Posts tagged Apple
China to get Wifi free iPhones earlier than expected
Jul 12th
China will be getting their required iPhone from Apple earlier than expected. However when the iPhone arrives, it will be lacking an important feature: WiFi. From sources it is gathered that Apple has applied and requested for a network access license so that iPhone can be sold in China.
Interestingly, the license is for customized iPhone model in which WiFi support has been disabled. If that comes out to be true, then that would imply one thing: Apple has finally accepted the demands of China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. China’s Ministry demands that iPhone runs only on cellular networks.
This comes out as a surprise since Apple previously signalled its intention to provide Wifi enabled iPhones only. However since Apple has seemingly accepted China’s demand, iPhone might be coming to China 2-3 months earlier. Matt Mathison, an analyst at Wedge Partners stated:
We now expect it to come before the Spring Festival in [January] 2010
Firefox market share increase whereas IE takes a fall
Jul 4th
Just recently we informed you about the release of Firefox 3.5. After the release of 3.5 version of Mozilla‘s browser, a few interesting developments have taken place. From what we gather Firefox is moving in the right direction and has managed to increase its market share. However the sad part if you are an IE fan is that the Microsoft‘s browser is seeing a decline in its market share. This has been confirmed by a graph which StatCounter has produced.
Here are the statistics:
- Internet Explorer for the first time has seen its market share drop from 62.09% to 59.49%
- Firefox on the other hand has managed to take its market share above 30%, by moving up from 28.75 to 30.33%
- Opera also managed to increase its market share just a little by moving up from 3.23% to 3.36%.
- Apple‘s Safari managed to register market share growth by increasing from 2.65% to 2.93%.
- Google’s Chrome also saw an increase in market share from 2.42% to 2.82%
Apple is running out of iPhones
Jun 29th
According to the availability tool, which is available on Apple’s website in times of scarcity, was last seen in the summer of 2008, can you people imagine that whenever the demand for the iPhone 3G was heavy and supply was really short.
We again saw it on Friday, only 29 of Apple’s 257 stores were displaying shortages of any iPhones. There were red “sold out” lights for selected 3GS models in all but six states. Kentucky’s store in Louisville, was completely out of stock.
This year’s model of the widget is considerably more accurate than the original. Last year, availability numbers were updated at the end of each business day. According to IFOAppleStore, the page is linked directly to Apple’s internal point-of-sale computers, allowing hourly updates for each store.
The shortages are all over the lot, but Apple is particularly facing the hard time meeting demand for the entry-level white iPhone 3GS. It is not yet clear whether demand for that model is unusually high or if Apple just isn’t making enough of them.
You can check out the availability in the Apple Store. AT&T has had 3GS supply problems from Day 1, but the widget doesn’t cover their stores. According to Apple, the older 8GB iPhone 3G is available in all its stores.
Rumor says Zune 16 GB and 32 to come this September
Jun 26th
Pretty much everyone is waiting and anticipating the arrival of Zune HD for various reasons. From the initial look of things, it appears to be a sizzling device and is targeted to provide an alternative to Apple‘s iPod Touch. Just like all the other people, the full details are yet to be known to us. There has been questions about the storage size that the Microsoft‘s Zune will offer, the release date and similar and related stuff. However Neowin published a post couple of days back that might have an answer to few of these questions.
Neowin reports that according to a document that Gizmodo received from Microsoft (apparently), Zune HD will be available in both 16GB and 32GB, and is expected to be released on 8th of September. However this news is yet to be confirmed by Microsoft. Still no news on the pricing of the upcoming gadget from Microsoft.
The specifications that are known include:
- 3.6 inch (or thereabouts) OLED full touch screen.
- NVIDIA Tegra powered.
- 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and 120GB versions.
- HDMI Connection to stream straight to your TV.
- HD Radio.
- Web Browser.
- WiFi compatible, with wireless marketplace.
- Released, early fall.
- International release of the Zune device itself.
- Home AV packs, Car packs, Charge packs.
Evernote for iPhone 3.0 is here; major update
Jun 18th
iPhone 3.0 is officially launched and new app is ready. The two main reasons to be excited about Evernote for iPhone 3.0: and the even greater stuff that will be added in the near future.
Let’s check out what’s new? I have discussed those features which I felt necessary, you can checked out more features here.
Beefy synchronization
The data synchronization part of the application is rewritten to take advantage of the new iPhone 3.0 capabilities, this will cause your info about all your notes to be synced locally on the device. You can scroll through thousands of notes without interruption and without ever seeing the dreaded “load 25 more” message.
No pending
New data handling functionality means that there’s no longer any need for a “Pending” tab — pending notes are now displayed in the normal note list and you can edit them at any time, even before they’ve been synced!
Where in the world?
You can push the “pin” button at any time to see all of your notes displayed on a map. The numbers indicate how many notes you have in a particular area, and zooming in will break up the groups until you can see each individual note as a pin.
Instant groups
The note views lets you group your notes by date, title, notebook, city or country. You can also instantly jump to a different group by taping the index bar on the right of the note list or scroll your finger over the index bar to fly through your notes at breakneck speed.
Advanced Searching
You can search through your notes and we’ve made that better as well. Advanced search options are now easier to use and many types of searches can be performed without ever having to touch the server, so they’re really fast.
Cinema-quality Landscape View
Mercy for your fingers
The steps and small buttons re eliminated when making snapshot and camera roll notes. Now you can snap a picture and send it to Evernote with just a couple of clicks.
Plays nice with others
Evernote for iPhone 3.0 now supports in-app integrations with iPhone apps from other developers. Several exciting Evernote-aware apps should be launching really really soon.
General improvements and bug fixes
This is our third major version of Evernote for the iPhone, so there’s a lot of improvements under the hood.
Apple finally fixes the Java vulnerability issue.
Jun 16th
After 6 months or more, Apple has finally decided to provide and issue patches for a well known security flaw in Java, which has been addressed by a few other operating systems. The dangerous flaw enables and provides Java applet the opportunity to execute malicious code on affected Macs. This code had the potential of causing the undesirable event of information theft or a compromised system. Apple posted a patch summary on Monday, which stated
Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 4 delivers improved reliability, security, and compatibility for Java SE 6, J2SE 5.0 and J2SE 1.4.2 on Mac OS X v10.5.
Last month, Intego which develops and provides security software for Macs, issued Mac users a warning in which it advised them to disable Java in their web browsers. They were advised to continue to do so till Apple fixed the Java vulnerability issue. Well that day has now arrived. Intego stated:
Apple has been aware of this vulnerability for at least five months, since it was made public, but has neglected to issue a security update to protect against this issue
Landon Fuller provided strength to this issue by releasing a proof of concept exploit code and highlighted its significance. He said in a blog post:
Unfortunately, it seems that many Mac OS X security issues are ignored if the severity of the issue is not adequately demonstrated.Due to the fact that an exploit for this issue is available in the wild, and the vulnerability has been public knowledge for six months, I have decided to release my own proof of concept to demonstrate the issue.
It has been observed that Apple is quite lazy and hardly reacts and responds quickly to flaws and vulnerability issues. The reason behind this act of laziness is not clear to me. May be you have the answer. If yes, then please enlighten us.
Safari 4 downloaded more than 11 million times
Jun 12th
Today Apple announced that more than 11 million copies of Safari 4 have been downloaded in the first three days of its release, including more than six million downloads of Safari for Windows.
Safari 4 is the world’s fastest, most innovative browser and is built on the world’s most advanced browser technologies including the new Nitro JavaScript engine that executes JavaScript which is almost eight times faster than IE 8 and four times faster than Firefox 3. Safari quickly loads HTML web pages more than three times faster than IE 8 and three times faster than Firefox 3.
Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing said:
Safari 4 is an incredible success on Mac and Windows with more than 11 million downloads in the first three days, Safari users love the incredible speed and innovative features like Top Sites, Full History Search and Cover Flow.
As we wrote earlier that Apple announced Safari 4, the new version of its Web browser for Mac OS X and Windows. Safari 4 has been available as a beta since February, 2009, but the final version was released earlier this week. The 11 million figure includes 6 million downloads for the Windows version of Safari. According to the Apple Safari is “the world’s fastest” Web browser.
Apple plans to ship Snow Leopard in September
Jun 10th
Apple yesterday among other important announcements, made an announcement that it will be launching its next operating system called Snow Leopard in September. To build on that announcement they also declared that the upgrade would cust just $29. Besides that they will also be providing a Family Pack which will cost $49. The Family Pack includes five licenses to the new OS.
If apple stays firm on its September release date, it will beat their long time rivals Microsoft and go ahead in terms of market. During the course of last week or so, we informed you about October 22 as the release date for Windows 7. On Monday, Craig Federighi, Vice President of Mac OS engineering, during the WWDC keynote presentation said:
Leopard was $129 but we want all Leopard users to upgrade to Snow Leopard, so we’re pricing it at $29.
During the last year’s WWDC, Snow Leopard which is also known as Mac OS X 10.6 was introduced. Bertrand Serlet, senior VP of software engineering said regarding Leopard and Snow Leopard:
We love Leopard, we’re so proud of it [that] we decided to build upon Leopard.We want to build a better Leopard, hence Snow Leopard.
The senior VP went on to brag the fact that their engineers refined more than 90% of Leopard’s code to create Snow Leopard. The engineers as told by the VP rewrote the Finder and went on to add new features such as Expose integration with the Dock. Other notable changes to the Snow Leopard include:
- Improved Performance
- Applications provided by Apple such as Mail get faster.
- Added In-box support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.
- Synchronization support for applications namely Mail, Calendar and Address Book on the Mac from Exchange.
Let us see how the people respond to Snow Leopard, whether it is able to gain maximum advantage of releasing the OS before Windows 7. May be Microsoft might release Windows 7 before the announced date as they did with Bing by releasing the Bing preview a couple of days before it was announced. Who knows, I might be wrong altogether. Be sure to provide us with your input regarding this interesting matter.
Apple releases Safari 4
Jun 9th
During the much awaited WWDC 09, Apple announced that it has made the final changes to its browser Safari 4 and released its web browser. The web browser is available as a free download for both Macintosh and Windows users. Safari 4 was released way back in February as a Beta version. The browser contains a few interface enhancements such as Cover Flow and Full History search.
The thing which is new in Safari 4 is that it had added the support for HTML 5 and advanced CSS effects. The browser also provides you with the ability to do a Full Page Zoom. The zooming process takes place and enables the user to take a closer and deeper look at the webpage without degrading the quality of the site’s text as well as the associated layout.
Apple claims that the Safari is the first browser to pass the Web Standards Project’s Acid3 test. This test is targeted to evaluating and examining how well and how cleanly a browser adheres to CSS, JavaScript, XML and SVG standards. Phillip Schiller, senior Vice President of worldwide product marketing said during Apple’s WorldWide Developer’s Conference held in San Fransisco:
The successful beta release helped us fine tune Safari 4 into an even better, faster version that customers are going to love.
Speaking about speed, Safari 4 contains a speed feature known as a “Nitro” engine. The Nitro engine is said to execute JavaScript upto 4.5 times faster than Safari 3. Apple is claiming that Safari 4 executes JavaScript 8 times faster than IE8 and 4 times faster than Firefox 3. On a similar note Apple loads HTML web pages 3 times faster than Firefox 3 and IE8.
Currently around 70 millions users located globally use Safari. Safari 4 for Mac OS X poses the requirement of a Mac OS X Leopard v10.5.7 or Mac OS X Tiger v10.4.11 and Security Update 2009-002. The minimum space required is 256 MB.
WWDC 2009 goes live. Watch it now..
Jun 8th
WWDC is live now, you can watch the live coverage at different sites which are stated below, if you people are looking for the best live-blogs for following today’s Apple announcement? Keynote is here.
There are certain questions arising in my mind, and of course you will be thinking them as well.
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Will we see next generation iPhone handware?
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Will Apple release iPhone 3.0 or just more features for iPhone 3.0?
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Will MobileMe 2.0 be good to go?
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Will we have to sit through 8 excruciatingly long app previews like the last 3 iPhone keynotes?
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Will Scott Forstall say “blow us away”?
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Will Steve Jobs show up in some way, shape, or Mobile iChat form to give that perfect “Boom!” or “One more–” accent to the show?
Here are the ones that we’ll be tracking. Come back to Fast Company during and after the event for more news and analysis.
Gizmodo: The sharpest photos, auto-update, and the most dependable crew in the gadget business. http://live.gizmodo.com/
GdGt: Written by pros, with instant analysis. http://live.gdgt.com/2009/06/08/live-wwdc-2009-keynote-coverage/
Macrumors: Good photos and insta-punditry. http://www.macrumorslive.com/
TheAppleBlog: http://theappleblog.com/live/
TheiPhoneBlog: http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2009/06/04/wwdc-2009-tipb-live-metablog-monday-1pm-edt10am-pdt/
Engadget: Relaying a near-transcription of the announcements, with photos. http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/08/phil-schiller-keynote-live-from-wwdc-2009/
