9to5 Staff

 Apple’s iPhone 3G sales could go stratospheric, with analysts recently raising Q3 estimates to 4.7 million or more.

Analyst Gene Munster at Piper Jaffray believes Apple’s selling 95 iPhone 3Gs in each of its 188 Apple retail stores every day, four times the sales momentum achieved by the previous model one year ago. That analyst now predicts Apple will sell "at least 4.47 million iPhones" in the current quarter. 

Munster mentioned that sales momentum has slowed slightly in recent days – but Apple revealed a deal with Best Buy under which the giant chain will also lend its retail weight to iPhone sales. Will this keep them high? 

The analysts at Lehman Brothers think it will. There, analyst Ben Reitzes said the move to offer iPhone through Best Buy is likely to see Apple hugely surpass previous sales predictions.

"We believe our estimate of 3.8 million iPhones sold in Apple’s [September quarter] is very conservative," he said. Citing strong international demand, the analyst predicts 8.3 million iPhones could be sold in the December quarter, with 12.1 million iPhone 3Gs set for sale this year. The analyst also warned the 24.2 million iPhone sales Lehman Bros. had previously estimated for 2009 could be conservative.

Apple’s iPhone sales may take a 0.2 million boost, though, should HSBC bank follow-up on its recently revealed plot to possibly deploy iPhones across its international staff.

And, with iPhone sales growth continuing to propel interest in the smartphone market, its extremely likely any move by HSBC to take on the Apple mobile will shake main competitor in the category, RIM, and will also attract more corporate sales.

In a final flourish, Apple’s constant iTunes expansion continues, with film and television shows now made available in both the Australian and New Zealand markets, and storefronts open or opening in all iPhone territories, Apple clearly has more leverage to use to massage any weakness in sales.

In related news, Apple’s iTunes team is involved in a new syndicated US radio show, which will likely make its music and entertainment brand ubiquitous, even among non-tech-savvy radio listeners…

This story goes on.

 Apple’s Mobile Me fracas caused "hundreds" of Mac users to fall prey to a phishing scam, tricked into handing over valuable personal information by spoof mail and a well-crafted site.

Data obtained by CardCops, a credit card protection service owned by the Affinion Group, shows several hundred .Mac member’s data being traded in underground markets frequented by identity thieves. Details on sale are alleged to have included social security numbers, birth dates, mothers’ maiden names, credit card numbers and more.

The information was obtained through a phishing scam, using emails that circulated when Apple began its disastrous transition from Mac.com to Me.com. The scams bore subjects such as "Billing problem", The Register explains.

In a classic move, clicking the link contained within that email took .Mac members to a (fairly) authentic page which claimed to belong to Apple and requested a host of details of a site visitor. With more than customary confusion among Mac users as Apple migrated its services to Mobile Me, it appears many who would otherwise have detected the problem fell for the scam.

iTunes users in Australia and New Zealand can now select from over 700 films for purchase and rental through the service.

Apple has made movies from major film studios including 20th Century Fox, The Walt Disney Studios, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. Entertainment, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (MGM), Sony Pictures Television International and Lionsgate are available through iTunes in Australia and in New Zealand.

New release titles are available for purchase on the same day as their DVD release, including favorites such as “National Treasure 2,” “Jumper,” “27 Dresses,” “Cloverfield,” “Vantage Point” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.” Over 100 titles are available in high definition.

“Movie fans in Australia and New Zealand can choose from a great selection of over 700 films for purchase and rent on the iTunes Store,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of Internet Services. “iTunes provides an incredibly easy and fun way for people to discover and enjoy movies, and has quickly become the world’s most popular online movie store with customers renting and purchasing over 50,000 movies everyday.”

iTunes movies in Australia start at A$9.99 for catalog title purchases, A$17.99 for recent releases and A$24.99 for new releases. iTunes Movie Rentals are A$3.99 for library title rentals and A$5.99 for new releases, and high definition versions are priced at just one dollar more. 

iTunes movies in New Zealand start at NZ$9.99 for catalog title purchases, NZ$17.99 for recent releases and NZ$24.99 for new releases. iTunes Movie Rentals are NZ$4.99 for library title rentals and NZ$6.99 for new releases, and high definition versions are priced at just one dollar more. 

Apple has had quite an impressive past few years.  Even as the overall US economy has slowed, Apple keeps delivering hit after hit (MobileMe notwithstanding).  Today’s news is that Apple’s market cap has passed Google’s, the  Internet titan that emerged in the late 90s and grabbed up the majority of the search and related Internet ad market.  Apple, this year, has also passed IBM (only to get passed back by Big Blue), Citigroup, and HP.

The big target out there off of Apple’s bow is Microsoft, valued currently at over a quarter of a trillion dollars and a 60% premium over Apple’s  value.  However, with Vista floundering and a blown deal for Yahoo! we’d say it isn’t impossible that Apple could catch its long time rival in the next few years.

It will be interesting to watch…

http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/452319854

 Apple’s iPhone is taking a slice of the enterprise market, with news that huge multi-national banking giant HSBC is considering deploying maybe 200,000 of the Apple devices across its global workforce.

The move would be a slap across the face for the bank’s current mobile supplier, RIM, which supplies BlackBerry handsets to HSBC, ZDNet Australia informs.

"’We are actually reviewing iPhones from a HSBC Group perspective … and when I say that, I mean globally,’ HSBC’s Australia and New Zealand chief information officer Brenton Hush reportedly said

HSBC has 300,000 staff internationally – if the bank chose to standardise around the Apple mobile, the move would instantly become one of the world’s largest iPhone orders, and would significantly boost Apple’s bid for a space at the infrastructure table in the enterprise markets.

What we’re waiting to find out now is if HSBC makes this decision – and if other Fortune 500 firms known to be testing the device follow suit: Fox Interactive Media, Walt Disney Co., the US Army and Genentech Inc.

We didn’t see this one coming when we looked at Apple’s move to widen its product portfolio way back in May – now it seems the company is developing futuristic wearable displays, really?

Apple and Sony are apparently both developing wearable, head-mounted video displays, setting the stage for more pervasive personal multimedia, and offering interesting new usage patterns for productive and/or military use.

We imagine a future scenario could include a touch-sensitive flexible controller and a wearable display, all snugly connected by Bluetooth, with your computer in your pocket and your data stored in the cloud. 

Well these way-out claims for wearable displays emanate from Research and Markets (R&M) in the latest report, ‘Personal Viewers: Sony and Apple Eye Accelerating Growth’.

The researchers cite rapid sales growth in both the consumer (near 100 per cent this year) and military (sales approaching $1 billion in 2008 to triple by 2012) markets as reasons Apple and Sony are interested in head-mounted displays.

They also note that the technologies involved are increasingly inexpensive and accessible, while demand and potential uses increase.

“Today’s personal viewers provide video only with limited visibility of the environment. Sony and Apple are developing the next generation personal viewer, the navigation/video sunglasses. These products will offer navigation features in full see-through mode as well as video viewing with a clip-on to block the background. We expect that clip-ons will be available to provide both see-periphery views of the environment, as well as full blocking of the environment to enable video immersion when desired. This new versatile product generation will further accelerate acceptance and sales of personal viewers,” the report explains.

Geordi La Forge (actor, LeVar Burton) would probably want one of these just to wear in  Star Trek: The Next Generation. He once moaned about his headset, saying, "It’s pretty much a living hell… 85 to 90 per cent of my vision is taken away when the VISOR goes on… I bumped into everything the first season – Light stands, overhead microphones, cables at my feet – I tripped over it all… So it’s a sort of conundrum – the blind man, who puts on the VISOR and sees much more than everyone else around him, when the actor actually does that he’s turned into a blind person…" (Well, that is what Wikipedia claims he said…

What else would make a cool Apple gadget, we ask?

The good news: It looks like no one got it hurt as it was a very late. A 3-alarm fire broke out at an Apple R&D IST facility a few hours ago. As of this writing it is still burning as firefighters in Cupertino try to contain it.

More as it comes in… since everyone is safe, we send our prayers out to all of the future iPods, Macs and iPhones that hopefully will get to see the light of day.

Video

UPDATE: Firefighters have put out the blaze. The three-alarm fire burned for over three hours at Apple headquarters. The fire scorched the roof and the second level at one of the six buildings on the company’s northern California campus in Cupertino. There were no injuries, but the building is understood to have suffered "a lot" of smoke damage. Link.

 The iPhone is the second biggest-selling smartphone in the US, confirms new research from Synergy Research Group.

The Synergy Q2 2008 Mobile Handset Market Share report confirms the US smartphone market posted strong double-digit growth, with the iPhone continuing to break records, shipping over a million units in

three consecutive quarters. 

"Even with Q2 shipments dropping in anticipation of the new 3G iPhone, Apple retained the second place spot for the first half of the year with Motorola a close third," the researchers said.

Motorola is currently the number one US mobile vendor with 25 per cent of the overall market, but it’s facing challenges taking a bite of the growing smartphone sector, researchers explained. "In Q2 2008, Motorola was the only vendor in our study posting double-digit drops for both sequential and annual growth."

In the first half of 2008, the US smartphone market represented 12.2 per cent of total mobile handsets shipped, the sector represented just 10 per cent of overall mobile sales in the first half of 2007.

While Apple’s share of the smartphone market fell 64.2 per cent in the weeks before launch of the iPhone 3G, the company still saw growth of 125.6 per cent year-on-year in terms of marketshare, the analysts said. RIM grew 92.1 per cent, while Samsung and Sony Ericsson experienced growth in the low 30’s. Motorola’s overall smartphone market share shrank 18.2 per cent, year-on-year, while Nokia saw its US smartphone share slide 24.5 per cent.

Right now it’s RIM’s game to lose, the researchers said: "Despite the rock star status of the Apple iPhone, the Blackberry (RIM) dominates the US market with a market share of 46 per cent (first half of 2008) versus Apple’s 15 percent," said Aaron Vance, Senior Analyst, Synergy Research Group. "But with iPhone’s continued strong success, which only took Apple a year to achieve a number 2 ranking, it may be sooner than later that Apple is challenging the Blackberry, a notion that would have seemed impossible to many a year or two ago."

Amazon has gone green, quietly introducing an all-new Green area on its online shopping website.

The green zone offers links to a selected catalogue of green products, which in the US includes organic food, green electronics (marked with an Energy Star rating) and a huge host of other selected environmentally-friendly products.

It’s a cross-category scheme that includes a list of products that customers have selected as the best green products offered by Amazon.com and a place for customers to discover Amazon’s entire green product selection.

You can take a look at the green selection here.

 Oh looky-look – some bright spark has created a comparison video they claim illustrates the difference between the kind of ‘Net access speeds promised for the iPhone 3G in advertising and the real world speeds people get.

So take a look and share your thoughts, people…

 See here. The musical geniuses who brought you such timeless classics as S.O.S. and Burnin’ Up performed today at the Apple SoHo. Meanwhile, hundreds of teenage girls (and apparently one guy), who think its crazy to wait in line all day for a phone, waited all day in line to listen to a horrible, direct-from-Disney group sound even worse in person (if that is even possible). Due to the popularity of the Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus, and High School Musical, I have come to the conclusion that teenage girls have it hard-coded in their DNA to have no taste in music. If you’ve looked at the iTunes Top 10 lately, you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about: there currently are two Jonas Brothers songs, a Demi Lovato song, a Miley Cyrus song, and now, a David Archuleta song. The good old days (which I wasn’t around to see), when bands like The Beatles were popular with teenage girls are over, and the days in which bands like the Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus are popular are just beginning. Check out this video which perfectly shows just how bad these current singers are. The Jonas Brothers covered Hello Goodbye, and this video shows both the Beatles version and the Jonas version side by side, to show just how poorly the Jonas Brothers covered it. Funny joke, right? Apparently not. Commenters are actually taking the sarcastic question that was stated in the video seriously! A few sample comments…

"i think both versions are great but personally for me i like jb a little bit better..but they are both great"

"in my opinion the jonas brothers did better but im not sayin the beatles are bad i just like the way jonas brothers did the song"

"JONAS DAHHHH AND SOMETHING IMPORTANT (mermaids r real!!!)"

"jonas brothers are 100,000,000 millions times betters"

"i liked jb’s version better cuz it wuz fast and upbeat!!"

Unfortunately, this horrible, obnoxious music will continue to be produced, unless these companies, primarily Disney, take a stand and start producing good music for all of these kids to listen to. One of these companies is Apple. Apple is considered to be a very hip company in the eyes of the same kids who buy the Jonas’ music. From iPods, to laptops, to iPhone, to Photobooth, Apple isn’t just desirable to geeks and fanboys… teenagers really like it too. Therefore, Apple is in a unique position, especially with the huge iTunes installed base, to decide what’s cool, and what’s not. Instead of using this advantage to promote music of actually quality, they instead are feeding right into the Disney trend, and promoting bands like the Jonas Brothers non-stop, from iTunes Home Page Ads, to Miley Cyrus being on the staff favorites, and now to the Jonas Brothers performing at an Apple Store. While part of me is sure this shameless advertising has to be because of Jobs’ ties with Disney, another part of me finds it hard to believe that Jobs would want to promote such low quality music, no matter how much it benefitted him financially. He has said many times how much he likes The Beatles and Bob Dylan, so why would he let The Jonas Brothers and Hannah Montana ascend into stardom? Anyways, I’ve blabbed enough about this: what do you think? Could this slowly creep up and overcome the record industry, destroying good music once and for all? Or am I overreacting to a dinky little concert in NYC? Sound off in the comments.

Michael is a teen blogger for 9 to 5 Mac, and has his own blog, Mac Soda. 

Remember when we told you (OK BGR told us to tell you) that Radio Shack and Best Buy were getting the iPhone soon?  Guess what?  Best Buy announced today that they will be selling the iPhone come September 7 at almost 1000 locations throughout the US.  They will be the first 3rd party retailer to sell the iPhone (unless you count Carphone Warehouse in the UK and every corner bottle-o in some place called ‘Australia’).

Shawn Score, president of Best Buy’s mobile division, says, "We think we’ll have a good supply for our customers."

Analyst Wolf says he believes that Apple is catching up with demand. "Supply is coming on board."

Best Buy says it has a national exclusive on the iPhone (outside of Apple and AT&T stores) through Christmas. The retailer has Apple Macintosh sections at 600 of its stores.

Adding to in-store customer waiting time is a new, longer procedure to activate the iPhone that has made the buying process much longer.

Questions that arise:

• Will Apple be able to meet this demand?  Aug 22 will double the footprint of countries with iPhones including India
• Will there be trained Apple techs onsite to help?  Buying an iPod is kids play compared to registering an iPhone
• Will this cheapen the iPhone experience?  When 1/3 of the US (Best Buy customers) has an iPhone, it doesn’t feel quite as special does it?
• Radio Shack…*ahem* got anything to say?
• Anyone think Apple will have any trouble getting rid of 10 million iPhones this year?  How about 20 million?

This kind of stuff is thankfully off of our radar, but on the way home from work today I saw a huge, insane loud line at the Apple store.  Being an Apple blogger I like to think I know when all of the new products are being released so I was wondering what it could have been.

As I approached, I noticed that all of the people in line at the store weren’t the normal iPhone line waiters.  They were all screaming tweeny boppers.  Has Apple released a new Hannah Montana iPod?

Nope, as one of the screaming teens cried: "the Jonas Brothers are playing!!!!!".  At the Apple Store Soho.  Right now.  Look, I snapped some picts (below)…surely some of you will be into this stuff?  More on the teen blog.

 Hey, Luther Here…Just thought you should know that the Jonas Brothers are performing at the Apple Store in SoHo, NY tonight at 8:00. If you get a chance check it out. I went to see Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway last month at the Apple Store. If you go, leave now because I was on line all day, and was lucky enough to be second. Good luck! 

New improvements within Yazsoft’s Share Tool software means you can enjoy all the benefits of your home network wherever you are, including screen, iTunes and document sharing.

Announced today and available for Macs running Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later, ShareTool lets users access their Bonjour services from anywhere securely using 100% SSH encryption. The software support extends to iTunes Music Sharing, Screen Sharing, File Sharing, printing, and much more. 

Your home or office network already supports file sharing between Macs, iPhoto and iTunes sharing and more. ShareTool simplifies the process of extending that network securely using the ‘Net: You can listen to your entire iTunes music library at work, control the screen of any of your home computers, or grab that important file.

The software automatically configures routers supporting NAT-PMP or UPnP. Remote services automatically appear in Finder, iTunes, and other applications while ShareTool enables remote access for any application or service that advertises itself using Bonjour and runs over TCP/IP.

Access to your services requires your Mac OS X username and password. A single license costs $20, a demo version is available.

Apple’s research and development teams are certainly considering ways in which they can engage the processor design expertise recently bought in-house on strength of the PA Semi purchase.

“PA Semi is going to do system-on-chips for iPhones and iPods,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs told the New York Times in June – but the Apple rumpur machine has already moved into overdrive, with the most recent speculation claiming the company’s boffins are now looking to develop a small processor that would be capable of QuickTime encoding and decoding.

Now, we’re not at all utterly convinced that the source of this new wave of speculation (Alley Insider) has got the whole picture here – sure, we can imagine such a processor could be invaluable across many of the company’s non-Mac products (Apple TV, people), so we suspect there’s more underneath the tip of this iceberg. But the iceberg likely doesn’t include any plans to leave the tender processor supplying arms of Intel, not so soon after the transition to chips from that company.

Given Apple’s admitted work on Open Computing Language (OpenCL), which lets any application tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications, there’s clearly more of a use for a QuickTime-decoding chip than the obvlous graphics implementations.

Within discussion of the rumoured encoding tech, it is important to consider the sheer importance of QuickTime technology within the Mac platform. Windows users may see it as the backbone for their iPod and iTunes, but on the Mac, QuickTIme does the heavy lifting for multiple applications. These include system-specific processes in Core Image or Core Video, but also includes work as the underlying engine for Final Cut Pro, for example. That QuickTime’s possibly receiving a few r&d dollars is no bad thing.

The purported QuickTime chip could therefore deliver significant performance increases for low-powered Macs, particularly once implemented in Snow Leopard. It could deliver significant improvements to professional video authors, and may even make it much easier to migrate content between different platforms – Mac to iPod to iPhone to Apple TV, for example.

Alley Insider suggests the new processor could well be part of Apple’s much speculated upon product transition (the one in which Apple will release new Macs, iPods, iPhone nanos, Apple TV devices and cure world hunger, that one, set for September, allegedly…).

Citing a tipster the report states: "I happen to know that the product transition referred to in Apple’s recent conference call was referring to QuickTime encoding/decoding chips built into their products." 

To be fair, Alley Insider then dismisses that claim as pure speculation. We think it likely Apple is looking to improve multimedia performance on its products, and suspect these claims may hint at a variety of chip-based implementations designed to lend Macs and other Apple systems a strategic advantage in an increasingly multimedia-focused market. The months in advance of Snow Leopard will be full of consolidation and development to improve and expand the facility of the Mac platform, this QuickTime chip could play a part (or could just be idle gossip, designed to help fill column inches on a slow news day).

 The signs are pretty good for Apple’s iPhone 3G launch in India. As far as we can tell, there’s a whole bunch of excitement among India’s switched-on, well-educated tech savvy gadget geeks…

See – what we’re reading right now from EETimes describes a lot of excitement there right now, as launch day clicks ever closer as the tock ticks to August 22.

Airtel and Vodaphone will be offering the in-demand device – three million of which have already been sold worldwide – in India. "Vodaphone is accepting iPhone 3G orders via SMS messages, but has also said nothing about the cost of the new phone or cancellation policies."

What we read about then is a huge big grey market for iPhone non-3G, which sets punters back around $299…but there appears to be some, erm, anticipation, as to how much the iPhone will cost…

"Here in India, cellphones have become status symbols. Whether you use all the features or merely receive voice calls, it doesn’t really matter," said Chiranjeev Shenoy, an executive at a multinational company, adding, "$600 is too high a price to pay, around $300 is a good price" for a new iPhone.

Oops, one snag, there’s no 3G in India yet, and GPS isn’t truly "there" yet… but we are interested in the long tail to the anticipative iPhone article…"There are few reliable statistics on the number of iPhones in India. Estimates range from 100,000 to 500,000."

Now, if only there were a smaller, perhaps less well-featured model that perhaps more people in the world’s growth markets could afford.

Heavy iTunes Store and software purchasers in the US had better get ready for the value of their dollar to shrink, as state authorities across the country have begun to push for taxes on downloads, like film, software and songs.

It’s all about the money – the US wants it, its citizens may be forced to hand it over – online retail sales in the US are set to reach $130 billion this year. That’s a fat and juicy low-hanging fruit for the taxman to get his hands around. 

This year so far at least nine US states have mulled over the notion of applying taxes against digital downloads, and five have already put them into effect, according to Cnet News.com. Nebraska, Tennessee, Indiana, South Dakota and Utah have all implemented taxes on downloads this year. In California, laws to implement taxes on downloads are continuously discussed – it’s a question of time.

Massachusetts, Wyoming and Washington are also pondering wrapping tax around iTunes buys – even as the industry unwraps those downloads from the cotton wool of DRM.

According to News.com, including Nebraska and Tennessee, there are 17 states, plus the District of Columbia, that tax digital downloads: Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Washington

Opposing these new taxes are consumer and tech industry groups, including NetChoice, who most recently argued that digital downloads are the greenest way to purchase multimedia, urging they be kept tax free.

And in New York, local state legislatures seem unlikely to move to tax downloads yet, terming them to be "intangible property" and therefore not liable to State tax.

But with iTunes now the largest music retailer in the US, accounting for maybe 21 per cent of recorded music sales there, just how long will music be tax free?

This week’s free app of the week is a game that hooks you from the beginning to the end. It makes you want to download new songs, and play it all day long. Hey that rhymes! This week’s free app is Tap Tap Revenge. You may have heard of it…it was on the top five downloaded free apps a while ago. I just thought I should revisit it.

Tap Tap Revenge is a fast-paced (when on hard) game that tests your rhythmic skills. I must say, This game is loads of fun. It is a game that can be played anywhere, even though you will draw attention to yourself! I’ve played it on the train and have had groups of people stare at me, and wonder why my hands were having spaz-attacks. Trust me. It’s totally worth it!

To play, you simply choose a level, and a song. It’s pretty self-explanatory after that. If you still need guidance, be sure to use the included tutorial track. You just have to tap through the circle beats, and shake your phone in the direction of the oncoming arrows.

The only cons: This version lacks the feature that allows you to use your own music from your iTunes library. Also, all the tracks sound like techno club beats. Tap Tap Revenge even allows you to download extra tracks, and is definitely a game you should try out. I must warn you, once you try it, you won’t get rid of it!

 Apple has already sold three million iPhone 3Gs in less than a month since the product shipped – and there’s no sign yet of momentum slowing down, an analyst claims.

Telecoms analyst Michael Cote of the Cote Collaborative made the claims in chat with CNN. A former T-Mobile executive, the media outlet says he has been "extremely accurate with wireless predictions in the past."

Apple – being Apple – refused to comment on Cote’s claims that the computer-cum-iPod-cum-iPhone-cum-pro software and education solutions company is seeing "unprecedented demand".

The three million figure is much higher than Wall Street analysts had anticipated, CNN informs. Many analysts had simply expected quarterly sales of up to four million…not monthly sales of three million…

Three days after the new iPhone’s July 11 debut, Apple announced that it had sold 1 million iPhones. 

Cote believes demand may ultimately fully outstrip supply, particularly as the device ships in new markets. "The demand is so strong it may impact or delay the new countries coming on," he said.