Apple may report $11.29 billion in revenue for the first quarter of 2009, more than $1 billion better than Wall Street experts are projecting, blogger-analyst Andy Zaky wrote Monday.

The blogger, who beat analysts in his prediction of Apple’s fourth quarter numbers, wrote experts have been “absurdly bearish” with revenue estimates that “no longer reflect even a scintilla of financial reality.”

“The analysts have been consistently wrong in predicting Apple’s earnings results and this time they’re going to get their ‘hats handed to them,'” Zaky wrote on his blog Bullish Cross.

In October, Apple’s Chief Financial Officer, Peter Oppenheimer forecast revenue of $9 billion to $10 billion for the December quarter. The Wall Street consensus is a slightly higher $10.08 billion.

Forget about what they manage to crank out of Cupertino. What is it about Apple that drives such innovation all over the rest of the globe?

The iPhone 3G became just the latest reason why Motorola is no longer king of U.S. cell phone sales. After losing its market lead Friday to South Korean Samsung, Moto Monday received more bad news: Apple’s iPhone 3G dethroned the slimline RAZR handset as the best-selling mobile phone in the United States.

The RAZR was the last big hit for the Schaumburg, Ill. handset manufacturer which has seen its market share slip away. Motorola slipped to second place behind Samsung, controlling 21.1 percent of the U.S. market, compared to the Korean’s 22.4 percent U.S. market share, according to research firm Strategy Analytics.

Apple’s iPhone 3G outsold the RAZR in the U.S. during the third quarter, according to consumer analysts at NPD Group. For three years, the RAZR was the top-ranked handset.

The keen Mac cultists among you will already know the story behind the cloverleaf Command symbol (⌘) but for those of you who don’t, this photo (by cogdogblog on Flickr, used under CC license) tells the story rather well.

The ⌘ was discovered for Apple by bitmap artist Susan Kare in a dictionary of symbols, where it was said to be commonly used in Scandinavia to identify places of interest or camp sites.

Cogdogblog’s photo shows the symbol alive and well in Iceland, 1300 miles or so away from Stockholm but culturally close nonetheless.

Where else has the command symbol been spotted? In a jellyfish. In a bakery. In a bedroom. If you’ve seen it anywhere interesting, do let us know.

It’s no secret than I’ve been a less-prolific blogger over the last, oh, six months or so. Part of this is fairly dull personal life details (marriage, etc. Hi, honey!), but a bigger part of it has been the very quiet development of my first book, Wired to Care, which I co-wrote with my dear friend and colleague Dev Patnaik of Jump Associates. The book won’t be out until January, but our new blog is live now.

Now, far be it for me to avoid any shameless self-promotion, but I bring it up for another reason. The top post of the moment is my epic manifesto on why it is that Apple has never made significant in-roads in the enterprise space, while IBM remains the machine of choice more than 30 years after Steve Jobs declared war on Big Blue. It’s tied tightly to the theme of the book, but I think it can be regarded most as a guest appearance by Cult of Mac at the Wired to Care blog. Plus, it has the Apple Lemmings ad:

“Steve Jobs doesn’t have a clue about how to sell anything to business customers. From 1981’s defective Apple III to the $10,000 NeXT Computer to Apple’s current efforts, the offerings that Steve Jobs has created for enterprise technology customers have universally flopped. The company’s current high-profile effort in that arena is the xServe, a sleek metal computer meant to handle the file-sharing needs of a small or medium business. While beautifully designed in the way that all of Apple’s products are, the xServe screams to the world of business that it was not designed with them in mind. People working in technology at companies want to buy something that looks reliable, fast, and, most importantly, too complex-looking for ordinary people to manage. Simple hardware doesn’t connect with its intended audience, and the xServe has no traction whatsoever with business customers.”

I have a lot more to say on the subject, and I hope you do, too! Let the argument begin in the comments thread at W2C, and I’ll keep you updated whenever there’s more Apple content over there!

A federal court judge on Friday granted a preliminary injunction requested by IBM that ordered Mark Papermaster to cease working for Apple until further notice.

Apple announced on Tuesday this week that Papermaster would be joining the company immediately in his new role as the head of the engineering teams that make the iPods and iPhones, reporting directly to CEO Steve Jobs. After Friday’s ruling by the court in the southern district of New York, Apple said Papermaster would comply with the court’s order.

“We will comply with the court’s order but are confident that Mark Papermaster will be able to ultimately join Apple when the dust settles,” Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said.

Kenneth Karas, the U.S. District Court judge in White Plains, New York, where the case was filed, didn’t immediately explain his ruling, saying he would release a full opinion in the future. He scheduled a follow-up meeting for November 18 to map out a time line for the case.

The suit grew out of Papermaster’s 26 year employment at IBM, where he was responsible for many of that company’s innovations in the development of silicon chip processor technology. He signed an agreement not to compete in similar employment with another company for one year, but quit abruptly on October 24th and planned to start at Apple this week.

Via Reuters, Trading Markets

UPDATE: This post has been edited for statistical clarity.

iPhones fail at roughly half the rate of Blackberry smartphones after one year of operation, according to a study by Square Trade research. Square Trade, a company that sells add-on warranties covering electronic devices beyond their manufacturer warranty periods, looked at the failure rates of 15,000 phones covered under its plans. According to their data, the malfunction rate for iPhones after one year is 5.6 percent, compared to 11.2 percent for the Blackberry and 16.2 percent for the Treo.

The study projects the failure rate for the iPhone after two years will be between 9.2 and 11.3 percent, compared to actual two-year failure rates of 14.3 percent for BlackBerries and 21.0 percent for Treos.

Of course, the sample size producing these numbers is a tiny fraction of the millions of smartphones on the market and may or may not be a truly accurate picture of the actual failure rates of the three kinds of phone.

Interestingly, the study found neither battery life nor call quality problems to be major issues for the iPhones that did fail. As was true with all three models in the study, the predominance of failure-related issues had to do with the touchscreen interface.

One area where iPhone does appear to lag its two main competitors is in failure due to accident: 12 percent of iPhone failures happen because the owner drops it, spills liquid on it, or otherwise stops treating it like the sensitive mobile computing device it is.

Via MobileCrunch

Now that Tina Fey can abandon her rock-hard chignon and go back to playing Liz Lemon on 30 Rock, we can admire the view from her boss, Jack Donaghy’s desk, namely his 24-inch iMac.

Wonder if it’s a coincidence Alec Baldwin is on the phone here. Be nice!

Via MacSmack

Artist Catherine Forster began examining the world through a microscope as a biologist, now she uses technology to talk about the world.

Her installation “Golden Oldies” features four silent videos inspired by pop songs (“Karaoke classics” she says) played on iPods.

These visual landscapes are inspired by “Tiny Bubbles” (Don Ho, 1966), ‘Under the Boardwalk” (Drifters, 1964), “Spinning Wheel” (Blood Sweat and Tears, 1969), and “Starry Starry Night” (Don McLean, 1971).

“Golden Oldies” was meant to be a humorous take on how people cut themselves off from the world by creating iPod retreats.

Right now, it’s part of a Biennial show in Kentucky, but Forster says the ongoing project include new videos from the 1960s to the 1990s. You can check out the videos up close from her site.

Earlier this week I seem to have touched a chord with a post about Tony Fadell’s “transition agreement” and the reimbursements Steve Jobs gets from Apple for expenses incurred in the operation of his private plane.

Several readers took me to task for illustrating the post with a hastily-cadged, photoshopped fake of a Gulfstream jet with a big Apple logo on it, which is fair enough, if somewhat lacking in the sense-of-humor department.

With thanks to reader Hihosilver, who sent in a real picture of Jobs’ plane on the runway at the San Jose airport, I was led to a couple of interesting airplane fan sites, where more pics of the Apple CEO’s gorgeous jet can be found. For your pleasure and amusement then, here’s a gallery, so the next time you see a Gulfstream Aerospace G-V at cruising altitude or taxiing on a runway near you, you’ll be able to tell if it’s likely to have Steve inside.

The drumbeat continues as Barclays Capital Friday became the latest analyst firm to trim its projection of iPhones sales for the first quarter of fiscal 2009. Citing the weak economy, analyst Ben Reitzes believes 5 million handsets will be sold during the quarter, down from the previously expected 6.2 million.

In a note to investors, Reitzes cited a “continued weakness in the economy” and an inventory already flush with 2 million iPhones.

Barclays also cut its target price for Apple shares to $121 from $125, however retained the Cupertino, Calif. company stock as overweight.

Apple will report $9.6 billion in revenue for the December quarter and $35.7 billion for fiscal 2009, down from $36.1 billion, the note predicted Friday. Apple reported $7.8 billion for the quarter ended Sept. 31.

Say Hello to Steve! is a Flickr pool that celebrates, even embraces the highly reflective screens on recent MacBooks and iMacs.

A lot of people have complained about the glossy screens. They have expressed their displeasure with protests and polls. Some wish that Apple still offered a matte alternative. Others have tried the glossies and found that, because the LCD panel display is so much brighter, they’re not so bad after all.

But the folks at the Say Hello to Steve! group are happy with their glossy screens. They like to see themselves – and their surroundings – reflected in the screens when they’re dark. The upshot is some nice, sometimes quite artistic, photographs. What can you see in your screen when your MacBook’s not switched on?

(Photo by Mojo.D, used with permission.)

Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple is finding a warmer reception in Europe than at home, two new surveys indicate. The iPhone, which sold 6.9 million units during the third quarter, now owns 17.5 percent of the smart phone market, beating RIM for second place among European mobile phone users.

Analysts at Canalys reported Thursday Apple experienced 523 percent growth during the quarter, outpacing RIM, which registered an 83 percent increase to 15.2 percent market share compared to 2007.

Apple’s rise trimmed Nokia’s market leadership, the Finish handset giant slipping to 38 percent of European cell phone sales, down from 51 percent a year ago.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told a developers’ conference in Australia yesterday he thinks the idea of using Webkit as the rendering engine for Internet Explorer is “interesting” and that his company “may look at that” as the Microsoft web browser continues to evolve.

Asked directly why IE remains relevant and what is the value of a proprietary rendering engine “when there are open source ones available that can respond to changes in Web standards faster,” Ballmer responded by admitting that Microsoft would need to consider the future of the browser and determine if there is any lack of innovation for the company to capitalize upon with “proprietary extensions that broaden its functionality.”

Since defeating Netscape, once the lone challenger to its dominance of the browser market, IE has been wildly outpaced by the likes of Firefox, Safari and Opera in the past five years, while the speed and standards compliant advantages of Webkit have led a number of developers to make it the foundation for their web browsers and other web related tools. Among them are Nokia’s mobile browser, Google’s new Chrome, and of course the mobile Safari browser used by Apple’s iPhone.

With Microsoft having long preached the gospel of praising developers for the innovations brought to its core product, the company would no doubt gain the undying gratitude of the developer community should it adopt Webkit and free developers from the extra work currently required to make their code render predictably in Internet Explorer.

Via AppleInsider

I just love this picture. It sums up perfectly the progress that’s been made in computing over the last couple of decades. That which was once beige and plasticky is now sleek and silvery. (I know some people still swear by those old clacky keyboards, though: John Gruber once called the Extended Keyboard II “the single best hardware product Apple has ever manufactured.”)

You get the same feel from this one. I remember being utterly amazed by the G4 iMac’s design. I borrowed one from Apple to write a review, and marveled at the computer’s shiny hinged neck and (for the time) large, bright display. Now compare it to a modern iMac. It looks like a toy. (Those of you still using a G4 iMac and enjoying it, get in touch to tell me how and why. Send pics.)

(Photos used under Creative Commons licence. Thanks to: Blakespot and Editor B

Today, Stanford professor Dr. Ge Wang and his company, Smule, introduced Ocarina, the first and only app that transforms the iPhone into an expressive musical wind instrument.

The app synthesizes sound in real-time, just like a regular instrument, based on actual gestures including wind input, tilt, and finger placement over the four holes overlaid on the multi-touch pad. Unlike other iPhone audio apps, the sound is not pre-compiled but is generated by the notes, gestures and nuance of the individual performer. As a result, it allows an iPhone user to explore and master the musical sounds of an entirely iPhone-native version of an ancient flute-like instrument.

Smule’s audio engine (CHiP) and the Smule Sonic Network make it possible to hear live performances around the world. With the globe view, you can hear performances, and see the origin of that performance.

Dr. Wang, in addition to being CTO of Smule, is director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra, and the author of the Chuck audio programming language.

Formation of the first iPhone Philharmonic cannot be far behind. Perhaps one day, iPhone music will be its own category at the Grammys.

Danny Hutton, founder of rock group Three Dog Night, credits his successful 40-something years in the band because of what could be described as shuffle music.

“We basically were doing iPods in the 1970s,” Hutton said. “Our songs were all over the place. We’d go from ballads to hard rock to country songs to an R&B song.”

Not sure they embody the eclectic iPod mentality (Beck? Girl Talk? 2 Many DJs?) but It’s better than blaming the iPod for ruining your music.

Via Mlive

I don’t know about you, but I get funny looks from folk when I show off my iPhone, then have to sheepishly confess that it doesn’t do MMS messages.

“Phhhfft,” people say, pulling out their 2-year-old Nokias that they got for free. “Even this crappy old thing can do MMS.”

Apple’s workaround is to send iPhone owners a plain text message with a link to a webapp, where they can view their MMS. In the UK, the O2 webapp is horrible. No-one at O2 has bothered to make it iPhone-friendly. The whole setup is clunky, to put it mildly.

Ross McKillop thinks so too, and that’s why he decided to build a better webapp, one that is designed for iPhone. The result is the newly renamed iPhoneMMS, which lets you view incoming and send outgoing MMS messages, via a complex arrangement of protocols and emails.

It’s still clunky compared to proper MMS support, but it’s a good deal better than the shoddy mess supplied by O2. Until they and Apple get their collective act together to make a decent built-in MMS application, it’s the best option.

The business market, long desired by Apple, picked the iPhone to top a J.D. Power and Associates survey for smartphone customer satisfaction. Ease of operation and the Mac OSX operating system were named the two biggest reasons, according to the survey released Thursday.

The iPhone garnered 778 points out of a 1,000 total possible score. RIM’s BlackBerry scored 703 and Samsung received 701 points. Palm’s Treo took its place in the cellar, getting 644 votes.

Software problems accounted for a quarter of the complaints by corporate users regarding smartphones. Of that group, 44 percent said they were forced to reboot their phone at least once a week during the year.

Poolga has what we think is a pretty excellent collection of iPhone and iPod Touch wallpapers created by a talented and creative group of “designers, artists, illustrators and dopey street bums ” from around the world. According to the site, they do it because “we hate the standard wallpapers and cheesy nature themes available everywhere.”

Check out a few of our favorites in the gallery below and visit the Poolga site as well as their Flickr page – they add new stuff every few days.

Webmonkey thinks iTunes sucks. And gives 10 reasons to bolster the case for saying so, including serious gripes about the infelicity of its library management, slow performance and its demands on system resources.

We agree with the complaint that iTunes refuses to let you take music off your iPod and put it in the library while almost every other music app out there manages to handle that task. And we’re resigned to the inevitability of iTunes for iPhone and iPod updates, but maybe there are better apps for managing a collection of digital music, like Songbird and Amarok.

What do you think? We’re listening…

Is the meteoric rise in demand for Apple’s iPhone cooling off? BMO Capital is the latest to issue a projection of slower production of the handset for the first fiscal quarter of 2009.

BMO’s Keith Bachman Thursday reduced his estimate for first quarter iPhone sales to 5.6 million from 6.6 million. At the heart of the prediction is 2 million of the 6.9 million units sold in September went into inventory.The analyst said due to that “channel fill” it will be difficult for the December quarter to compare to the 6.9 million handsets sold in the quarter ended September 30.

The analyst said the December quarter will bring 5.6 million iPhones sold, down from 6.6 million previously projected. Still the number is expected to be a 15 percent increase in end-user sales over the 4.9 million sold in September.

Like most nerdy types, I went through a phase of being the family tech support guy. Back in the days when I knew a few tricks to make Windows co-operate, this was occasionally a productive use of my time. These days, it’s a complete waste of it.

So I’ve refused to take on tech support jobs for family and friends over the last couple of years. To avoid causing offense, I’ve usually just shrugged my shoulders and said in a regretful tone: “Sorry, I don’t think I’ll be able to help. I’ve not used Windows for years and I wouldn’t have a clue where to start.”

This get-out sounds even better because it’s the truth.

Plenty of people are tut-tutting today about the lavish “transition agreement” outgoing iPod guru Tony Fadell signed in order to spend more time with his young family and act as special adviser to Steve Jobs during the coming year. And surely $300K per year in salary, with stock options worth upwards of $8 million makes the worst economic downturn in 50 years seem like something a 39 year-old guy might survive.

But reports filed with the SEC indicate Apple reimburses Steve Jobs for expenses traveling on the company’s private Gulfstream jet to the tune of 2/3 Fadell’s annual package per quarter, and even that number is well down from the amount the company was spending on the corporate jet just one year ago.

Puts the whole financial crisis thing in perspective, doesn’t it?

In an emailed response to another user disappointed in the performance of the glass trackpad on his new MacBook Pro, Steve Jobs said, “Software Fix coming soon,” according to MacRumors.

We reported on the possible dustup over quirky trackpads on Monday, noting the growing number of threads related to user concerns about it in Apple’s discussion forums. In comments to our post Cult of Mac readers, on balance, haven’t seemed to find it much of an issue, but if a software patch is indeed forthcoming, that should be good news to all who have been bothered by the problem.