9to5 Staff

Readability, a service akin to Marco Arment’s Instapaper which turns any web page into a clean and comfortable reading view, announced in a blog post today plans to ease the paid subscription requirement in order to make it more useful and free for everyone. In addition, they also teased the upcoming new iPhone and iPad apps here (the submissions are awaiting approval from Apple).

A paid subscription is still available to those wishing to access beyond the most recent articles in their Reading Lis, including the ability to access daily digest of the Reading List on the Amazon Kindle. The company noted:

With this release, Readability is available at no cost. Sign-up and you’ll have your own profile and reading list in no time. Both Readability accounts and our companion apps will always be completely free, but we also offer a premium experience for users who want additional features and an easy way to support their favorite writers and publishers.

Eagled-eyed readers would know that Readability has been around for a while now. Indeed, reading aficionados have been enjoying functionality provided by Readability on a daily basis, yours truly included. In its most basic, free of charge offering, clicking the Readability bookmarklet in your browser strips away heavy graphics, adverts and other layout elements on web pages, leaving only the text portion and hyperlinks, which is all that matters anyway. You can also save optimized articles for later with automatic syncing across devices and send an article to your Kindle.

Another great thing: Readability is supported across dozens of popular desktop and mobile apps through the official API, including Reeder for iOS and Mac, Twitter clients Echofon, Ubersoscial and Tweetbot and many more.

http://vimeo.com/arc90/readability

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An Apple television mockup by Adr-studio.it

Sony CEO Howard Stringer said in a recent interview he had “no doubt” that Apple was working on a television set, hinting his company had a few tricks up its sleeve as well.

I spent the last five years building a platform so I can compete against Steve Jobs. It’s finished, and it’s launching now.

Well, those plans have come into full. The Wall Street Journal ran a story detailing Sony’s push into the cable TV space. Think a streaming service aiming to obsolete cable and satellite TV providers by pushing more affordable entertainment content to devices via the ubiquitous IP protocol. Yes, Sony is already streaming Hollywood entertainment via the PlayStation network, but this is a different animal.

You see, even though Sony has its own movie and television studio, they lack a major TV channel in the United States, meaning they’re forced to shop for TV channels elsewhere. The company is allegedly negotiating the rights to offer third-party television programming via the web in the United States, “people familiar with the situation” told the paper:

But one person familiar with the talks said that Sony doesn’t want to recreate the same bundles cable TV offers and might start with smaller niche channels that are having trouble getting fees from cable operators.

Content would stream to the 18.1 million PlayStation 3 consoles installed in the U.S. homes, as well as networked HDTVs and Blu-ray players. Sony is apparently in talks with Comcast’s NBCUnviersal, Discover Communications and News Corp, but the deal is anything but given because Sony would love to undercut these guys on price. Clearly the company has nothing to lose considering its absence from the cable TV business. Another major obstacle: Bandwidth caps being imposed by Internet providers in the United States.

Sony has had little luck so far with their Google TV sets and Stringer is adamant that “every TV set we all make loses money”. Apple, of course, is rumored to be exploring a full-blown television set with Siri and Apple TV functionality built-in in an attempt to expand into the HDTV market understood to be worth an estimated $100 billion in 2012, much to the analysts’ delight. That project is allegedly being headed by iTunes creator Jeff Robbin.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/?v=NnSmENvbY8I#!]
With the $199 Kindle Fire out of the gate, the inevitable questions pops into mind: Which is faster overall, the Amazon or Apple tablet?

The comparison isn’t really fair because Amazon skimped on internal components, which was key to its breakthrough $199 price point. An iFixit teardown reveals Texas Instruments’ OMAP 4430 chip inside the device, also  found inside Research In Motion’s BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.

For starters, iPad 2 boots much quicker than the Amazon tablet – again, due to its more efficient dual-core processor and optimized software. Browsing the web? No surprises here either, Safari on iPad 2 stormed ahead, performing noticeably faster than Amazon’s Silk browser which offloads page rendering to the Amazon cloud. One thing to remember: In this test, Kindle Fire was loading Flash content which of course is not supported on Apple’s device.

The iPad 2’s graphics unit, praised for its nine times performance jump, helps with scrolling, which is pretty choppy most of the time on Amazon’s device. One surprising finding is that Kindle Fire streams Netflix smoother than iPad 2, most likely due to the new version of their Android client which is not yet available for Apple’s platform.

This is not the most scientific test in the world, mind you. Again, as 9to5Google noted in its quick review, there’s really no comparing Kindle Fire to iPad 2, be it on the price, overall polish, performance or shininess. As for the speed, mainstream buyers may not be interested in raw specs anymore and Amazon has priced this thing out of the range of the Samsungs and BlackBerrys of this world so it’s more of a competitor to Android tablets than to Apple.

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Following in the footsteps of Fortune, Financial Times and other companies that tap modern web technologies to their advantage, Foursquare, a popular location-based social networking web site, is focusing on HTML5, too. For much of the social stuff found in the App Store, a well-written HTML5 web app can perform just as good as its native counterpart.

Foursquare’s new experience on the web doesn’t just provide the features from their native iPhone client, they also augment it with new social discovery capabilities optimized for mobile devices such as iPad and other tablets.

Point your iPad’s Safari browser at foursquare.com and log in using your credentials. You should be presented with a map that shows your friends, trending places (yellow), places on your lists (green), places with Specials (orange) and popular places (blue).

The new List discovery feature lets you search for a particular venue visually, including guiding tours of places built using crowd-sourced knowledge. The site-wide redesign includes revamped place pages, commenting, bigger photos and so forth. Another noteworthy nice-to-have: Places on the map show personalized content based on the time of day.

According to the blog post:

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Yup, it’s that time of year again as Apple’s App Store team begins emailing registered developers, letting them know that the iTunes Connect service they use to manage App Store items will shut down for the winter holidays, between December 22-29. During this time, apps will not be updated, price changes will be locked and apps slated to hit the App Store for the first time will be delayed. Attempting to schedule app updates or price changes from December 29 through December 29 may result in an entry being unavailable for purchase, Apple writes. Full contents of Apple’s email right after the break.

Thanks, Jan G!

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English progressive rock band Pink Floyd and Sting, another British-born musician, singer, songwriter, activist, actor and philanthropist, both released their apps for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad in the App Store yesterday. Neither is your typical app album, that is – a music album repackaged as a native app with added multimedia bells’n’whistles.

Sting decided to give away his iPad app free of charge, his way of paying tribute to Steve Jobs. Sting 25, the 442MB download, features an elegant user interface and hours of music videos, interviews, concert footage and other material. The musician unveiled the app yesterday at the Apple Store in New York’s Upper West Side, where he performed the song “Fragile”.

He actually dedicated the song to Steve Jobs, saying:

In some way he’s created our future.

As for the Pink Floyd app…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/?v=-xf5Kjnlq4A]

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Interesting move today from Amazon.  Not only did they drop the price of Apple TV to $89.99 matching Best Buy, but they are now calling it the ‘2010’ edition.  Could that mean an update is on the horizon?  At the very least, it is a solid deal.
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NTT DoCoMo is Japans’ largest wireless company, but they don’t carry the iPhone yet. According to their president and chief executive Ryuji Yamada, they “haven’t given up” hope of landing the iconic handset. At the same time, he criticized a large volume of devices Apple is requiring iPhone carriers to commit to. Rival KDDI Corp, Japan’s #2 carrier, joined Softbank in selling the iPhone in Japan.

Should the introduction of the iPhone result in “the mass majority of our products occupied by the iPhone”, Yamada noted, then such a scenario would be “difficult to swallow”. Regardless of the politics, the key concern reportedly comes down to a simple question of Apple refusing to allow carrier junkware on their handset.

Apple has insisted from the onset that they be the only entity controlling what software goes on users’ iPhones. Apple is unlikely to change its stance as they’ve always acted as a gatekeeper of the iPhone, refusing to relinquish their ownership of user experience over to the carriers.

The Wall Street Journal has the story:

The closed operating system of the iPhone also limits NTT DoCoMo from pre-installing some of its applications—including its e-wallet, which allows consumers to pay for merchandise with their smartphones, as well as its i-mode email service—which Mr. Yamada said are important for Japanese customers.

We caught a glimpse of Apple’s legendary volume requirements when Sprint announced plans to spend $20 billion to purchase 30.5 million iPhones. Even though their CEO Dan Hesse said the handset is “worth every penny”, Sprint will lose money on the deal until 2014 and will need $7 billion in financing “to cover a cash shortfall caused by heavy investments in the Apple Inc iPhone introduction and a big network upgrade”.

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In addition to a revamped Android version, Netflix said today that a “new tablet experience should be available for members with iPads in a few weeks”. What’s the new tablet experience like? According to a press release and a blog post, Netflix aims to consolidate the app’s user interface across iOS and Android tablets with a “much more immersive” design that manages to cram up twice as many movies and television shows as before without looking cluttered. Neil Hunt, chief product officer at Netflix, says:

In the last 12 months we have seen a threefold increase in how long Netflix members are watching on their tablets. We’re happy to debut a new user experience coinciding with the release of the next generation of devices from industry leaders. The new Netflix interface offers a significant improvement in browsing and searching for TV shows and movies to instantly watch.

Each item in the new interface sports a larger artwork than before and you can swipe between the individual rows of titles. If this sounds familiar, you’re right – a similar experience is built into supported set-top boxes, gaming consoles and other Netflix-ready devices.

Interestingly, the new Netflix software is also available for the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet. Netflix also offers a free trail, here.

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Smartphones are good for many things, especially for personal information management. If you deal with business cards a lot, you probably discovered specialized apps that let you scan any business card to effortlessly create a contact entry in your iPhone. The App Store is a home to dozens of those, such as Business Card Reader for iPhone from Shape Services.

Most of them being paid, today their makers face a dangerous competitor: The hugely popular LinkedIn social network for business pros. The company today announced a re-launch of its free iPhone app titled CardMunch. As a result, their old app will no longer be supported.

The newly launched CardMunch program can digitize printed business cards and turn them into a digital representation, just like similar offerings on the App Store. Unlike other programs, CardMunch automatically links scanned cards to LinkedIn profiles:

By using the new CardMunch app, you now have access to deeper and richer information about the person behind the card — via the LinkedIn profile — who you know in common, where they’ve worked, where they went to school, and much, much more!

Go ahead, grab yourself a copy now, it’s free. More features after the break.

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The delayed iPhone launch gave Android vendors additional three months to gain market share whilst negatively affecting Apple, sending shares down ten percent over the past month. Worry not, though – strong iPhone 4S launch and price reductions for both the iPhone 4 and 3GS models are seen as catalyst enabling Apple to regain lost share from Android manufacturers during the current quarter.  Also, remember Apple is still taking more than half of all smartphone profits.

The gist of today’s report from Gartner pegged Apple’s share of the global smartphone market at 15 percent on sales of 17.29 million units, a 21 percent annual increase. But the smartphone market grew at an even faster clip so Apple actually recorded a decline from the 16.6 percent in Q3 2010 on sales of 13.48 million units. Android, meanwhile, has gone from 25.3 percent in Q3 2010 to 52.5 percent in Q3 2011, more than doubling its market share. Together, iOS and Android accounted for more than two-thirds of all smartphones sold (talk about duopoly).

Apple is also under pressure as quarterly iPhone sales decreased compared to the 20.34 million iPhones shipped during the June quarter. Principal research analyst Roberta Cozza said some consumers “were waiting for a rumored new iPhone and associated price cuts on older iPhone models; this affected U.S. sales particularly”.

Gartner believes Apple will bounce back in the fourth quarter because of its strongest ever preorders for the iPhone 4S in the first weekend after its announcement. Markets such as Brazil, Mexico, Russia and China are becoming more important to Apple, representing 16 percent of overall sales and showing that the iPhone has a place in emerging markets.

iPhone 4S launches in India, the world’s second-largest market, on November 25. Pre-orders sold out in Hong Kong in 10 minutes and the online Apple Store is now offering unlocked iPhone 4S units. The company pledged to roll out the handset to a hundred carriers in 70 countries by the year’s end, the fastest iPhone roll out yet. Supply chain sources claimed Apple cut holiday quarter iPhone 4S orders, but analysts rushed to dispute that report. How does Apple fare in the whole handset market? Read on…

Source: Gartner (November 2011)

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According to the back office chatter, Apple is working on a blown up iPhone display and a shrunken iPad. An insider speaking to The Korea Times asserted Apple is developing iPhone 5 (no surprises here) and engineering a smaller version of its 9.7-inch iPad. According to the IDG news service which translated the original article from Korean, a smaller iPad – referred to as the iPad mini – will sport a 7.35-inch display.

If true, iPad mini should be a bit larger than Amazon’s seven-inch $199 Kindle Fire tablet scheduled to launch tomorrow. Apple and LG Display are reportedly negotiating a $1.1 billion deal for a long-term supply of display parts for iOS devices from 2012 through 2016:

A meeting between Apple and LG Display is reportedly due to take place in the next few days and one of the topics of conversation will be Apple’s plans to introduce a 7.35in tablet.

The report corroborates a UDN story a month ago mentioning both LG Display and AU Optronics as sampling 7.85-inch displays for iPad mini. The time could be right for a smaller iPad as Goldman Sachs reported this morning that demand for Apple’s tablet could be fading ahead of the crucial holiday shopping season and, more importantly, in the wake of the more affordable (and smaller) tablet offerings from Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

Let’s not forget other vendors who are gearing up to release an avalanche of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich tablets early next year. Amazon is understood to be close to releasing an 8.9-inch tablet later this year and has reportedly commissioned contract manufacturer Quanta Computers to build a Kindle Fire successor planned for the second quarter of 2012.

The unnamed executive cited by the Korea Times article called for a four-inch iPhone 5 (not unheard-of) with the same 960-by-640 Retina Display pixel resolution. The last bit would certainly prove a welcome news for app developers who needn’t cope with another fragmented platform.

As always…

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Apple’s Mac business has been growing steadily pretty much everywhere, especially in China. The United States has long been Apple’s #1 market, but that’s not to say the Mac doesn’t keep on chugging along in other markets as well. According to Gartner, Apple in Western Europe grew Mac sales 19.6 percent in the third quarter of 2011.

At the same time, rival Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Acer Group all lost ground, with the exception of Asus (their sales were up 20.3 percent). Apple sold 1.13 million Macintoshes in the Western Europe region during the third quarter for a 7.6 percent market share, up over a 5.7 percent share just a year ago. In the United Kingdom, only Apple and Samsung grew sales by 21.8 percent and 39.0 percent, respectively as everyone else fell miserably.

The result earned Apple the #5 spot in the UK computer market for a 7.8 percent market share, narrowly escaping Samsung which had a 7.5 percent share of the UK market during the third quarter. It’s interesting that Samsung is now chasing Apple in the UK in terms of computer sales. Expect to see this trend elsewhere as the South Korean conglomerate increasingly turns its attention to the PC market.

Research director Ranjit Atwal said “the market seems to be moving at three speeds”, while principal analyst Meike Escherich offered an explanation behind the otherwise weak PC shipments in Western Europe:

Note: Data includes desk-based PCs and mobile PCs. Media Tablets are excluded | Source: Gartner (November 2011)

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Something strange has happened concerning the ongoing legal battles between Samsung and Apple: The former changed its mind and is now saying it won’t block iPhone 4S sales in South Korea after all. According to The Chosun Ilbo, a major South Korean newspaper, Samsung will not impose a sales blockage on the iPhone 4S which launched in the country this past Friday.

Debating “until the last moment” whether to file a motion similar to those they had previously filed against Apple in France, Italy, Australia and Japan, Samsung caved in. They will not be filing an injunction on iPhone 4S sales on their home turf. According to a senior Samsung executive:

We concluded that we should engage in legal battles with Apple only in the global market, but not in order to gain more market share in Korea.

Samsung also requested to see the iPhone 4S firmware source code and details of Apple’s carrier subsidy agreement. A judge last week ruled in favor of that request. Even in the wake of the ugly public brawl between the South Korean technology conglomerate and its biggest parts buyer, it’s been reported Samsung will nevertheless manufacture the A6 chip for Apple’s 2012 iPhone and iPad models.

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Amazon offers the Pioneer 840-watt 7.1-Channel 3D Home Theater Receiver, model no. VSX-1021-K, for $299.99 (add it to your cart to see the price). With free shipping, that’s $20 under our mention from last month and the lowest total price we could find by $99. Features include 120 watts per channel into seven channels, Airplay streaming, iPod, iPhone, and iPad App compatibility, Ethernet and Bluetooth connectivity, five HDMI inputs with 3D passthrough, one HDMI output, and more.

Just last week, the older model, without Airplay, was slashed to the same price.

Videos below:
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With this year’s holiday season looming, the online Apple Store is ready with the new Holiday Gift Guide section. Holiday gift ideas include Apple’s most popular mobile devices and computers as well as a hand-picked selection of third-party products, add-ons, device accessories and even fashion cases to carry your products around in style.

The gadget maker teases:

All kinds of gifts for all kinds of lists. Shop the season’s finest accessories for iPad, iPod, iPhone, and Mac.

All products on offer in the Holiday Gift Guide come with free shipping, Apple notes. And with gift wrapping and free personal laser engraving, plus in-store pickup, it gets even better. If you were planning on making anyone’s season bright, including your own, shop the Holiday Gift Guide section over at the online Apple Store. Or just use the updated Apple Store app to shop from the palm of your hand or use the self-checkout option in-store.

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In addition to the big three (AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint) as well as regional carrier C Spire which has begun selling iPhone 4S today, Apple’s new handset is now available from Claro Puerto Rico, the largest Puerto Rican telecommunications services company. The  Guaynabo, Puerto Rico-headquartered wireless operator hosts a million US customers in Puerto Rico (yes, it is a U.S. territory, U.S. dollars, U.S. citizenry) which makes it slightly bigger than C-Spire by subscribers.

Claro is the largest mobile phone network in the Americas. It is part of the Mexican telecom group América Móvil which is one of the four largest mobile phone network operators in the world, with more than 200 million customers.

What’s interesting about their offering is that Claro will be offering the 16GB iPhone 4S for just $99.99 with a standard two-year contact, quite possibly the lowest subsidized price in the United States. The 16GB/32GB version is a $199/$299 value with a two-year contract. Customers can choose between four plans costing $64.98, $74.98, $79.98 and $84.98 a month. All plans include unlimited minutes and text messages and 250MB/2GB/5GB/unlimited data.

They are also offering no-contract iPhone 4S for $669.99/$769.99/$869.99 for the 16/32/64GB version, which is a $20 premium from Apple’s online store, which began accepting orders for the unlocked iPhone 4S this morning. Claro is offering both the 16GB iPhone 4S subsidized and non-subsidized beginning today, with 32GB and 64GB capacities “coming soon”.

Claro is also offering the 8GB iPhone 4 for $49.99 ($569.99 contract-free).

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Apple’s US online store today began accepting orders for the unlocked iPhone 4S, priced at $649/$749/$849 for the 16/32/64GB version, making good on its promise to provide the unlocked handset in November. The company advises:

The unlocked iPhone works only on supported GSM networks, such as AT&T in the U.S. When you travel internationally, you can also use a micro-SIM card from a local GSM carrier. The unlocked iPhone will not work with CDMA carriers such as Verizon Wireless or Sprint.

An unlocked iPhone 4S is of particular interest to those traveling abroad as they can just pop in a local carrier’s SIM card to avoid paying exorbitant roaming fees.

Meanwhile, carrier Sprint today begun SIM-locking all iPhone 4S devices purchased Friday, November 11, 2011 and onwards, SprintFeed noted. According to SprintFeed:

Starting tomorrow, all iPhone 4S devices will have the SIM locked. The locking occurs during the activation process and is invisible to the customer (no extra action is needed by customer or rep).

9to5Mac discovered mid-October that Apple Stores in the United States were selling contract-free iPhones. Any GSM phone that was sold off contract was unlocked and we’ve confirmed that they’ve stayed unlocked, even after the 5.0.1 update (below).
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2C2oCsrqcM]

Jean-Louis Gassée, Apple’s former head of Macintosh product development between 1981-1990, has commented on Apple’s crucial choice of Steve Jobs’s NeXTSTEP as their operating system back in 1996 instead of BeOS, his own creation. Much of NeXTSTEP code would make possible Mac OS X, later adapted for Apple’s mobile devices.

Speaking at a Churchill Club “Steve Jobs’ Legacy” talk event (which is fantastic the whole way through – above) in San Jose yesterday, Gassée remarked (at about an hour in):

Thank god that didn’t happen, because I hated Apple’s management.

BeOS was pretty good, mind you. Positioned as a multimedia platform, BeOS benefited from symmetric multiprocessing, pervasive multithreading, preemptive multitasking and BFS, a custom 64-bit journaling file system known as BFS. It too was developed on the principles of clarity and an uncluttered design.

So why did Apple side with NeXT and acquired the company on February 4, 1997 for  $429 million? In hindsight, even though beOS was pretty good, it was the aquisition of Jobs that was worth to Apple more than the NeXTSTEP software. Or, as Gassée put it, “Jobs’s acquisition of Apple”.

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A rendition of an Apple-branded television set.

The WSJ reports that amid losing money on every television set they make, Sony somehow has a strategy for redemption. Stringer declined to provide details about what Sony is developing but said “there’s a tremendous amount of R&D going into a different kind of TV set”.

He he has “no doubt” Apple’s Steve Jobs also was working on changing the traditional TV set. “That’s what we’re all looking for”, he noted, warning “it will take a long time to transition to a new form of television”. Slim margins, low prices and little innovation make the business of researching, developing and marketing high-definition television sets a cutthroat one, he remarked:

We can’t continue selling TV sets [the way we have been]. Every TV set we all make loses money.

His company, Stringer said, spent the last five years creating an ecosystem to take on Apple, even though the company had seen little success with the Google TV platform and other connected television efforts:

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Apple just released iOS 5.0.1 build number 9A405, a minor update to its mobile operating system fixing (hopefully) the iPhone 4S battery woes. The software arrives just a day following the iOS 5.0.1 release to certain end-users for testing and a week following a developers-only version.

In addition to battery fixes, iOS 5.0.1 also enables multitasking gestures on the original iPad (go to Settings > General > Multitasking Gestures), fixes the Smart Cover security flaw, resolves bugs with Documents in the Cloud and improves voice recognition for Australian users using dictation.

You can update by connecting to iTunes and hitting the Check for Updates button in the Info pane or download an over-the-air update directly on the device (Settings > General > Software Update). Note that OTA update may not be available for everyone right away. If not, wait a little as these things take some time to propagate.

Full release notes and direct download links right below:

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