re emphatically not stating or leaking anything further. “We do not have any confidentiality agreements with Apple,” Richardson told TUAW.

As for those iPhone 4S Otterbox packaging photos that leaked yesterday, she explained, “What was circulating yesterday was not a case image for the iPhone 4S but a packaging design.” Otterbox has not identified the source of the photos.

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AT&T’s Randall Stephenson recently responded to the possibility of Sprint getting a next-gen iPhone during the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference. On top of describing the effects of new carriers adding the device to their lineup as “always overblown”, he went on to say “I’m very confident that we’ll do very well with” the new iPhone.

When talking about potential competition from Verizon and Sprint regarding the yet to be released iPhone 5, he had this to say:

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In the midst of all the high-profile Samsung vs. Apple cases throughout courtrooms worldwide, some have missed the smaller court cases popping up that could have just as much of an impact depending on the outcome. Bloomberg reports Taipei-based semiconductor manufacturer Via Technologies Inc. is suing Apple based on three patents related to microprocessors in tablets and smartphones.

The products at issue generally concern microprocessors included in a variety of electronic products such as certain smartphones, tablet computers, portable media players and other computing devices.

The case was filed yesterday with the U.S. District Court in Delaware and seeks an order to prevent Apple from selling products that are covered by the three invention patents in the US. Via wrote in a statement that the patents at issue cover microprocessor functionality featured in Apple iPhone, iPad, iPod and Apple TV devices, mainly covered in the US Patent No. 6253312, Method and apparatus for double operand load and US Patent Nos. 6253311 & 6754810, Instruction set for bi-directional conversion and transfer of integer and floating point data.

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Scott Sutherland of Wedbush Securities today issued his updated projections for Apple in the remainder of Q4 and going forward. During the statement, he claimed a next-gen iPhone will land in October alongside “an iPhone targeting emerging markets and an LTE iPhone in 2012 with a “materially improved user interface.”

While we already expected two new iPhone models to land October 4th (as of latest reports), we’re not sure what this means for Wedge Partners’ Brian Blair’s prediction of only an upgraded iPhone 4S variation. The report notes that Sutherland didn’t explain any further.

In August, we told you about reports regarding Apple sending out 4G LTE-capable test units to carriers. We heard around the same time that China Mobile was working with Apple to launch an LTE equipped iPhone, leading reports to claim it could possibly be the iPhone 4S or iPhone 5. More recently, China Mobile’s chairman Wang Jianzhou commented this month confirming an iPhone is in the works for their TD-LTE network.

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Adobe today quietly released Photoshop Elements 10 and Premiere Elements 10, bringing with them new Facebook and YouTube integration, video editing and burring features, object-based search, and new color correcting and text curving and flowing effects.

New Facebook features allow you to auto analyze your images to identify people and tag them based on your Facebook friends. Those tags are then carried over to Facebook when uploading from Elements. A new object-based search is one of the most impressive enhancements, allowing you to find images containing a particular object such as a house or vehicle.

Other features include auto enhance and color correct for video footage, allowing you to “Automatically boost tone and vibrance without affecting skin tones, or use sliders to adjust color with complete control”. You can now also paint 1 of 100 new paint effects onto specific photo areas, add new text effects, and immediately upload video clips to Facebook and Youtube. Learn more about all the new features in these latest releases here.

Adobe’s store now has Photoshop Elements 10 or Premiere Elements 10 for $99 each (upgrade $79/ea) or both for $179.

Or, you can grab Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 and Premiere Elements 10 for $99 each on Amazon now.  Curiously, Adobe hasn’t yet updated Photoshop Elements 9 Editor in the Mac App Store.  It will be interesting to see what happens there.

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Instagram has released a huge update today with Version 2.0 in what they’re calling one of the “largest revamps” to the app’s core camera technology since it launched. Along with a UI overhaul, the app now supports images with a resolution up to 1936×1936 on the iPhone 4 (in your camera roll, not on Instagram), in comparison to the 612×612 prior to the update.

As part of a brand new camera UI, the most impressive feature is the new “live filters”. They’ve taken the old filters and rewritten them to be “200x faster”, allowing you to instantly apply effects in real-time within the camera UI. The image above shows off the new UI, but you can go here to learn exactly how all the new elements work. Oh, and you can also now enable and disable borders on every filter.

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An Apple spokesperson has confirmed to WSJ they will begin selling the 3G version of their iPad 2 in China through Apple Retail Stores, the Apple online store, and authorized resellers starting Wednesday. This will add to China’s growing tablet market, roughly 75% of which is already dominated by the iPad.

The Wi-Fi-only iPad 2 is already available in mainland China. Up until now, only Hong Kong has officially had access to the 3G iPad 2 model, but as the report notes, some 3G iPads have made their way into the region on the grey market. Of course China Unicom would be the obvious choice of carriers, but at this point they’ve declined to comment.

Apple has once again been on a retail blitz in China opening up a number of grandiose retail spaces in recent months and a couple due this week.