First Rhapsody lashed out at Apple over the new App Store requirement mandating a 30% cut off-the-top of all in-app subscriptions and purchases, and now Last.fm co-founder Richard Jone is joining the cry, saying that “Apple [has] just f*cked over online music subs for the iPhone.”
Sony’s been making some noises lately suggesting that if their new Music Unlimited service takes off, they might ditch iTunes once and for all. Lest there be any doubt, though, that this is a fanciful fever dream that depends upon the digital equivalent of a pig sprouting wings and leaping majestically into the sky, Sony Network Entertainment COO Brandon Layden says that Sony won’t be ditching iTunes after all.
At a meeting held at the home of John Doerr of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Apple CEO Steve Jobs met with President Barack Obama last night alongside other Silicon Valley executives, the White House has confirmed.
Unlike his peers at Yahoo!!, Netflix, Twitter, Google and Facebook, though, Jobs remained out of sight of reporters throughout the meeting, and was seen neither entering or exiting the meeting.
We’re all used to it now but when the iPhone first debuted, a common criticism leveled against it was battery life. Apple’s always been aggressive with power management across its iOS devices, but compared to the feature phones that were nearly ubiquitous at the time, the iPhone is a hog, and users buying one had to switch from charging their phones once every few days to charging it one or more times per day.
Apple’s only improved the battery life of the iPhone since then, but as our gadgets become ever more power hungry, there’s always going to be an increasing demand upon lithium-ion tech. In a new patent, Cupertino seems to have identified a new way to improve battery life, and while it’s hardly as esoteric as Apple’s more wild-eyed patents, it’s plenty exciting for those who want a longer lasting iPhone or MacBook.
Anyone who has used the new MacBook Air can attest to what a tiny miracle it is. Spec-wise, it doesn’t look like much at all, but even the 1.4GHz 11-incher surprises by bleeding the edge of OS X performance in nearly all the ways that count for the average users through the accomplishment of its standard SSD drive. Consumers are thrilled, and so is Apple, with Tim Cook recently saying that Apple saw the new Air as “the future” of the MacBook line.
Looks like NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang agrees, but if anything, he’s even more excited about the Air than Cook is, claiming it’s not just the future of the MacBook line, but the future of laptop design across all platforms.
In an interview with Peter Kafka over at All Things D about the launch of their new Music Unlimited streaming music service, Sony’s Tim Schaaf — who worked at Apple for fourteen years as a senior executive in charge of Quicktime, and was intimately involved in the company’s media products — allowed himself to be drawn into comment about his former employer, specifically in regards to Apple’s new in-app subscription and purchasing policies.
“It seems a little aggressive,” Schaaf said about Apple’s new policies, which threaten to kick from the App Store any app developer who fails to offer their app’s products and subscriptions through Apple’s in-app purchase mechanism, or offers them more cheaply elsewhere.
“Sounds like a good thing for Android,” Schaaf concluded, referring to Google’s less prohibitive terms as part of their competing One Pass in-app purchase and subscription service, and implying that developers would begin to flee the App Store if his former employer did not buckle.
Ouch. Do you agree with Schaaf’s assessment?
Apple was the only big name in mobile that didn’t show up at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week… but it didn’t stop the iPhone 4 from winning the show’s Best Mobile Device Award.
According to the judges, the iPhone 4 won because “it has a great screen, sharp design, fantastic materials, and phenomenal ecosystem for app developers. In a tight race, the iPhone 4 built on the success of its predecessors to set the pace for smartphones.”
Ouch. That’s got to hurt: beaten by a company that didn’t even show up. All was not totally bleak for the Android and Windows Phone 7 device manufacturers in attendance, though: one of their own in HTC won the Device Manufacturer of the Year Award. Personally, though, we think that should probably have gone to Apple too.
At this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha hinted that Google might be on the cusp of releasing its own answer to iTunes in the coming months.
In reference to their upcoming tablet, the $799 Xoom, Jha said that Android Honeycomb 3.0 would put Motorola in a better position to compete with the iPad because it “adds video services and music services.”
“If you look at Google Mobile services [in Android] today, there’s a video service, there’s a music service,” Jha said. Then he corrected himself. “That is, there will be a music service.”
How much money are you worth to mobile advertisers? Much more than an Android users, that’s for sure… at least according to this infographic put together by the boys over at Mobclix.
Of course, just how much money you’re worth depends a lot on what you mostly end up doing on your iPhone. Utilitiy users are worth almost $9.50 each on average, compared to just $7.20 for the same category on Android. Entertainment users are worth a few bucks less ($6.70 on iPhone, $4.90 on Android) and games are worth the least at just $4.00 per iPhone and $1.90 per Android device.
Mobclix came up with these numbers by taking their monthly advertising revenues for each app category and dividing them by users in a given month. At first blush, it looks like utility apps are where it’s at when it comes to mobile advertising, but as Mike Schramm reminds us, those numbers are skewed by the sheer volume of people spending more time on their iPhone in Angry Birds than editing spreadsheets on them.
Capcom’s Smurfs’ Village has garnered an astonishing volume of controversy since it first debuted in the App Store.
The issue? Smurfs’ Village is a freemium title: free to play, but all of your progress in the game is tied to collecting “Smurfberries” (a Roald Dahl inspired sexual euphemism if I ever heard one). You can buy Smurfberries to quicken your progress as in-app purchases.
The controversy all stems from the fact that it’s a freemium game with a subject matter aimed almost exclusively at small children, coupled with Capcom’s decision to price Smurfberries in ridiculously expensive bundles.
Pocket Gamer reports that Apple is hopping mad about the situation, with Steve Jobs playing the Gargamel to Capcom’s Smurfs. The company has apparently gone as far as to haul Capcom into their offices to chew the game maker out.
More proactively, though, this whole Smurfs Village debacle might result in a shortening of the iTunes login window (or the time iOS allots to make purchases after you have entered your iTunes password before you have to enter it again) from fifteen minutes to just five.
It may have taken Apple three years, but iOS is finally in a state that there aren’t a lot of perceived criticisms when it comes to its feature-set. The niggling criticisms of naysayers like copy-pasted and multitasking have been addressed. What’s next for iOS 5, then?
9to5Mac has put up an interesting overview of what they think is coming in 2011 to iOS. With the operating system itself pretty robust, they believe that Apple will focus more on apps and services this year by leveraging many of their recent acquisitions in maps, voice control and cloud technology.
For some fun adventures surfing the HTML5 web as through a vintage NES, download Pixelfari and give it a spin. Built upon Safari, it’s of questionable import or usefulness, but it isneat. Twitter and Facebook are especially fun.
Insane. According to Rovio’s Peter Besterbacka, gamers are now spending over two hundred million minutes every day playing their popular cross-platform title, Angry Birds, one of the most popular games on the iOS and Mac App Stores. Yeesh. Forget AAPL… it’s time to buy some Rovio stock.
Just so there’s no misunderstandings, Apple has posted a support document explaining the differences in making calls on the GSM (AT&T) and CDMA (Verizon) iPhones, as well as listing a few shortcuts available to Verizon customers for turning on things like call forwarding without opening the Settings.app. Good to know.
[via TUAW]
Omnivision, the company that makes the camera in your iPhone, have just outed their second-generation backside illuminated sensor, the OV8830, and it’s a pretty exciting product for Apple fans: it should give the iPhone 5 the ability to record 1080p video at thirty frames per second, as well as substantially improve image quality.
Yesterday, Apple revised its App Review Guidelines, and one of the provisions was that apps would no longer be accepted if they were primarily comprised of media content better sold through iTunes or the iBookstore. In other words, apps could no longer be mere wrappers around movies, albums or e-books.
That’s not to say that Apple doesn’t want movies and books on the App Store, though. They just want their apps to be more than just wrappers. Case in point, Warner Bros’ latest app: they have just released The Dark Knight as a downloadable app that contains a free five minute preview of the movie, with the full film available as an in-app purchase.
The distinction? The Dark Knight comes with a lot of extra features, just like you might find on the DVD version. Since that’s something iTunes Movies can’t do — yet! — Apple seems to be okay with Warner Bros’ releasing their movies in app form… which is good news for Warner Bros, who intend on releasing more movies as apps later in the year.
Analysts all seemed united that Verizon was going to sell a lot of iPhones the first week they were available. With breathless anticipations, these analysts rattled off predictions. Would Verizon sell 500,000 iPhones? A million? A jillion? The sky seemed to be the limit.
Well, admittedly, it’s informal, but Boy Genius Report has some exclusive numbers on how many iPhones Verizon sold through five Apple Store locations in the first five days of sale… and as you can see, while the Verizon numbers are undeniably higher than the AT&T numbers, they’re not orders of magnitude greater. Verizon and Apple are reportedly disappointed.
Last year, Apple signed an exclusive agreement to use Liquidmetal — a high-strength metal that is light and can be processed like plastic — in their future products.
An ex Liquidmetal exec thought Apple would make iPhones out of it. A source speaking to MacTrast, though, says that Apple’s Liquidmetal investment won’t debut in the iOS line, but instead in March’s MacBook Pro refresh… which looks like a far more radical redesign than previously suspected.
The Apple Wireless Keyboard and Magic Trackpad fit together as if they were meant to be one and the same… so why aren’t they? While there are ergonomic reasons why it might not be ideal on the desktop, a combined keyboard/trackpad would be the perfect solution for people trying to control a Mac hooked up to their television, or when lounging in an arm chair in front of your iMac.
Enter the MagicWand, a new accessory from Twelve South that connects the Apple Wireless Keyboard to the Magic Trackpad without adding any additional bulk.
I puzzled awhile trying to figure out how the MagicWand holds the two accessories together until realizing how simple it was: it’s just a half-cylinder bracket that snaps along the battery case, tightly uniting the keyboard and trackpad when placed side-by-side in either righty or lefty configuration.
Very clever, and the price isn’t bad either: it’ll only cost you $29.99. After years of using an absolutely execrable combination keyboard/trackball for my home theater Mac, I’m going to switch to the MagicWand full time.
Microsoft has finally released its first piece of software on the Mac App Store, but it’s not one of their premier software packages like Office. Instead, Microsoft is dipping their toes in the App Store water by releasing Windows Phone 7 Connector as a free download through Apple’s digital delivery system.
Windows Phone 7 Connector has been available in beta since October, but it’s now a final release. The Connector app allows owners of a Windows Phone 7 device to sync their iTunes music, videos and podcasts to their phones.
Of course, we’ve never been quite sure what sort of mad man uses a Mac but owns a Windows Phone 7 device over an iPhone, but we’re sure there’s at least a few of them out there… albeit employed exclusively in Microsoft’s Mac software division.
If you’re one of them, you can download Windows Phone 7 Connector on the Mac App Store by just clicking here. Hey, why not… it’s free.
Apple’s prohibitive new policies in regards to in-app purchases and in-app subscriptions have been spilling all the digital ink so far, but Cupertino also took the opportunity yesterday to clarify their position on “cheating” App Store developers: zero tolerance.
In Apple’s newly revised App Review guidelines, Apple has warned all devs who try to unfairly influence iTunes ratings, steal data from users or plagiarize other works that if they keep it up, they’ll be summarily kicked from the App Store.
Back in July of 2010, John Browning, Jacob Balthazar and Claudia Keller filed a class-action lawsuit against Apple claiming that the iPad shutdown when used in direct sunlight due to heating issues.
The crux of their case? Apple’s marketing for the iPad — which, as you might recall, was heavily slanted towards e-reading at the time — (debatably)said that “reading on iPad is just like reading a book.” Books don’t overheat! Books don’t shut down!
If you’re eager to pick up a Sandy Bridge MacBook Pro, you won’t have long to wait, as a source is now telling Apple Insider that production of the latest MBPs is now underway, with volume shipments ready to begin as early as the first week in March.
Earlier today, when mulling over Amazon’s options in making their Kindle app comply with Apple’s new in-app purchase rules, I suggested that the simplest way for Amazon to preserve its existing business model without fleeing the App Store might be to pursue a good old fashioned lawsuit.
Amazon hasn’t filed one yet, but music subscription service Rhapsody is already threatening one, having already issued a statement saying “We will be colaborating with our market peers in determining an appropriate legal and business response to this latest development.”
If you’ve ever heard a snatch of a catchy song on television or in a bar and wondered what it was enough to pull out your iPhone, you’re probably familiar with music-identifying services like Shazam which record a snippet of music and then try to identify the artist, album and title against the information in its database.
Ever wonder, though, how Shazam gets all of its data? Intriguingly, it doesn’t all just get pumped in from the labels. Instead, Shazam employs a constabulary of music detectives who not only track down on-the-rise tracks and artists, but also actively search out new tracks to index, implement and program into their data frames.
A fantastic piece explaining how one of iOS’s most casually impressive apps is driven by the invisible magic of human ingenuity.