Tech Industry

Off topic, I know, but interesting and funny after some initial awkwardness.

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Also, Conan is a large man.

War has (almost) been declared..

No, not between Apple and your choice of:

• Google
• Microsoft
• Nokia
• Adobe
• Verizon
• US DoJ
• Sony
• Or anyone else you fancy naming (see poll here), but an all new enemy is waiting in the wings…

Nintendo

Satoru Iwata, Nintendo president, has reportedly told his senior executives recently to regard the battle with Sony as a victory already achieved and to look to Apple, and its iPhone and iPad devices, as the “enemy of the future”, the Times Online tells us.

Nintendo is attempting to seize back the market it feels it helped develop with its mobile devices, and is plotting to “unleash the full force of its development and marketing artillery against Apple”.

Meanwhile, Apple

Apple’s customers outside of the US have been told the iPad ships at the end of the month. Some prices have been announced and European prices have been leaked. Here’s how all the prices compare if converted into the same currency at today’s currency exchange rates. Here’s the dollar price between countries. Bear in mind these include different levels of sales tax (0%-9%), which doesn’t feature in US prices.

Perhaps that’s why there is eBay.

iPhone shipments have more than doubled year-on-year, new figures published by IDC this morning have revealed, with the Apple mobile grabbing marketshare from Research In Motion

Apple has announced that it intends making the iPad available in nine more countries on May 28, and will open up for pre-orders on May 10.

Press release follows:

CUPERTINO, California

Opera Software has thrown its hat in the ring on the great Adobe Flash v. Apple, iPhone and the need for open standards debate, urging Adobe to embrace open web standards.

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Adobe feels another blow this morning on news that popular online document sharing service, Scribd, intends scrapping use of Flash in favour of basing its service on HTML5.

Meanwhile, Adobe CTO, Kevin Lunch, maintains his attack on Apple Inc., calling the company

Adobe has changed its tune, with CTO Kevin Lynch clearly listening to Steve Jobs in the delivery of his latest promise,

Intel

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0&w=700&h=400]

Chrome isn’t just faster, it builds in Flash (I know) for more security and performance.  It also improves speed and adds a bunch of HTML5 elements that Steve Jobs is also promising for Safari, soon.

Via Me

News Corp

Manufacturers are already producing components for the next-gen iPhone with just weeks to go before launch, while massive sales are driving growth for Apple

The iPhone will be a payments system – on steroids. Take a look at this item over at Computerworld, while considering the following press release.

With a million sales to its name, Apple

While Bill Gates concedes Apple and Steve Jobs have

Apple may avoid any possible antitrust investigation on behalf of US regulators by making a change in the terms of the iPhone 4.0 SDK, industry insiders suggested late last night.

Regulators are unlikely to investigate the company if it finds some way of letting developers use other tools to write apps for the platform.

As we reported citing the NY Post yesterday, both the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department Of Justice (DOJ) are currently negotiating to decide under whose jurisdiction this case might lie. Neither party has issued comment at this time.

Adobe has allegedly complained at Apple

US regulators are refusing comment on queries questioning an earlier report which claimed an investigation into Apple

Surprising? Not especially. Apple today confirmed it has sold over one million iPads since the product launched last month – it sold its one millionth iPad on Friday, just 28 days after its introduction on April 3.

Available only in the US while Apple deals with what it has called higher than expected demand, the sales record naturally spun further eloquence from Apple

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jhoWsHwU7w&w=560&h=340]

In a move we

Steve Jobs recently responded to a customer’s email on video codecs by saying that the Ogg Theora Open Source format was about to be attacked by a pool of patent holders.  Some disagree very strongly with this, saying that the statement is FUD.

Whether or not that is the case, are we, as Apple users, entirely happy with H.264 licensing terms?  In a lengthy post entitled ‘Why Our Civilization’s Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the MPEG-LA’, Eugenia Loli-Queru presents a very scary future where the patent holders can flip a switch and pretty much require us to pay them every time we record, edit or play back our videos. 

Ed Bott at ZDNet has a pretty informed take on the whole thing, saying that in the end, it is in everyone’s best interests to keep H.264 free for casual users.