An obstacle blocking some publishers adopting the iPad may be just a minor issue, if a compromise offered by Apple is accepted. The Cupertino, Calif. company is now telling publishers they can send subscribers to a newspaper or magazine web site, so long as customers are given the option to sign-up through iTunes.
“Apple is basically saying, ‘Let the subscriber decide,’ knowing full well they will choose iTunes. After all, it’s simply easier for consumers to subscribe to digital publications from one place,” according to TechCrunch, citing unnamed sources.
Thanks to the massive headache of Antennagate, Consumer Reports famously felt that it could not recommend the iPhone 4 to its readers… an approbation that, as we all know, tanked Apple stock, prompted Cupertino to dump unsold iPhones by the millions into an Arizona landfill and ultimately led to Apple’s enthusiastic embrace of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating system.
I kid. As you know, none of that happened, and the iPhone 4 is the best selling iPhone yet. But I’m sure you’re wondering what Consumer Reports thinks of the Verizon iPhone 4, right?
Well, as it turns out, they like it, with Consumer Reports’ Mike Gikas claiming that “key technical differences” separates the Verizon iPhone from the AT&T iPhone.
Color me pretty shocked with this pronouncement, considering the fact that the Verizon iPhone suffers from many of the same attenuation issues as the AT&T iPhone. Charitably, the issue may simply be that Consumer Reports is willing to recommend the Verizon iPhone despite much of the same hardware design thanks to the strength of the Verizon network… but could it also be that, despite their principled stand on the matter earlier, after eight months Consumer Reports has decided that the so-called “death grip” isn’t really a big deal after all the page views have stopped flowing in?
TUAW has just posted a rather interesting theory about what will happen to the original iPad once the iPad 2 is released in the next few months: they suggest that the iPad will be handled more like the iPhone than the Mac, and the previous generation iPad will still be sold for another year as the “budget” model, similar to the way the iPhone 3GS is still sold by AT&T as the sub-$100 iPhone.
Under this theory, the iPad range might start at a $399 price point for the original iPad with WiFi. It’s an intriguing thought, but I tend to doubt it, for one reason: Apple selling the previous gen iPhone as a budget model has more to do with the carriers than Apple itself.
Yet another Wall Street analyst has weighed in with a prediction on sales of Verizon’s iPhone, which becomes available to everyone Thursday. Apple and Verizon will top the 1 million mark during the first week, RBC Capital Markets’ Mike Abramsky told investors Wednesday.
Despite the iPhone 4 being available for 8 months with AT&T, the Verizon launch could threaten Apple’s estimated 1 million to 1.5 million unit initial inventory, the analyst warned. Between 3 million and 4 million iPhone 4 handsets will be sold by Verizon and its partners during the first quarter after the units become available, Abramsky adds.
What better way to bide your time waiting for that institutionally late Amtrak than loitering in an Apple Store? Such seems to be the thinking in Cupertino, as sources now indicate that Apple wants to open a brand new Apple Store right in the heard of New York City’s Grand Cental Terminal.
Microsoft’s long belated response to the iPhone finally arrived in October with the launch of Windows Phone 7, but despite being an admittedly great modern day mobile operating system, it’s not doing so great in retail, so far only selling two million licenses to OEMs, with even less actual phones getting into end user’s hands.
Microsoft thinks it needs to do better to retake the smartphone market from the likes of Google and Apple, and now they’re shuffling around the upper management in the hopes that an internal restructuring will help them take Cupertino on.
Congressman Markey just wrote a letter to the FTC, asking them to investigate apps where “Smurfs and snowflakes and zoos (act) as online ATMs pulling money from the pockets of unsuspecting parents.”
So: whose responsibility is it?
Apple, who approves the games in the store and takes a 30% cut from the sales — at least those sales where parents don’t complain and get a refund?
Parents, who aren’t vigilant enough about disabling in-app purchases — and checking every time the tot gets their hands on an iDevice to play to make sure that it is, in fact, disabled?
Game devs who created a mechanism for that has been described as “credit card bait?”
Let us know why you think Apple should or should not allow these apps in the comments.
See this iPad? It’s a hit-and-park casualty, gunned down in its prime by the treaded wheels (both front and back) of a Chrysler PT Cruiser, a car so heavy that even the standard Apple case was not enough to prevent it from being smashed nearly to smithereens.
But god bless Gorilla Glass and Apple’s fine craftsmanship, because unbelievably, this iPad still works, from multitouch down right to the marrow of its accelerometers. What a champ.
Of course, how “functional” this is depends a lot on how you feel about dragging your finger across a planar surface comprised of thousands of tightly packed, razor sharp glass shards. Does multitouch still work when you’ve scraped your pointing digit down to just a protruding bit of skeleton?
Free-App Hero is a clever tracker for good quality free games on the iOS App Store. Note the use of the words “good quality” there; Free-App Hero has an editorial team that’s fussy, and cares about the recommendations it makes.
So they won’t recommend rubbish games, or ad-supported games, or games that start good but get worse, or games that claim to be free but turn out to be useless without an in-app purchase.
All they’re interested in is finding the good free stuff, and passing it on to you.
Free-App Hero isn’t free, but neither is it expensive. And if you really don’t want to pay for it, the Cheapskate Edition is just as effective.
As a direct result of downloading Free-App Hero, I’m now completely obsessed with King of Tennis, which is probably the most bonkers game I’ve ever seen. Great fun, though. And that’s what Free-App Hero is all about; delivering fun.
A US congressman wrote to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requesting more information about possible consumer protection issues related to “in-app” purchases — such as kiddy game “Smurf’s Village” we’ve been talking about for months.
Spurred on by a Washington Post article (what, he doesn’t religiously read Cult of Mac?) Congressman Edward J. Markey, a senior member and former chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee’s Communications, Technology and the Internet Subcommittee, fired off a few thoughts on the games that target young children.
An excerpt from Markey’s letter:
“I am disturbed by news that in-app purchases may be taking advantage of children’s lack of understanding when it comes to money and what it means to ‘buy’ an imaginary game piece on the Web. Companies shouldn’t be able to use Smurfs and snowflakes and zoos as online ATMs pulling money from the pockets of unsuspecting parents. The use of mobile apps will continue to escalate, which is why it is critical that more is done now to examine these practices. I will continue to closely monitor this issue and look forward to the FTC’s response.”
Is embattled cell phone pioneer Nokia preparing to join the wave of Android followers? Some see such a move a distinct possibility following a candid memo by Nokia CEO Stephan Elop to employees. In the internal message, Elop admits Apple changed the smartphone landscape and the Finnish mobile phone maker must either join or create smartphone eco-system.
“Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we wither build, catalyze or join an ecosystem,” Elop wrote.
Might be time to get rid of this vector for security exploits, yeah? Photo: Adobe
Back in December, Adobe pushed out the first beta of version 10.2 of their notorious Flash Player for Mac… a plugin that is so notoriously demanding on battery life that merely installing it can drain the maximum capacity of a laptop battery by over an hour. now it’s available in a final version.
The big advance in Flash Player 10.2 is functionality called Stage Video that offloads almost all of the rendering of high-performance videos to the GPU, using “just over 0 percent CPU usage.” Stage Video should have a noticeable effect on battery life and snappiness, and if you can’t get along with Flash on your Mac notebook, Stage Video support alone makes this an easy upgrade to recommend.
Well, it will make it one, eventually. Right now, not all content providers have enabled Stage Video APIs in their system, and until they do, Flash Player needs to rely on the CPU to process their video. Also, considering that most of the battery drain attributed to Flash on the likes of a MacBook Air come from advertising and site elements as opposed to a playing YouTube video, it’s unlikely that Stage Video will really make a difference in the short term for many users.
Either way, though, Flash Player 10.2 should bring a significant performance increase to the machines of many users, with Adobe citing their two-year old test Mac Mini being able to run full 1080p content with a CPU load of under 8 percent. That’s pretty good performance for one of software’s most notoriously resource hogs.
Despite having a brand new antenna, the Verizon iPhone 4 also has antenna issues when held in a “Death Hug,” iLounge has discovered.
The “Death Hug” is when the phone is cupped by both hands and held in landscape orientation — not exactly normal. Still, iLounge found it slows both cellular and WiFi reception when loading web pages. But as Steve Jobs pointed out in response to the original Antennagate controversy, holding any smartphone in your hands degrades the signal to some extent.
This doesn’t look like Antennagate redux. We can’t see the VZW Death Hug turning into another PR headache for Apple.
So how are things going over on the Mac App Store? What are developers noticing when their apps first go on sale there?
Marzban Cooper, one of the team behind zen word processor OmmWriter, spoke to Cult of Mac today with some interesting observations about the transition to the Store, and its effect on sales.
His only wish? That there was a similar store for Windows, so he could do the same with the forthcoming Windows version of the application.
I recently was surprised to find a Google Chrome netbook waiting at the door for me. I had requested one through the Cr-48 pilot program when it was announced last year but was not counting on getting one. I am a power Google Apps user and use everything from Calendar to Latitude to Chrome. So far I love it and here are some of the features the Cr-48 has that Apple should employ into their future laptops:
After consistently undervaluing Apple, Wall St. analysts are now saying the company should be the most valuable company on Earth.
At least five firms Wall St. have upped their 12-month forecasts to an average of $467, putting Apple’s market cap at $433.7 billion, way past Exxon Mobil’s $423.2 billion.
Apple’s stock hit a new all-time high today of $355.12, valuing it at $326.6 billion. The biggest bull on Apple’s stock, Ticonderoga Securities, says it’s going to $550 thanks to future sales in China.
If you seek a stark picture of the smartphone landscape, look no further than this graph (above) released by Asymco analyst Horace Dediu. Never mind the RIMs and the Nokia’s, the battle is down to two players: Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. The two platforms, each around two years, collectively have 50.2 percent of the market.
“The conquerors came with new business models and a focus on computing not telephony,” Dediu writes Tuesday. As a result the two companies have led “the most competitive technology market on the planet.”
Developers of an iPhone game called “Smuggle Truck” are already drawing fire – and free publicity – for a game that has not yet been approved by Apple.
The full title of the game from Boston company Owlchemy Labs is “Smuggle Truck: Operation Immigration.”
In it, players navigate through what looks like the U.S.-Mexican border. As the truck drives over cliffs, mountains and dead animals, immigrants fall off the truck bed. Scores are calculated by the number of immigrants helped into the U.S.
Remember the heady days of music sales, when Apple beat the stuffing out of traditional music labels, even besting retail giant Wal-Mart as the No. 1 seller of music? Well, the Cupertino, Calif. company still leads, but the growth of music is slowing and appears to be giving way to video.
Revenue from digital music sales for the last three months of 2010 were up just 1.6 percent for Apple, falling 5 percent from the previous quarter, according to a Tuesday report. Although Apple’s digital music sales are slowing, Warner Music Group appears even further along the S-Curve; the publisher’s last quarter sales fell 14 percent, the company announced. For Apple, the next thing is digital video, where one research firm says the tech giant controls almost 65 percent of the sales.
Apple just delivered a small but welcome tweak to the Mac App Store: a window that pops up when you click “Purchase” next to an app, asking you to confirm your decision.
Depending on whether or not, like me, you’ve accidentally bought a $50 piece of software on the Mac App Store through the errant click, you’ll find this either a welcome prophylactic against your own casual stupidity, or an irritant that doubles the clicking required to actually get the app you want.
Unfortunately, if it’s the latter for you, the Mac App Store doesn’t allow you to toggle the purchase confirmation off, as in the iOS App Store, so you’ll just have to live with the redundancy for now.
If you’re on an iOS device, today’s Google logo is pretty neat. Simulating the brass-plated portcullises of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus in order to celebrate Jules Verne’s birthday, the logo will read your iPhone or iPad’s accelerometer and slosh around the subaquatic view accordingly.
If you’re on a laptop or a device without an accelerometer, no problem: a handy joystick next to the logo will simulate the effect.
Evidence continues to mount that Apple will release the next refresh of the MacBook Pro line soon, with Best Buy’s internal inventory system already showing a new 13-inch MacBook Pro for $1199 that will be in stock come March 11th.
If Best Buy’s inventory is accurate, it further stresses the likelihood that the new MacBook Pros will use Intel’s dual-core Sandy Bridge chips, which are due to start shipping on February 20th.
Intel’s Sandy Bridge architecture promises faster performance in both computing and integrated graphics power, all the while maximizing power efficiency. It is the successor to Intel’s Arrandale mobile processor line, which Apple failed to adopt for the last MacBook refresh, instead depending upon the aging Core 2 Duo processor.
It is unknown what other changes the new MacBook Pros will integrate, but given Tim Cook’s comments that the MacBook Air is the future of the MacBook line, a slimmer footprint, SSD options and instant-on ability seem like the most reasonable guesses. What are your predictions?
Verizon Wireless may have sold 500,000 iPhones on the first day the Apple handset became available on Feb. 3, a JPMorgan analyst told investors Tuesday. The estimate is based on the carrier’s statement it had sold more iPhones in the first two hours than were sold on any of its previous first day events.
Analyst Phil Cusick said Verizon’s previous one-day sales record was when Google’s Droid handset became available in 2009. If Cusick’s estimate is correct, Apple is on path to break its previous first weekend sales record of 1 million sales set with the last two iPhone versions.
In just four months, Instagram has already pooled together a user base of over two million daguerro-hipsters, who are now responsible for uploading up to 300,000 photos a day. That’s a success by anyone’s measure, so it’s no surprise that Instagram is looking to keep their momentum going by expanding in interesting ways.
In a blog post, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom explains how the company intends to grow: by opening up the site to other developers and let them hook into the Instagram ecosystem thanks to a new API.
