Lonnie Lazar - page 9

In sharp contrast to Apple’s largely upbeat recent quarterly earnings announcement, Microsoft reported “a number of grim statistics, including a steep decline related to its Zune portable media player,” highlighted in a report Thursday at MarketWatch.

The portable music player sector seems to have reached a general level of saturation, as even Apple’s iPod — a device that spawned the resurgence of an entire industry when it was introduced nearly a decade ago — suffered an 11% drop in sales during the most recent quarter. But that is nothing compared to Microsoft’s copycat gadget, the Zune, which saw a 42% drop in year-over-year sales.

“If Zune were going to make a strong move against the iPod, it already would have,” said IDC analyst Susan Kevorkian, and some analysts are now looking for Microsoft to admit defeat and announce termination of its ill-fated hardware venture.

When the company launched the Zune in 2006, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer believed its 802.11 wireless functionality would take out the iPod by creating a “community of entertainment aficionados” who’d enjoy being able to connect with one another and with other 802.11-enabled devices, but apparently there’s a reason devices such as the iPod and the Zune are often called personal media devices.

As late as March of this year, Ballmer still maintained the Zune is not going away, but unless the tepidly anticipated touch screen Zune HD is somehow a huge hit, declining numbers like the ones highlighted by MarketWatch foretell a grim future for the little PMP that couldn’t.

The long-standing tiff between Apple and the iPhone jailbreaking community reached new heights of absurdity in a recent filing Apple made with the US Copyright office, in which the company all but claimed granting iPhone jailbreakers an exemption from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act would invite terrorist attacks on the nation’s wireless network infrastructure.

In a written response (PDF) to questions from the Copyright Office, Apple claimed that jailbroken iPhones could be used by drug dealers to avoid authorities, by hackers to skirt carrier-enforced limitations or even by attackers to crash the software at cell phone towers. “Technological protection measures were designed into the iPhone precisely to prevent these kinds of pernicious activities,” said the Apple statement, which added, “if granted, the jailbreaking exemption would open the door to them — to potentially catastrophic effect.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), representing consumer interests and arguing in the case for the jailbreaking exemption, dismissed Apple’s claims. “This is all just a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt,” said Fred von Lohmann, an EFF senior staff attorney and the organization’s expert in intellectual property law.

Von Lohmann called Apple’s claims that jailbroken iPhones could bring down a carrier’s network a hypothetical game. “None of this has ever happened [with jailbroken iPhones],” he said. “You don’t see the independent iPhone stores filled with malicious software tools. Instead, they’re filled with the software that Apple has refused to offer in its App Store.”

The Copyright Office is expected to make its final ruling in the case by October.

[via PCWorld]

The iPhone has been an utter disaster in Russia, according to an interesting report penned Thursday by Svetlana Gladkova at Profy.

The Russian experience suggests that, despite howls of complaint by some consumers in markets where Apple has exclusive distribution agreements with a single or perhaps a pair of wireless carriers, where the device is sold unlocked and unsubsidized by carriers, its price simply puts it beyond the means of all but a tiny number in the current global economy.

Three major carriers sell the iPhone in Russia, having collectively agreed with Apple to sell 3.5 million units over a two year period. But they have managed to move barely 250 thousand phones in the first six months of availability, according to Gladkova, and market players there a feeling distinctly glum about prospects for meeting their goal.

Unlocked phones in Russia — where service contracts are not nearly so common as in markets such as the US and UK — sold initially for the dollar equivalent of $1000, though the market price has dipped currently to $700 – $800, which is still hardly affordable to a populace with per capita GDP of around $15,000.

Corruption also hampers legitimate iPhone sales in Russia, where some 400,000 black market devices made it into circulation before the official release, according to Gladkova, soaking up early demand and deflating the impact of continued heavy advertising by the country’s three service providers.

Now, carriers and their retail partners — local distributors on the hook for millions of dollars in ancillary distribution agreements — are playing hot potato with millions of unsold phones while the carriers scramble to rewrite their contracts with Apple.

The chaos in the Russian market makes things here in the West seem downright orderly, where, ironically, an 8GB iPhone 3G can be had for under $100.

Image – Russian exclusive SimaPhone by Denis Simachev

Apple took one more step toward fully integrating the iPhone platform into MobileMe Wednesday, making a free MobileMe iDisk application available for download on the iTunes App Store.

Members of Apple’s $99 per year cloud computing service will be able to use the iDisk app on their iPhone or iPod Touch to view files stored on an iDisk; access Public folders; easily share files from an iPhone using integrated email links; quickly access recently viewed files and view iPhone-supported file types-including iWork, Office, PDF, QuickTime and more. Files larger than 20MB may not be viewable.

The iPhone jailbreak community, famous for stepping into the breach when Apple’s incomprehensible App Store approval process fails to give users what they want, now offers GV Mobile on Cydia, just one day after Apple thumbed its nose at Google Voice apps for the iPhone.

While some outlets remain comfortable blaming AT&T for Apple’s rejection of Google Voice apps, despite the fact that it’s demonstrably wrong to do so, the jailbreak community was pleased to offer up developer Sean Kovacs’ GV Mobile app, which had been available on the App Store before being yanked in the larger decision to separate Apple from Google with respect to voice services.

Google itself has a Voice app, presently in beta and available by invitation only, but Kovacs’ GV Mobile brings the power of Google’s revolutionary voice product to the iPhone, allowing users to:

* dial numbers via the iPhone address book or typing on the keypad
* Full SMS support (view historic, reply, send new)
* retrieve and delete recent call history
* playback and delete voicemails
* take calls from different phones other than your iPhone
* enable or disable the phones that Google Voice forwards calls to
* add or delete phones that Google Voice forwards call to.

Users must already have a Google Voice account and a working wireless phone plan in order to take advantage of the app’s features, but it seems clear – with millions of numbers in reserve and broad interest in the convenience and configurability of Google’s Voice product – some may find access to GV Mobile something worth jailbreaking their phone for.

Are you on an iDiet?

If you really want to move your dieting practice into the modern age, you may want to check out The Connected Scale from Withings, a WiFi-enabled scale that sports a free companion iPhone app (iTunes link) that will give you access to information about your weight and body-fat percentages over the course of time, all viewable in table and graph form – and accessible from the Internet.

Now, there’s a password you’ll want to keep secure.

UPDATE: Withings informs CoM the Connected Scale will be available to US Customers in September at a retail price $159 USD, on their website (https://www.withings.com/). And yes, it can display weight in pounds.

Nissan unveiled the details Monday on its plan to produce the first electric, fully-networked consumer automobile, which will function with an exclusive remote-control iPhone application to make efficient use of the car’s battery.

Dubbed Car 2.0, Nissan’s idea suggests the next generation of cars will connect to public and private power grids and communication networks, and will function similarly to electronic gadgets familiar to consumers today.

Nissan calls the system controlling the auto EV-IT, a central brain encompassing an onboard transmitting unit that stays connected by mobile networks to a global data center.

Drivers will be able to view the driving radius within range of their battery charge level on a navigation map, and also find detailed information about available charging stations within range, according to a report describing the car at Earth2Tech.

The iPhone app will let drivers access information about the time required for a full charge and the current temperature inside the vehicle. The app will also let drivers control air conditioning and heating from outside the vehicle, allowing them to cool down or heat up their vehicle while it’s still plugged in rather than using the battery once they are on the road.

The final prototype for Nissan’s 2010 electric car is set to debut on August 2nd.

Apple’s iTunes – the only online music distributor that matters, according to one well-placed music lawyer – may get additional competition before year-end, if an exclusive Wired report published Monday proves accurate.

Spotify, a music service boasting over 6 million songs that can be accessed on-demand and customized into personalized, editable, downloadable playlists, is currently available only in Europe but the company is feverishly working to sign distribution agreements with copyright holders and music labels to bring both a desktop and an iPhone application to American consumers as soon as possible, according to the report.

Spotify’s potential to compete with iTunes in the US remains speculative at this point, and the company understands that despite having created a slick iPhone app to which Wired writer Eliot Van Buskirk gives rave pre-release reviews, Apple could put the kibosh on the whole thing if it determines Spotify “replicates functionality” provided by Apple’s native iTunes application. “It’s going to be very interesting to see if Apple lets this through or sees us as competition — fingers crossed,” explained Spotify communications manager Jim Butcher.

Whether or not the iPhone app is approved, when the company gets its US distribution agreements in order it seems likely that many will check out some of the interesting features the desktop service will have to offer, such as the ability to stream playlists created by other Spotify members and to access an ad-free version of the service with a premium account.

It will be interesting, too, to see how Spotify differs from and compares with Lala, another iTunes competitor with great potential already available in the US.

Despite worldwide economic recession, Apple enjoyed its best non-holiday quarter ever in its 2009 third quarter ended June 27, 2009, the company said on Tuesday.

Apple made a whopping $1.23 billion profit on revenues of $8.34 billion. The gobs of cash came from robust sales of 2.6 million Mac computers (up 4% from last year thanks to a MacBook refresh in the quarter), and blockbuster sales of the iPhone 3GS, which sold 5.2 million units, up an unbelievable 620% from a year ago.

This when other tech companies companies like Nokia are tanking.

“We’re making our most innovative products ever and our customers are responding,” said Steve Jobs in a statement.

Other highlights:

– the traditional iPod is on the way out. Apple sold 10.2 million iPods during the quarter, down 7% from a year-ago. The market is saturated and customers are buying iPhones instead.

– Gross margin was an amazing 36.3 percent, up from 34.8 percent in the year-ago quarter. (Dell makes about 5% margins on its products).

– The iPhone 3GS and $99 iPhone are a huge hit. Apple shifted 5.2 million iPhones during the quarter, up 626% from a year ago.

– Apple is a truly international. Overseas sales accounted for 44% of the quarter’s revenue. This will jump when the iPhone goes on sale in China later this year.

Apple’s full unaudited financial statement after the jump.

Multiple reports Tuesday indicate a 25 year-old employee of Foxconn, one of Apple’s OEM suppliers in China, killed himself last week after losing a 4th generation iPhone which he had been instructed to ship to Apple headquarters in Cupertino, CA.

Sun Danyong was a recent engineering graduate who worked in product communications for electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn in Shenzhen, a city in the booming industrial corridor between Guangzhou and Hong Kong.

On Thursday, July 9th, according to the first English-language report on the incident at Venture Beat, Sun got 16 prototype phones from the assembly line at a local Foxconn factory. At some point in the next few days, he discovered one of the phones was missing.

On Monday, July 13, he reported the missing phone to his boss. Then, that Wednesday, three Foxconn employees illegally searched his apartment. Accusations have reportedly been flying about the Chinese language Twittersphere that Sun was detained and physically abused during the investigation, although this has not been substantiated.

Shortly after 3am on Thursday July 16th, security cameras at Sun’s apartment building show him leaping to his death from a window in his apartment.

Are you a Gmail person? With more than one @gmail.com account? Thought so. How many times have you thought how much you like Gmail but felt frustrated by one aspect or another of the limits (mostly time and productivity-oriented) imposed by working with email in a web browser?

Yup. Well, guess what? There’s an app for that.

Mailplane brings Gmail to your Mac desktop and unleashes power and productivity you’ve only wished for in Google’s excellent mail product.

We’re only just now checking Mailplane out, but with support for:

# Drag and drop attachments
# Multiple Gmail accounts
# New mail notifications
# Easy screenshot sending
# Gmail shortcuts
# Integration with OmniFocus,

our first impressions are that Mailplane is well worth giving a more extensive test drive. It’s got a 30 day free trial and we’ll be giving you our more extensive review in about a month.

If you check Mailplane out, be sure to let us know what you think about it in comments.

UPDATE: the original headline and a reference to “wireless” syncing in this article have been changed to correct a misunderstanding on the author’s part.

Apple has confirmed that Palm Pre will no longer be able to sync with iTunes versions beginning with the latest update, killing a sales feature that Palm had long relied upon in billing its phone as a major competitor to the iPhone.

“iTunes 8.2.1 is a free software update that provides a number of important bug fixes,” said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris, in a BusinessWeek report Wednesday. “It also disables devices falsely pretending to be iPods, including the Palm Pre,” she continued, adding, “As we’ve said before, newer versions of Apple’s iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with unsupported digital media players.”

For a device roundly touted as iPhone’s most worthy competition in the smartphone market, Palm’s Pre has not made many waves since being released on June 6 by Sprint, and remains hampered by an online app store with very little product.

There is some disagreement among analysts about how well the Pre has been received so far by the market, with some crowing that expectations have been more than met, while others say not so fast.

While the news of iTunes’ Pre lockout is no surprise, and Palm could still easily craft workaround allowing Pre users to sync with newer versions of iTunes, including using third party solutions to do the job, the lockout news is further evidence that Apple is not about to let up the pressure on a company now run by some of its former employees.

As flash memory and solid state drives steadily become the storage media of choice for portable electronic devices, Apple’s iPod Classic – the device widely credited with kickstarting the company’s rise from the ashes of the John Scully era – may not survive to celebrate its 10th birthday in 2011.

1.8 inch hard disk drives manufactured by Samsung and Toshiba, the last two manufacturers standing in a once-robust market for small, high-capacity spinning disk drives, sit languishing in the supply channel, according to a report at Ars Technica, and industry trends do not bode well for the future of Apple’s signature gadget.

When Apple launched the first iPod in 2001, the hard disk was the only vehicle capable of storing large amounts of data flexibly at reasonable cost. Since then, however, advances in Flash memory and SSD technology have made those two storage options the industry standard for everything from netbooks to iPhones and the entire line of Apple’s portable music players, with only the Classic continuing to rely on the 1.8″ HDD.

The trend toward Flash memory and SSD technology has been building for at least the last couple of years, with Apple having been ahead of the curve when the company introduced its Flash memory-based iPod nano in 2005.

SSDs typically offer higher performance–often much higher performance–than hard-disk drives and are more durable since they have no moving parts. While the larger question of where the technology is headed remains somewhat in debate, in large part over concerns about data’s long-term reliability in SSD storage media and Flash memory’s eventual degradation related to writing, erasing and re-writing its memory blocks, the fate of the 1.8 inch HDD seems dire.

The industry’s current disdain for small-form HDD products, and Apple’s apparent design trajectory for its mobile PMPs and handset devices, suggest the time has come to prepare farewells for the iPod Classic.

Image credit: Randy Stewart

And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They’re quite aware of what they’re going through.
– David Bowie

One day, people may point to an article published Monday at PCMag.com (perhaps the preeminent Windows-foucused tech magazine around) by long-time Apple-baiting columnist John C. Dvorak, as a signal for the storming of Microsoft’s figurative Bastille.

“If I was going to buy a new laptop this minute, a MacBook Pro is probably what I’d get,” are words almost no tech watcher of the past 20 years would ever figure to come from Dvorak, the smart, engaging veteran columnist who has taken over the years a nearly perverse glee in stirring up the bee hive of Apple loyalists in tech journalism.

But that’s exactly what Dvorak had to say after seeing first-hand “all these whiz-bang features” of his son’s brand-new MacBook Pro that, he said, “make me realize that I have fallen behind.”

But don’t go thinking Dvorak has fully consumed the kool-aid or that his enmity for Apple will abate completely anytime soon. The real reason he’s kindly disposed to an Apple product at this point, aside from “that hard aluminum unibody that makes the thing feel like a rock,” is a piece of software his son required, DEVONthink, which organizes and sorts PDF files into manageable database blocks – and has no Windows-based counterpart. “It’s about as close to a killer Apple app as anything I’ve seen since VisiCalc in the late ’70s,” he gushed.

Of course no Dvorak piece would be complete without a pointed jab at something Apple, and he dutifully reported his son’s experience at the Apple Store as something akin to “a car dealership in the ’70s, with layers of various salespeople, each trying to screw you.”

“I actually think that the Apple Stores are barriers to sales, and people only buy Macs because the machines have clearly moved ahead in genuine usefulness,” he wrote, saying, “overall, it’s a pathetic indictment of the entire PC scene.”

Well, perhaps it’s a reach to tar the entire PC scene with the same brush, but clearly change is in the air and more and more people such as Dvorak’s kid are coming around to just how far Apple machines have moved ahead.

It’s at least a bright sign that someone like Dvorak has finally noticed.

If you’re looking for an interesting portal into the iTunes App Store’s 65,000+ titles with as little risk as possible, www.appgiveaway.com may be a resource worth checking out.

The website, which launched this spring and is gaining traffic steadily, posts descriptions of 5 – 8 apps per day in different categories (games, entertainment, utilities, business, etc.) and gives promo codes away randomly to users who register and indicate their interest in particular apps.

The site was originally conceived as a marketing vehicle for app developers, with the enticement for iPhone and iPod Touch users who like the idea of possibly getting a paid app for free.

“We seek out developers and they also find us,” said Al Lijee, an AppGiveAway spokesman, adding, “Developers have been kind and posted us in forums and are linking back to us from their websites.”

Posted apps currently get between 40 – 70 people registering for promo giveaways, Lijee told Cult of Mac, and the site gives away around 30 codes for each app it features.

What it is: Daisy Disk is Mac utility software that, sadly works only on machines running OS 10.5 and later, because it’s the kind of thing that could make you want to investigate your hard disk daily.

Why it’s cool: The interface is just plain awesome. Daisy Disk scans any mounted disk and displays it on a beautiful sunburst map, where segments mean files and folders, and are displayed proportionally to their sizes.

The map is easy to read and navigate and lets you quickly preview any file and reveal it in Finder to delete.

It’s essentially like running the Mac’s built-in disk utility on your volume, but where’s the fun in that?

Where to get it: Download a free 15 day trial version or buy it outright for $19.95 from the secure online Daisy Disk store.

Screenshots after the jump.

[Thanks mustardhamsters]

Download the free Barnes and Noble App (iTunes link) for iPhone or iPod Touch and for a limited time you can get a free Tall iced or hot coffee at any Barnes and Noble cafe, just by showing your device running the app to a cafe server.

Limit one coffee per device.

[Thanks, iphonespaz]

With new rumors about the much anticipated Apple tablet hitting Monday, it seems fair to ask how one is supposed to decode the storms of speculation that have long whirled around the company and its products.

Some thrive on rumor and innuendo about Apple – the largely well-regarded Macrumors attracts over 6 million unique visitors per month, AppleInsider nearly a million – and with Apple’s penchant for absolute secrecy over its design department and product development it’s no surprise whispers and baseless fantasy comprise much of what passes for “news” about Apple.

If Apple really is coming out with a tablet in October, or AT&T really is going to open tethering to the US iPhone market in September (a persistent rumor AT&T continues to deny with respect to both price and timing), does it benefit anyone to know about it now? And if it turns out there is (again) no tablet, or that tethering comes tomorrow for free (you wish), how does that affect the way one is supposed to receive the next rumored news item about what they’re up to in Cupertino?

These questions are one small aspect of the larger debate about the ways news and journalism are changing in the Internet age. Traditional news organizations have been cutting resources for true investigative journalism for years, in favor of selling ads and eyeballs with cheap sensationalism, in part because it often seems that’s what the public wants, but also because it’s easier to publish a rumor than it is to get at the truth or to take time to think about and craft a well-reasoned opinion piece.

Monday’s rumor about the Apple tablet originated with a report at the China Times, which is no tabloid sheet, and appears to be based on information about companies high up in the Apple supply chain that a respectable news organization would be able to source and confirm before printing as news. Do standards of journalistic ethics prevail at major news organizations in Asia? Have budgets for investigative journalism survived the impulse to feed the public’s insatiable desire for knowing what the future holds?

The answer to such questions holds the key to understanding how to receive a report about what Apple has up its sleeve. What you believe comes down to whatever you can know for yourself and who you can trust to tell you the truth. Ultimately, no one really knows until the lights come up at the next Apple “event” – and, after all, anticipation is more intoxicating than feeling you already know what’s coming.

What it is: Pix Remix is a new iPhone app from Bay Area-based Jump Associates and Originate Labs that lets you turn photos – taken with or stored on your iPhone – into slideshows, collages, and interesting pan & zoom presentations — and makes it incredibly easy and intuitive to share them in email or post them to Twitter and Facebook from right within the app.

Why it’s cool: Impressive for an initial release, Pix Remix is loaded with effective tools for personalizing your photo shows, with built-in transitions including fade/dissolve, push, drop and spin out; and the collage function makes it easy to drag, resize and bring photos to the front or back. The pan and zoom function lets you become an instant documentarian, guiding your viewers’ eyes from one spot to another on individual pictures, zooming in to a special detail area. Text can be added to give photos captions or tell a story about your show.

Once you’ve got your photo show together, Pix Remix makes it easy to share in email or to post to your Twitter page or your Facebook profile. Email recipients have the option of viewing your work on a web page or within the Pix Remix app on their iPhone; updates to your Twitter status automatically append a bit.ly url that sends viewers to the Pix Remix web page for your show; shows can be posted directly to your Facebook profile, where your contacts can view your creations right within Facebook, without ever having to leave the site.

Pix Remix is so intuitive and easy to use, I made my first collage and sent it to myself in email while I sat on the porcelain throne in my office during my morning constitutional today!

Where to get it: Pix Remix is available now on the iTunes App Store; it sells for $2.99.

Important Disclosure: Cult of Mac contributor Pete Mortensen is the communications lead at Jump Associates and works in the firm’s growth strategy consulting business. He was involved in the original brainstorming sessions that led to the development of Pix Remix but was in no way affiliated with the writing of this product review, nor did his association with Cult of Mac influence the author’s use of the application or his conclusions regarding its quality or value.

Word Flipper is an addictive, fast-paced word search game for iPhone and iPod Touch that just hit the iTunes App Store with update 1.1 and is bound to generate new buzz with some excellent feature updates.

One user describes it as “Sort of Boggle meets Dance Dance Revolution with a carnival twist!” but it really must be played to be appreciated.

Jamie Grove, Word Flipper’s developer, said, “I wanted to make a game that combined my love of word games with the fast-moving action available on the iPhone/iPod Touch,” which he’s done by incorporating innovative use of the iPhone OS accelerometer.

The new version also incorporates social media functionality, with achievement awards, global leaderboards, and integration with Facebook and Twitter.

Word Flipper (iTunes link) is available now on the App Store and sells for 99¢.

The United States Department of Justice has taken the first baby steps that could eventually lead to an official investigation of the Telecom industry and the effects its exclusive carrier agreements have on consumer prices and choices, according to a Wall Street Journal report Monday.

The initial review looks to determine whether large U.S. telecom companies such as AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. have abused the market power they’ve amassed in recent years, according to people familiar with the matter.

Largely moribund and hamstrung by internal politics and inefficiency during the Bush administration, DOJ under President Barack Obama has seen renewed relevance as an arm of the Federal government and has lately signaled business as usual could soon be ending for an industry left to its own devices during the past decade or more.

Many people have long decried exclusive carrier agreements that make popular gadgets such as Apple’s iPhone available only to consumers willing to sign multi-year service agreements with AT&T and likewise Blackberry’s Storm to those who’d sign with Verizon.

The Wall Street Journal quoted the Justice Department’s antitrust chief, Christine Varney, saying she wants to “reassert the government’s role in policing monopolistic and anti-competitive practices by powerful companies.”

Apple’s iPhone has recently become the most popular camera on Flickr, one of the Internet’s most well-regarded photo sharing social media sites.

Expressed in “percent of members” terms, the iPhone has lately bested two models of Canon’s EOS Digital Rebel, of which the XTi had long been the clear favorite choice of Flickr members.

UPDATE: Since this post was originally published, the Flickr site’s graph has been changed, and now shows the iPhone is the #2 camera among Flickr members, resting just behind the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi, which has apparently enjoyed a bump in popularity for which the previously published graph did not account.

[Thanks Rafael, for the heads-up on the graph change!]

Among popular camera phones, the iPhone has outdistanced its rivals since its release two years ago and recently widened the gap between its nearest competitor, the Nokia N95, by a huge margin.

The data is to be taken with a grain of salt as anecdotal and largely unscientific, but it is interesting to note such graphic evidence of popularity for a phone camera that had been denigrated by many as one of the most pitiable features of Apple’s popular smartphone.

Apple recently upgraded the specs on the iPhone camera, giving it a boost in pixel capacity and adding both variable focus and video capabilities, which should only increase its attractiveness going forward.

What it is: iPlay Music, a Mountain View, CA company, produces music learning software and operates a web-based store in the iTunes mold that just launched an innovative Chords for iTunes app that gives musicians an easy way to synchronize music in an iTunes library with a Quicktime video showing the chords to play along with a particular song.

Why it’s cool: The Chords for iTunes app is a promising tool for learning to play popular songs, whether you are a guitarist or keyboard player, and offers easy to read visual cues to the chords of songs such as Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay, Proud Mary, Refugee, When I Come Around, and more.

At present there are but 26 songs available to download for free, but the iPlayMusic Store offers a host of additional paid downloads that teach everything from 12 Bar Blues to Reggae strumming to Swing and Rock chord formations. The catalog of downloadable lessons is a bit thin in the early going, but many of the basics that underly a strong foundation in musicianship are covered and for those just beginning to learn an instrument, iPlay Music products and services are well worth checking out.

A couple of cool features of the software allow you to slow down a song while remaining in pitch so you can play along at the speed you need to learn the song, and an Export to iPod feature, that allows you to put the lessons on your iPod or iPhone so you can take them with you on the go.

Where to Get It: All the info you need is available on the web at the iPlay Music site. The Chords for iTunes (Beta) app is a free download, and many of the lessons available on the iPlay Music Store are available for free as well.

Most paid content sells for 99¢ and multi-lesson packages and Family Packs can go for up to $29.95.

For all of its public perception as a great censoring overlord, the Chinese government leaves plenty of wiggle room for computer manufacturers, including Apple, to avoid complying with recently mandated strict Internet filtering requirements.

While foreign and domestic makers of computers running Windows will eventually have to ship their machines with controversial Green Dam Youth Escort software, other machines running Mac OS X or Linux, for example, will be exempt from the mandate, according to a report at Yahoo Tech.

An Apple sales representative in Beijing indicated Green Dam is not being bundled with Macs sold at the Apple Store there because the software, which blocks pornography and “sensitive” political content, is not compatible with the Mac’s operating system.

In addition, a Lenovo spokesperson confirmed its computers running Linux are also being shipped without Green Dam and said the Ministry of Industry and Information and Technology is not requiring non-Windows machines to come with the program.

A source connected with Green Dam developers said they are testing the software on non-Windows platforms but did not indicate when or if an OS X compatible update might be released.

Apple now has overall market share leadership in the worldwide smartphone segment, having overtaken former frontrunner Nokia based on browser calls for mobile ads. A recent report at BNet Technology cites AdMob statistics that show Apple with 49 percent of mobile ad traffic in the first quarter of 2009, compared to 32 percent for Nokia.

The market shift may have less to do with customer preferences for Apple’s hardware, however, as a recent smartphone industry analysis from Gartner notes; services and applications have become the primary drivers of smartphone success.

The stats appear to vindicate Apple’s approach to application distribution via the iTunes App Store. William Volk, CEO of entertainment and business apps vendor PlayScreen, said on a professional forum posting that “other stores simply aren’t matching the ARPUs [average revenue per user] of the Apple App store.”

The iPhone OS also enjoys a comfortable lead over every other mobile operating system, including Symbian, Research in Motion (RIM), Palm and Windows, with May numbers showing iPhones had 68% of the browser requests in the survey.