ComScore has released its latest report today, detailing the market share of the major smartphone OEMs and their platforms. Unsurprisingly, Apple is still leading in terms of handsets shipped with 41.7% of smartphones shipped, while Android is still leading the mobile operating system market with 52.8% of the market.
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You don’t want to admit it, but you were talked into being an early adopter of Android Wear or Pebble before Apple Watch was even a thing. Now that Apple Watch preorders have kicked off and the Watch is almost in your hands, it’s time to unload your Android Wear watches before people catch on and resale values plummet.
Good news: NextWorth, one of the leaders in mobile device trade-ins, today announced it will begin paying out for your old Android, Samsung, and Pebble watches (and soon Apple Watches too).
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Jawbone announced this evening that it finally expects to begin fulfilling pre-orders of its Up3 fitness tracker on April 20th. The company expects all pre-orders to ship no later than mid-May. After pre-orders have been fulfilled, Jawbone will begin shipping new orders of the Up3. Pre-orders will ship in the order they were received.
<a href="http://9to5mac.com/2015/04/08/apple-watch-ship-times-4-to-6-weeks-may-for-edition/">Leaked delivery details</a> from Apple.com indicated supply would be constrained.
Update: A reader got a reply from Apple CEO Tim Cook about the situation. See below.
Apple has today posted a press release reaffirming that Apple Watch try-on sessions and preorders start tomorrow, Friday April 10th. It also confirms that Apple Watch orders will be exclusively online for the launch period.
Angela Ahrendts says that Apple expects demand to outstrip supply at launch on the back of tremendous interest from customers viewing watches online and in the Apple Store app. As such, this has forced the company to limit orders to online only for the time being.
“We are excited to welcome customers tomorrow and introduce them to Apple Watch, our most personal device yet. Based on the tremendous interest from people visiting our stores, as well as the number of customers who have gone to the Apple Online Store to mark their favorite Apple Watch ahead of availability, we expect that strong customer demand will exceed our supply at launch,” said Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s senior vice president of Retail and Online Stores. “To provide the best experience and selection to as many customers as we can, we will be taking orders for Apple Watch exclusively online during the initial launch period.”
We have already highlighted the best bits from the Apple Watch write-ups posted today but text alone is not enough to fully appreciate the scope of the Watch’s functionality. We have collected all the video reviews of the device, which offer a visual appreciation of the Watch’s feature set. Moreover, with something as personal as a wearable, the videos also show you how the Watch looks worn on people’s wrists.
Follow along below for our video roundup:
With the embargo lifted, Apple Watch reviews are spreading around the web, ahead of preorders on Friday. We saw a glimpse of the Apple Watch packaging yesterday, but Chinese website ‘Gadget Guy’ has stepped up to offer the world’s first unboxing video for the device.
The ‘exuberant’ demo shows how the Watch packaging resembles a jewellery case. Inside the square outer box is a rounded rectangle which contains the Watch itself, presented on its side with band already connected. An insert helps keep the Watch band in a curved shape when you unbox the lid for the first time. Other items, like the inductive charger and instruction sheets sit in the square box.
Watch the videos after the break.
Just so there’s no ambiguity on this point, I’m definitely an Apple TV fan. The first-generation model was a (literally) hot mess, but Apple did a much better job with the streamlined second- and third-generation versions, which I use every day and have strongly recommended for years. If you have an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, the Apple TV is one of the top three accessories you can buy for under $100, and nearly a no-brainer at Apple’s recently announced $69 price point.
Even as a fan, though, I give Apple TV’s chief competitor Roku great credit for developing compelling alternatives. According to reports, Roku is the number one seller of media streamers, and has been outselling the Apple TV for some time now. While it’s true that sales don’t necessarily reflect quality, Roku has earned its numbers by frequently iterating on its products — ironically unlike Apple, which has spent years letting an old Apple TV design chug along as a “hobby.” The difference in Roku’s and Apple’s approaches became starker yesterday when Roku released the new Roku 3 with Voice Search ($100) and new Roku 2 ($70), updates to two of its already-successful devices. These media streamers include several of the key features Apple should be adding to the Apple TV, including voice search, downloadable apps, games, and more…
It’s always a difficult task when comparing iOS and Android devices, but this year it may be more important than ever. Samsung has finally stepped up its game with the Galaxy S6, and now we have something that is truly comparable to Apple’s iPhone lineup. Today we’re getting into the ultimate comparison between Samsung’s Galaxy S6 and Apple’s iPhone 6…
At the Spring Forward event, Apple and HBO announced HBO Now, an over-the-top unbundled streaming service for HBO shows, like Game of Thrones, independent of a cable subscription. They claimed that HBO Now would be ‘exclusive to Apple TV and iOS devices for three months’. This seemed like a great promotion for Apple’s television offerings, coinciding with a price cut of the Apple TV box to $69.
However, Sling TV has now announced that it will be offering the same deal through its service: HBO shows for $15 a month. This throws shade at Apple’s announcement — signing up for Sling TV will make HBO available on devices like the Roku this month. It is worth noting that the Sling deal also requires a subscription to Sling itself, HBO is only available as an add-on, which is an additional $20 a month.
Sling has found a ‘loophole’ in Apple’s deal so that it can offer cable-independent HBO content this month as well, sidelining Apple’s three month exclusivity window …
Microsoft shifted its focus when it introduced the Surface Pro 3 last year to target both the iPad and the MacBook, but today the company announced a more consumer level iPad-like version of its tablet simply called the Surface 3 with the same $499 starting price as the iPad Air 2.
Google also unveiled a collection of new competitively priced hardware including new Chromebooks and a Chromebit HDMI running Chrome OS for under $100 …
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In case you hadn’t heard, Jay-Z is this week launching (relaunching) the Tidal music service he recently acquired along with a lot of help from industry friends. The company is hoping its model is innovative and helps artists earn more, but its UI for the web app appears to be a shameless copy of Spotify, as you can see in the comparison screenshot: Tidal above, Spotify below.
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T-Mobile has today unveiled what it hopes will be the next-generation of network maps, breathing new life into the carrier coverage maps of old. T-Mobile says that its new “Next-Gen Network Map” is the industry’s first crowd-sourced map, and reflects “near real-time customer experiences.”
SSDs are fast, but still expensive compared to spinning metal drives, giving us less storage capacity in today’s Macs than we got in older models. Pick up a classic 13-inch MacBook Pro with a hard drive, for example, and you’ll get 500GB of storage for $1100, compared to just 128GB of SSD storage in the $1300 entry-level Retina model.
That may be set to change thanks to new 3D NAND technology announced by Intel and Micron, allowing them to fit far greater storage capacity into the same space as today’s drives. By stacking flash cells on top of each other, up to 32 layers deep, they can can triple the capacity in the same size chip without the usual high price-tag, reports PC World.
For a standard 2.5-inch SATA drive that means up to 10TB of space; for the M.2 drive type used by most laptops, the 3D NAND will boost capacities up to 3.5TB.
We’ve been promised this technology before–Samsung demonstrated 24 layers of 3D NAND back in 2013–but Intel and Micron say that manufacturers will be able to buy the new chips later this year. Of course, with Apple not noted for its generosity when it comes to storage capacity, you may not want to hold your breath.
Earlier this month we shared that Apple would soon begin allowing customers to try in-ear headphones at its retail stores. As we mentioned then, Demo Kits include six models of in-ear headphones, half of which are Beats-branded:
The following headphones are available to try out with Demo Kits (Apple’s prices listed, but linked to better prices at Amazon): RHA MA450i ($49.95), urBeats ($99.95), Beats Tour ($149.95), JayBird BlueBuds X ($169.95), PowerBeats 2 Wireless ($199.95), and the Bose QC20i ($299.95).
Japanese blog Macotakara has now shared an image of the Demo Kits including each headphone model reported before.
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Apple recently dropped the price of the current Apple TV.
John Paczkowski at Buzzfeed, formerly Recode, has today posted that Apple intends to debut a new Apple TV at WWDC, in the summer. Matching reports from 9to5Mac from the last year, he claims the new device (a revamp of the current hockey-puck Apple TV) will feature Siri and an App Store.
This is one of the reason’s why the new hardware would be shown at WWDC, so that developers can begin application development ahead of the product’s release.
The report claims that the device will feature more onboard storage to store applications and ‘expects’ it to use Apple’s latest A8 chip for better power. 9to5Mac has previously reported the new Apple TV will be a slimmer redesign of the current hockey puck with voice integration and a new remote with more tactile, easier to press buttons.
Searching for ‘antivirus’ now only shows games or Find My iPhone-esque apps.
Apple has seemingly decided to crack down on antivirus and antimalware apps, removing them from the App Store. Although there has been no official statement from Apple on a policy change, Apple’s loose guidelines allow them to pull pretty much anything at any time, particularly something like antivirus which has questionable utility within the sandboxed iOS environment of iPhones and iPads.
One casualty of the removal is Intego’s VirusBarrier, which claims that this takedown was not specific to its product with Apple deciding the entire category of antivirus products is now off-limits.
As a photographer, I’ve been thrilled to see iPhones become compelling replacements for standalone point-and-shoot cameras. Our world has improved in both measurable and immeasurable ways from widespread, immediate access to quality photography; the images documenting our lives are more compelling and numerous than ever before.
But professional photographers toting DSLRs now struggle to stand out from amateurs with iPhones. The Chicago Sun-Times infamously fired its entire photography department in favor of using images from iPhones and wire services, a move mocked by other newspapers but embraced by some broadcast journalists. Fixed-lens, small-sensor iPhones can’t match standalone cameras in image quality, particularly in dark settings, but they’re hard to beat in speed and convenience.
The question is how to combine the immediacy of iPhone photography with the quality offered by superior cameras. For me, the answer has been Eyefi‘s SD cards, which wirelessly transfer a standalone camera’s photos to an iPhone or iPad for rapid editing and sharing. (See my How-To on transferring, editing, and sharing DSLR/point-and-shoot photos with an iPhone or iPad for more details.)
Eyefi’s first $100 card contained 2GB of flash memory and a Wi-Fi chip; since then, every Eyefi card has improved on the same concept, so the brand-new 32GB Mobi Pro ($100) isn’t so much a surprise as the culmination of everything the company has done before. It has the highest storage capacity, broadest file support, and easiest workflow of any Eyefi card I’ve tested. Most importantly, it brings a more durable enclosure that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to any potential reader, originally introduced in Eyefi’s more affordable non-Pro Mobi cards. Read on for all the details…
The Swiss watch market is bracing for the smartwatch movement, with many fearing another downturn for traditional mechanical timepieces much the same as when low cost Quartz movements were first introduced.
Industry players don’t intend to sit around and see how Apple Watch sells against traditional watches, however, as many of the watch world’s biggest luxury watchmakers— Tag Heuer, Breitling, Swatch, Frederique Constant—are showing off their first smart watches at Baselworld 2015 this week, the premier tradeshow for the jewelry industry where most Swiss watchmakers choose to unveil their latest creations each year.
A few on the list below were announced in the weeks leading up to Baselworld which officially starts today, but this week will be the first time anyone actually gets their hands on these new Swiss smartwatches that hope to compete with the Apple Watch. We’ll be updating this list as more luxury smart watches get unveiled in Basel, Switzerland.
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Pixelmator has today released a new update for the iPad version ($9.99) of its popular image editor. Version 1.1 includes a brand new watercolor painting feature, which can be used to create brand new pieces of art from a blank canvas or add stylistic additions to existing images and photos. Brushes overlay new colors additively with soft radiuses to create beautiful blends and shading. Pixelmator says they spoke to real artists to help design the brush strokes. It feels really nice to use.
Although watercolor painting is the headline addition, Pixelmator 1.1 also includes a new Color Picker with a swatch of previously selected colors, an updated rendering engine for better performance and much more. You have to see it in action … (video below)
My cable provider is pretty terrible. I don’t need to name any names because this likely applies to your cable provider as well. They are all horrible. I often experience drops on popular channels, get bonus filler channels that no one wants, and see indiscriminate additional subscription fees and charges without any real reason. This Onion article, though it is satire, doesn’t stray too far from the truth.
For a very casual TV watcher, it’s not a great experience – to put it mildly.
So the prospect of an Apple web TV service with a price tag of around $40, as the WSJ and others reported last night, is highly appealing to me if it means I can catch the few shows I watch now without the hassle of my cable subscription. I’ll still be tied to the monopolies for Internet service which isn’t terrific, but the theoretical ‘Apple Cable’ service has the potential to fix a number of problems for me.
Apple started off its March event with the announcement that HBO Now, the premium network’s new $15/month web service, will be available with 3-month exclusivity on the App Store and Apple TV at launch next month. While we’ve heard for quite some time that Apple is developing a web TV service, and the upcoming HBO Now channel seems to be the best taste of what that could offer. I’m hopeful that the potential ‘Apple Cable’ can solve my cable subscription woes. Here’s how:
My feelings for Nintendo are complicated. I’ve loved its games ever since the original Donkey Kong, owned every Nintendo console (including the Virtual Boy), and recommended the Wii U as the best game console for families and kids. But if I was mildly displeased with Nintendo as a company during its haughtiest years — the time when most of its key third-party developers walked away — I’m downright angry with it today. At a press conference in Japan this morning, Nintendo announced its second collaboration with a mobile game publisher in two months, the headline from which was what millions of people have been waiting years to read:
Sure, the official Nintendo press release actually says “smart devices” including phones and tablets, but iPhones and iPads are a safe bet. The press release also says “gaming applications” rather than games, but a press release from Nintendo’s new mobile partner DeNA confirms that the companies will indeed produce mobile games together. Just think about it: Super Mario World on the iPad! Donkey Kong Country on the iPhone! That’s just what everyone has wanted! But there’s a catch…
Despite reports that NBC Universal is not involved in negotiations for Apple’s upcoming subscription TV replacement service, NBC still hopes to arrive on the Apple TV as soon as the second half of 2015, according to a source with knowledge of NBC’s digital roadmap. A recent presentation slide provided by the source shows that NBC wants to launch Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Xbox apps during the second half of this year, following its existing apps for iOS and Android devices. NBC also would like to add new affiliate stations, Nielsen Rating integration, and support for Google’s Chromecast…
The jailbreak community has worked to get Mario onto the iPhone for years.
As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Nintendo has finally decided that it is time to start making mobile games for platforms like the iPhone. The company has confirmed it will begin developing titles for smartphones and other mobile devices (presumably, ‘tablets’) featuring famous franchises like Mario.
Until now, Nintendo has been resistant to share its first-party intellectual property (‘IP’) outside of its own consoles. Clearly, it was worried that bringing characters like Mario to the iPhone would cannabilize sales of its own hardware like the Nintendo DS. However, as part of a new partnership with a mobile gaming company, there has clearly been a change of heart by Nintendo executives.
T-Mobile announced Data Stash back in December, giving postpaid customers 10GB of LTE data free of charge and the ability to roll over their unused data month-to-month for up to a year. As of Sunday March 22nd, prepaid customers will now get to enjoy the same deal.
This month, we’re taking Data Stash even further. I’m happy to announce that, starting Sunday March 22nd, Data Stash will start rolling out to Simple Choice prepaid customers. Every single one of our prepaid voice customers with a qualifying Simple Choice plan will start out with a Starter Stash with up to 10 GB of 4G LTE data. And when that’s all used up, they’ll start rolling forward their unused data for use up to a full year. Automatically… and at no extra charge.
T-Mobile says that the ability to roll over data from month to month has been one of the most requested changes, with 27% of postpaid customers having already dipped into their data stash.
The full text of the press release can be found below.
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