Apple has just announced the winner of the App Store’s 10 billionth download sweepstakes.
The 10 billionth app was downloaded by Gail Davis of Orpington, Kent, UK.
Gail downloaded the free Paper Glider app, netting her a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card.
Congrats Gail!
BTW: Looks like reader @Jack predicted the correct time frame in an earlier post trying to predict when the 10 billionth app would be downloaded.
Apple: Apple’s App Store Downloads Top 10 Billion
Apple’s countdown to the App Store’s 10 billionth download is now over, and the lucky downloader of that 10 billionth app will soon be receiving a $10,000 iTunes gift card.
It’s taken just over two and a half years for the App Store to reach this landmark since its launch in 2008, which is quite remarkable considering it took almost seven years for the iTunes Store to reach the same milestone for music downloads. App downloads have been growing exponentially in the last year. In just January 2010, Apple had sold 3 billion apps. There are more than 300,000 apps available in the App Store; and Apple has sold 160 million iOS devices.
Apple has promised that the lucky winner of that whopping iTunes gift card will soon be announced, and if you think it could be you, keep your eye on the promotional page of Apple’s website.
This is pretty mystifying. 9to5Mac has done some more digging around in the latest iOS 4.3 SDK and found some references to the type of camera sensor the iPad 2 will have. Surprisingly, though, it’s not the 5MP sensor found in the iPhone 4, but instead a much lower resolution camera, most similar to the one in the iPod Touch.
Found in the AVCaptureSession.plist file within the K94 directory is mention of a “Back Facing 1MP Photo” string. K94 is rumored to be the iPad 2’s internal codename.
It’s curious that Apple would chose to go with so few megapixels for the iPad 2. In the latest iPod Touch’s case, the decision to go with a smaller megapixel camera had everything to do with the thinness of the device: the iPod Touch is simply two svelte to fit the iPhone 4’s camera modules into, but with a 0.7MP camera module, they just fit. The iPad 2 is a far thicker device than the iPod Touch, though.
Is Apple just trying to save some money here? Do they not think people will use the iPad 2’s rear camera very much because of the unwieldiness of the tablet form factor? Or, like the iPod Touch, is this an issue of physical footprint?
Images of cheap Chinese iPhone knock-offs leaking out of Asia are one of the most fun things to write about as an Apple blogger. Who is actually stupid enough to buy an iPhome 5G from Orange when what they really want is an iPhone from Apple? Who are these laughably crappy clones aimed at?
According to Nokia, the answer to that question is twenty percent of the global phone buying population.
Referred to as KIRFs, these fake phones are a huge problem for traditional handset makers. In fact, at least one out of every five cellphones sold around the world — primarily in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe — is an illegal or unlicensed clone of a more popular prestige phone… and the actual number may be quite a bit higher.
So next time you see a funny post about the latest iFauxn to come out of Shenzhen, remember: that ridiculous little knock-off and its ilk is probably in just as many pockets around the world as the real iPhone itself.
As it turns out, turning your iPhone 4 transparent is as easy as grabbing yourself a pentalobe Torx screwdriver, opening up your iPhone 4’s chassis and applying paint thinner to the inside of the Gorilla Glass to strip off the black undercoat.
What a great looking mod! Too bad it’s going to wreak havok with your iPhone’s photographs. As you might remember, the white iPhone 4 was delayed because the white inner coating underneath the Gorilla Glass caused light to leak onto the camera sensor, washing out your snapshots… and that all happened with a layer of paint. Imagine how unusable your iPhone 4’s camera will be if the case is totally transparent.
Instagram has become an iPhone photography phenomenon (although not everyone likes it), but like any online community with that many participants, it can be hard to find the really good stuff.
So English developer Elliott Kember has put together Instagre.at, a site that slurps up popular photos from Instagram HQ and spits them out in a very desktop browser friendly way that lets you navigate with your arrow keys.
You can flit left and right through the popular images, but try hitting the down arrow too: it lets you drill into further lists of images using a particular Instagram filter, or by a particular user. Use the up arrow, or the Escape key, to go back to the popular list. Neat stuff.
Gossip rag Valleywag claims Tim Cook is gay. The evidence:
1. He appears to be single, a “lifelong bachelor.”
2. It’s the subject of gossip inside Apple.
2. Two “well-placed sources” say so.
If Cook steps into the CEO role, Apple’s other executives will encourage him to come out, Valleywag says. This would be a good thing for Silicon Valley and for gay rights.
Being gay is certainly no problem here in the San Francisco Bay Area. No one bats an eyelid. But Apple’s other execs are concerned about public perception, Valleywag says. Could it spell trouble for the Apple brand?
Apple’s longtime partner in China may get an iPad 3G, according to a Friday report. Apple in late December 2010 received government certification for a device identified only as “model A1337.” Although the parties refused to comment on the report, the news may point to the iPad.
“Specifications are consistent with the tablet device and because all existing commercial versions of the iPhone — Apple’s only other device that uses cellular networks — are already being sold in China,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
In preparation for the Verizon iPhone, Apple has quietly altered their existing iPhone 4 Bumper Case design to fit both GSM and CDMA versions alike.
US Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot through the head twelve days ago during a Tucson, Arizona rampage that left six dead and thirteen wounded, is now able to stand with assistance… and is using an iPad.
A hacked together media center originally meant to run on the first Microsoft Xbox, XBMC runs pretty much on every platform under the sun these days, including the original Mac OS X-based, Intel x86 AppleTV… so it was probably only a matter of time that it was ported to the second-gen, A4 based model. That time is now!
Steve Jobs has very clearly spelled out his feelings about multitouch on a desktop or laptop environment. Multitouch, in Apple’s view, is meant to be horizontal, not vertical, which is why you will never see a touchscreen iMac or MacBook. The Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad are Apple’s answer to the problem posed by desktop multitouch.
Makes sense to me. That said, the problem with even the Magic Trackpad is that it’s not real multitouch, in the sense that you are not directly interacting with a display with your fingers. Instead, you’re phoning what your fingers are doing to a connected display, the same as any mouse.
That’s clearly not as elegant a solution as Apple would like, so it’s no surprise to me that a new patent application spells out the possibility of a Magic Mouse with either an “OLED or specialized display surface made of collimated optical glass that contains a unique magnifying capability.”
Some insight is emerging as to what Apple product (hardware, software, or media) is earning the most bucks. Turns out, at the core of success for the Cupertino, Calif. company might be software. Earlier this week, Apple announced its iOS-powered triumvirate — iPhone, iPad and iPod touch — comprised 65 percent of the $17.3 billion in the last-quarter revenue.
Additionally, sale of Mac OSX products accounted for 20 percent of all sales. Combine those two with sales of the Mac OSX software and the various App Store products and 90 percent of Apple revenue is coming from software, according to analyst Horace Dediu of Asymco.
Master storyteller Mike Daisey takes to the stage in a one-man show about Apple founder Steve Jobs debuting in Berkeley.
Titled “The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” the monologue will likely have a new resonance since Jobs announced his medical leave from the Cupertino company January 17.
“It is almost impossible to imagine Apple without him, and there’s a palpable sense of loss and change as the tech industry struggles to know what this will mean for its future,” Daisey wrote on his blog after the announcement.
In addition to being “obsessed” with Apple, Daisey is his known for talking intelligently about tech on stage, from his monologue on Nikola Tesla called “Monopoly!” to recounting his own stint in the customer service trenches at Amazon.com in “21 Dog Years.”
The show launches Sunday, January 23 and runs through February 27 at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
We’ll be talking with Daisey and attending the show, so look for that interview and a review in the next few days.
From BBC One and The One Ronnie Show comes this delightful spoof poking fun at the challenges of all those fruit themed devices in our lives these days. A lighthearted dose in true Python’esque fashion – lest we take our tech too seriously!
It’s not bad. Don’t miss the YouTube comments. Here’s a typical sample:
I can’t wait!!!!!! Finally!!!! iPhone on Verizon!!!!!
I get to dump my crapass Android piece of poop for a real smartphone!
yay
The senseless attack on a Tucson, Ariz. political rally for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords two weeks ago has had many secondary effects: a million accusations from both sides of the political aisle accusing the other side of bearing some culpability or seeking some advantage; calls for some measure of weapons control from both the right and left (including by Dick Cheney); and, most signifcantly, eloquent and sincere memorials from across the country.
And, though this is a small thing in the larger scheme of things, I find downright moving the fact that part of Rep. Giffords’s remarkable recovery has been flipping through family photos on an iPad with her husband.That’s a heart-rending scene if I’ve ever heard of one.
It might be sappy to say, but I genuinely feel it’s an endorsement of the view of technology that Apple has been championing from the start. Why should computing be made as simple and intuitive as humanly possible? To let the maximum number of people possible use them.
And that means a public official and wife brutally cut down in broad daylight can touch a magic window and see her family. Technology can’t aspire to higher aims. Our best wishes to Rep. Giffords and the other survivors of the Tucson attack for their continued speedy recoveries.
USA Today: Gabrielle Giffords stands with help for first time
Your vintage Macintosh Plus might not get a lot of playtime anymore now that you’ve got an iMac and a new MacBook Air, but there’s no reason it can’t still be a valuable part of your home Mac office… as long as you’re willing to do a little bit of hacking.
Over at Macenstein, hacker Dean Gray talks about how he took his old 1986 Macintosh Plus 1MB and turned it into a working Time Machine server… about as pitch perfect a use for an old Mac as I can think of.
According to Dean, the hack was pretty easy: he just ripped out the innards and filled it with six different hard drives equaling 2.3TB of space total. An Intel Atom motherboard ties those drives together, and since he couldn’t find a display that fit, Dean decided to install a 10.4-inch digital picture frame instead.
Too bad: if Dean had found a display of the right size, he could have had a vintage Macintosh Plus emulator running full-screen all the time, while the Time Machine server quietly backed up his data in the background. Maybe this would work, Dean?
One of the most irritating things about upgrading your version of iOS as a jailbreaker is losing all of the Cydia tweaks you’ve installed. Even if you re-jailbreak the next version of iOS, there’s no easy way to re-download and install all of your favorite apps and tweaks… especially if you’ve been grabbing them from third-party repositories.
Luckily, that seems like that’s about to change. Cydia’s newest feature allows you to re-download all of your apps easily in case you have to wipe and restore your device through the “Manage Account” section, which lets you keep track of your packages and app purchases through a Google or Facebook account.
Surely, there will be some who won’t entirely be comfortable handing over their Facebook or Google login details to a bunch of jailbreakers, but I just can’t wait to if it means I never have to find and download 5 Icon Dock again.
T-Mobile has hinted it may be the third U.S. wireless carrier to get the iPhone.
“Ask Apple,” said T-Mobile executives when asked whether it was getting the iPhone 4 at a press conference in New York today, according to Electronista.
Though neither confirming or denying, T-Mobile’s answer suggests that talks between the carrier and Apple are ongoing. Verizon used similar language in the run up to its announcement that it would be carrying the iPhone.
One issue that T-Mobile did discuss was the readiness of the iPhone’s radio chips. To work on T-Mobile’s network, the iPhone would have to support the 1,700MHz 3G band.
T-Mobile president Philipp Humm said while the current iPhone isn’t compatible with T-Mobile’s network, future 3G chips would support more cellular frequencies.
“We’re not part of the [iPhone] chipset today,” president Philipp Humm said. “But we have chipsets which support five, or up to 10 spectrum bands in the market, so we should expect there will be more degrees of freedom going forward.”
T-Mobile may be eyeing the iPhone 5, which is rumored to have a dual-mode chipset from Qualcomm with both CDMA and GSM. If it includes both 850MHz and 1,700MHz, Apple could produce a single phone that works on almost all carriers.
The great iPad 2 screen resolution debate rages on, this time with a downer rumor from Digg’s Kevin Rose.
There will be no change in the iPad 2’s screen resolution, said Rose on Twitter, citing his “iPad source.” (The tweet seems to have disappeared, but Rose posted a screenshot of his IM on Instagram).
Rose, of course, has a spotty record when it comes to predictions. Less than two week’s ago, he was saying it would have a Retina Display. The news is sure to a bummer for those of us holding out for a Retina Display, or something close.
Behold TankBot, a nifty little robot you can control with your iPhone, iPod or iPad.
Plug in the dongle and you can use your iDevice to control TankBot as it navigates, roams and clears obstacles. Then charge it up with a USB cable instead of batteries, a 30-minute charge gets you 15-minutes of over-hill-and-dale action.
Perhaps the best part: the price should hover somewhere under $20.
Desk Pets International brought it out at the New York Toy Fair, it’ll be in stores sometime this year. They are touting it as the first cheap robot toy that fully integrates with Apple devices.
All I know is that every year, I pretend to buy something for a nephew when it’s really for me. TankBot is going on the nephew wish list.
Via Gizmo Watch
Before Tuesday’s Q1 2011 earnings call, Fortune issued a score card ranking various analysts’ predictions (both pro and amateuralike) on how Apple would do this quarter
Now the results are in, and across the board, the amateurs did far better predicting Apple’s results than the professionals at the brokering houses and banks.
It’s not even close, either. Once ranked, the bottom twenty spots in scorecard accuracy all go to professionals being paid for their insight and accuracy. On average, progessionals were off by a 9.04% margin. Meanwhile, nine out of the ten amateurs made the top ten, and overall were only over by a little under 4%.
Jeez. And to think we bailed out these bozos. Based upon these results, it looks like the average investor would be better off cracking open a blog than employing a pro.
Another intriguing fossil unearthed from the second iOS 4.3 beta is the mention of two new services called Media Stream and Photo Stream, which 9 to 5 Mac’s Marc Gurman speculates is meant to be just one more element of an eventual Apple-run social network which will debut in iOS 5.
If you for whatever reason doubted that the next iPad would be FaceTime compatible, a new screenshot found inside the latest iOS 4.3 beta gives stronger indication than ever that there will be both front and rear-facing cameras in the iPad 2.