9to5 Staff

Yet another big name in online video provision expressed interest in migrating at least part of its services to HTML5 — Netflix.

Netflix currently uses Microsoft

Apple has opened up its iPad App Store for international purchases.

The dedicated iPad App Store has only been available to browse via the US iTunes Store until now. Overnight this situation changed and users worldwide can now explore their own versions of the store.

This takes place as Apple prepares to ship the iPad in nine additional countries — Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK — on May 28.

At the beginning of the month, Apple noted that it had already sold over one million iPads while customers have downloaded over 12 million apps from the App Store, as well as 1.5 million ebooks from the new iBookstore.

NB: There are reports suggesting the new store isn’t fully implemented at this time.

http://cdn.abclocal.go.com/static/flash/embeddedPlayer/swf/otvEmLoader.swf?version=&station=kgo&section=&mediaId=7451439&cdnRoot=http://cdn.abclocal.go.com&webRoot=http://abclocal.go.com&site=

Apple has reversed a prior policy requiring iPad purchasers to pay with a credit or debit card at Apple Retail Stores. The company reversed the policy after coverage from KGO San Francisco’s consumer reporter after Diane Campbell was turned away from a San Francisco Apple Store when she tried to pay cash for her iPhone.

Apple senior vice president of retail Ron Johnson told KGO, “We heard about this, you know… we all would love people like Diane [Campbell] to get an iPad, so I called her up and she was very excited and we’re actually on our way to deliver an iPad to her house.”

Apple felt so bad about the whole situation that they gave Ms. Campbell an iPad for free. But why was the policy in place at all? Apple won’t admit it, but company watchers suspect the company was trying to keep folks from buying iPads in bulk and then reselling them overseas for a profit. By requiring the use of a credit card, Apple can keep individual purchasers from buying too many iPads. The no-cash restriction isn’t new either — when the iPhone was still new, users couldn’t purchase more than two of the phones at a time and no one could pay with cash.

Most legal experts agreed that Apple forbidding cash purchases wasn’t illegal, but as Diane Campbell showed, it can look pretty bad to turn down purchases. Now, it seems Apple agrees.

[MacRumors]

You knew this would be coming out of Google I/O: Tablets based on Android. This one is 8.9 inch widescreen from NVIDIA that runs a multicore ARM Cortex A9 processor.  It seems to run the football game pretty well and it has a front facing camera (with two USB ports).  

But it is only a demo at a tradeshow, not an actual shipping product.

http://www.viddler.com/simple_on_site/bff485cf

Apple and Microsoft find themselves in the same corner of the web video war started today by Google with the announcement of their new VP8 video codec and WebM project. 

Yes, Microsoft and Apple, vs. Google and Adobe.  Ugh.  How things have changed.

Google have lined up Adobe, Firefox, Opera as well as some other players behind the new format.  No doubt, its YouTube property with 40% of the web video market will be a big asset.  In a surprising move, Adobe said they’d update their billion Flash clients to be able to use the new VP8 HTML5 format, which would put the capability to play VP8 on Internet Explorer and Safari, even if Microsoft and Apple didn’t want to add native support.

VP8 isn’t supported widely (at all?) in hardware so it will tax the batteries of mobile devices to play the Open Source format.  That might change, however.

Google’s Chrome Browser currently plays both Theora and H.264 video.  It isn’t certain if Google will continue to support H.264 or if other browser vendors will support multiple formats.

Apple and Microsoft are both in the MPEG LA group and recieve very small royalities from the usage of H.264 video. It isn’t certain why Google was making the move to VP8, but the possibility that it would have to pay royalties on 40% of the web’s video might be a motivator.

Adobe appears willing to take a little of Apple CEO Steve Jobs

Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, generated headlines this weekend with his declaration that the iPad brings you

Internet-based TV show guide,  Clicker, took a bow during Google

Surprising absolutely no one at all, Apple seems set to offer the next-gen iPhone in black and white configurations.

New images have appeared online seemingly detailing the new cases, showing the front and back of a purported white next-generation iPhone front panel.

As MR notes,

First interesting bit from Google IO. It looks as if HP/Palm is going to be running the Chrome Browser.  Didn’t see that one coming!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HMWnLTO6jU&w=640&h=385]

AT&T Wireless boss, Ralph de la Vega

Besides AT&T tethering and some groovy background images, the iPhone 4 Beta 4 update does have exciting information to share with us.  We are pretty sure the iPhone 4 is going to have a LED Flash, no surprise there:

But maybe some other devices are going to have cameras with a Flash?  iPad?  iPod touch?  it wasn’t immediately apparent from any of the recent prototypes, but there it is, in the iPhoneOS 4 code:

Yep.  iPad with camera Flash.  

Regardless of having a LED Flash, the iPod touch will certainly will have a camera:

And one last one.  We haven’t seen much mention of Mac OS 10.7 until now.  It makes its first appearance in the AVMediaFormat files below.

If Apple is putting 10.7 code into iPhone 4, it means that 10.7 is planned to be released at some point in iPhone OS 4’s lifetime, which starts in June and extends until June 2011.

Thanks AL!

Apple has seized almost three-quarters of Japan

Vietnam’s Tinhte has yet another scoop. This time they’ve found a prototype iPod touch with a 2 megapixel camera.  We have to believe this is what Apple will release this Fall at their iPod event, if not (hopefully) sooner.

Similar images of prototype iPod touches w/camera materialized before last years iPod event and one even showed up on eBay last month.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSLqIkBv81s&w=700&h=400]

Close-up stills below:

via Engadget

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuhHIqJyjY0&w=700&h=555]

Bill Gates at D:All Things Digital a couple of years ago waxes eloquent on the future of computing.

Note Jobs’ response to Bill’s iPad description:

“The PC, this general purpose device, is going to continue to be with us, whether it’s a tablet or a notebook or a big curved desktop that you have in your house, or whatever it might be.”

Via: Gizmodo

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9uDXbRU5ew&w=640&h=505]

The video above shows an iPad app called Artikulator. It lets you slide your fingers across the screen to create your musical notation. It should reach the App Store soon, and also runs on an iPhone.

For more traditional music notation, Musicnotes.com, a publisher and retailer of digital sheet music, announced on Tuesday the release of a Sheet Music Viewer application for Apple’s iPad.

The free app features caching of sheet music to the iPad, and is currently limited to songs arranged in the Musicnotes format.

Apple has shipped the fourth beta of Mac OS 10.6.4, with notes accompanying the release claiming there