Europe - page 4

The International Electrotechnical Commission has forced Apple to stop selling the Mac Pro in European countries. Apple has officially announced the news to its retail partners, and all sales for the Mac Pro will come to a halt after February 18th. The U.S. remains unaffected.

The reason for the sales ban has to do with updated European regulatory requirements relating to fan guards and electrical port protection. Apple has previously confirmed that a new Mac Pro is coming later in 2013, and the updated product should pass inspection just fine.

AT&T could acquire a European carrier as it looks to expand its business overseas, The Wall Street Journal reports. The company is reportedly looking at way in which it can escape the growth constraints in the United States by entering a new wireless market where it can “upgrade technology and rollout more lucrative pricing strategies.”

Although AT&T is only identifying targets at this point, it’s though the company could announce a deal before the end of the year.

Apple’s AppleCare Protection Plan has come under fire once again in Europe after Test-Aankoop/Test-Achats, a Belgian consumer watchdog, filed a complaint against the way in which the Cupertino company markets the product in Europe.

Customers within the European Union are entitled to a free two-year warranty with any consumer electronics purchase, but Test-Aankoop/Test-Achats claims that Apple’s warranty marketing doesn’t properly explain these rights to Belgian shoppers.

The European Commission’s Vice President for Competition Policy, Joaquín Almunia, has confirmed that it will charge Samsung  “very soon” in an antitrust patent case after the Korean electronics giant broke competition rules by filing patent-infringement lawsuits against Apple. Samsung has been under investigation since January for a possible breach of antitrust rules, and earlier this week, it dropped all of its injunction requests against Apple in Europe.

Korean electronics giant Samsung has today announced that it will drop its patent-infringement lawsuits against Apple in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. The announcement comes just hours after Apple was denied its request to have 26 Samsung devices banned in the United States — though the two cases are unrelated.

Square Enix has revealed that it may reconsider its pricing structure for mobile games following critical feedback from users in Western countries. While the Japanese developer is well-known among iOS users for its awesome RPGs, such as Final Fantasy and Chaos Rings, it’s also famous for its hefty price tags, which can often be as much as $18 per title.

When console-quality games are going for less then $5 these days, those prices are a big problem for some.

Gah. Apple has jacked App Store prices across Europe, rising around 11% at some levels. This is due to local VAT increases in some places, as well as the lower value of the Euro against the dollar in recent months.

After much speculation, the last piece of the iPad mini puzzle has fallen into place, as a complete list of European prices of the iPad mini have leaked to the Internet, confirming that the iPad mini will come in multiple variations and ship with LTE capability.

EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding has called for Apple’s warranty adverts to be examined in the European Union’s 27 states. Reding hopes to establish whether or not the Cupertino company fails to mention a buyers’ right to a minimum two-year warranty for all electronics, including Macs and iOS devices.

iTunes Match has expanded its reach in Europe today as Apple brings the music matching service to Hungary and Poland more than 18 months after it made its debut in the United States. The Cupertino company is yet to add these countries to its iTunes Match availability page, but users report that the service is now appearing in iTunes.

With the incredible success of the App Store, sometimes it’s easy to forgot that there are still many, many countries the world over that don’t have access to it yet. That number has been reduced today, however, as Apple brings its mobile marketplace to another 32 countries, bringing the total number of countries with access to the App Store to 155.

WWDC may have sold out quickly, but as we reported there are alternative events for IT professionals  and developers that want to network and hone their skills. One of those is the annual European Macintosh System Administrators Meeting, which began accepting registrations this week for this year’s event, which will be held in Sweden this September.

Unlike WWDC, MacSysAdmin isn’t intended for developers as much as it is IT professionals that need to deploy and manage Apple technologies in business and education.

Music streaming service Spotify has announced that it will continue offering unlimited listening to its free customers in the United States. In case you didn’t know, all that free music you’ve been listening to won’t last forever. Spotify said from the very beginning that free users would only have unlimited listening for 6 months, and it’s been 9 months since the streaming service went stateside. Looks like the honeymoon will last a little longer.

A specific date for the unlimited listening discontinuation has not been given, so you may want to think about coughing up $10 per month for a Spotify Premium account. There’s also some good news for certain Spotify users in Europe.

Having been fined $1.2 million by Italian regulators late last year over its marketing for AppleCare products, Apple has been forced to clarify its warranty coverage for customers in the European Union, and compare its extended warranty products against statutory EU warranty coverage.

Following yesterday’s report that revealed Australian regulators are preparing to sue Apple over its “misleading” advertising for the new iPad down under, the Cupertino company has begun offering refunds to those customers who feel they’ve been misled.

Well, it seemed like only a matter of time before Apple’s promises of 4G data on its new iPad got the company into trouble. Australia’s competition watchdog is now threatening to sue the Cupertino company over its ‘misleading’ advertising for the new device, which can actually only connect to 4G LTE networks in the U.S.

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Today is new iPad day in the rest of the world. At 8AM local time in additional countries across Europe, Mexico, New Zealand and even Macau. As in the US and the other countries in the first wave of launches,. there appear to be plenty of iPads to go around.

Several reports that surfaced during the days preceding Apple’s latest iPad event suggested that while the U.S. would get LTE connectivity in the new device, it would be stripped out for those in Europe, where LTE networks are yet to launch.

To everyone’s surprise, Apple left the LTE chip in for us Europeans. But the problem is it won’t support European LTE networks.

The iPhone is ranked as the top smartphone in the United States, and with sales on the upward trend worldwide, one would think that there’s no stopping Apple’s magical handset. As it turns out, the iPhone has a “crutch” that’s key to its success: carrier subsidies.

It’s common practice for U.S. carriers to subsidize a phone to make it more affordable for the average consumer. The trick is that customers get locked into a two-year contract. While Apple profits and carriers take an initial hit off the subsidized model in countries like the U.S. and U.K., less expensive Android devices are dominating markets where consumers pay full price for their new phones.

Photo of Zias used with permission

This smiling youngster is Zias Kool, and he’s happy for good reason: as a birthday present, the makers of cult iOS puzzler Edge are going to add his Lego-designed custom level to a future version of the game.

Knock, Knock!

Who’s there?

Doctor.

Doctor who?

Doctor who owns an iPad, along with 26 percent of my peers.

A good pun it’s not, but the facts are worth my terrible setup: Fully one quarter of European doctors own an iPad, according to a survey of “1,207 practicing physicians in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the UK.”

Apple is slowly rolling out international support for iTunes Match today, with the service appearing in the U.K., Australia, and parts of Europe. The music matching service has been exclusive to the U.S. since its launch earlier this fall, but it made its way to Brazil earlier this week. If you can’t see it where you are, here’s a handy tip to get it working.

Late last month, Apple rolled out the iTunes Music Store to twelve new European countries. Now they’ve done the same for the iTunes Movie Store, so if you’re Bulgarian, Czech, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Slovakian, Slovenian or from Cyprus, hey, go nuts!

[via MacTrast]

Fearing its Galaxy Tab slate will never hit shelves down under, Samsung has reportedly proposed a deal with Apple that would allow the Korean electronics giant to launch its iPad competitor in Australia.

Lending a little bit more credibility to the reports that Apple is holding retail sleepovers tonight in preparation for the release of OS X Lion tomorrow morning, photos of Italian signage for Lion has leaked onto the web.