9to5 Staff

Steve Jobs at Apple’s developer conference in the summer of 2011. As soon as he took the stage, Jobs pointed at someone dear to him in the audience, flashing that infectious smile of his.

Well, don’t get enraged immediately, that’s what some analysts are saying seven months in Steve Jobs’ medical leave, his longest leave of absence ever at Apple. Analyst Tim Bajarin with Creative Strategies told The San Jose Mercury News that Jobs had appeared to him at WWDC this June “the same as he did in March when he introduced the iPad 2”. One cannot “draw too much from the length of the absence”, he said, speculating Jobs’ recuperative process might require less physical activity.

After all, announcing his third medical leave in January, Jobs said in a company statement that Apple’s operations boss Timothy Cook would be “responsible for all of Apple’s day to day operations” as “I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company”. Bajarin, who reportedly mingles regularly with upper management at Apple, confirms Jobs has definitely moved away from micromanaging every aspect of the company:

They tell me he calls in regularly. He talks to Tim, he talks to the top guys, he talks about the Apple stores. But while he used to micromanage everything in ways that most CEOs would not, right down to issues with the company cafeteria, the big change with his latest leave is that there’s less micromanagement and more management of his executive team and the big-picture issues.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8KVz0CKbwU]

Here’s an interesting video showing off a white “iPhone 5”. Yeah, China already makes these. To be honest, it does look a lot like the device the Giz-China.com blog wrote about last week (and French-language site NowhereElse.fr agrees). As you may have guessed it, that fake iPhone 5 is already on sale in China and can be yours for a cool $108. Of course, it’s nothing more than a rip off. However, regardless of it running a Java-based operating system, its maker went to great lengths to bank on the iPhone 5 meme…

For starters, it sports the shiny Apple logo on the back. And check out the slightly elongated design and thin profile, said to be only 7mm thick (compare that to the iPhone 4’s 9.3mm profile). Knock-off makers are getting better and better at what they do and Steve Jobs must be going through the roof. Although Chinese authorities shut two fake Apple Stores, there’s little hope that the government will take action against vendors that blatantly rip-off branded products as the concept of intellectual property is being stretched beyond limits in the country.

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mockup

The Next Web points at a Guardian online article which states that a next-generation iPhone has been delivered to carriers for field-testing. Without going into much detail as to when exactly Apple might launch iPhone 5 beyond crystal ball peering, author Charles Arthuer writes on the paper’s blog that “my carrier sources tell me that the boxes in which the new iPhone hardware is encased have been transported to carriers for testing”.

The article is referring to the cases Apple (and other manufacturers) use to enclose prototypes so they don’t raise suspicious in field-testing. Remember Gray Powell, an Apple engineer who famously left an iPhone 4 prototype on a bar stool in California? That prototype had been enclosed in an iPhone 3GS-like case and Apple later argued it made discovering the antenna issue that much harder. Of course, Guardian’s article is really a non-discovery as 9to5Mac discovered that the next iPhone hit final testing with Apple in June.

Guardian’s take on those cases? Right below…
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Nuance, which is said to power speech-to-text features in iOS 5, released today a new cloud-based service and iOS app which makes it easy to organize, access and share any document from any desktop or mobile device. The Nuance PaperPort Anywhere service gives you one gigabyte of free cloud-based, searchable storage for your documents with permission-based file sharing via email.

Paid upgrades are also available: $10 a month for 10GB and $25 a month for 50 gigabytes of storage. Nuance’s price tiers actually fare pretty favorably compared to iCloud, Dropbox and SugarSync. Cloud scanning is enabled through their PaperPort scanning and document management application for Windows PC which was also updated today. All of this is augmented by a free app for iPhone and iPad that lets you access and send documents from PaperPort Anywhere. You may remember Nuance in July released a free Siri-like Dragon Go for iOS app. More features of their latest offering and a video tour right below:

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Update: Just for clarification, iCloud does not use up purchased storage space for songs, movies, television shows, e-books and apps bought in iTunes. This is also true for up to a thousand recent photos from your iOS devices or computers that use iCloud’s Photostream feature.

With the iCloud price tiers revealed yesterday, Federico Viticci of MacStories.net has done a nice job comparing Apple’s cloud storage offering to those of Dropbox and SugarSync, two of the most widely used cloud storage services out there. Apple is on par with Dropbox if you’re in a market for a 50GB storage in the cloud. The latter also has a 100GB option for $199 a year which Apple lacks. However, Apple beats them with 5GB free accounts versus a 2GB free option over at Dropbox. SugarSync tops both Apple and Google by giving you ten more gigabytes (for 60GB total) for your hundred bucks a year and their $150 a year for 100GB plan comes in cheaper than Dropbox ($199 a year) or Apple on a per-GB basis. In addition, SugarSync also offer 30GB and 60GB accounts and match Apple with free 5GB accounts.

It should be noted that Dropbox is the only truly cross-platform service. Dropbox provides a desktop client for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and utilizes a clever file handling mechanism which takes care of translating file and meta data differences among platforms. All services enable you to log in to a web interface to manage, upload and download your files on any Internet-enabled device. Of course, Apple’s offering is much more than a hard drive in the cloud as it sports seamless syncing of contacts, appointments, email messages, documents, photos and other data across desktop and mobile devices. iCloud also has the pretties web interface, unique services like Find My iPhone and rich web apps that mimic the appearance of their Mac and iPad counterparts down to pixel-level accuracy (video tour, screenshot gallery).

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Apple kicked off digital software distribution on Macs with the Mac App Store and Lion, a major operating system revision released exclusively as a four gigabyte download. As a consequence, folks no longer get an elegant USB key for restoring the operating system if your machine goes south. Instead, new Macs now have the Lion Internet Recovery feature that boots your Mac from Apple’s servers if something goes wrong. As useful as Lion Internet Recover is, however, having a bootable Lion installer on an USB thumb drive is recommended for everyone, not just for those plagued with a slow Internet connection or users that upgrade multiple Macs to Lion.

The process of creating a bootable Lion USB or DVD is now a one-click affair thanks to a useful program by Guillaume Gete which automates the whole thing – you are only required to put the Lion Installer in your Applications folder (if you don’t have it, re-download the installer off the Mac App Store on a pre-Lion Mac). In addition, the Lion DiskMaker 1.1 script lets you work with a 4GB flash drive rather than the 8GB minimum requirement when manually burning the install disk image onto a DVD or USB drive. It also works with SD cards and FireWire/USB external drives. This is especially useful if you still have a Snow Leopard USB key lying around somewhere.

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In response to media reports that it has halted planned sales of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia until Apple lawsuit is resolved, Samsung Australia has stepped forward and shed some light on the matter. The company clarified via the official statement published by Ausdroid.net that a court injunction involves a Galaxy Tab 10.1 variant that the company “had no plans of selling” in Australia whatsoever.

They re-iterate plans to launch a version for the Australian market “in the near future”. It is not clear from the statement whether or not said version will arrive regardless of the outcome of the Apple lawsuit in the country. The company does stress that “this undertaking” will not affect availability of their smartphones and tablets around the world. Here’s Samsung’s statement in its entirety:

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You may have heard rumors that Apple is hard at work developing a new MacBook Pro sporting an ultra-thin design akin to the MacBook Air. Despite prototypes reportedly being tested, little is known of specs or other features. One thing seems pretty plausible: Redesigned MacBooks are most likely to utilize the current-generation 32-nanometer Sandy Bridge chips rather than Intel’s upcoming 22-nanometer Ivy Bridge platform. Swedish web site Sweclockers.com has found out that the chip maker won’t have Ivy Bridge chips available in volume until April 2012, despite first silicon prototypes arriving soon. On top of that, Intel will first ship quad-core Ivy Bridge chips for desktop computers and dual-core counterparts for notebooks will arrive a few weeks later, meaning around the summer of 2012.

Assuming Apple refreshes the MacBook Pro lineup with said ultra-thin design this year (the last update was in late February), the machines will run current-generation Sandy Bridge chips, even with the preferential treatment Apple’s been getting from Intel (the chip giant is known for giving Apple exclusive access to unreleased SKUs). Then, six or so months later, Apple portables should adopt the Ivy Bridge platform. As noted by Hardmac, “we could see Apple using one if its usual strategies to revamp the sales without changing a lot inside”, which is how the company had gone about the original unibody MacBooks unveiled in October 2008. The delay in bringing the Ivy Bridge platform to market is likely to affect the iMac family as well.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/?v=FpANHa8VsSw]

Apple yesterday opened up its iCloud service for developers so they can integrate web-based documents storage into their apps. YouTube user helpfulmactips2010 (via MacRumors) provides this helpful video tour showing off the various features and the rich iCloud.com web interface that provides access to web apps which closely resemble the appearance of their iPad counterparts. This includes web-versions of Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Find My iPhone, iWork data storage and iPad-like “task switcher” at the bottom, as we showed you in our extensive screenshot gallery. It’s worth noting that web app icons are exact carbon-copies of their iOS versions. The web interface even sports iOS-style notifications and subtle animations. Apple has also revealed price points beyond the free 5GB of storage ($20 for 10GB, $40 for 20GB and $100 for 50GB a year) and released new versions of iWork for iOS and iPhoto for Mac to developers, featuring full iCloud support. And you gotta love those cute error messages, as shown in the screenshot below. More screenshots of error pages here and another video below the fold…

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Although Chrome controls one-fifth of the global web browsing market and has overtaken Firefox as the second most-used browser in the UK, Google’s browser has been growing slower in absolute terms than Apple’s Safari in the month of July. In July, Chrome added .34 percentage points of market share for a 13.45 percent web usage share. In the same period, Safari grew .57 percentage points for a 8.05 percent web usage share in July, per latest Net Applications metrics. Apple’s and Google’s browser were the only ones growing (with the exception of the Other category), while Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox ceded market share and had 52.81 and 21.48 percent web usage share.

A big factor: Apple just revamped its consumer MacBook Airs and Mac Minis as well as refreshing the Mac OS with Lion.

Of course, the numbers are not representative of the whole market because Net Applications derives stats from some 40,000 participating web sites, but they’re a good and fairly accurate indication of market trends.

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Some iOS developers have reportedly taken matter into their own hands, teaming up to create a joint opposition to serious legal threats coming from patent troll Lodsys which has been seeking to extract royalty fees from iOS developers small and big alike, including the likes of Atari, Rovio and Electronic Arts, the world’s biggest publisher of entertainment software on any platform. As you know, Lodsys is asserting its license to use patented in-app purchasing technology covers store owners Apple, Google and Microsoft, but not third-party developers that put their digital warez for sale on those stores. Per ArsTechnica story:

On Monday, renowned iOS developer Mike Lee announced the Appsterdam Legal Defense Team, which will be made up of indie developers fighting patent trolls as a single unit and funded by contributions from participating companies. The goal, aside from the obvious one of being free from frivolous patent lawsuits, is to become “the ants of East Texas, minding their business until someone invades their anthill.”

FOSS Patents, the intellectual property blog, reported last week that Lodsys opposed Apple’s motion for intervention. Apple’s response to Lodsys’s intimidations has been mild, to say the least. Apple filed a motion with the Eastern District of Texas to intervene as the defendant in a lawsuit from Lodsys in June. The company ambiguously asserting it might step up in defense of third-party developers targeted by the patent troll firm. Apple’s deafening silence had even prompted EFF to issue call to arms, demanding that Apple protects its developers.

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UPDATE: This feature is apparently only a US-thing for the time being…

Coincidentally or not, Apple has just made some back-end changes to the iTunes Store cloud as the new iOS 4.3.3 firmware updated for Apple TV went live a couple of minutes ago. As you can see from the above screenshot, it’s now possible to re-download purchased television shows in iTunes through the Purchased tab in the iTunes Store section of the iTunes desktop app. The Purchased tab is also available via the iTunes app on iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, allowing you to re-download previously purchased shows directly to those devices. Put simply, the company has blurred the line between purchases and rentals, although users are still offered the choice between renting or owning television shows on offer in iTune Store.

This latest addition comes on top of the ability to re-download purchased apps, e-books and music in desktop iTunes, which has been in place for some time. The feature also ties in nicely to the latest Apple TV software update which lets you purchase television shows through the device (see the screenshot below), not just rent them as before. Presumably, content begins streaming on the Apple TV (due to its small storage), with your other iOS devices and computers automatically downloading the purchase if you have enabled Automatic Downloads in Settings > Store.

In other words, “Apple has rolled out a cloud-based storage locker for TV shows… And you know movies are next!”, as cleverly put by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber.
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/?v=fLPMLJgGsiA]

File this one under the ‘freaky’ category. Publisher Hearst is promoting its first iPad-only magazine titled Cosmo for Guys (no jokes, please) with the “iPad Head Girl”. The campaign employs a modern take on the sandwich man, thanks to creative concept by viral marketing agency Thinkmodo which calls for a custom-designed head gear, fabricated by MTV Movie Awards makers Clockwork Apple. The Next Web explains that the head gear is comprised of four iPads “shaped into a cube projecting video playback of each side of her head”.

Update: The making of iPad head Girl:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-VRCat3r2I]

The stunt is an attempted analogy of a guy “getting inside a girl’s head”. And how is the girl able to tell her way with the head gear on? She’s wearing a pair of video glasses inside the head gear which display live video feed captured bya camera hidden inside her purse. Gotta love how New Yorkers give her a strange look as she strolls down a park. A couple of screenies of the mag right below…

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Image via PCWorld.com

In a surprising turn of events to anyone following the ongoing Apple vs. Samsung spat, Bloomberg reported this morning that Samsung has agreed to temporarily cease sales of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet until their legal dispute with Apple is settled or they win court approval:

Apple Inc. escalated a patent dispute against Samsung Electronics Co. and won an agreement that the South Korean company won’t sell the newest version of its tablet computer in Australia until a lawsuit is resolved. Samsung, based in Suwon, South Korea, agreed to stop advertising the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia and not to sell the device until it wins court approval or the lawsuit is resolved.

It’s interesting because Samsung was advertising the Galaxy Tab 10.1 launch in the country since July 20. Still, carriers Vodafone and Optus both hinted at plans to offer the device to their Australian customers “soon”. Samsung’s decision came as a lawyer for Apple sought an injunction before Federal Court Justice Annabelle Bennett in Sydney, claiming Samsung’s tablet infringes ten Apple patents. With that in mind, Samsung’s clearly on the defensive here. Apple also wants wants to “stop Samsung from selling the tablet in other countries” and Samsung’s conceding to Apple may have set an important precedence for other countries. Of course…

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Add-on lenses for iPhone 4 are all the rage and photography aficionados are especially drawn to niche products that let your iPhone 4 capture 360-degree images or footage, such as this cool Kickstarter project we reported on back in April. The latest adapter lens comes from Pixeet (via Slashgear) and takes panorama concept even further by providing a case to slip your iPhone into and then attach the fisheye lens onto the case magnetically. Unlike the Kickstarter kit that captures 360-degree shots with four cameras, Pixeet’s device has only one camera so you must rotate around and capture multiple shots.

When you have your four shots ready, fire up a free iPhone or iPad app which stitches them all together to form a nice-looking 360-degree panorama images. Examples and a video tour right below. The product will set you back $49, which includes the case and lens. Pixeet also provides a version of the product for the iPhone 3G or 3GS. The company also says they will release a version of the iOS panorama creation app for Android in September.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUlcP46ikQU]

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iPhone 5 knockoff

John Packowski writes for The Wall Street Journal’s blog AllThingsD that, alas, iPhone 5 will be launching in October, not in September as the rumor mill has been buzzing over the past few weeks. This information apparently comes from an unnamed source close to Apple. The blog has been right about many things Apple in the past so it’s worth mentioning here:

So those rumors claiming the iPhone 5 will debut in late September? They’re wrong. Instead, it’s going to be an October surprise — the month in which Apple will be launching its next generation iPhone.

We received solid information last month that AT&T was making big changes to its insurance policy related to iPhones in the first week of October.  Additionally, we broke the news that AT&T was introducing a new throttling policy as of October 1st as well.  The writing appears to be on the wall.  But AllThingsD think it will be a late October surprise:

So when can we expect the company to uncrate the iPhone 5? “October,” the source said, while declining to offer a hard-launch date. Other sources said it will be later in the month, rather than earlier.

Others have reported that AT&T has blacked out employee vacations in the September’s last two weeks, which is usually a sign of a major product launch which may or may not be related to a new phone from Apple. This unconfirmed piece of the puzzle was apparently provided to Gizmodo by an AT&T employee this past Friday who noted that “historically the only time they’ve done this was for an iPhone release”, adding that “we’re looking at the last two weeks of September”.  BGR said that it was the first two weeks of September.  Not so says AllThingsD:

“I don’t know why AT&T’s calling for all hands on deck those weeks, but it’s not for an iPhone launch,” a source familiar with Apple’s plans said.

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Illustration via profile pictures on IEEE’s Facebook page

The IEEE standards body that oversees the development of WiFi technology announced today a next-generation WiFi 802.22 technology designed to facilitate wireless data transfer up to 22Mbps over great distances up to 60 miles, or a hundred kilometers. The interesting thing is, the new technology is utilizing television bands without interfering with reception of existing TV broadcast stations:

This new standard for Wireless Regional Area Networks (WRANs) takes advantage of the favorable transmission characteristics of the VHF and UHF TV bands to provide broadband wireless access over a large area up to 100 km from the transmitter. Each WRAN will deliver up to 22 Mbps per channel without interfering with reception of existing TV broadcast stations, using the so-called white spaces between the occupied TV channels.

The technology will be great in rural areas and developing countries with vacant TV channels, IEEE says. In our view, this could also knock out any rationale for the much talked-about AT&T/T-Mobile merger. For example, why use pricey cellular data if your phone is within the range of a 802.22 hotspot? Apple is one of the leading backers of WiFi and has long ago incorporated wireless capabilities to all their products. As of recently, Apple ships its Macs with souped up WiFi capable of hitting 450Mbps over wireless networks, even though they aren’t advertising this as a feature.

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The new icons are bigger so you can filter search results without sanding down your finger.

Google last month announced a bunch of enhancements to its search engine and today they confirmed via a blog post an overhauled layout on iPad and other (read: Android) tablets, just two days after the blog Digital Inspirations leaked the new UI. From now , running a query by visiting www.google.com in your iPad’s browser produces an iPad-optimized layout in search results.

Gone is the left-hand column that had ridiculously tiny search controls, making room for bigger buttons and more white space which is definitely a lot easier on the eyes. It’s surprising how long it has taken Google to optimize web search experience on tablets, really. Now you can finally hit the controls on smaller tablets without having to sand down your finger first.

Our favorite: The big buttons right below the search box for quick access to specific search silos, such as Web, Images, News and so forth. Also noteworthy, image results are  now way more attractive due to larger previews and they continuous scroll – just reach the bottom of the page and a new batch of images will load automatically. The new layout will be available on iPad and Android Honeycomb 3.1 tablets and in 36 languages “in the coming days”, everyone’s favorite search monster noted. Another pretty screenshot right below.

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Image credit: Gizmodo

Anticipating Android backers will face legal hurdles as Apple now has the upper hand in its case against HTC (here and here), Google has stepped up and bought more than a thousand IBM patents for an undisclosed sum. The news was first reported by the blog SEO by the Sea and picked up by The Wall Street Journal. The search company might use IBM inventions as a leverage against pending lawsuits that indirectly involve its Android software.

Google failed to outbid the Apple-led consortium which paid $4.5 billion for Nortel’s treasure chest of more than 6,000 patents covering wireless technologies, among them crucial inventions related to fourth-generation cellular networks. The new patent deal is in line with Google’s focus on snapping up patent portfolios left and right in creating a “disincentive for others to sue Google”, as noted on their official blog back in April. The 1,030 granted patents Google bought from IBM cover varied technologies, including…

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Global operating profit from the sale of mobile phones among eight major players, by Asymco

In case you missed it, the big news today is that Apple is king of the hill in smartphones and is now chasing LG for the third place in global cell phone sales. Samsung, which reported its second-quarter earnings today, ranks as the world’s second-largest smartphone maker in units, but the company said it will cease reporting phone and tablet sales citing competition from Apple. If that didn’t impress you, this data point will blow your mind: More than six out of ten dollars of profit in the mobile phone business go to Apple’s pockets, or 66.3 percent. This is interesting because it shows Apple steadily improving its profitability in the cell phone space at the expense of its rivals, Asmyco’s Horace Dediu explains:

This share is up from 57% in Q1 and 50% in Q3 and Q4. Samsung’s share went to 15%, though that’s not a peak level historically. In Q1 2008 the company was at 21%. RIM was at 11%, a level in a range that has been unchanged for three years. Finally, HTC captured 7.4%, a new high and an increase from 6% since last quarter.

And guess who controlled the industry’s profits four years ago, when the iPhone debuted? That’s right, Nokia, which in the second quarter of 2007 enjoyed 55 percent of global operating profit from the sale of mobile phones. Back then, Apple, Research In Motion and HTC collectively captured 11 percent of the profits and now they together control 84 percent of the profits. And another somewhat related tidbit: Apple now has more cash than the world’s largest sovereign government.

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The new MacBook Air is not on par with 2011 iMacs when it comes to Thunderbolt I/O performance because the notebook uses a scaled-down version of the Thunderbolt chip, AnandTech discovered having taken a peek under the Air’s hood. Due to space constraints on the ultra-thin notebook, Apple used a smaller Thunderbolt controller chip named Eagle Ridge which sports two Thunderbolt channels and supports just one external display.

Its full-size counterpart dubbed Light Ridge supports two external Thunderbolt displays plus four bidirectional 10Gbps channels for an aggregate bandwidth of 80Gbps. An Eagle Ridge chip measures half of a Light Ridge chip’s dimensions. The Air is the only machine from Apple that has the Eagle Ridge chip: The latest Thunderbolt-equipped Mac mini, iMac and MacBook Pro all use the faster Light Ridge controller.

This means, MacRumors notes, that the mid-2011 MacBook Airs can only drive one external display using the Thunderbolt port, “although the machine’s integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000 would also preclude the use of two external monitors on the MacBook Air as it does on the 13-inch MacBook Pro”.

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