9to5 Staff

 Smartphone manufacturers have caught the bug, exploring Innovative new technologies and touch screens as they attempt to secure their slice of the market against Apple’s iPhone, at least, that’s what the analysts think is going down.

ABI Research calls the wave of invention that’s breaking across the smartphone industry the ‘iPhone effect’. Essentially, Apple’s high-tech foray into the market is forcing existing incumbents to play catch-up to remain competitive.

The analysts predict smartphone shoppers will face an array of choices, with touchscreens, touchpads, movement sensors and tactile feedback appearing across these devices. It’s extremely likely Apple’s competitors will attempt to build more user friendly interfaces within their products. The research claims manufacturers to be working to optimise their operating systems to work more efficiently on low-spec processors.

Smartphones are predicted to account for 31 per cent of mobile phone sales by 2013, the research claims. That’s up from 10 per cent of the market last year.

The Apple device is also impacting mobile marketing, the researchers claim: “When the iPhone was announced over a year ago, many thought that the device and its support for the Safari browser meant that this might be the beginning of the end for mobile specific websites and marketing programs. After all, the iPhone had a PC level browser with full HTML support.”

They praise the iPhone for its intuitive user interface, big screen, touch-navigation, and more.

 Cult Manga animations along with a pair of cult US sitcoms will be made available through iTunes, a Starz Media executive confirmed last night.

Marc DeBevoise, SVP of business development and strategy confirmed the move in a panel discussion at the Future of Television West conference last night. He promised to make four cult Manga anime classics available through iTunes, including the ground-breaking ‘Ghost In the Shell’.

LINK

Update: woops – we forgot about the oldest trick in the book (you know? The Chronological Book of Tricks, Page 1?) – registering a domain name and pointing it to Apple.  It is too early…going to get some coffee now!

http://www.ipodair.com

New tablet or random domain name purchase to point confused web users…we like the former!

Thanks Tousigar

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApYT300glAU&hl=en]

Digitimes says that in the second-quarter 2008 (within weeks to months) ASUS will be releasing EeePCs with resistive touch panels.  This contrasts with the more acurate capacitive touch screen technology that is employed in the iPod Touch and iPhone.   The difference to the user is that resistive touch works with styli while capacitive touch uses the natural capasitance of the finger to pinpoint location.  Because the resistive touch screen is a more mature technology, the prices in bulk for the addition of this technology will approach only $10 per device.  I wrote on why I think that the EeePC is the biggest competitor to the iPhone and iPod here.  This only makes that competition more significant. 

 UK intelligence service, MI6 (home of James Bond) is searching for a Mac using forger to join the Queen’s Secret Service. The intelligence service needs someone with QuarkXPress and Adobe CS skills to create forged documents, currency and other publications for its secret agents.

The winning recruit will be given full spy training and an inflation-proof pension.

MI6 is hosting a recruitment ad on its website, promising a fascinating work environment at the organisation’s London headquarters.

“We’re sure you’ll understand that as an organisation that collects secret intelligence, we can’t tell you a great deal about what you’ll be doing,” the ad states. “You’ll also benefit from very high-quality training in your specialist skills.”

The winning recruit will work within the Design and Print team of the organisation. And will be licensed to Mac, on the Queen’s business.

Kevin Rose of Diggnation/digg.com and Pownce fame is predicting that the iPhone is getting a front camera for video conferencing.  He also "predicts" that it will go 3G in the coming months – never mind that both Steve Jobs and AT&T’s CEO have also confirmed a 2008 3G iPhone.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ6JEs5swKg&hl=en]

Keep in mind, Kevin Rose is 0 fer in iPhone predictions, previously predicting:

• January 2007 launch on "all" providers, both CDMA and GSM (June 29th launch)
• Extremely small form factor (not that small)
• Two battery design (with single charger) — one for playing music, the other for phone functions (not even close)
• Flash memory: 4GB for $249, 8GB for $449 (nope)
• "Slide-out keyboard" (wha?)
• Possibly touchscreen (can’t always be wrong?)

Needless to say, we wouldn’t bet the farm on this…sorry.

Sony is probably the biggest perpetrator of loading up their brand new laptops with crapware (stuff like 30-day trials of services that almost no one would ever want – like AOL).  Most Sony laptop owners we know just install a fresh OS on their machines the first time they use them rather than try to uninstall the litany of the crapware individually.  Well, if you are in the market for a Sony laptop, your initial experience with your great Sony hardware could be getting slightly better.

Engadget is reporting that Sony is offering to ship you a machine without putting crapware on it for $50.  So Sony is acknowledging their users might want a better experience out of the box…but then charging for the option.  Sony isn’t really putting a shine on their brand with this new ‘Fresh Start’ initiative are they?

As Mac users who are used to pristine machines out of the box, we can appreciate the "fresh start" but being charged for it leaves the bad taste in our mouths.  Is it really worth the $50 Sony?  To give your customers a nice clean computer that isn’t polluted with applications that give your users a three hour of uninstalations tax?

Update: According to C|Net, Sony caved into our pressure and removed the $50 fee to rmove the crapwarz.  Rest of the industry?  Are you listening?

Windows users who have Apple’s Software Update installed are getting notices that there is a new version of Safari available for upgrade – even if they never installed Safari in the first place.  Safari 3.1 for Windows is Apple’s first Safari version not to carry the Beta moniker.

There are definitely two schools of thought on this one – we are NOT taking sides. 

The first is that Apple is using its market leading position in music jukebox software to push its browser – like Microsoft used its market leading position in operating systems to push IE a few years back.  While effective, it isn’t really fair to the Firefoxes and Operas of the world who don’t have that leverage to fall back on.  It is also a bit misleading to say it is a "software update" when it was never installed in the first place.  If you were using Microsoft Office on Mac and an update came up saying "Update your Internet Explorer (which you don’t have on your machine) for Mac to 5.2.3".  Would you be happy?

The other school of thought is that Apple isn’t forcing this on anyone.  There is simply a Apple (not iTunes) software update that is letting Windows users know that there is a web browser available for them, should they want it.  Google does this in one way or another with its Macintosh applications.  So does Adobe. No harm, no foul?

Vote!

Apple has now filled what was a gaping hole in their Time Machine backup ecosystem.  You can now use Airport connected HFS+ Formatted USB hard drives to backup your Leopard computers.  Apple had promised this feature long ago and then pulled the advertising for the "Airport Disk Time Machine Backups" and hasn’t able to deliver during the first two releases of Leopard.  This might have been more difficult than originally planned (though our Flux Capacitor has helped many). 

Apple has now released Airport and Time Machine updates that now allow you to see Airport connected USB drives and back up to them like Time Capsule drives.

It isn’t known whether Apple waited to sell a few Time Capsules before releasing this fix or the company genuinely didn’t have all of the pieces together.  Anyway.  Download and backup to your heart’s content. 

 Adobe has issued a statement to clarify claims the company is working to deliver Flash support for the iPhone.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen confirmed his company to be working to deliver Flash support on the iPhone during Adobe’s Q1 financial conference call last night. This afternoon (US time), Adobe issued a statement of clarification – and it appears Apple will have to become involved in order to bring Flash support to the device.

"However, to bring the full capabilities of Flash to the iPhone Web-browsing experience, we do need to work with Apple beyond and above what is available through the SDK and the current license around it," the company said. 

"We think Flash availability on the iPhone benefits Apple and Adobe’s millions of joint customers, so we want to work with Apple to bring these capabilities to the device." (As reported by Information Week).

Looks like the jury’s out on this one.

Remember those super-fast WebKit specs we told you about a few weeks ago?  Remember how it was going to help Safari 3.1 become a much faster browser?  What about all of the other goodies?   Now you can get them in a final version of Safari.  Apple today unleashed Safari 3.1 using much more recent version of the WebKit engine.  Preliminary results (meaning going to all of our favorite sites) are quite good. 

It remains to be seen if speed increases like this (and iPhone/iPod touch) help Apple’s browser gain marketshare. 

Review from Computerworld:

Apple released Safari 3.1

on March 18 with an updated rendering engine that makes the fastest Internet browser even faster.

On top of that, Apple’s new browser includes some features that reflect the future of the HTML 5 specification: offline storage, media support, and CSS animations and Web fonts. It also adds some needed compatibility and bug fixes, as well as some other new features that really make it a great everyday browser.

For the uninitiated, Apple provides a great PDF overview of Safari. You can get the upgrade/installer from apple.com/safari/download/ (it’s about a 16MB download for both Mac and PC) or simply update from Software Update. The installation is easy but strangely requires a restart on Macs but not on Windows. By the way, Safari 3.1 is the first Windows version not to carry the "beta" tag.

The interface and the user experience are largely unchanged from those in Safari 3.0. Under the hood, however, Apple has

made some significant changes

that it has pulled from the latest builds of the open-source

WebKit

engine.

WebKit is the framework version of the engine that’s used by Safari. It is also the basis of the Web browsing engine in iPhone’s Mobile Safari, Symbian’s browser, the Google Android platform and Adobe’s new AIR platform.

Testing

To check out how well Safari 3.1 handles Web sites, I ran it through some popular standards testing — and found that it leads the pack. In the Acid3 Tests, which were created by the Web Standards Project to test dynamic browser capabilities, Safari 3.1 scored 75 out of 100, significantly higher than the previous version of Safari and other shipping browsers (Firefox 3 Beta 4 scored 68, while the most recent WebKit scored 92).

However, the big news is how fast the new version of Safari is. How fast? I tested Safari 3.1 on my first-generation 2-GHz MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM. In MooTools’ SlickSpeed speed/validity test, Safari came out on top in almost every category on both Mac and PC.

It also did significantly better than any shipping browser on the SunSpider JavaScript speed tests (although since these tests are hosted at WebKit.org, they are perhaps biased). For example, on the Mac, Safari scored 4430ms, compared with 5048ms for Firefox 3 Beta 4.

While I spend 90% of my time on a Macintosh, I also installed Safari on my Windows XP box to see how it stacked up against Internet Explorer, Opera and Firefox. In short, it worked extremely well for everyday browsing, offering speed and efficiency, especially on a four- or five-year-old machine. It also performed really well with lots of tabs open.

Although Safari 3.1 does perform much better than the shipping version of Firefox, the speed improvements in Firefox 3 Beta 4 are catching up with Safari 3.1 — though Firefox 3 did consume more CPU cycles during my tests.

One of the drawbacks of Safari has been the perceived "over-smoothing" or softening of fonts on the PC. While this hasn’t been completely fixed, Apple’s Safari 3.1 allows Web sites to specify fonts outside the seven Web-safe font families; these new fonts can be downloaded by the browser as needed.

Unfortunately, there are still prominent features that are part of rival browsers that Safari simply can’t match. For example, Safari doesn’t have all of the add-ons that Firefox enjoys, such as the Google toolbar.

Furthermore, if you need to use a site that employs Microsoft‘s proprietary DirectX technology — like Microsoft Exchange’s Outlook Web Access, for example — you’ll find that the experience on Safari leaves much to be desired. In this case, you’re better off using Internet Explorer.

Finally, Opera offers features, such as direct BitTorrent downloads, that aren’t offered in Safari.

With the 3.1 release, Safari has become the fastest browser you can use. If that isn’t enough reason to make a switch, its strong adherence to Web standards and rapid adoption of new technologies might make you think again.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen has confirmed his company is now working with Apple with a view to offering Flash support on the iPhone.

The move follows Apple’s release of the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK). Narayen, who was speaking during the company’s conference call with Adobe investors last night, confirmed the company plans to create Flash player for the iPhone as an application which will be distributed through the App Store to iPhone users.

This indicates some change in the relationship between Apple and Adobe. Apple CEO Steve Jobs this months said the current iteration of Flash Player for mobile devices lacked the horsepower iPhone users need. He characterised the full Flash Player application as posing too high demands on the hardware, and described a “middle product,..that doesn’t yet exist.”

YouTube and the BBC are the only online video providers to format their videos especially for the iPhone.

Remember those iPod and iPhone price cuts we talked about last month?  We still think they are coming.  The latest sign?  Not this – well maybe.  But most obvious is AT&T’s huge price drop on refirbished 8Gb iPhones.  Usually, Apple offers refirbs for $50-$100 less than retail.  $150 seems way too much of a cut for us.  Also, hypothetically, if Apple did drop the retail prices by $100 next week or the week after – the $249 8Gb iPhone still seems like a good deal.  Right?

For $249, we are seriously thinking about getting a backup!

The Financial Times is reporting that Apple is in negotiations with the big record companies to offer an unlimited subscription model.   The deal would give customers access to the entire iTunes music Library in exchang efor a premium price put on Apple devices (iPod, iPhone, etc).

Nokia currently has this model and offers the music companies $80 per handset for the priveledge – to be split up based on the downloading habits of its users.  Apple, on the otherhand, is only offering $20/device.

According to FT:

One executive said the research had shown that consumers would pay a premium of up to $100 for unlimited access to music for the lifetime of the device, or a monthly fee of $7-$8 for a subscription model.

Apple, which is thought to make relatively little money from the iTunes store compared with its hardware sales, is also understood to be examining a subscription model.

Subscriptions would work only for its iPhone devices, where it has a monthly billing relationship with customers through the mobile phone operators offering the device, while the “comes with music” model would work with iPhones and with iPods.

The subscription models under discussion in the music industry include the provision for customers to keep up to 40 or 50 tracks a year, which they would retain even if they changed their device or their subscription lapses.
Other music groups are understood to be in talks with Nokia, which is keen to sign up as many of the major labels as possible before launching its first “comes with music” devices in the second half of this year.

At $20/device, it doesn’t seem likely that the record companies will bite – but there might be a sweet spot – perhaps based on storage space that both parties can agree on.  Also, Apple could offer the deal as an "option" for some customers only.  Apple is thought to make little on the sales of iTunes music and Amazon, lately, is offering music from all four big lables in DRM-free format at a cheaper price than Apple – who offers DRM free music only from EMI

digg_url = ‘http://9to5mac.com/iTunes-subscription-coming-34255342’;

Apple today announced a new model AirPort Express that supports 802.11n wireless networking, confirming information first leaked by the company’s Swiss online retail store.

The $99 product doesn’t offer support for network hard drives connected to the USB port on the gadget, but does continue to permit network printer sharing over that port. Clearly Apple wants people to invest in AirPort Extreme or Time Capsule in order to share storage across their network.

"Apple is leading the way with a broad range of innovative 802.11n base stations for almost any wireless networking need," said Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing.

Other than the introduction of the faster wireless standard, little else about the product has changed: support for streaming music, some security and the ability to support up to ten users on the network remain.

Fortune magazine commissioned artist Karen Caldicott to create a Steve Jobs sculpture for the publication.

The creation features Jobs in tell-tale garb, replete with trimmed white beard, glasses, and (naturally) an iPod, though Apple’s CEO is seen here to be holding an older, second generation iPod nano.

The news first appeared on collaborative illustrators and artists weblog, Drawn!, which offers regular information and links submitted by its creative members.

More recenly, Caldicott created a sculpture of disgraced US politician, Eliot Spitzer.

It’s not known if Fortune presented the sculpture to Jobs in recognition of Apple becoming the most admired company in America.

 Microsoft has gone public on plans to compete with Apple’s iPod and iPhone – but we’ll be waiting until 2009 until the company gets it together.

 Microsoft France’s Francois Ruault has confirmed the company plan to ship Zune in Europe in 2009. The third generation of the device hasn’t yet been announced, but will be the model that ships in Europe, a report claims.

In a familiar note, the company also intends introducing a WiFi music store and (potentially) a Zune-cum-mobile phone iPhone competitor.

Apple’s Swiss store updated their specs (translated to English) on the Apple Airport Express to include 802.11N Wireless hardware over the weekend, according to MacGeneration.  Current Airport Express hardware uses 802.11G Wireless and hasn’t changed physically since its introduction in 2004. 

Other than the wireless, the images on the updated site have the hardware looking the same.  The Swiss Store page makes no mention of whether the new revs of the Airport Express will support USB hard drives for Time Machine backup or otherwise.  We’d guess not as it would pull people from Time Capsule purchases and isn’t really what the small portable device was made for.

In any case, if you are thinking of getting an Airport Express, you might want to wait until you see one with 802.11N on the package – which should be any minute now….

Apple may introduce a quad-core MacBook Pro this year, as Intel has confirmed plans to ship Core 2 Duo-based quad-core processors later in the year.

Intel has developed these processors for use in high-performance laptops, which it sees as portable replacements for powerful desktop systems.

We know Apple won’t comment on future products or speculation, but the new processors are expected to appear in the third quarter. The processor is manufactured using the 45-nanometer process. It’s likely the chips will feature on-board support for WiFi and WiMAX.

The new processors demand significantly more power than those used in current Apple laptops. This suggests Apple may delay the launch of the new products until battery life has been optimised.

An outcry of criticism rocked Cupertino yesterday as optimistic iPhone application developers complained the company had done exactly what it said it would – rejecting thousands from its new iPhone Developer Program.

Reports claim thousands of developers both small and large have applied to join the scheme, but the vast majority have been rejected, generating this hail of criticism.

The reports ignore Apple’s earlier promise that it would accept only a limited number of developers for its iPhone Developer Program at this point.

"During the beta iPhone SDK program, a limited number of developers will be accepted into Apple’s new iPhone Developer Program and offered the ability to get code onto iPhones for testing," the company said in a March 6 press release.

Developers want to be able to test in-development software on an iPhone so they can be ready to ship these solutions when Apple opens the doors to third party applications in June.

Membership of the iPhone Developer Program costs from $99 per year and is required in order to test applications on an iPhone.

Despite the frustration, Apple’s rejection letter isn’t final. It reads: "The iPhone Developer Program is available to a limited number of developers and we plan to expand during the beta period. We will contact you again regarding your enrollment status at the appropriate time."

With in excess of 100,000 developers already downloading the iPhone SDK, Apple may be facing some technical hurdles as it tries to launch the scheme. While the effect of the delay may deter some from pouring huge resources into application building now, currently rejected developers may be invited to sign up in the months ahead, as Apple tweaks its scheme.