Tech Industry

Apple is this week expected to reveal the first major brands who’ve signed-up for iAds in Europe, though initial euphoria greeting the launch of the service has now waned, with ads agencies complaining on price and that Apple are difficult to work with.

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I’ve been using the Energizer Qi wireless induction charger for iPhone for the past few weeks and think it might deserve a place in our household.  The concept is pretty straightforward.  You put a protective jacket over the iPhone which also serves as a receptor for the induction charge.  Instead of plugging in a 30-pin adapter to your iPhone every time you want to charge it, you just plot it down on its Qi-spot.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jubhpnxK8wc&w=640&h=385]

I should also note that touching the charger points with fingers (even with metal rings) is safe.  The Energizer Qi retails at Amazon and Target for $89 and should be hitting stores in about 2 weeks.  The rubberized case for the iPhone is an additional $35.

Competitors include the poorly rated Powermat and the Duracell MyGrid which also scores low.
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Apple’s long-going mini-battle with iPhone copycat, Meizu, has taken an interesting turn today. Apparently another Chinese company, Herron Network Information Co., has sued Apple along with the Chinese Patent Bureau over patents the company calls “invalid.” According to MeizuMe:

Apple filed a patent covering three products. When the Patent Bureau saw that Apple did not specify what product the patent was for, they helped Apple register the patent for their mobile phone. However, a Shanghai company took the Patent Bureau to the courts about this. Apparently, acting for someone else like the Patent Bureau did is against Chinese law.

Apple apparently was very vague about their iPhone-related patents in China simply patenting a rectangular shaped device with round edges, a vertical oriented screened-device, and a device with a round button under its display. Herron Network Information Co. claims this patent is way to broad to be considered a patent and feels that it is hurting their own company along with others. They also claim that companies like HTC and LG released devices with vertical screens, rectangular-shaped designs, round edges, and round buttons under the screen.

Herron Network Information Co. may have a good case if they could prove other companies are certainly being hurt in China by Apple’s broad patents and the part about the Patent Bureau sliding Apple through is just wow. Let us know in the comments what you think about this and how you think this will all end in China. If you’re interesting you can watch the full court hearing here in Chinese. Oh, and according to the live blog Apple arrived to court fashionably late. Also, the guy who I think is Apple’s lawyer looks a little like Bob Mansfield.

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Silicon Alley Insider reports that former Apple Senior Vice President of iPhone Hardware is now working for Cisco. His job is described as working on “chips for switches.” Mark Papermaster was reportedly fired from his job after some conflict with Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Only time will tell if Apple and Cisco go at it over Papermaster just like Apple and IBM went to war over Papermaster’s acquisition.

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Okay. We know this is not exactly Mac-related but we haven’t seen these official shots of the Jolibook anywhere else. In case you aren’t familiar, the Jolibook is the notebook created by the folks behind the Jolicloud OS. Jolicloud is a very light weight, cloud-based operating system that can put multiple systems into constant sync. It’s social based and works with apps. It wouldn’t be wrong to say this is sort of like iOS for a computer with a keyboard and trackpad. The lids of the Jolibooks look sort of cool and are very colorful/playful. Oh and if you’re wondering the OS does work on the MacBook Air and that’s pretty sweet. Pic of the lid after the break:

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIixUYaLufo&w=670&h=401]

COMPUTERWORLD: Apple makes such beautiful products. Take the iPad for example — it is magical, and with hot new competitor the Samsung Tab receiving destined-for-the-grave reviews, wouldn’t it be nice to run Android on an iPad, rather than spend your cash on Samsung’s not quite as good as an iPad tablet-thing.

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He’s generally nice to the Tab which has has its proponents and detractors.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/bcvideo/1.0/iframe/embed.html?videoId=1248069317901&playerType=embed

Remember kids, competition is good. So hopefully there will be some soon.
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Relax developers, relax developers, for today Oracle and Apple have announced how they intend maintaining Java on the Mac — and to be honest it looks like it will be better than before.

Apple will contribute nearly all the key components, tools and technology required for a Java SE 7 implementation on Mac OS X, including a 32-bit and 64-bit HotSpot-based Java virtual machine, class libraries, a networking stack and the foundation for a new graphical client.

OpenJDK will then make Apple’s Java technology available to open source developers so they can access and contribute to the effort.

Press release follows:
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7ZUHbLHMBs&w=670&h=527]

Their second studio album went double Platinum, they released third album, Plastic Beach, this year, and the fourth album’s on its way and recorded on an iPad. That’s right, Damon Albarn’s project band, Gorillaz will release a fourth album recorded on an iPad.

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Proving the adage that imitation is flattery, Google’s engineers are busily getting it together to bring something ‘magical’ to answer Apple’s magical iPad, at least that’s what Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang says.

Speaking during his company’s Q3 financial call, he promised his company would start to develop its phone and tablet design wins. He also waxed lyrical on Google’s Android folk, “they’re building a magical product,” he gushed.
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I’d love to comment and I know full well that there’s rabid fans for Flash, but I’m going to keep this short and sweet. You’ve seen the headlines saying that the recent OS X update patched over 130 bugs? Well, don’t suppose you noticed that 42 percent of these bugs were bugs in Flash.
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Apple couldn’t get it together with Facebook for Ping functionality so Apple went to Twitter. Twitter has announced that Ping is now integrated into Twitter.com and this will put your Ping activity, song previews, and iTunes links right into your Twitter tweets. The setup process is simple. You just head into Ping on your iTunes store menu and click the Twitter banner up on top. Just sign into your Twitter account and you are good to go.

When you are all linked up anything you do on Ping, whether that be posting, liking, or reviewing it will be tweeted by you. Within the Twitter.com UI are now iTunes/Ping styles song previews and links which make it really easy for people to sample songs right in the browser. The feature is now available in all 23 countries where the iTunes Music Store is live.

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COMPUTERWORLD: Apple is deadly serious about its plans for the Mac App Store. The company is about to disrupt the entire retail software sales industry in order to create the world’s biggest market for consumer software sales — only on a Mac.

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See that huge Intel heatsink on the $199 Boxee box from the iFixit teardown?  You think the Boxee Box uses 6W of power like the AppleTV?  Probably not.  Interestingly, it is beating the AppleTV on Amazon here and here but that is probably just for pent up demand.

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We’re heading into the Holiday season and the smartphone wars seem set to get a even more gritty as this season Apple will be competing not just against other makers, but against that big little word, “free”.

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GyO7gH_qk0&fs=1&hl=en_GB]

Lithuanian tipster tells us: “If the Western World use iPad for business and entertainment, in Lithuania the iPad is used by pensioners in demonstrations against the government :) You just have to mount it on a wooden stick, and you ready to go.”

iPad planet, I keep telling you.

There’s money in free. Please, bear with me, it may sound counter-intuitive, but why else are one-third of the top-grossing iPhone apps made available via the App Store free apps?

In-app purchasing has opened up new opportunities to developers to entice users with quality apps for free (the carrot) and then to upsale new features, layers, levels or any other conceivable kind of virtual good (I bought an obelisk once) via in-app purchasing, GigaOm tells us.
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If you love the smell of fried conspiracy in the morning then you may enjoy this observation from Business Insider — it looks like Apple TV sales may be being kept put of the ‘top selling’ categories on Amazon.

You see, even with a quarter million sold so far, Apple TV doesn’t show up in among the top 100 list of electronics items sold via the giant retailer, but there’s evidence to show it should be in the top 20.  AppleTVs do show up here and here.
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The iPad seems like a pretty good deal in the US, where prices start at $499 (£309), but in the UK it costs from £429, and while the product’s selling like crazy here, a lot of Brits just think the price is too, too high to buy.

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Sony introduced a Flash-based movie and TV show repository today called Crackle that is meant for GoogleTV.  The good news is that it works well on Mac as well and there is some compelling (and lot of not compelling) content on there from Sony Pictures and Movies.

Obviously because it is Flash based, it doesn’t work on iOS devices (haven’t tried with SkyFire) and it will juice your processor on your Mac, but free full length high quality movies?  Hard to argue with that.

Update: commenters say it works with Skyfire!

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AT&T is notifying its customers this evening of a settlement for “Internet Taxes” charged to its loyal customers…

• If you paid taxes, fees or surcharges (“Internet Taxes”) to AT&T Mobility LLC (“AT&T Mobility”) on internet access through certain services including iPhone data plans, Blackberry data plans, other smart phone data plans, laptop connect cards and pay-per-use data services on bills issued from November 1, 2005 up to and including September 7, 2010, you might be eligible to receive benefits from a class action settlement.
• The settlement resolves lawsuits concerning AT&T Mobility charging Internet Taxes for internet access through certain services.
• The two sides disagree about whether AT&T Mobility’s charging of Internet Taxes was proper, and if it was improper, how much the plaintiffs would have been entitled to. The parties have agreed to resolve these cases by settlement.

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