iOS Devices

MacRumors points us to AT&T’s new ‘Upgrader App’, that lets users pre-order the iPhone 4S directly from their iOS device (due out on the App Store later today). It lets you pre-order right from your handset starting Friday, October 7. Besides actually performing the evil deed of purchasing the darn thing, the app lets users know their upgrade eligibility and how much the iPhone 4S will cost them.

We’ll update when it goes live.

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Following up the official announcement of iCloud and iOS 5 this afternoon, Apple has begun seeding OS X 10.7.2 GM to the Developer Center. This final release gets the Mac prepared for iCloud’s official release October 12th, to the general public. The GM also features bug fixes, enhancements, and Safari 5.1.1. If you find anything interesting, we’re all ears.

Also, check out the iOS 5 GM!

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It’s been long time coming and it’s finally here. The U.K. online Apple Store now lists the Apple iPhone Micro USB Adapter, available for £8.00 and shipping October 14. From Apple:

The Apple iPhone Micro USB Adapter allows you to use third-party micro USB cables and chargers to sync or charge your iPhone. Simply connect your iPhone to the Micro USB Adapter, then connect a micro USB cable or charger to the Micro USB Adapter

Standards bodies in Europe had agreed last year that all mobile phones sold in Europe should drop proprietary connectors in favor of standard USB jacks. Apple’s been ignoring the initiative up to the point when some watchers questioned whether the European Union should fine the Cupertino, California-based gadget maker.

As it turns out, Apple has elegantly addressed those concerns with this dongle. What it does for Apple is it lets them follow the letter of the law without redesigning the iPhone or, worse, risk incompatibility problems with a billion dollar ecosystem of accessories that take advantage of Apple’s 30-pin dock connector.

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Table courtesy of The Verge. Go past the fold for the full version.

Our friends over at The Verge have beaten everyone to the comparison punch by creating this fine table offering an at-the-glance overview of the key hardware features of the newly introduced iPhone 4S and the eighteen months old iPhone 4. Hope you don’t mind that the new iPhone 4S is a tad heavier than its predecessor, full three grams to be precise. We take it you’ll also appreciate Siri, an iPhone 4S exclusive personal assistant based on software which “helps you get things done just by asking”. It’s also our belief you’ll appreciate an hour longer talk time on the iPhone 4S and the new 64GB model costing $399. The full table is right below the fold.

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Apple’s Site is still a bit flaky right now but give it a try.

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The headline says it all. Apple CEO Tim Cook has just wrapped up the “Let’s talk iPhone” press conference by confirming pre-ordering dates for the new iPhone 4S. In case you haven’t realized, the amazing Siri personal assistant feature is exclusive to the iPhone 4S because it requires lots of computational power provided by the handset’s dual-core A5 chip, the same that runs inside the iPad 2, too. Also worth noting, a 64GB version has now been added to the iPhone lineup for the first time.

Your iPhone 4S lineup now looks as follows: 16/32/64GB versions priced at $199/$299/$399. The company will begin accepting pre-orders this coming Friday, October 7 for buyers from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Germany and Japan. A week later, on October 14, the device will ship in the aforementioned countries. The initial wave will be followed by the iPhone 4S rollout to 22 more countries by the end of October, including Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

Oh yeah, it’s coming to Sprint, too.

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Get downloadin’!  Not sure if it will come over the Air – anyone?
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Despite Phil Shiller’s remark that it may not be such a good idea to demo Siri, iOS chief Scott Forstall took the stage to demo the feature previously known as Assistant, which 9to5Mac exclusively revealed (here and here). “Siri is your intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking”, says the official tagline. It’s activated just by holding down the home button briefly and understands natural-language queries in English, German and French, with more languages possibly following at later time.

For starters, you can, say, tell Siri to set an alarm clock just by saying “wake me up at 6 AM”. Or, you could ask Siri something like “What time is it in Paris?” and it will speak aloud “The time in Paris, France is 8:16 PM” How nice is that?

How about asking Siri “Do I need a raincoat today”? Sure, you can do that and it’ll respond “It sure looks like rain today”. That’s the power of the DARPA-funded military project striving to create an artificial intelligence-backed personal assistant that learns.

Siri is omni-present throughout the entire operating system so you can issue complex voice commands that include core functionalities. Siri can text messages for you, set calendar appointments, compose and dictate email, look up contacts, create notes, search the web, create geolocation-based reminders such as “remind me to call my wife when I leave work” and lots, lots more.

If there ever was such a thing as a software-based killer feature on a mobile phone, this is it. Also worth noting, the amount of user interface work Apple’s done around Siri is just mind-blowing, as you can see on the included screenshots. It’s not a pretty interface, great speech recognition/synthesis and clever artificial intelligence: Siri taps the power of the web to deliver mash ups that will blow your mind. More examples below the fold:

Images via Engadget

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Apple’s marketing honcho Phil Schiller took it upon himself to unveil a refreshed iPod touch lineup, which now includes both black and white models (remember, we called both), plus a new breakthrough price of just $199. The iPod touch is Apple’s “most popular iPod”, Schiller told the crowd, adding this:

It’s thin, it has the Retina Display. HD video. Gyro. Amazing gameplay. It’s the most popular music player, and the #1 portable game player.

The revamped models look the same as the fourth-generation iPod touch, which was available only in black. The new iPod touches now come in both black and white. As mentioned, the entry-level 8GB version now starts out at just $199. Apple is clearly positioning this device as a portable gaming machine, aiming with it directly at Sony and Nintendo.

So, the new iPod touch lineup now looks like this: The 8/32/64GB white or black for $199/$299/$399. It ships by October 12. Sweet.

iOS is coming next Wednesday, October 12, Scott Forstall just said at the “Let’s talk iPhone” event in Apple’s Cupertino headquarters. We’re also expecting the new iPhone to go on sale October 14-ish or around that time. Mark your calendar and clean up and back up personal information on your iOS devices to make a major upgrade as painless as possible come next Wednesday. The software will roll out to all devices October 12, he said. It will be a free update, compatible with the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, the original iPad, iPad 2 and the third- and fourth-generation iPod touch.

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UPDATE: More details from Apple after the break.

Scott Forstall is onstage at the Apple media event right now introducing a new iOS app called “Cards” that allows you to “create and mail beautiful cards right from your iPhone or iPod touch.” It comes with over 21 template designs for greeting cards.

Interestingly, Apple will provide you with high quality prints of your greeting cards mailed to you on 100% cotton paper. You’ll even get a push notification when the greeting card is delivered.

The app will be available free on Oct. 12th with prints going for $2.99 in the US and $4.99 elsewhere.

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Image via The Verge

Apple CEO Tim Cook focused on iPad, Apple’s newest business during an opening segment of his “Let’s talk iPhone” talk at Apple’s Cupertino campus. “We think iPads can change the way teachers teach, and kids learn. Many educators agree with us. In fact, every state in the US, now has an iPad pilot program, or are deploying one,” he said while showing pretty slides depicting a range of different iPad users flashing happy smiles.

The device has a 95 percent satisfaction rate, he stressed. More importantly, “kids are going to be amazing on those virtual keyboards when they grow up”. How true. And he wasn’t referring only to kids in the United States.

Pilots are using iPads in place of heavy flight manuals and “over 80 percent of the top hospitals in the US are testing or piloting iPads”. Impressive. “And it doesn’t stop there, from the boardroom to the backroom”, Cook said, remarking:

And despite everybody and their brother trying to compete with iPad, 3 out of the 4 tablets sold in the US are iPads.

Another unheard of number: 92% of the Fortune 500 companies are testing or deploying iPad. Last, but not least, Apple has passed the quarter of a billion sales mark with iOS devices.

Image courtesy of The Verge

Tim Cook is onstage talking about current iPhone stats. While talking about the incredible success that the iPhone 4 has had, he also notes that the device has only captured a 5% share of the global handset marketshare.

“Despite all this success and momentum, the iPhone has 5% share of the worldwide market of handsets. I could have shown a much larger number if I just showed smartphones, but that’s not how we look at it.”

He also mentioned iPhones being used in business:

“That momentum is far outpacing the industry. It’s not just consumer, 93% of the Fortune 500 are testing or deploying the iPhone. It’s consistently rated #1 in every customer satisfaction ranking I can find.”

Cook then showed slides related to customer satisfaction and continued about current stats.

“Customers love iPhone, and it’s consistently rated #1 in every satisfaction rating I can find.”

Image via Engadget

Another tidbit regarding the iPod. Apple’s music player brand still holds a 78 percent market share a decade since its launch. Quite impressive. They sold over 300 million iPods to date. “It took Sony 30 years to sell 220 million Walkman cassette players,” Apple CEO Tim Cook remarked. We take it that means the iPod classic isn’t going away.

The iPod family of music players still have a lot to offer, he said, noting that nearly half of sales are from users who already own one. Apple shipped 45 million iPods from July of last year to June of this year. As for iTunes, the online music store now commands a 20 million songs-strong catalog. Remember, iTunes Store launched with just 200,000 songs.

Related articles

• Report: iPod Shuffle and Classic are gonners (9to5mac.com)

Bluetooth 4.0 theoretically allows iPhone 4S devices to connect to the new MacBook Airs (And other BT 4.0 devices) at an extremely low power mode up to 50 meters away.

BGR has just obtained an interesting image suggesting that select RadioShack stores are getting “important shipment” Monday and Tuesday. It should “not be opened for any reason”, usually a tell-tale sign of Apple products inside. According to the note, RadioShack will police employees by sending auditors to select stores who will determine whether or not the packages had been tampered with.

“Any violation of this direction could result in disciplinary action up to and including termination”, reads the notice. This is no definite confirmation that these packages contain bran-new iPhone 4S devices, but it’s highly likely given that their inventory system has iPhone 5 placeholders.

Need more proof that Apple’s next iPhone allegedly dubbed the iPhone 4S will sport the same design as the current-generation iPhone 4? Well, a pair of images just appeared on Apple’s website, representing the black and white iPhone 4S models. The Newsstand app icon on the homescreen gives away that the devices run iOS 5. Notice a gap in the upper right corner of the stainless steel band, just like on the CDMA iPhone 4?

This could easily signify that the iPhone 4S in fact is a dual-mode handset which runs on both GSM and CDMA networks, as rumored. Need even more proof that this is legit? Just change the URLs by removing the ‘s’ after the ‘iphone4’ part of the URL and you’ll get the old images, shown below (old images: black, white).

Thanks, Scott!

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Image via GDGT

Find below coverage that we’ll be pulling in live from around the web. You can find a roundup of our predictions here as well as a few last minute whispers here. The Liveblog post is sticky at the top and newer posts are below.

Event is over, Archive is below

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Do you know what time it is? It is one hour before this iPhone event – and Apple is updating its Store. That means new toys obviously. You ready already?

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According to The Next Web and the “sources familiar with the situation”, the iPhone 4S, about to be unveiled at Apple’s Cupertino campus around 10am PT, 1pm ET, will sport “more definitive GPS features”, as well as the ones already rumored, such as an eight-megapixel camera on the back with a backlit sensor, a much faster dual-core A5 processor with 1GB RAM (twice the iPhone 4) and the pocket personal assistant simply named Assistant:

Our sources tell us the iPhone 4S “is much more powerful than an iPhone 4″ and “feels like the high-end device”, all but confirming that the device will feature Apple’s new A5 processor and include 1GB RAM, as tipped in previous reports, noting that the device will retain the same dimensions and design as the iPhone 4.

The GPS feature could be a Mapping thing – perhaps turn by turn directions or it could be Find My Friends, which we’ve detailed before. As for the back camera (which 9to5Mac discovered was sourced from Sony), the publication’s sources mentioned a 3264-by-2448 pixel resolution, the same as the now famous Sushi shot which made rounds in early September. The iPhone 5 with its teardrop design? Author Matt Brian explains it’s a prototype for a future iPhone 5 “which won’t be available any time soon”, which is in line with 9to5Mac’s findings pointing to the iPhone 4S with a design akin to the existing iPhone 4.

Just hours ahead of the Let’s talk iPhone event at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, the Wall Street Journal taps the people familiar with the company’s plans who claim the device “won’t operate on long-term evolution or WiMAX fourth-generation networks”, adding:

The people said the device will work on 3G networks, which are broadly in use today and are the standard for the current iPhone 4. AT&T says its HSPA+ network has 4G-like speeds.

The story also confirms a Wall Street Journal report from yesterday claiming Sprint pledged to a cool $20 billion in iPhone orders in the next four years. “Sprint Nextel is expected to join AT&T and Verizon Wireless in offering the device later this month, though T-Mobile has said it isn’t signed on yet with Apple”, writes author Greg Bensinger. Additionally, the Journal’s blog post has essentially debunked a BGR story from yesterday which speculated Apple Sprint would allegedly get an exclusive on iPhone 5, described as a 4G WiMAX phone.

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