Today we get our first glimpse at Apple’s plans for that upcoming flagship retail store that we noted earlier this week was in the works for Stockholm, Sweden. The images come from a presentation by Apple (via feber.se) showing off a model and renders of what the new retail location will look like located in Stockholm’s high profile Kungsträdgården area.
Apple looks to be set to open a new flagship retail store in Stockholm, Sweden, according to a report from local news outlet Expressen. The report claims that Apple plans for the store to be similar to the iconic Fifth Avenue location in New York and that it hopes to open it within the next two years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz1_FT1ykFw
Although deeper changes to Maps are in the works, Apple did announce a new City Tours feature for iOS 8 discreetly on one of the keynote slides. This feature is not normally available in the current iOS 8 betas, but developer Pierre Blazquez has managed to unlock the feature through a hidden debug screen and shines some light on exactly what ‘City Tours’ entails.
City Tours is best described as a guided-camera Flyover view. After activating the tour, the Maps app changes to satellite mode and begins zooming and panning to different landmarks in the city. For example, in the video, the tour rotates and pans between a couple of different cathedrals. More screenshots after the break …
While not official from Apple, the store that was previously rumored to be an Apple Store in Stockholm’s Taby C mall appears pretty likely to be an Apple Store. The run-up to this day has been long for Swedish Apple users. The local MacWorld.se says doors should open around Oct. 25, which is just in time for iPad Minis and the holidays. Watch out IKEA!
https://twitter.com/digitrendSE/status/240026380824346624
Perhaps most disappointing about this whole thing: Malls in Sweden look exactly like malls here in the United States. :(
The Moving Picture Experts Group, otherwise called MPEG, announced a draft of a new video compression standard known as High Efficiency Video Coding, or H.265, that will be twice as efficient as the current H.264 standard. Ericsson Research Manager for Visual Technology Per Fröjdh, who also serves as chairman of the Swedish MPEG delegation, explained the standard could hit commercial products by 2013:
“There’s a lot of industry interest in this because it means you can halve the bit rate and still achieve the same visual quality, or double the number of television channels with the same bandwidth, which will have an enormous impact on the industry”… Fröjdh believes that the HEVC format discussed by MPEG in Stockholm could be launched in commercial products as early as in 2013… “It will take time before it’s launched for a TV service, but adoption is much quicker in the mobile area, and we’ll probably see the first services for mobile use cases next year,” he says.
We told you a couple months ago that Apple was likely planning its first retail location in Sweden after job listings were discovered on Apple’s website. There were reports at the time that the store would end up somewhere in Stockholm’s city center, but the exact location was otherwise unknown. Today, local reports from 99mac and others claimed Apple is now confirming to new employees that the store will be located in the NK mall in Stockholm. According to the report, there is also talk that Apple is planning more retail locations for Malmö and Gothenburg, and possibly a second location in Stockholm.
The Stockholm store increases Apple’s retail presence to 13 countries, and it is expected to open sometime in August or September. NK Mall has two locations in Stockholm and Gothenburg, with the Stockholm location alone receiving roughly 12 million visitors annually.
