Jan 08
LOS ANGELES — An iPod owner is suing Apple Inc., claiming it restricts consumer choice and has monopolized the digital music market because its popular line of music players and its iTunes online music store are not compatible with rival music devices.
The lawsuit, filed Dec. 31 in U.S. District Court in Northern California, seeks class-action status and is the latest of several that claim Cupertino-based Apple has an unfair grip on the online music market.
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Jan 08
SanDisk today announced at CES a refresh to its Clip and View media player lines, but the updates don’t bring much in the way of new features. Instead, they stress massive capacity boosts, with the View surging to a maximum capacity of 32GB of flash memory. The storage capacity of flash-based devices is now large enough to put serious pressure on the remaining hard drive-based players, and that’s good news for consumers who like long battery life, reliability, and the ability to jog with a player.
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Dec 18
According to the Wall Street Journal Asia, Jobs and Co are in Japan working out the details for a domestic iPhone launch. It’s no surprise then that Jobs was rumored to have just met with NTT DoCoMo’s president, Masao Nakamur, to discuss the deal with the largest carrier in the world’s second-largest economy. As usual, Apple seems to be playing the carriers off one another with rumors that The Steve is courting Softbank as well. However, “people familiar with the situation” say that DoCoMo is the first choice. While the revenue sharing is a sticking point as usual, WSJA says that Apple doesn’t expect to have any difficulty closing the deal. Funny, that’s what everyone was saying about Vodafone in Europe.
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Dec 17
O2 is to trial an internet-based TV service next year after trialling a similar product in the Czech market, a test bed for the mobile phone company’s wider ambitions.
The Czech IPTV launch has proved a big success for O2 and its owner, Telefonica, since it launched in September 2006, attracting 70,000 customers so far. It offers more than 50 channels with content from leading producers including Sony, Disney, Warner Bros and HBO, the US TV producer behind The Sopranos.
O2 has been expected to launch IPTV services in the UK after it snapped up the small broadband player Be, which has the fastest network in the country. Although O2 has launched broadband services, the capacity of the Be network would allow for a robust IPTV service to be carried to customers. Continue reading »
Oct 29
U.K. mobile phone operator Huchison 3G UK on Monday rolled out the Skypephone, a handset designed to simplify use of the Skype VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) application.
Huchison 3G, branded as “3″ in the U.K., is offering free calls between Skype users through the 3G mobile phone, which goes on sale Friday in the U.K. The Skypephone will be released by the end of the year in Australia, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, Ireland, Macau and Sweden.
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Oct 29
Apple has posted a QuickTime version of the new user-created iPod touch television ad that began airing on Sunday evening. Based on student-created advertisement that was posted to Youtube, the ad spot was made “broadcast-ready” by Apple’s advertising agency, TBWA/Chiat/Day, according to an online report. The commercial features a fast-paced overview of the portable player song with “Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex,” The spot’s creator, Nick Haley, is an 18-year-old student and Apple fan in the UK who created the content and uploaded his video to YouTube. Continue reading »
Oct 29
Simplifying hacks of v1.1.1 iPhones and iPod touches even further, beyond applications such as iJailBreak, a new website called Jailbreakme (iPhones/iPods only) offers a solution to unlock Apple’s latest devices without first docking them to a computer. Upon directing Safari to the site, users are prompted to read directions and install AppSnapp, after which the necessary “Installer.app” icon will appear on the Home screen. The site is so far reported to be safe and easy to use.
Users who want SSH access can do so by installing the BSD subsystem, Community Sources and then Open SSH, the last of which allows Finder drag-and-drop access to iPhone/iPod contents. All of these do however require a desktop computer to be available, as well as more technical knowledge. Jailbreakme also does not provide an easy means of installing the third-party software it is meant to open access for. Continue reading »
Oct 29
The latest embarrassment for Apple’s iPhone is a report from ecoadvocacy group Greenpeace which says the revolutionary new cell phone has traces of two toxic chemicals that have been eliminated by some of Apple’s rivals from their products.
The group arranged for an independent UK lab to test the phone’s components. “An independent scientific laboratory tested 18 internal and external components of the iPhone and confirmed the presence of brominated compounds in half the samples, including in the phone’s antenna, in which they made up 10% of the total weight of the flexible circuit board,” according to a statement on Greenpeace’s website. “A mixture of toxic phthalates was found to make up 1.5% of the plastic (PVC) coating of the headphone cables.” Continue reading »
Oct 29
SAN JOSE, California — Apple Inc. no longer accepts cash for iPhone purchases and now limits sales of the cell phone to two per person in a move to stop people from reselling them.
The new policy started Oct. 25, said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris. Before then, there was no cash restriction and the purchase limit was five per person.
“Customer response to the iPhone has been off the charts, and limiting iPhone sales to two per customer helps us ensure that there are enough iPhones for people who are shopping for themselves or buying a gift,” Ms. Kerris said. Continue reading »
Oct 14
A 13-year-old hacker claims to have developed code that would let you put third-party applications on an iPod Touch without having to take a computer science class.
AriX sent us a press release Sunday promoting iJailbreak, an automated program that allows third-party applications to run on the iPod Touch. It doesn’t work for the iPhone, and it’s only available for iPod Touch owners that are using Intel-based Macs. I don’t have an iPod Touch at my disposal right now, so I’m unable to test whether it actually works, but some users on MacRumors.com reported that it worked. Continue reading »
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