Lonnie Lazar is a writer-musician-web designer-attorney. He writes about Apple for Cult of Mac and Mac|Life, and about VoIP and telecommunications for Voxilla. Follow Lonnie on Twitter @LonnieLazar, join the Cult of Mac on Facebook, and find Lonnie's photos on Flickr.
Two thirds of all mobile web access happens on Apple’s mobile OS, according to February results published by market researchers Net Applications.
iPhone’s closest competitor, Windows Mobile, had just 6.91 percent of the traffic, while Google’s Android and Symbian were both locked in a tie for third at 6.15 percent. Palm and Blackberry bring up the rear at 2.37 and 2.24 percent respectively.
It’s worth noting that Android, which didn’t exist before October, was able to gain the marketshare Symbian took two years to achieve, and that, in the grand scheme of things, Apple’s mobile OS commands just 0.48 percent of all web traffic world wide.
The first thing you see when waking your iPhone is the time, in big, bold, impossible-to-mistake numbers. And yet, a niche that seems to be growing almost as fast as fart apps is that of clocks. A search for clocks in the App Store turns up flip clocks, digital clocks, atomic clocks, analogue clocks even a goldfish clock. So it’s nice to see something a little bit different.
AboutTime (click opens App Store link) displays the approximate time in everyday language – it’s about quarter past four etc. As the developers say it their description ‘how often do you really need to know what the time is to the nearest second’?
At night, the colors change to a much darker palette making it suitable for a bedside clock. But the killer feature may be that when you swipe the screen, the page turns (with a nice animation) to reveal a quote about the nature of time itself from a selection of famous philosophers, authors and more, ranging from Albert Einstein to Britney Spears…
The perception of iPhone as a “failure” in Japan is largely the result of what people read in newspapers, according to Nobuyki Hayashi, the Japanese journalist who was cited as a source in the Wired article we posted on late last night, and who put up a lengthy post of his own Friday to clarify the situation.
“The majority of Japanese … haven’t even touched one,” Hayashi wrote, adding, “So as soon as I give lecture, show it to them and let them play with it, they change their mind and become a fan of iPhone.”
Much of the chatter about the issue in the iPhone blogosphere Friday stemmed from Wired writer Brian X. Chen’s headline, which stated unequivocally that Japanese “hate” the iPhone, but as Hayashi points out in his post, Chen relied on quotes from a conversation Hayashi had with writer Lisa Katayama back in late 2007 to make his case.
Obviously, much has changed in the iPhone ecosystem, a well as in the US and Japanese economies since then.
The reality is likely more that the iPhone has been a relative disappointment in Japan. Many believe the device could do much better in Japan if Apple gave SoftBank more control in how they market / advertise the device, and if Apple would enable feature sets dear to the Japanese consumer, such as a built-in TV tuner and the ability to use it as a mobile payment system.
For a detailed look at Hayashi’s position on the iPhone in Japan, see his blog post.
Apple tapped Ernst&Young Friday to be the company’s independent accounting firm, severing ties with KPMG, which had audited the company’s books since fiscal 1997.
In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Apple said there were no disagreements with KPMG “on any matter of accounting principles or practices, financial statement disclosure or auditing scope or procedure” during the past two fiscal years.
The move, according to an Apple spokesperson quoted for a Reuters article, was a result of a recently adopted board “policy to review the appointment of its independent auditor every five years.”
Apple said the decision to change auditors was made after a competitive process, in which several firms including KPMG were invited to participate.
The regulatory filing said KPMG’s audit reports on Apple’s fiscal 2007 and 2008 financial statements contained no adverse opinions.
Apple issued a store-wide prohibition on all AppStore support for Emoji Friday, according to a report at ArsTechnica.
Emoji, the cute graphical images favored by many heavy SMS text users and a standard part of mobile communications in Japan, are “hidden” on iPhones sold outside Japan. However in recent months, third party apps and other hacks have appeared, allowing all iPhone users to access Emoji through the phone’s International keyboard options.
iPhone developer Gary Fung, whose Typing Genius has been a hit among Emoli lovers, told ArsTechnica Friday that existing applications that offer Emoji enabling beyond their base functionality have been ordered to remove Emoji support.
Fung said that Apple has required an immediate update to his Typing Genius program with the Emoji support removed and the same order appears to have gone out to all developers whose App Store marketing text mentions support for the Emoji feature.
For a more detailed description of how Emoji are enabled on the iPhone and some speculation about why — beyond the company being just plain mean — Apple came down on all the Emoji-san, see blogger/developer Erica Sadun’s report at ArsTechnica.
Speaking of iPhone art (see our colleague Nicole Martinelli’s post following this one), iCloseBy.com, developers of several popular Apple iPod Touch and iPhone apps, announced an ‘Emotional Networking’ wireless world art project Friday.
iWallFlower.com is a web site which displays in real time, drawings being made by iPod Touch and iPhone users from around the world. Visitors can view the art as it is being created, and any iPod Touch or iPhone user can download the free iWallFlower App from the Apple iTunes store, and instantly and freely add artwork to the iWallFlower World Art Project
Displayed artwork receives popularity votes, and the most-appreciated drawings will be displayed most often, both on the www.iWallFlower.com site, and wirelessly on iPod touch and iPhones running the app.
Apple apparently looked the other way when the iMafia app for iPhone came through the AppStore gates. The game from PlayMesh allows users to buy additional premium content and packages games from outside developers together with the premium content, making iMafia the first app with an approved in-game microtransaction system, according to a report at Gizmodo.
The system allows developers to monetize free apps without advertising, and companies profit by selling in-game bonus material. Apple retains its usual cut from any apps sold within iMafia, but then PlayMesh will take an additional (still undisclosed) cut from those developers working with them. Is it possible everyone wins in this scenario?
If Apple continues to approve apps with such a revenue and promotion model, it could turn out to be one cure for the “race to the bottom” that some developers have complained about.
According to Play Mesh founder Charles Ju, in the two days this system has been live, iMafia has pushed two other games into the top 100 of overall paid iPhone games. iMafia, which is free, currently ranks seventh among the iPhone’s most popular games.
Then there was Swiss manufacturer DEOS’s Diamond Earbud covers, which you could have for a paltry $4500.
Comes now, however, the new champion of conspicuous consumption – iPhone division, the Kings Button iPhone mod, in which Austrian jeweler Peter Aloisson will encrust your device in three kinds of 18-carat gold (white, yellow and rose) and 6.6 carats of diamonds, for the “What Financial Crisis?” sum of $2.5 million.
Kind of makes you wistful for I Am Rich, doesn’t it?
Japanese cell phone users are simply ahead of their time, according to a report at Wired, which counts the Apple smartphone’s relatively pedestrian toolset and a strong dose of cultural bias against non-Japanese brands to explain why Apple’s provider partner Softbank is now giving away 8GB iPhones to customers who sign a two year contract in the country where gadgets rule.
For example, while many Japanese are heavily into working and playing with video and photography on their cell phones, the iPhone has virtually no video support and a camera that could be described as eccentric, at best. In addition, many Japanese enjoy TV tuners built into their cell phones, while YouTube and the Ustream app can hardly be said to offer content with mass appeal.
Nokia and Motorola have also famously failed in Japan, so Apple is not without company, but in a country with extremely competitive cellular rate plans, Softbank’s monthly rates are seen as too high in comparison to others’ offerings.
It’s odd to think that in the US and in many parts of the rest of the world, where Apple sold over 10 million iPhones in 2008, the device is seen as a status symbol, even an indicator of too-much coolness, while in Japan, “carrying around an iPhone would make you look pretty lame.”
Engadget, among others, today has been flouting the little piece of filmmaking above as an advertisement for the Blackberry Storm prepared by New York advertising agency Guava, but rejected by RIM as too confrontational.
We’d add, having seen the Blackberry Storm in action, “off the mark” as well.
Apple is apparently refusing to cover the cost of repairs to some MacBook Air notebooks, even though the devices are under warranty, according to a report at Engadget.
Some MacBook Air owners who embraced the device in its original iteration (Rev.A) have found that over time, with normal use, the hinge fitting the screen to the body of the laptop becomes irreparably loose, sometimes even catching and cracking.
Discussion about the problem first hit the Apple Support fourm back in Feb. 2008 and appears to be well documented, though as an official matter Apple says it is not a “known” issue.
The Engadget report relates a case in which “Apple did the repair for free, but only after we escalated the issue to a manager, who let us know how very nice of them that was.” Apple classifies the damage as “accidental,” and thus not covered under the normal warranty. The hinge repair costs around $800.
Let us know in comments below how widespread this problem might be among Cult readers and whether you think you’d have what it takes to get an Apple Repair manager to cover repairs to your broken MacBook Air screen.
The software keyboard on the iPhone has been seen as a dealbreaker for some consumers from the very beginning.
For example, when I interviewed blogger/developer Erica Sadun for a MacLife piece when the original iPhone came out, she told me under no circumstance could she take a phone without a tactile QWERTY keyboard seriously as a tool for business.
Many others have complained at various times about the inexact science/art of using the iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard and I must admit, as much as I love my iPhone, I avoid using it for tasks that require a lot of typing.
Now, however, there’s a simple little jailbreak app that takes a least some of the pain out of using the soft keyboard by adding a 5th row, giving users access to numbers without requiring navigation to a sub-menu. Access to symbols is easier, too — just hit the “shift” key and the numbers turn to symbols.
Say what you will about jailbreaking the iPhone, the “outlaw” development community keeps coming up with solutions that many an iPhone user has pined for since Apple’s first smartphone came to market in the summer of 2007.
Steve Jobs missed leading an Apple shareholders’ meeting on Wednesday for the first time since his return to the company in 1997, but the founder and visionary CEO remains “remains deeply involved in strategic decisions,” according to director Art Levinson, who spoke to reporters at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California after the meeting.
Despite his absence from the meeting, shareholders sang Happy Birthday to Jobs, who turned 54 yesterday. Reporters were barred from taking laptops, iPhones or other communication devices into the meeting, but a few attendees were apparently able to sneak in wireless handhelds to post notes during the meeting, according to a report at Fortune.
Details on shareholder actions at the meeting after the jump.
Boxee software and data remains intact on Apple TVs, despite the appearance of having been wiped from the media center device by Apple TV’s latest software update.
“Boxee does run on the updated 2.3.1 software,” Andrew Kippen, Boxee media relations spokesman told Cult of Mac. “Each firmware update from Apple will normally erase non-Apple menu items from AppleTV,” he explained. “Boxee users simply need to re-apply the patchstick to add the menu item back.”
After the patchstick has been re-applied, user logins, media sources, preferences, etc. will be just as they were before the upgrade.
It’s taken almost eight months, but Apple seems to finally have the mobileme cloud services product firing on all cylinders after an update Wednesday.
A redesigned log-in page is the most obvious cosmetic change but a perceptibly faster UI and better integration among calendar/mail/contacts appears to bring the service up to a level worthy of the hype that accompanied its launch last July.
See the Apple support document for details and let us know in comments how you feel about mobileme. Is it worth $100 a year?
You’ll need to understand French to grok the audio in these two video looks at a PearC, the German Mac clone that even its manufacturer admits will probably not be around too long.
The machine sports an Intel Core 2 Duo (E7300) 2.66GHz processor, 4 GB DDR2 1066 MHz RAM, 750 GB hard drive ( 7200 rpm), Nvidia GeForce 8400GS 512 MB, a 22x DVD burner, a FireWire 400 card (3 ports on the back and front), six USB output (two front), a PCI WiFi 802.11 b / g / n with external antennas, with analog audio inputs and outputs, but no Bluetooth, which is apparently “optional on a USB key.”
With Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.6) in a sealed box and a homemade boot CD, the whole package is about 700 Euros.
MacBook Pros are the hottest selling items in Apple Retail Stores, according to a report issued Tuesday by The Channel Checkers.
Apple’s premium notebook computers, ranging in price from $2000 – $2800 outsold the rest of the company’s systems at three quarters of the stores in in the independent survey of 15 brick and mortar outlets, with one store in Houston reporting the 13″ aluminum MacBook as its hottest item and a store in New York moving more 2.4gHz iMacs than anything else.
One third of stores reported February sales were up, while 87% of the stores surveyed reported no discounting in order to drive sales. Channel Checkers concluded that demand for Macs remains strong enough to support Apple’s premium pricing model.
“Apple products are selling more slowly in February,” the firm said. “However, despite the slower sales, demand remains strong enough that Apple does not need to discount products on a wide scale basis.”
With recent industry analysts expecting Apple sales for the quarter ending in March to be around 2 million units, down just 6% from last year’s record-setting pace, the steady popularity of the company’s high-end notebooks is a bright spot in an otherwise gloomy economic picture.
Apple released an Apple TV update Tuesday evening that, not surprisingly, removes third-party add-ons, such as the popular media center application Boxee.
Apple TV users who are willing to hack their device to extend its functionality are likely to be savvy enough to have disabled auto-update on their machines, but it’s also likely some may wake to an unpleasant surprise on Wednesday morning.
The Apple TV support page had not been updated at press time with fixes and improvements in software version 2.3.1. Readers are invited to let us know in comments what amazements, if any, come with the update.
eBay officials took down an auction listing for a pre-release beta copy of the first-generation iPod Tuesday after being informed by Apple the attempted sale would violate the company’s intellectual property rights.
Mike Evangelist, who writes the WritersBlockLive blog, “was one of a bunch of internal testers for the iPod,” according to a post describing the result of his attempt to sell his device on eBay. After internal testing for the iPod was completed, all the beta testers were given opportunities to turn in their beta units in exchange for an official first release device, but Evangelist never did.
Facing “some unexpected expenses,” he figured selling the rare piece of Apple history on eBay would net him several hundred dollars. “There was great interest in the auction before it was pulled,” he writes, adding “I expected the final price to easily exceed the $450 reserve I had set.”
After the auction unexpectedly disappeared,he received a note from eBay saying “The rights owner, Apple, Inc., notified eBay that this listing violates intellectual property rights. When eBay receives a report of this type of violation, we remove the listing to comply with the law.”
So now Evangelist is just selling the thing through his website. From the several pictures he has available on the site, it looks to be in great shape, too.
At press time, the device remains unsold, with a high bid of $700.
Steve Jobs, who historically would spend hours a day logged into a chat client, has been using his computer less since taking his six-month leave of absence, according to a report by former PBS journalist Mark Stephens.
“Steve Jobs has stopped using his computer. He’s off curing himself of something he won’t name and in some manner we can’t know but I CAN tell you right now it doesn’t involve using his computer,” Stephens wrote under his pen name, Robert X Cringley.
Stephens argues in his post that because Jobs has not yet resigned from his position as CEO at Apple, his health is material to Apple and to Apple shareholders, is material to the company, and should be disclosed.
Because Jobs’ previous habit was to be available online to his coterie of personal contacts, a trend he apparently continued even after he announced he’d be taking a six month leave of absence near the beginning of this year, the apparent fact that he is no longer logging on daily is, according to Stephens, “important.”
“His condition remains squarely on the table, hot and steaming and ready to be served-up,” Stephens writes. “Who cares?
Anyone cares who actually expects Steve Jobs to return to Apple.”
If you can think it, it’s said, eventually technology will allow you to do it.
Something I’ve thought about several hundred, if not thousands of times, is capturing the audio from a particularly tasty video I’ve been pointed to or have happened to come across (mostly) on YouTube.
Turns out, you can do that.
There’s a super easy way of doing it completely online at VidToMp3, but if you’d like a handy, light app for handling the task on your Mac, savvy Japanese developers at iExtractMp3 (translated from the original Japanese) have developed a universal binary, now in its 4th iteration, to do just that.
I tested both the online method and the iExractMp3 app today and added a couple of Snooks Eaglin tunes to my iTunes collection in a matter of minutes.
If you want to use iExtractMp3, you’ll need to know how to first download .flv files to your hard drive, which is easy enough to do. Everything else about using iExtractMp3 or VidToMp3 is self-explanatory.
The genie is now so far out of the bottle, one almost wants to feel sorry for the powers that be in the music industry.
Of course Apple thinks of these users as criminals, but, really, how long can the company deny the rest of its smartphone ecosystem the number three functionality its users believe is still missing?
As the touchscreen smartphone market enters a more competitive landscape, Apple is likely to be forced to either lower its price on the iPhone or revise growth and margin expectations for the device, according to a comprehensive analysis of the growing sector released Friday by Royal Bank of Canada.
RBC analyst Mike Abramsky elaborated on research published earlier this month indicating Apple’s next version of the iPhone, expected by many to come to market later this year, will see much more robust competition from the likes of Google, Palm, Microsoft and HTC, none of whom had anything comparable to the iPhone until quite recently.
Among the options available to Apple aside from outright price cuts – which acting CEO Tim Cook has indicated the company is “looking into” – working with carriers such as AT&T on adjustments to the phone’s data plan offerings seems to be a likely strategy for increasing the value of iPhone as a choice.
Click on RBC’s handy chart above for a larger image and a comprehensive view of the current landscape.
Gridiron Software released Thursday the much anticipated free public beta version of Flow, software for the Mac the company calls a Visual Workflow Manager. In short, Flow brings order out of chaos and, if first impressions mean anything, is apt to be the most transformative productivity tool anyone has seen in quite a while.
Many talented and creative people are not wired for total top-down organization and don’t hard-code cross-referencing and version tracking into their work on projects. As a result, a lot of frustration and lost time can accompany efforts to complete work to its final delivery state.
Flow lets you get out of your own way, automagically tagging and tracking everything that goes into a project, from idea to end result. Users can see how all the pieces of a project fit together, in one interface, and access them instantly, even if they are offline.
The built-in, automatic time-tracking feature is bound to be received as a godsend by those responsible for budgeting and billing and Flow collaboration enhancements promise to increase productivity by helping you work smarter, not harder.
For the guided tour demo of Flow’s amazements go here.
The first version is for Intel Macs, with support for PowerPC and Windows coming soon. Download the free beta here and when you decide to buy the promotional price of $249 is good until May 1. After that, the price will be $299.
Microsoft used an image of an ambling snow leopard licking its chops for the backdrop to its Live Search homepage on Thursday, prompting a few in the business and technology press to speculate why.
Among them, Ina Fried at c|net is likely furthest from the mark, with her suggestion Microsoft could have been showing a player’s tell that Live Search will be the default search engine in Safari’s tool bar when the next version of OS X launches.
Fried suggests that because Microsoft has money to spend and because it might be willing to do so in order to get the market share boost for Live Search that such a deal would bring, well, she admits the idea is a “crazy” one, but she put it out there any way.
Why it won’t happen: Apple doesn’t need the money and has almost never made it a practice to co-brand its products with services that suck.
