Apple’s “12 Apps Of Christmas” iPhone commercial

Apple just pushed out a new, Holiday-themed commercial. Playing on the classic “12 Days of Christmas” song, they rattle off a different type of application for each of 12 days.

With a New Phone, Google May Challenge Apple

SAN FRANCISCO — Two titans of the tech world, Google and Apple, may soon be engaged in hand-to-hand combat. Or, more precisely, handset-to-handset combat.

Google plans to begin selling its own smartphone early next year, company employees say, a move that could challenge Apple’s leadership in one of the fastest-growing and most important technologies in decades.

Google’s new touch-screen Android phone, which it began giving to many employees to test last week, could also shake up the fundamentals of the cellphone market in the United States, where most phones work only on the networks of the wireless carriers that sold them.

The company, using

the power of its brand, plans to market and sell the new phone directly to consumers over the Internet, and buyers would be able to sign up for service from any compatible provider, the employees say.

The introduction of a Google phone — manufactured to its hardware and software specifications by an Asian maker of handsets — would be an important and risky departure for Google. Until now, it has made software to power cellphones that are built and marketed by partners, and it has largely avoided selling hardware.

The apparent shift underscores the fact that mobile phones are quickly becoming the biggest technology battleground of the future, as consumers increasingly rely on their phones to browse the Internet and perform other computing tasks.

It also indicates Google’s determination to make its mark on yet another industry, as it has done previously in advertising, books and online videos.

But analysts say it is not clear that Google’s success on the Internet will carry over into the design, marketing and distribution of hardware. Many companies have tried to make similar shifts and stumbled. Microsoft turned the Xbox into a hit, but when it pushed aside its partners in the music-player business in favor of its own Zune, it failed to gain traction against Apple and its iPods.

The phone’s success could also depend on how Google chooses to price it. Most Americans buy phones that are subsidized by wireless carriers, which recoup that cost by locking customers into contracts. IPhones that cost consumers $199 actually cost AT&T about $550, analysts say.

Katie Watson, a Google spokeswoman, declined to comment on the company’s plans. She referred reporters to a blog post published Saturday in which Google said that the new device was a “mobile lab” that would let employees test out new technologies.

Google employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because plans for the phone were supposed to be confidential said that the device, manufactured by the Taiwanese company HTC, was thinner than Apple’s iPhone, with a slightly larger touch screen. It could be available as early as January, they said.

Employees say the phone will be sold unlocked, meaning that buyers will be able to choose a service provider, and will be based on G.S.M. technology, which is used by AT&T and T-Mobile in the United States and by most other carriers around the world. It is named Nexus One, according to various reports and to digital traces that the phones have been leaving on Web sites.

Google had long insisted that it was not interested in building and selling phones, saying it preferred to rely on hardware partners and wireless carriers to market a wide variety of phones powered by Android, the operating system that it offers free.

In October, Andy Rubin, vice president of engineering for Android at Google, scoffed at the idea that the company would “compete with its customers” by releasing its own phone, according to the technology news service CNet.

Analysts say that the apparent shift signals a recognition by the company’s executives that Google needs to take more control of its destiny in the wireless world.

“They perceive mobile as the next major opportunity,” said Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. “It is too big a risk to drive the strategy through their partners. They want more say and more control.”

In addition, analysts say that the iPhone, despite prominently featuring some Google services, makes the company nervous.

“They don’t want to have access to Google being controlled or influenced by one player like Apple,” said Ben Schachter, an analyst with Broadpoint AmTech, a research firm.

Google wants to get more people using Web-friendly phones in part because it depends on the growth of search advertising, which is slowing on PCs. On cellphones, however, use of Google’s mobile search engine grew 30 percent in six months this year, Mr. Schachter said. “That’s huge, and a majority of that growth is coming from the iPhone,” he said. “When that happens, Apple has a lot of power over influencing users’ behavior.”

Until recently, Google and Apple were considered close allies with a common enemy: Microsoft. They shared two board members, Eric E. Schmidt, the chairman and chief executive of Google, and Arthur Levinson, the former chief executive of Genentech.

Flash Apps We’d Like to See on the iPhone

Adobe is finally bringing Flash to the iPhone. Now’s your chance to tell us what you think programmers should use this awesome power for.

Adobe has been working long and hard to finagle Apple into imbuing the iPhone with a full Flash experience. The solution unveiled Monday was a compromise at best: Adobe announced its new development kit would convert software written in Flash into standalone iPhone apps. Though this is a lesser Flash experience, Adobe claims there are over 1 million Flash developers worldwide, so expect a flood of new Flash iPhone apps and games to land in the App Store in the near future. Compare that to the 100,000 iPhone developers that Apple says are already out there, and you’ll get an idea of how this might start to change the landscape for iPhone apps.

That gets us in the mood for wishing. There are plenty of Flash-based games, apps and streaming-video sites we’d love to see turned into iPhone apps. Some examples include the Hulu TV-streaming service, the Straw Hat Samurai fighting game, or maybe even a mobile version of the Aviary multimedia suite.

Read on for our wish list of iPhone-ported Flash apps we’d like to see in the App Store. And after you’re done, feel more than welcome to suggest the Flash apps you want to see, in the Reddit-powered list below. If Flash developers see enough demand for their apps and games, they might feel compelled to deliver their wares to the iPhone.

One note: Before submitting your suggestions, make sure to check out Adobe’s limitations for converting Flash into iPhone apps. But keeping that in mind, let your imagination run wild. Ours have already.

Hulu

We have a feeling consumers wouldn’t have created such a fuss over the lack of Flash on the iPhone if a Hulu app were available. Imagine how great that would be. Missed the first episode of Flash Forward? On your bus ride home, launch the Hulu app, punch Flash Forward into a search and stream the episode over a 3G connection — all free, with the brief interruption of a few ads. We estimate this will make commuters’ lives 40 times less miserable. (If a Hulu app ever appears, AT&T and Apple might cripple it to work Wi-Fi only, but hey — this is a wishlist, so we can dream.)

Straw Hat Samurai

Samurai warriors are rad (almost as awesome as ninjas). Imagine how fun this game Straw Hat Samurai would be on an iPhone. The game involves using your mouse to draw lines onto the areas you’d like to slash your enemies to death. It’s charmingly simple, and with an iPhone it would be even better, using our fingers to swipe across the touchscreen to swing the sword. We think kids with an iPod Touch would especially love this game. Try it out at Kongregate if you haven’t already.

Dolphin Olympics 2

Yeah, that’s right — we like this dolphin game. Got a problem with that? It’s fun. You take on the role of a dolphin, and the goal is to do as many tricks as you can in two minutes. Sounds like a stupid time waster, we know, but that’s what all games are, right? See if you can make the dolphin fly into space, and then tell us this game isn’t entertaining.

Aviary

Aviary is a pretty impressive multimedia suite coded in Flash. In your desktop browser you can apply effects and make basic edits to images, and there’s even a vector-editing tool. We wouldn’t expect this to translate smoothly into an iPhone app, but it’d be great to see a lighter version modified for iPhone owners. We’re a pretty multimedia-savvy bunch, aren’t we?

iTunes 9 breaks Palm Pre syncing

In a move that should surprise no one, iTunes 9, released yesterday, prevents the Palm Pre from syncing music. This is an ongoing battle between Palm and Apple: Palm released the Pre smartphone with the ability to be recognized by iTunes, allowing users to transfer their (non-DRMed) music. Apple countered by breaking this functionality, and not long after, Pre came out with their own “bug fix,” which restored it.

Palm initially worked its way by having the Pre identify itself as a mass storage device, then by having the device identify itself (via it’s USB connection) as a device created by Apple. Perhaps anticipating a complaint by Apple to the group that oversees the use of the Universal Serial Bus, Palm filed a complaint saying it was Apple who was misusing USB, and restricting other companies unfairly.

No word yet on how Apple has plugged what they see as a hole, but I imagine that the Palm engineers are coding away, looking for another workaround.

The Six Worst Apple Products of All Time

Don’t choke on Apple’s bad seeds.

Here is a list of the software giants’ biggest flops… I’m guessing Microsoft’s glory was partially dependent on the downfall of these products at the time

1. Macintosh IIvi and IIvx

Originally introduced in 1992 as a replacement for the popular Macintosh IIci, the IIvi and IIvx featured a new case design and an internal CD-ROM drive. Unfortunately, the IIvi was powered by a measly 16MHz 68030 CPU, while the IIvx connected a 32MHz 68030 to a 16 MHz bus; both were slower than the three-years-older, 25MHz IIci. The IIvi lasted only four months; while the IIvx held out for a year, the significantly faster 68040-based Centris 650 went on sale just four months after the IIvi and IIvx were released.

2. Macintosh TV

Macintosh TVApple’s first foray into the world of television wasn’t Apple TV; it was the 1993 Macintosh TV, a black all-in-one Mac with a 14-inch CRT monitor. Based on the Macintosh LC 520 case, it wasn’t a horrible computer, but despite its name could not display TV from its cable-ready TV tuner card in a window. Apple made only 10,000 before canceling the weak-selling product.

3. Pippin

After the Macintosh TV, Apple didn’t give up on a device that connected to your living room TV. The next attempt was the Pippin, a stripped-down Mac designed by Apple and introduced by Bandai in the United States in 1996 as a video game console for multimedia CD-ROM games. It was underpowered, overpriced, and title-poor compared with the Sony PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and Nintendo 64–Bandai sold just 42,000 units before discontinuing it.

4. Power Macintosh 4400

Released in 1997, the Power Macintosh 4400 was Apple’s feeble attempt at a cheap Mac knockoff. It had a sharp-edged metal case and more industry-standard components than other Macs, and it was horrible. It crashed all the time, had a particularly loud fan and a lousy internal speaker, and (oddly) had its floppy drive on the left side–convenient for maybe 10 percent of the population.

5. Twentieth Anniversary Mac

Released in 1997, the Twentieth Anniversary Mac (TAM) featured an elegant, upright design that Apple would nod to years later with the flat iMac. But in a triumph of form over both function and common sense, Apple priced the underpowered TAM at $7,499–a whopping $5,500 more than the comparable Power Macintosh 5500. Within a year, Apple had knocked the price down to $1,995, placating people who had paid more by giving them gifts of high-end PowerBooks.

6. Apple USB Mouse

The “hockey puck” mouse. Perhaps no Apple product has been as reviled as the infamous “hockey puck” mouse, which shipped with the original iMac in 1998 and lasted for two years. Its small size made it awkward to grasp, and its round shape made it tricky to orient. The only people who liked it were the folks who made third-party mice and USB-to-ADB adapters that enabled the use of older mice.

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For more Macintosh computing news, visit Macworld.

Vodafone to sell the iPhone 3G S for the hefty 619/719 euro

16 June, 2009

A leaked internal Vodafone Italy price list interestingly lists the price of the upcoming iPhone 3G S at the old continent. If you are not willing to enter into contract with Vodafone, you’d have to go for some quite steep contract-free prices to get one.

The iPhone 3G S 16GB will set you back 619 euro, while the iPhone 3G S 32GB will cost you 719 euro.

Leaked Vodafone Italy pricelist

Interestingly, the same pricelist lists the iPhone 3G with unchanged prices meaning there will be price deduction if you opt for the now year-old model. An unlocked iPhone 3G 8GB costs 499 euro, while the 16GB version trades for 569 euro.

Again those price are commitment-free, we guess the carrier will subsidize the contract prices heavily. We really hope they don’t pump up the iPhone monthly plans as well.

June is a hectic month for the industry this year and you can find some of the trend-setting mobiles hitting the stores these weeks.

Both the Samsung Omnia HD and the Nokia N97 retail for about 550 euro, for instance, while the Sony Ericsson W995 Hikaru can be found for 400 euro. Nokia N86 8MP (450 euro) and the LG GC900 Viewty Smart (380 euro) are also shipping.