Partially hidden by the fantastic iPhone sales numbers Tuesday was the fact that Apple outsold RIM’s BlackBerry during the third quarter. Analysts say the information may serve as a roadmap for Apple.
Tuesday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said 6.9 million iPhones during the quarter. RIM sold 6.1 million BlackBerries during the same period, according to reports.
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“Apple sells to a much wider audience than RIM,” Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney told Cult of Mac. Apple’s iPhone 3G is sold in 51 nations.
Cool your jets. That’s the advice from analysts on a flurry of conjecture about whether Apple is stealthily testing online some mix of iPhone and MacBook.
What sparked the talk was a brief mention in the New York Times that an unnamed search engine found in its logs an unannounced Apple device with a display size between an iPhone and a MacBook.
Lending further weight to the suggestion were comments by CEO Steve Jobs that the Cupertino, Calif. company “had some pretty interesting” ideas for the netbook or mini-notebook market.
It’s easy to think that software developers spend all their time furiously typing code, but that’s not the case at all.
Rory Prior, developer of nifty photo gallery app Instant Gallery, recently published a little PDF booklet showing off some of the design work he has put into his software over the years. Tucked inside it – and also revealed on this blog post of his – were some pen-and-paper sketches of software idea in progress.
The blog post shows how work is progressing on Rory’s iKanji app for the iPhone. There’s some much older work (not just sketches, but also mockups and early application designs) in the booklet.
This is a rarely seen side of software development, and one that deserves a little more limelight, I think.
Proving yet again that it pays to shop around, at least two recently-released apps are offering broadly the same functionality. One is free; the other is free (with adverts) or costs three bucks. But which is the better option?
iPhones could be a big part of the changes coming to Washington, DC in the post-George W. Bush era if a House Chief Administrative Office (CAO) test deems them suitable for use by members of congress and their staffs.
At the request of a number of congressional representatives, the CAO has begun testing a small number of iPhones within its ranks to see if they are compatible with the working needs of lawmakers and staff, according to a report at the Hill.com.
RIM’s Blacberry handhelds have been the communicator of choice in Washington since 2001 and today nearly 8,200 rely on a dedicated Blackberry exchange server to deliver email to people affiliated with the House of Representatives. “We’re trying [iPhones] out … because we heard a lot of people wanted the option to have them,” said Jeff Ventura, a spokesman for the CAO.
Should the iPhone become widely adopted after congress reconvenes in January, it will require costly investments including a new email server, in addition to the handsets themselves, funds for which would be required to come from the Member’s Representational Allowance, which is a government term for “paid for by taxpayers.”
Senior executives from Intel yesterday called Apple’s bet on ARM chipset technology for its mobile phone platform “not very smart.”
Pankaj Kedia, director of ecosystems for Intel’s ultra-mobility group told attendees at the Intel Developers Forum in Taiwan, “I know what their roadmap is, I know where they’re going and I’m not worried.”
Kedi appeared with Shane Wall, Intel mobility group VP and director of strategic planning, who said iPhone “struggles” running any application that “requires any sort of horsepower at all.” Their comments came on a day when Apple reported 4Q earnings and, in particular, sales of the iPhone roundly acknowledged as a “home run.”
Kedia tarred the entire smartphone market with the same brush, saying reliance on ARM technology makes “”the smartphone of today … not very smart.”
Of course Intel has a dog in this fight, as the chipmaker is known to be working on a mobility chipset of its own, known as Moorestown, and is likely feeling left out of Apple’s earnings party, having been rebuffed by the company’s purchase of P.A. Semi and its decision to develop iPhone ARM chips in-house.
Wall brushed off the success of the iPhone as a phenomenon combining clever UI and Steve Jobs’ knack for hype.
Claiming Intel processors achieve two to three times the performance of ARM equivalents, Wall said “”If you want to run full internet [on a mobile platform], you’re going to have to run an Intel-based architecture.”
For his part, Jobs joined an Apple earnings call yesterday for the first time since 2000 to celebrate the company’s success with the iPhone, telling those who wonder when Apple will start selling a less-expensive “netbook” computer that the iPhone is already leading that nascent market segment. He also said his company “had some pretty interesting” ideas if the category continues to evolve.
And so, the gauntlet in the mobile platform war appears to have been thrown. Let the chips fall where they may.
Citi Wednesday cut its target price for Apple to $153 from $170, joining several other analyst firms reducing Apple share price while advising investors the Cupertino company remains a good buy.
“We believe this is an attractive opportunity to buy a leading technology innovator on sale,” analyst Richard Gardner told clients Wednesday.
Although the financial firm reduced estimates for fiscal 2009 through fiscal 2010, Citi maintained a “Buy” rating for Apple shares.
If you’ve not heard of James Thomson, he’s the chap behind advanced launcher DragThing and high-powered Mac calculator app PCalc. Seeing as iPhone’s calculator is a bit lacking, Thomson created PCalc for iPhone (which you can buy by clicking here), pictured above, and sales were swift.
However, on his blog, Thomson reported yesterday that PCalc 1.1 almost vanished without a trace. The reason? Apple had changed the way applications were displayed on the App Store, listing them by original release date rather than the date of the most recent update. Consequently, PCalc 1.1 languished on the last page of the Utilities section, since it was released very early on in the App Store’s history. Sales of the update, unsurprisingly, weren’t exactly speedy.
At the time of writing, PCalc now sits on page 4 of the Utilities section, with Thomson having manually changed the ‘Availability Date’ in iTunes Connect. “So, is this behaviour a bug, a loophole, or how it’s actually supposed to work?,” asks Thomson, noting that those who aren’t aware of this undocumented ‘trick’ are effectively being penalized in the listings.
This episode raises obvious questions. Is there a general misunderstanding regarding how application updates should be dated for their position in the ‘release date’ sort order? Or is Apple already sick of developers trying to regularly bump their apps to the top of the pile via tiny incremental updates, and therefore made changes that caught the likes of PCalc in the blast?
We very much hope the former is the case. It would be terrible if the ‘Availability Date’ fix is a loophole that Apple’s going to close. After all, if you’ve spent lots of time working on an application, what incentive do you have to fix bugs and add features if your creation will forever sit abandoned and forgotten, dozens of clicks away from the front door?
Apple blew past analyst expectations, reporting Tuesday it sold 6.9 million iPhones for the quarter ended Sept. 30. Despite outselling RIM, the stock target price was cut Wednesday by one financial expert.
In a long-awaited pronouncement of Apple’s financial health, the company announced a 35 percent jump in revenue, posting $7.9 billion for the quarter, up from $6.2 billion for the same quarter in 2007.
If there’s one thing you can admire in software developers who rip off other people’s ideas, it’s honesty about what they’re doing.
In building WrongRoom, Joseph Lyman has created something modeled on the longstanding best-in-class full screen editor, WriteRoom. It’s his first OS X app, so we should be gentle: but at least he’s up front about why he made something that’s been made before:
“WrongRoom: A shoddy freeware clone of a perfectly good program”
He even encourages anyone who downloads WrongRoom to go and buy a license for WriteRoom. And he’s right. WriteRoom is a much better app with many more features. WrongRoom offers vaguely similar functionality, but it’s just … well, wrong. Even the icon’s a little wonky.
Top marks to Joseph for being so upfront about it, though.
Paramount Digital Entertainment has revived the School of Rock brand with an application that teaches you principles of music education on your iPhone or iPod Touch.
The 2003 movie starring Jack Black tells the story of a struggling musician who scams a job teaching at an upper-crust private high school and ends up teaching the kids how to form a band and play rock music. The app gives users the opportunity to experiment with a variety of authentic virtual instruments ranging from guitar and bass to piano and drums. Users can also learn to play tracks from legendary artists including Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Scorpions and Royal.
The $6.99 app is organized as a game that incorporates features allowing players to explore the history and diversity of music and instruments through a series of quizzes and challenges. Players are challenged to identify brand-name guitars and keyboards using “axes” from well known musicians, receive instruction in the areas of melody, harmony, rhythm, tempo and beats, and have the ability to record and play back jam sessions.
As the game progresses, the songs and variations become more challenging, allowing players to master instruments, advance to different levels and accumulate points that eventually result in graduation from The School of Rock. Groupies and backup singers not included.
This is one of those ideas that hits you like a bucket of wallpaper paste, and you think “Why on earth did no-one think of that before?”
Choosy is a utility for anyone who uses multiple browsers and wants to open certain links in certain browsers under certain circumstances. Web developers will know what I mean, but there’s something in this for normal people, too.
For example, if you’ve created any stand-alone webapps using Fluid, you might want to open some links in one or more of those apps. Say you’ve got a Fluid app for your Google Docs. When an email arrives with a link to a shared document, Choosy will let you open it in the right Fluid-created app, not in your default browser.
I suspect developer George Brocklehurst might be a name to keep an eye on in future. What’s the next smart idea up his sleeve? Watch out for more bucket-of-wallpaper-paste moments.
AppLoop released a program today that turns any web content into a native iPhone app in under two minutes.
Because many websites are produced by people with few to no developers’ skills and because the iPhone does not store web content locally on the device, developers at AppLoop sensed the need for a way to let content providers do a better job of extending their material to mobile platform users.
Enter the Mobile Application Generator, which converts any RSS feed into a brandable mobile application in less than two minutes. It requires no programming, software downloads, or code maintenance – AppLoop does the nerdy stuff. For free.
Along with generating a fully brandable native app for you – you customize the appearance of the application and include your own logos and color schemes in the set-up process – AppLoop provides an end-to-end analytics library so you can track real-time usage, popular content, and application engagement across various platforms.
Native applications will eventually be deployed across multiple mobile platforms, though Apple’s is the only one operational at present. The company expects to be distributing to Android soon.
Creating a native app allows users to access content regardless of internet connection availability. Images, text, and other data are stored locally for access at any time. Users can also share and promote content on a variety of social services, including Digg, Twitter, FaceBook, and Email, as well as mark items as favorites for later access to read and share with friends. The company envisions support for multiple feeds within the same application in the near future, so larger websites can have different categories and a more customizable user experience.
Designers at FullSIX have a handy little website where you can post your recommended fixes to the iPhone, a resource the company created as “a technological ode to our favorite phone.”
At this writing, 99 total wishes have garnered almost 5000 votes and 1 wish has been granted by the Firmware Update gods.
You can add your own wish(es) to the list, at the top of which resides (not surprisingly) “cut and paste,” or simply add your vote to one of the wishes listed.
Boxee announced product upgrades today giving users of its Mac-Ubuntu-AppleTV media center application seamless integration with Hulu and CBS.com offerings through the Boxee interface.
Making a bid for wider recognition of its product at CEA i-Stage in Las Vegas, Boxee is preparing to move from the invitation-only Alpha stage into beta release of a service that aims “to bring all your entertainment into one place.” The company plans to send out 10,000 invitations to its final Alpha release today.
Be sure to watch the video embedded above for a good overview of what Boxee is all about, and check out the Techzilla Boxee Review we posted a few weeks ago.
On the eve of the release of Apple’s fourth quarter results, one analyst firm suggests the number to watch is how many Macs were sold during the period ended Sept. 30.
Piper Jaffray offered clients predictions that were slightly more optimistic than the Wall Street consensus. Mac sales are “key” to Cupertino’s financial picture, according to the analysts.
In a note to investors, the financial firm predicted 2.8 million Macs were sold during the fourth quarter. The estimate expands on a 2.7 million Wall Street projection.
Will Motorola’s Android handset pose a greater threat to the iPhone, improving on the G1, the first Google phone from HTC and T-Mobile? That’s the question on many minds as details of Moto’s open-source phone appeared Monday.
Motorola’s Android unit, not expected until late 2009, reportedly sports many features missing from the G1, offering improved specs, according to Monday’s BusinessWeek.
Citing information distributed to carriers, the financial news source said the Motorola device appears to be “a higher-end version” of the G1, produced by Taiwan’s HTC.
Given the title, there had to be some Apple action in this teen flick revolving around mix-CDs, break-up mix-ups and all-night quest in Manhattan for a band called Where’s Fluffy?
Norah (Kat Dennings) discovers something in common with Nick (Michael Cera) by scrolling through his iPod.
She declares: “You’re, literally, like, my musical soulmate.”
The line has sparked off a debate about whether personality is really defined by playlist.
The iconic HOPE poster of Barack Obama by the artist Sheppard Fairey has inspired a slew of knockoffs and imitators, many of which have been collected at Rene Wanner’s poster page.
I took a shot at it using a widely known Steve Jobs portrait and the how-to tutorial from Vectortuts, and invite Cult of Mac readers to do the same.
Send us your Fairey treatments of Jobs, or Jony Ive, Phil Schiller, Tim Cook or any of your favorite Apple luminaries, and we’ll feature the best here on the site.
To kick start your inspiration, here’s a gallery of some we like from Wanner’s page:
Steve Jobs' health is a topic of concern for the Apple community -- and for Wall Street. Photo: Apple
In the Cold War era, a cottage industry was created around determining the geopolitical significance of Khrushchev or Brezhnev not appearing at the May Day reviewing stand. For silicon valley, it is Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Tuesday’s new product announcement.
Was Tuesday’s announcement of new MacBooks a cryptic message to investors worried about Jobs’ health? We all remember the dive Apple’s stock took when a rumor (which turned out to be false) spread that the Apple leader had been rushed to the hospital for heart trouble.
So, when Jobs shared the stage with Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook and Senior Vice-President of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive, speculation began that Apple was sending a message to Wall Street: don’t worry, we have a plan.
Bubble Telescope, by Ciro Marchetti Epilogue, by Chet Phillips
Digital artists of all backgrounds are invited to submit original works of art created or enhanced using Mac hardware or software tools for a chance to be exhibited at the Macworld Conference & Expo January 5 – 9, 2009. Thirty selected images will be displayed to thousands of Macworld attendees at San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center and will also be presented in the Digital Art Gallery section of the Macworld Conference & Expo website.
All submissions will be reviewed by a distinguished panel of industry luminaries including: Rudolf Frieling, Media Arts Curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder; Pop artist icon Peter Max; and Nathan Moroney, Principal Scientist, HP Labs. Judges will determine the top thirty works to be showcased during the event.
Artists must be 18 years of age or older, and must reside in the United States. There is a $20.00 entry fee and a 3-image submission limit. Each winning image will be printed on the new HP Designjet Z3200 Photo Printer for exhibition in the conference hall. The deadline to enter is Friday, October 31, 2008.
Early reviews on Google’s Android smartphone indicate the Mountain View-based company may not knock Apple’s iPhone out of the ring, but Blackberry could soon look like an afterthought.
Walt Mossberg, the Dean of Technology writers, says Android is in the same class as iPhone, but allows the two devices will probably attract different types of users. For him, the physical keyboard is the notable differentiator, but he finds the T-Mobile G1 – Android’s lead-off batter, set to debut October 22nd – “only fair…with keys that are too flat and that can be hard to see in bright light.” Mossberg says the G1’s touch interface is “slick, clever…fast and smooth” and provides “much more flexibility in organizing your desktop than on the iPhone,” and he notes it includes some key features omitted on the Apple phone. The G1’s limited copy and paste functionality, and the ability to send photos via MMS may not convert the Apple faithful, but unlike AT&T, T-Mobile will allow users to legally unlock the phone after 90 days and start using it on another carrier, with a hefty early-termination fee.
Rachel Metz, writing for Associated Press, says the Android is “smart” but it needs work. She found the phone’s built-in support for YouTube “underwhelming” and complains that video and song playback is hampered by “a major hardware shortcoming”: no standard headphone jack. The G1’s earbud headset plugs into the same mini USB port used to charge the phone, which poses several problems for Metz, “as you can’t use your favorite headphones without an adapter and it’s impossible to charge the G1 while listening to music or watching videos, unless you want to use the included speaker.”
Tech Radar notes the G1 has a “kill switch” similar to the iPhone and is impressed that it is explained openly in the terms and conditions. They also like the fact that if you don’t like an app you’ve downloaded, “Google kindly lets you refund your money within 24 hours of purchase, which means you can try all the probably rubbish location based ‘find your friend’ apps without worry.”
T-Mobile has reportedly sold 1.5 million of the Android G1’s by pre-order, but buyers may be surprised that when they open up their boxes they will be getting what BusinessWeek writer Stephen H. Wildstrom calls “a developers’ release: a preliminary, unfinished version of a program that lets engineers kick the tires and gauge its potential.”
To mark the one-month anniversary of launching HD sales at its iTunes Store, Apple announced it will offer more than 70 episodes of Fall prime-time hits from ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and cable.
Among the HD episodes are ABC’s “Desperate Housewives,” “Lost,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Eli Stone.” CBS shows include “CSI,” CSI: New York, “CSI” Miami” and “Numb3rs.” NBC show in HD on iTunes include “30 Rock,” Heroes,” “The Office” and “Law and Order: SUV.”
Apple said it has also sold 200 million television episodes and 1 million HD episodes. The HD episodes from ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox cost $2.99 a piece while each regular episode from the iTunes Store carry a $1.99 price tag.
In September, Apple kicked-off HD sales, offering 12 high-definition NBC episodes for free. The announcement coincided with the release of iTunes 8 and the return of NBC, which left the iTunes Store in August 2007, following a dispute over pricing of its television shows.
Reaction is still coming in from analysts on Apple’s decision to drop the price of its plastic entry-level MacBook. While ThinkPanure and others believe the sub-$1,000 notebook isn’t enough to attract worried consumers, some onlookers told Cult of Mac the move was a good beginning.
“They’ve never done cheap well – but the $999 MacBook is a good start,” Piper Jaffray analyst Andrew Murphy e-mailed Wednesday.
Murphy said Apple is positioning Mac sales for a long economic slowdown. Wednesday, JPMorgan said Apple had “meaningful buffers” that could allow the company to ride out any initial impact. Analyst Mark Moskowitz pointed to the value of Cupertino’s brand and iPhone revenue expected later in 2009.
Although the price cut affects a legacy plastic MacBook, more than half of the consumers considering the $999 plastic MacBook will opt for the newly-unveiled $1,299 aluminum unibody design, Murphy wrote.
The upshot of Tuesday’s new products: a slight or no impact on Apple margins. The company is expected to announce third quarter numbers later this month.
