Tech Industry

Apple may abandon use of Infineon baseband solutions in its future iPhone 5 following the latter firm’s acquisition by processor giant, Intel.

Expand
Expanding
Close

BusinessWeek this morning has an interesting read — a profile of the head of Apple’s main iPhone manufacturing partner, Foxconn’s Terry Gou. Gou notes on Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, “I forced him to give me his business card”.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Computerworld: Apple is putting up a fight like we’ve never seen before. This is not a repeat of the Apple v. Microsoft battle of yesteryear. This is a new skirmish fought with different rules, in which only one of the combatants truly has a historic understanding of what the stakes are.

Read More:

Earlier today we reported on a rumor that Office for Mac 2011 will be launching on October 27th, but tonight we’ve discovered otherwise. When browsing for Office for Mac 2011 on Amazon there’s a noted date of October 26th, 2010 on the titles of both the Home/Business and Student editions. Amazon is notorious for revealing product release dates before announcements and with Microsoft stating the software would be launching in October, we are pretty confident the 26th is launch day.

Office for Mac 2011 will launch at $99 (academic license), $119, or $199 depending on whether the Business/Home or Student edition is purchased. The next-gen productivity suite offers new themes, a re-designed interface, better collaboration tools, and improved Windows compatibility.

Nokia has just announced that CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo is the old, and Microsoft’s Stephen Elop (left in picture) is the new; CEO that is. Kallasvou has been Nokia’s CEO since June 2006, but the company clearly took some hits with Apple’s entrance into the smart phone business in 2007 with the iPhone.

Starting September 21st, he will move to a board of directors position and Elop will make his trip from Redmond’s business chief to a brand new office. Nokia Chairman, Jorma Ollia offers the following statment about Nokia’s change in leadership:

“The time is right to accelerate the company’s renewal; to bring in new executive leadership with different skills and strengths in order to drive company success.”

Apple has clearly changed the game world wide with their iPhone, and it is clear that Nokia is amidst a downfall because of it. Their smartphone market share has dropped significantly over the years, and notably fell from 45% to 37.4% in Q2 2009.

Expand
Expanding
Close

You knew this was coming since Apple’s announcement this morning that they’d allow applications that were created in 3rd party development tools to be accepted to the App Store.  Now Adobe has officially responded:

Apple’s announcement today that it has lifted restrictions on its third-party developer guidelines has direct implications for Adobe’s Packager for iPhone, a feature in the Flash Professional CS5 authoring tool. This feature was created to enable Flash developers to quickly and easily deliver applications for iOS devices. The feature is available for developers to use today in Flash Professional CS5, and we will now resume development work on this feature for future releases.

Adobe had planned to shutter the service and had ceased development on it.  Quite a day Adobe’s had because of Apple’s announcement.  Their stock went up 12% today on the news.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Update: We’ve just discovered otherwise: It appears that Office for 2011 may actually be launching on the 26th, not the 27th.

In a report on Microsoft’s Office 2011’s impending launch, Mac Generation (English translation), noted that the software will supposedly launch on October 27th. Microsoft Office 2011 will be launching in over 100 countries in both Student and Business/Home editions. Microsoft’s next generation productivity suite offers an updated user interface, new collaboration tools, better Windows compatibility, new themes and many other features.

Just yesterday we reported on new Office 2011 details and a Microsoft-made video detailing new information. When the software launches it will be available in $99 (academic license), $119, and $199 configurations. These prices depend on whether you purchase the Business/Home or Student edition. In terms of Mac Generation’s track record, they successfully reported Safari 5’s features and its WWDC launch.

According to a report by Asymco, Apple’s average iTunes operation costs nearly $75 million dollars per month. This is more than double 2009’s average monthly costs of $30 million. The rise is credited to the new features Apple has recently implemented into iTunes as well as the 18 million apps downloaded each day. In case you didn’t catch Apple’s September 1st keynote, that’s roughly 200 apps per second.

At this moment, the total yearly operational costs for Apple is somewhere in the $900 million range (75 million x 12 months), and since iTunes is only growing with more and more content, the one billion mark is sure to hit very soon. These costs cover purchasing abilities from 160 million credit-card carrying iTunes customers, and all the content that gets downloaded to Macs, PC’s and the 120 million iOS devices rocking today. Maybe that $1 billion data center will help out later this year.

iTunes to date has sold over 450 million TV shows, 100 million films, 12 billion tunes, and 35 million books. That’s on top of the 6.5 billion apps people have downloaded. That’s an app for every person on the planet!

Seems they forgot that little bit of information last time around.

Fortune points us to two ads that Sony has made to try to convince defectors not to go iOS.  Clearly a long reach.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IOt19iOED0&w=640&h=385]

Don’t miss the other below:

Expand
Expanding
Close

Computerworld: Apple last week helped create a brand-new $15 billion business when it introduced its new AirPlay music streaming system, which it is licensing to third party developers — and which it created with help from BridgeCo, here’s what the BridgeCo people told 9to5Mac’s own Jonny Evans this week.

Read More

Apple today released the following statement on App Store Review Guidelines:

The App Store℠ has revolutionized the way mobile applications are developed and distributed. With over 250,000 apps and 6.5 billion downloads, the App Store has become the world’s largest mobile application platform and App Store developers have earned over one billion dollars from the sales of their apps.

We are continually trying to make the App Store even better. We have listened to our developers and taken much of their feedback to heart. Based on their input, today we are making some important changes to our iOS Developer Program license in sections 3.3.1, 3.3.2 and 3.3.9 to relax some restrictions we put in place earlier this year.

In particular, we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need.

In addition, for the first time we are publishing the App Store Review Guidelines to help developers understand how we review submitted apps. We hope it will make us more transparent and help our developers create even more successful apps for the App Store.

The App Store is perhaps the most important milestone in the history of mobile software. Working together with our developers, we will continue to surprise and delight our users with innovative mobile apps.

It would appear that Apple has reversed course and now is allowing third party application development environments to be used to submit apps.  What happened to the Thoughts on Flash:
Expand
Expanding
Close

Wow! You really can tell you’ve made it when the competition start to trash talk you, and now we’re seeing the biggest compliment ever shot across at Apple, with Acer founder Stan Shih calling Apple’s products a “mutant virus”.
Expand
Expanding
Close

We’re not saying the iPhone 5 will be this startlingly amazing example of a location-sensing, near field communicating hyper-advanced device that might run at speeds as fast as 2.5GHz — but we are saying it’s possible.
Expand
Expanding
Close

850 MHz is my friend. I know I talk crazy smack about AT&T’s coverage in New York, but it is definitely getting better. The FemtoCell in the house also works like a charm.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZsfefaezNY&fs=1&hl=en_US&hd=1]

Expand
Expanding
Close

Last week we discovered that Apple has included a vibrate mechanism on the new iPod touch as an accessibility tool for those unable to hear when a FaceTime call is incoming. Well, today Apple has amended their iPod touch accessibility page removing the line you see highlighted in the screenshot below.

It is not clear while Apple decided to remove the vibrate function from the iPod touch as it seemed like a pretty neat feature for consumers but even better for those really in need of it, like the deaf. The folks down at iFixit even tested this by simply receiving a FaceTime call on their iPod touch 4. They can confirm Apple’s change in plans. This does not even seem to be some Apple copy/paste or photoshop error as they were very clear to say “a vibrating alert – on your iPod touch.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-n_9u6–i0&w=640&h=385]

Microsoft updated their Mac Office 2011 page today on multiple editing with Sharepoint/Skydrive.

Collaborating with friends, colleagues and classmates is worry-free with the co-authoring tools in Office 2011. Documents can be stored in the cloud (SkyDrive free to consumers and SharePoint for businesses) allowing for multiple people to access and edit a document. In addition, there is built-in support for the Office Web Apps. That lets a user edit an Office document, even if they are at a machine that doesn’t have Office installed on it.

The team also announced new features in Outlook for Mac including the scheduling assistant, which allows users to see their calendar in line with their mail resulting in a more efficient workflow. Additionally, PowerPoint 2011 allows users to broadcast a presentation. Broadcast Slideshow lets the users of your choice view your presentation at your speed, all recipients need is a browser connection.
Expand
Expanding
Close

Pretty cool.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElubRNRIUg4&w=640&h=385]

Apple’s iPhone 4 seems set to hit the insanely populous Chinese market as the device has won key approval from government agencies there.

The company has won a China network license for the iPhone 4 from China’s Telecommunication Equipment Certification Center. That’s broadly in line with statements from Apple’s Chinese iPhone carrier, China Unicom, which has previously said it expects to offer the iPhone in China later this year.
Expand
Expanding
Close

Here’s interesting: aas the above chart shows we’ll soon have downloaded more apps from iTunes than songs. Though to be fair, reading too much into the statistic is unwise, as so many of the apps available in-store are free, while music costs at least 59-cents.
Expand
Expanding
Close

Plans to extend the song samples made available via iTunes to a more satisfactory minute were shelved in advance of last week’s music product update event because music publishers refused to play ball.
Expand
Expanding
Close