9to5 Staff

The venerable Apple-branded music locker in the cloud is virtually a go as Apple has apparently signed a streaming agreement with record label EMI, CNET’s Greg Sandoval reported yesterday evening. Multiple industry sources told the publication that the remaining two labels are about to sign on a dotted line:

Apple has signed a cloud-music licensing agreement with EMI Music and is very near to completing deals with Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment.

Those talks could be completed “as early as next week”, sources say.

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We have been expecting to kiss our $30 unlimited data on the Verizon network goodbye since last year’s announcement of the mid-summer 2011 change. In order to “soften the blow”, the big red carrier is now dropping hints of possible new plans calling for shared data among family members. Verizon’s finance chief Fran Shammo told the Reuters Global Technology Summit:

Verizon Wireless plans to kick off pricing changes this summer by eliminating smartphone plans that allow unlimited Web access for a flat fee. It will replace them with tiered pricing that forces heavy data users to pay more for mobile data. After this change the company will look to soften the blow by offering more options such as family plans for data services.

The new plans will allow families to share data just as they are now able to share voice minutes. Think of it as family mega-plans for data, Shamoo said. “People are going to share that mega-plan based on the number of devices within their family. That’s just a logical progression”, he told the news gathering organization.

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Chip maker Intel says collaborating with Apple is a welcome challenge because mobile gadgets with the “Designed by Apple in California” sticker shape Intel’s thinking about future processors. That’s the gist of what Intel’s senior vice president Tom Kilroy told Reuters today at the news gathering organization’s Global Technology Summit in New York.

We work very closely with them and we’re constantly looking down the road at what we can be doing relative to future products. I’d go as far as to say Apple helps shape our roadmap. Apple — they push us hard.

No wonder Intel is cozying up to Apple – they would die for an iPhone contract. At the same time, Nvidia’s boss Jen-Hsun Huang is telling the press that Tegra 3-powered Honeycomb 3.1 tablets will overtake the iPad.

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And it’s only for jailbroken devices with a front-camera. The $7 RecognizeMe by Apocolipse unlocks your phone by matching pre-recorded images of your face against the front camera feed. Simply holding the device in front of your face for a couple of seconds should automagically unlock it. Check out a cool video demonstration below…

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Toshiba made a lot of noise by announcing a new four-inch LCD display last week. It would have been dismissed as yet another phone LCD product if it weren’t for its 367 pixels-per-inch density. Yes, looks like Toshiba has outclassed a 326 pixels-per-inch Retina Display on iPhone 4 running at a 960-by-640 pixel resolution. Engadget had a chance to spend some time with Toshiba’s new display at SID 2011, recording the above video demonstration for your viewing pleasure.

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OmniVision Technologies, Apple’s prime supplier of CMOS sensors for iOS gear, has outed a new image sensor today. The OV5690 module has a slimmer profile, a valuable treat for tiny gadgets where space is at premium. The OV5690 isn’t just a five-megapixel camera in a smaller package. According to OmniVision, the module touts improved image quality with full HD 1080p video capture at thirty frames per second. Both features make the OV5690 a prime candidate for next-gen iOS devices…

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What’s your switching strategy? Most folks believe they’ve got it all figured out until they realize that transferring settings and documents from a rusty PC to a Mac is a mind job. Parallels, the company that brought you great PC virtualization software for the Mac, has just released on the Mac App Store Parallels Transporter, their handy tool aimed at switchers. It’s a no-brainer, especially at price that low. More information below the fold.

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We’ve received a lot of tips this morning in regards to Apple’s online store going offline and back online, apparently without visible changes. As our Mark Gurman scooped last night, the outage could bring us new iPhoto letter press cards, covers, calendars and more later today. Also worth noting, Apple Bitch spotted the new Returns link at the page bottom, right alongside other service links.

The link takes you to Apple’s standard Returns & Services page explaining the minutiae of product returns and your consumer rights. It’s a welcome change that adds more transparency to Apple’s dealings with online buyers as opposed to burying helpful links where nobody can spot them, like most other companies do. Mystery solved, guys, moving on…

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All those surveys about corporate America embracing iPads? They’re accurate. Here’s a shocker, though: Most are missing or neglecting the fact that businesses are clueless about putting Apple’s shiny gadget – or tablets as a product category – to a productive use. According to a recent Digital Research survey, more than half of the businesses interviewed said they didn’t have a tablet strategy even though they were handing out tablets left and right to their employees. Talk about the consumerization of the enterprise. That’s just tip of the iceberg, though.

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iFixit points at a Chipworks analysis of the iPhone 4’s voice processor that powers the noise cancellation feature which improves call quality by suppressing background noise while boosting the caller’s voice. It’s an Audience-branded silicon, as denoted by the Audience marking innocuously placed inside the chip itself. The Chipworks team has figured this out by X-Raying the chip, as always.

The finding put to rest speculation whether Apple had invented their voice processor or licensed third-party tech. Teardown wizards over at iFixit also noted that a small 3mm x 3mm chip sits right next to the A4 processor.

The package has an embedded digital signal processor with accompanying analog front ends. The iPhone’s audio cancellation capabilities are very impressive, outperforming just every non-Audience powered cell phone we’ve tried… This is a huge win for Audience. They’re seeing impressive traction in other smartphones. Going forward, it will be interesting to see if Apple decides to integrate the technology into the A5 (as they have with other subcomponents) or if this relationship with Audience is long-term.

iFixit’s Kyle Wiend told me in an email that Audience is “the same company that powered the Nexus One’s innovative audio cancellation”. Go past the break for another amazing look at the chip’s innards plus a YouTube clip demoing its noise cancellation capabilities.

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According to paidContent, Apple is planning on exhibiting at the upcoming BookExpo America trade show, a first for the company. Apple will be sending an iBookstore employee Scott Simpson and their show presence is said to be significant based on a large booth in a prime location, next to publishers Random House, Disney Book Group and Macmillan. Apple won’t be selling anything, but their presence is meant to boost their position in the e-reading space and raise visibility of the iBookstore and iPad as an e-reading device.

UPDATED [May  18, 2011 1:00pm Pacific]: The original story has been updated with a quote from a spokesperson for the event confirming Apple will be privately meeting select books publishers rather than exhibit at the show.

via MacRumors

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That Apple zoomed past Microsoft in terms of profits is also a reflection of their relatively high yearly profit per employee. That’s the inevitable conclusion based on a research note by analytics firm Pingdom, sourced from public Yahoo! Finance data. The survey looked at the profit-per-employee metric for several tech brands that are publicly traded on NYSE and NASDAQ, including Google, Intel, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and others.

In 2008, Google was leading this list, but now Apple has surpassed it by quite some margin. This isn’t because it’s not going well for Google, but rather because it’s going spectacular for Apple.

So, what can we learn from this data?

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Market research company Forrester Research is out with a new report deconstructing the “post-PC era” buzzword. It’s real, they say, and consequences will “revolutionize computing product strategy”. In short, there are four facets to the post-PC era – ubiquity, instant-on performance/casual use, intimate experience and physical interaction with content.

If you can’t see the above video, head over to the Forrester blog. No doubt Steve Jobs, the post-PC era poster child, is going to love the report. “It’s so much more intimate than a laptop and it’s so much more capable than a smartphone”, Jobs told the audience of journalists at the January 2010 iPad unveiling, explaining what makes Apple’s tablet a category-defining product of the post-PC era. Apple and its boss have been using the “post-PC era” phrase in marketing collateral ever since.

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We’re not entirely surprised, but were nevertheless taken aback by the news that Scott Wilson’s iPod nano watchbands will be sold at Apple’s retail stores later this week. For those who have been sleeping under a rock lately, Scott Wilson is the brains behind the LunaTik and TikTok concept projects.

Of course, Wilson’s not the first as Griffin beat him to market with iPod nano watch straps, but looks like he wasn’t kidding when he raised a million dollars on Kickstarter. Here’s how Wilson commented the development in an interview with FastcoDesign:

A lot of people just don’t have the instincts to know whether it’s going to sell, so they just don’t want to gamble. But to see it globally accepted across 50 countries, that’s not much of a risk. I bounced it off of different contacts at different retail channels, and they all decided that it needed to be in that 34.95 to 35.95 sweet spot.

Apple will be carrying the designer’s watchbands at their retail stores later this week. The LunaTik in silver and red will retail for $79.95. The TikTok in black and white will be sold for $39.95. According to Willson’s survey, more than three quarters of iPod nano buyers (76 percent) had purchased the miniature music player because of the watchband. Go figure. Here’s a neat reminder of how the iPod nano watch came to be in the first place…

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The above chart, so-called “tree view”, renders the primary mobile phone brands in terms of operating profits, excluding loss-making vendors. Yeah, the large orange rectangle is Apple. You can also see that Apple, Research In Motion and HTC combined generated three quarters of total profits during the first quarter of 2011. Yup, just three vendors controlling 75 percent of handset profits. Even more astounding, the achievement is based on just 16 percent of the volumes for the smartphone vendors. Asymco’s Horace Dediu explains that all phones will eventually become smartphones:

I don’t see non-smart devices being interesting to vendors in the near term. Each additional dumb phone added to a portfolio will decrease a company’s operating margin. The market dynamics are such that I think non-smart phones will disappear entirely from branded portfolios in 3 to 5 years.

Apple is, of course, the most profitable handset vendor of the three. The Cupertino team has managed to capture a whooping 55 percent of total profits and one fifth of total revenues during the first quarter based on shipments of just five percent of all of the handsets that had been sold during the quarter.

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Apps specifically created for iPad’s larger canvas are key for iPad’s growth, sources say.
Pictured above: The universal Find My iPhone app designed both for iPhone and iPad.

Nvidia CEO Huang Jen-Hsun blamed slow sales of Android slates to a multitude of factors ranging from the lack of expertise at retail, sub-par marketing, higher price points and software. Extending the opinion, Asian sources from notebook vendors warn that lack of content is to blame for weak demand for Android slates. It’s the software, stupid, they argue, reports DigiTimes.

The sources pointed out that most of the applications that are executable on Android 2.x are turned out to be un-executable on Android 3.0, while any application that can run on iPhone can be directly transfer to iPad for execution. Since there are only limited applications specifically designed for Android 3.0, it has significantly lagged demand of Android 3.0-based tablet PC.

“Apple would have achieved a much bigger market share than it already has if the player decided to wait”, the source admitted. Android 3.1 should resolve all those issues when it becomes available in the second half of this year, the source concluded. Most apps designed for Android 2.x smartphones apps either don’t scale well or “turn out to be un-executable on Android 3.0”, the source noted, blaming poor demand for Honeycomb tablets on a limited number of tablet-specific software experiences. Apple, of course, is employing quite the opposite tactics focused on promoting apps tailored to the iPad.

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Computer maker Hewlett-Packard isn’t impressed with Thunderbolt, a high-speed I/O technology Apple and Intel co-developed as a new industry standard meant to replace a plethora of slow and incompatible connection standards in use today. Speaking to PCWorld yesterday, HP’s worldwide marketing manager for desktops Xavier Lauwaert said the company did look into the technology but walked away unimpressed.

We did look at Thunderbolt. Were still looking into it. Haven’t found a value proposition yet. On the PC side, everybody seems to be content with the expansion of USB 3.0. Do we need to go into more fancy solutions? Not convinced yet.

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DigiTimes reported this morning on the retail channel chatter that suggests a late May launch for iPad 2 in Taiwan. They should know: DigiTimes is a Taiwanese trade publication:

Sources in the retail channel estimate that the iPad 2 should be launched as soon as within the next 1-2 weeks.

The publication also wrote that the wait for the sought-after tablet is causing weak demand for Android slates and tablet PCs in general because a portion of would-be tablet buyers are postponing their purchase until iPad 2 arrives.

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With the Apple-Nuance partnership all but confirmed, the recordings of Nuance-powered text-to-speech seem to be all the rage because they provide an indication of how an improved text-to-speech synthesis in Mac OS X Lion might sound like. Hit the links below to listen to a select few Nuance-powered voices as WAV files. You can also check out a whole lot more voice recordings here.

• French Canadian (Felix)
• English British Accent (Serena)
• English American Accent (Samantha)
• Spanish (Monica)
• Irish (Moira)
• Scottish (Fionna)
• Mandarin Chinese (Mei Ling)
• Finnish (Mikko)
• German (Yannick)

The difference is obvious. The voices sound more natural and less robotic compared to standard Mac OS X text-to-speech. Plus, Nuance’s RealSpeak software renders a greater range of emotions and accents, from French to Romanian to Thai to Mandarin Chinese and more.

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Mozilla, the open-source organization behind the Firefox browser, has laid out plans to upgrade Firefox 3.5 users to Firefox 4.0 in an attempt to kill the aging pre-4.0 releases as soon as possible. More than twelve million users who are still running Firefox 3.5 versions will be automatically updated to the latest GPU-accelerated version, thanks to the silent updating mechanism. This is a first for Mozilla as they’ve thus far put users in control whenever a Firefox software update became available.

“We need a plan to obsolete Firefox 3.5 as we can’t support it into perpetuity. We have been frustrated with our efforts to move users off of old releases and are worried too many people do not upgrade and are on vulnerable and unsupported versions of Firefox,” the team wrote on the MozillaWiki site. Also, Mozilla is now offering a new pre-release channel for those wishing to try out experimental Firefox features before they are rolled out to beta releases.

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You may have heard that an unknown company called Lodsys was threatening to sue small iOS developers over the use of in-app purchasing, a system-wide iOS mechanism that lets users buy additional content inside apps, using their standard iTunes credentials. This being an Apple-designed feature, a lot of  folks were left scratching their head when Lodsys announced last Friday plans to take developers to court should they refuse to pay royalties.

Following a storm of criticism by many online media outlets and bloggers who said the company was acting like a patent troll, Lodsys put out a blog post. No, they’re not patent trolls and yes, they’re just trying to “get value for the assets that it owns”. Right. In a series of Q&A posts Lodsys detailed this issue. They’re entitled to claim 0.575 percent of US revenue made from in-app purchases, so says Lodsys. On annual sales of one million dollars this amounts to $5,750 a year in license costs. But wait, there’s more of that nonsense.

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