Verizon spokesman John Johnson says the company will not have the iPhone any time soon.
“No plans to carry the iPhone in the immediate future,” he told Beet.TV. Instead, Johnson makes a plug for “incredible Android devices.”
The news has got to come as a disappointment to Verizon customers hoping to get their hands on Apple’s gear, as well as AT&T customers hoping to switch to what’s considered the best network in the U.S.
Verizon has been long rumored to get the iPhone, but those rumors now look like wishful thinking. Unless, of course, Verizon has taken to Apple’s tactic of denying interest in a product right up until they launch it.
These are pictures of what appear to be spare parts –PowerbookMedic is a repair shop — but don’t appear to be the final versions. The text on the back is placeholder text. As well as the back case, PowerbookMedic also has images of a white front panel and some chassis parts.
The 4G iPhone is likely to be introduced at next week’s WWDC.
If you believe iPads are not just for keeping the offspring entertained during car trips, there are numbers to back that up.
Half of the top ten paid iPad apps are “productivity tools,” in other words, apps that grown-ups use for work.
According to Distimo, a start-up that analyzes app stats, the top two paid iPad apps in April are word processor Pages and Goodreader, a large-file PDF enabler.
Pinball HD is the only game in the top five paid apps at spot no. 3, followed by note taker app Penultimate and presentation app Keynote. (You can download the full report here.)
Our good friend Graham Bower likes to occasionally send some of his gorgeous Apple product mock-ups our way. His latest creation is a direct response to the recent rumor that the next Apple TV will be a $99 iPhone OS device that streams media to your television set, and answers the question: how do you control a multitouch operating system without a touchscreen?
The answer: make the remote a touchscreen. Graham’s idea is that Apple would ship the new Apple TV with a remote similar to the Magic Mouse, along with a built-in accelerometer.
I’ve mulled over this idea for the Apple TV’s remote before. On first blush, it seems like a great solution, but here’s the problem: the only way a device like this can work is if it introduces some sort of pointer to iPhone OS. For multitouch to work on a display divorced from the actual input device (ie: for multitouch to work when you’re not directly touching the screen on which graphical elements are displayed), you need some sort of icon to show you where your “fingers” are.
After just two months of (perhaps overconfidently) offering a $29.99 unlimited, month-by-month data plan to purchasers of the iPad, Ma Bell has already killed it off… and are now replacing it with a vastly inferior and more pricy plan.
The new plan — called DataPro — offers 2GB of data per month for $25. Go over 2GB in a month and you’re charged another $25, with your 30 day window to use that 2GB resetting itself.
Think that’s bad? It gets worse. AT&T is also canceling unlimited data for the iPhone. Current subscribers get to keep their $30 all-you-can-eat plans, but when you new customers or contract renewers will now only get 2GB of data.
The positive side? After over a year of waffling on it, AT&T are finally bringing tethering to the table with iPhone OS 4.0. But you have to pay an additional $20 a month for it, and you’re still only limited to 2GB. To put this in perspective, this is twice as much as Verizon charges for 5GB of tethering data on a $29.99 unlimited monthly data plan.
Our succinct thoughts on the matter, after the jump.
AT&T announced today that, on June 7th, unlimited mobile data plans for new users are going bye-bye in favor of two new “limited” data plans. It also provided new details on its U.S. iPhone tethering plan.
Two new data plans
AT&T currently offers an unlimited data plan for both the iPad and iPhone for $30 a month. A 250MB plan is available for the iPad for $15 a month. Both these plans are being nixed in favor of two new plans that will be available for both devices:
Never one to let an opportunity to explain a technology with a metaphor pass him by, Steve Jobs compared the transition from PCs to tablets as similar to when people stopped buying trucks and started buying cars (which is a dubious view of history, but let him run with it). From Engadget:
When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.
I actually think Steve is both right and wrong about this. What’s more likely is that a lot more households will again become one-PC homes as the need to do intense writing, coding or other keyboard horsepower activities gets more evenly distributed as other kinds of applications migrate to tablets. Only time will tell, of course.
Y’know those popular kids in high school? The ones who get along with everyone, are easy on the eyes, fun to hang out with, good at everything without being exceptional in any one area, and don’t ever seem to run out of energy?
That’s Casio’s EX-H10. Aside from one ridiculously high-performing attribute, the EX-H10 isn’t really exceptional in any one arena; rather, this point-n-shoot is a collection of quality and smart features brought together in a relatively high-value, good looking — if stoutish — container.
Much has been made over the last 24 hours about the fact that Apple has managed to sell two million iPads in just 60 days — a pace dramatically ahead of the original iPhone, which took 74 days just to get a million units into the hands of the public. Much less-debated, but potentially more interesting for Apple’s long-term future, is that the iPad has grossed more than $1 billion in revenue by hitting the 2 million mark. At $499 a pop and units as pricey as $829, they’ve cleared that barrier by a flying leap in record time. For context about just what a monumental achievement this is, consider the fact that when FedEx reached $1 billion in gross sales in its tenth year of operation, that was the quickest rise to a billion dollars in revenue without acquisitions in the history of American business.
Apple’s growth machine has hit a new gear with iPad, and I’d like to take this post to due some geeky quick and dirty analysis in the manner used at my day job to get a sense of Apple’s expectations for the platform and to guess as to whether its rapid take-off is a good sign or a sign of danger.
Whether in line with the national average or not, the recent slate of suicides at Foxconn has been a public relations nightmare not just for the Chinese electronics manufacturer, but for their partners as well.
Now, a report from Chinese site Zol.com.cn suggests that Cupertino might be taking the well-being of their subcontracted workers into their own hands: they claim that Apple will subsidize the wages of Foxconn employees working on their products with a profit-sharing scheme.
According to the article, Apple believes the main reason for the suicide jumps is low wages, and so they are prepared to offer roughly 1 to 2% of the profits of Foxconn-produced Apple products to the employees who have worked on them.
Steve Jobs’ “hobby” device might not be a hobby for long: Engadget reports that sources close to Apple claim that the Apple TV is currently getting a massive overhaul as an iPhone OS, streaming video device.
The old Apple TV was like a big iPod that connected to your set, so it’s not really a surprise that Apple’s re-imagining of Apple TV is essentially as a big iPhone connected to an HDTV. According to Engadget, the new Apple TV will have an A4 CPU, run iPhone OS and only ship with 16GB of flash storage.
Why so little room? Because Apple’s trying to do away with local storage in favor of their cloud iTunes service. The new Apple TV will be capable of streaming your media at 1080p through a web connection (or a Time Capsule, if you still want to store your media locally, but it’s all still streaming).
The biggest reveal? The price. Engadget says the new Apple TV will costs only $99. Wow.
When Gizmodo got their hands on the first leaked fourth-generation iPhone prototype, they weren’t able to give a resolution for the display. It was a frustrating omission which caused many of us to wish they’d taken a microscope to the display and confirmed resolution through the tedious process of pixel counting.
Someone else has now done just that and seems to have confirmed what we all suspected: the next-gen iPhone display is a 960×640 IPS, quadruple the resolution of the current iPhone.
That’s really impressive: imagine how fantastic games are going to look on the iPhone, or video for that matter… the new iPhone is going to be just shy of native 720p HD. This is turning out to be an iPhone well worth having waited for. WWDC just can’t come soon enough.
Skype’s been teasing us with the promise of this for a while now, and we postulated they’d add the feature after Apple revealed iPhone OS 4 would include background VoIP — and yesterday it finally arrived: Skype’s iPhone app now works over a 3G network.
The grieving family of a Foxconn worker who jumped to his death in January protest outside the factory.
The rash of suicides at Foxconn are not due to harsh working conditions but the plight of China’s migrant workforce, says an open letter signed by a dozen Chinese sociologists.
The letter blames the string of Foxconn suicides on the social problems faced by China’s vast class of migrant workers.
Originating from poor rural areas, Chinese migrant workers are often rootless and isolated, cut off from friends and family. Instead of finding good jobs in urban factories, they are often too poorly paid to settle in their new cities, and have limited access to education and healthcare. With no prospects at home, they are stuck. The sociologists call it the “path of no return.”
We have made them live a migrancy life that is rootless and helpless, where families are separated, parents have no one to support them, and children are not taken care of. In short, this is a life without dignity.
The sociologists note that at the end of 2008, the population of Shenzhen exceeded 12 million, but only 2.28 million were registered as permanent residents. The giant Foxconn plant, which employs upwards of 600,000 workers, is located in Shenzhen.
The sociologists call on Foxconn and the Chinese central government to boost wages, and improve access to housing, eduction and healthcare. They also say demand workers be given a “voice,” which presumably means unions.
We call on every enterprise, to make a conscientious effort to increase migrant workers‘ pay and rights, and allow migrant workers to become true “citizens of the enterprise”.
The sometimes accurate, oft wishful thinking Digitimes has a doozy of a story this morning, claiming that the fourth-generation iPhone we’ve seen time and time again in countless leaks might not be the one Jobs hoists onstage at WWDC in June.
According to their interview with senior analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple has two iPhones its currently working on, internally called the N90 and the N91. The N90 is the iPhone Gizmo got their hands on, while the N91 is a less impressive handset more similar to the iPhone 3GS.
The N90 is the iPhone Apple wants to release, providing they don’t have any unexpected setbacks (such as component shortages). The N91 is the iPhone they’ll release if they can’t get their ducks in a row.
In one of the biggest and unlikeliest turnarounds in business history, Apple is the most valuable company in technology, passing Microsoft in market capitalization.
Apple’s market cap has passed $227.1 billion — ahead of Microsoft’s $226.3 billion. Apple is up about 1.8% today, and Microsoft down about 1%.
Of course, this may change tomorrow, but for the moment, Apple is the new king of technology.
What a difference a decade makes, when Apple was on the ropes and Microsoft look unassailable. Now, Apple is clearly at the forefront of the next huge wave in tech: mobile. Microsoft isn’t even in the game.
I find my cinema display offers plenty of screen real estate for the things I do everyday, and with my MacBook Pro hooked up, having two displays is a real benefit. It’s nice to have the ability to browse through one document whilst typing up another on a separate screen, or have easy access to my music library or my Twitter feed without having to move or minimize the application I’m working on.
However, I don’t always want to be sat at my desk. I often like to get stuff done from the sofa when I’m feeling a bit lazy, or from the garden on a nice day. Now I can have two displays wherever I’m working thanks to Air Display from Avatron Software on my iPad.
Microsoft's James J Allard (seen here with Bill Gates) is leaving the company, largely because of failed attempts to match Apple's iPod, iPhone and iPad.
Two of Microsoft’s highest-profile executives are leaving, and Apple’s running rings around the company is partly seen as the reason.
Robbie Bach and James J Allard, leaders of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division, are both leaving and will not be replaced. It is Microsoft’s biggest management shakeup in years. The restructuring will put CEO Steve Ballmer in direct charge of Microsoft’s consumer-focused mobile businesses, which are getting a kicking from Google, Nintendo and especially Apple. This transition is reminiscent ofwhen Bill Gates left Microsoft, which signified a turning point for the company’s leadership and direction.
In fact, Venture Beat’s Dean Takahashi, who wrote a pair of books about the Entertainment & Devices Division (Opening the Xbox and The Xbox 360 Uncloaked), says the inability to compete with Apple is behind the shakeup:
Allard’s last project at Microsoft was Courier, which Ballmer canceled earlier this year. It was viewed as an attempt to take on the Apple iPad. While Bach’s division is profitable now, it may be remembered for its inability to take on Apple in the increasingly critical mobile business. And that may explain why, any day now, Apple’s market capitalization is going to become bigger than Microsoft’s.
UPDATE: Horace Dediu has a good guess why Bach was fired: he lost Hewlett Packard when the company bought Palm. “Bach lost a key account; in fact, he could be responsible for having lost the biggest account that Microsoft ever had. Ballmer is a sales guy and he knows the importance of these relationships. A customer like HP must be managed carefully and their strategy must be steered to fit with yours. If HP felt they needed to go somewhere else for their mobile OS, it’s a slap in the face, but if they buy the asset and IP and internalize a competing platform, then that is a dagger to the heart for Ballmer.”
Another worker at China’s Foxconn Technology Group has died. While few details were released by the state-run Xinhua News Agency, the incident is the 10th death in the past year at the electronics maker. Ironically, the death followed an announcement Monday by Foxconn disputing reports of a sweatshop atmosphere.
“We are certainly not running a sweatshop. We are confident we’ll be able to stabilize the situation soon,” the AP quotes Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou.
For years, I’ve been resiting the urge to upgrade my deck and instead pumping my iPod or iPhone audios to my antediluvian car stereo with a cheap $2 cassette deck adapter. For guys like me, then — individuals who own cars worth less than their phones, and are proud of the fact — the iDeck iPod Car Cassette Adapter seems ideal: it turns your existing cassette deck into a permanent in-auto iPod dock.
I’d be typing “SOLD” here except for that last remaining sticking point, the price: the iDeck costs $39.99 through Amazon. Heck, for that price, a cheapskate like me might as well buy a new car. One with floorboards!
In the ramp up to the official unveiling of the next-generation iPhone next month, megalithic big box retailer Wal-Mart is planning on slashing the price of Apple’s 16GB iPhone 3Gs to just $97.
That’s a $102 savings over the current price, and strongly implies that, next month, the 16GB iPhone 3GS will be AT&T’s new entry-level iPhone and cost $99 in locations across the country (Wal-Mart tends to undercut AT&T’s own prices by a couple of bucks).
To get the deal, customers will need to sign up for a two-year contract from AT&T. However, with talks of a Verizon iPhone hitting at the end of the summer gaining traction, it seems like a short-sighted move to sign up with AT&T before seeing what deals might result from an iPhone price war between two competing national carriers.
Holly Golightly probably wouldn’t wear her iPad in a front pocket pouch, but in a pinch it may be better than a toting a bulky bag.
As much as we’re crazy about the iPad, carrying it around is still kinda awkward — remember the condom case? — but an Australian company has come up with an intriguing solution.
The iDress positions itself as kind of a chic, kangaroo iPad pouch, a cute to-the-knee number in black cotton sateen, perfect for when it comes time to put down your mouse and pick up a glass of prosecco, if their marketing speak is to be believed.
WiFi operates in unregulated portions of the radio spectrum. These frequencies are shared with things like microwave ovens, cordless phones, garage door openers and an increasing plethora of other WiFi devices. What many WiFi networks face these days is like trying to tune in to a weak radio station in a busy city market.
This week a few tips and suggestions to try when things aren’t working.
