Velcroman1 writes "The most asked question in all of technology finally has an answer. When will Verizon get the iPhone? The answer: early next month. Verizon COO Lowell McAdam unveiled a new iPhone Tuesday during a presentation in New York that was short on surprises as most of the tech press already knew what was coming. 'If the press writes about something long enough and hard enough, eventually it comes true,' McAdam joked. Nevertheless, the move clears a major hurdle for Apple as they face increasing competition in smartphones, particularly from devices based on Google Inc.'s Android software which has exploded in popularity. Verizon's Lowell McAdam described the unveiling as a 'great day for wireless customers across the US.'"

Hugh Pickens writes "The WSJ reports that Verizon Wireless, the country's largest wireless carrier, is confident enough in its network that it will offer unlimited data-use plans when it starts selling the iPhone around the end of this month, a person familiar with the matter says. Such plans would provide a key means of distinguishing its service from rival AT&T Inc., which limits how much Internet data its customers may use each month. Verizon has a lot at stake as it starts to carry the iPhone, which it is expected to announce Tuesday at an event in New York City. Verizon, more than any other US carrier, has built its reputation on its network quality, and any stumble in handling iPhone traffic will call into question Verizon's major selling point. On the other hand, if it does handle the iPhone well, then AT&T will have a harder time arguing it didn't mismanage its own network. Anthony J. Melone, Verizon's chief technology officer, says the company has invested heavily in its 3G network to handle surging smartphone traffic, including nine million Android subscribers, up from none a year earlier.'"

Adrian writes "61.5 million people in the US owned smartphones during the three months ending in November 2010, up 10 percent from the preceding three-month period. For the first time, more Americans are using phones running Google's Android operating system than Apple's iPhone, but RIM's BlackBerry is still in first place, according to comScore. RIM fell from 37.6 percent to 33.5 percent market share of smartphones, Google captured second place among smartphone platforms by moving from 19.6 percent to 26.0 percent of US smartphone subscribers, and Apple slipped to third despite its growth from 24.2 percent to 25.0 percent of the market. Microsoft, in fourth place, fell into single digits from 10.8 percent to 9.0 percent while Palm was still last and further slipped from 4.6 percent to 3.9 percent." This is not unexpected, since Android sales have been outpacing iPhone sales for some time, but it happened significantly earlier than Gartner's prediction: Q4 2012.

An anonymous reader writes "Apple has removed VLC media player from the App Store, putting an end to the controversy on the license (in)compatibilities. Indeed, the iTunes page for VLC media player stopped working. VLC developer Rémi Denis-Courmont notes that he is 'not going to pity the owners of iDevices, and not even the MobileVLC developers who doubtless wasted a lot of their time. This end should not have come to a surprise to anyone.'"

Stoobalou writes "The Mac App Store has only been open for 24 hours but methods for circumventing Apple's DRM are already hitting the Web."

Orome1 writes "Apple today released Mac OS X 10.6.6 which increases the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac. What's also very important in this release is the introduction of the long-awaited Mac App Store with more than 1,000 free and paid apps."

hostedftp writes "In speculation news making the rounds — Apple's recent activities in the Cloud has been leading to conclusions of the what the innovative giant plans to unleash in 2011. The most recent news of Apple applying and securing a patent for a network-boosted OS has made speculators believe Apple is going to launch a Cloud-based operating system for the Mac."

kdawson writes "David Gewirtz's blog post over at ZDNet warns of an imminent price collapse for traditional Mac applications, starting tomorrow when the Mac App Store opens. The larger questions: what will Mac price plunges of 90%-95% mean for the PC software market? For the Mac's market share? Quoting: 'The Mac software market is about as old-school as you get. Developers have been creating, shipping, and selling products through traditional channels and at traditional price points for decades. ... Mac software has historically been priced on a parity with other desktop software. That means small products are about $20. Utilities run in the $50-60 range. Games in the $50 range. Productivity packages and creative tools in the hundreds, and specialty software — well, the sky's the limit. Tomorrow, the sky will fall. Tomorrow, the iOS developers move in and the traditional Mac developers better stick their heads between their legs and kiss those price points goodbye.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Apple has received a patent that hints at the intent of providing network computers that will boot through a 'net-booted environment.' It may seem that Apple is moving slowly into the cloud computing age and that it has many assets that are simply not leveraged in what could be a massive cloud environment that could cause more than just a headache for Google and Microsoft. However, it appears that Apple has been working for some time on an operating system, conceivably a version of a next-generation Mac OS or iOS, that could boot computers and other devices via an Internet connection."

bonch writes "Charles Ying argues that Android's UX architecture has serious technical issues because, unlike the iPhone and Windows 7, Android composites the interface in software to retain compatibility with lower-class devices. Additionally, Android runs Java bytecode during animation, and garbage collection blocks the drawing system. Google engineers dismiss the desire for hardware-accelerated compositing and cite more powerful hardware and an avoidance of temporary objects as a solution to the collection pauses, but Ying argues that will just lead to [a lower] average battery life compared to devices like the iPhone."

An anonymous reader writes "In May, Apple surpassed Microsoft in market capitalization to become the second largest company (by that measure) in the world. Today, with its shares riding high, Apple passed $300 billion in market cap, entering a club of two along with the still-gigantic ExxonMobile. And investors' targets could bring Apple beyond where Exxon is now (though Exxon continues to soar as well). Perhaps Wall Street is catching on that, despite the discontinuation of their underused Xserve, Apple is in fact becoming one of the key tech providers to enterprise, a position that even a year ago seemed laughable. If you consider the iPad to be a PC (which enterprise increasingly is), then suddenly you realize that Apple is expected to climb to 12% market share in 2011. Plus, of course, they have those little things called iPods, and iTunes..."

An anonymous reader writes "As Google prepares to compete with Apple in the digital newsstand business, both companies seem to be glossing over the fact that consumer demand for digital magazines is dropping. 'Wired's collapse from 100,000 iPad copies in June to 23,000 in November was most dramatic, but the story is not much different at Glamour, Vanity Fair, GQ or Men's Health.' Meanwhile, issues of subscriber privacy continue to crop up — Google has reportedly told publishers it will supply certain information about subscribers, and it's not clear whether users will have the ability to opt-out. And according to the Wall Street Journal, 'Apple is planning to share more data about who downloads a publisher's app, information publishers can use for marketing purposes.'"

Hugh Pickens writes "Philip Elmer-DeWitt writes in Fortune Magazine that Apple and Google have two very different strategies in the competition shaping up in 2011 between Android and iPhone. According to the conventional wisdom as espoused by Don Dodge, a Developer Advocate at Google, both Apple and Google will win because they are playing different games. Android will win the market share battle, but Apple will generate bigger profits. 'Apple goes for the high end of the market where they can charge high prices and enjoy great profit margins. Apple has been successful with this strategy multiple times, and will do it again with iPhone,' writes Dodge adding that Google's strategy with Android is to generate revenue streams from mobile search and advertising. Another Google employee, Tim Bray, sees things differently and says he won't be surprised if Apple ships a cheap iPhone and if this time next year, dirt-cheap iPhones were competing against Androids that push the user-experience lever farther than Apple. 'There's nothing fundamental in Android that would get in the way of a industrial-design and user-experience rock-star team, whether at Google or one of the handset makers, testing the hypothesis that these things are central to Apple's success.'"

tekgoblin writes "An Apple authorized Service Provider called System Graph is suing a customer who complained online about poor service from them. The customer Dimitrios Papadimitriadis took his iMac to them because he was seeing gray spots on his LED panel. The Greek company System Graph recommended a full interior cleaning of the iMac and performed the service for Dimitrios. He then got his iMac back and noticed moisture behind the screen and that it still did not work properly and took it back to the repair center. System Graph then told him that they needed to keep his iMac to replace the LED screen and he would be without it for another week.

An anonymous reader writes "Non-recurring iPhone alarms stopped working on January 1 for devices running iOS 4.02, 4.1, and 4.2.1. Apparently, it will fix itself by January 3, and the current workaround is to set the alarm to repeat. My girlfriend wasn't impressed, sleeping in, and I wasn't either, having to race her to work!"

An anonymous reader writes "From the article: 'Apple is being sued for allegedly letting mobile apps on the iPhone and iPad send personal information to ad networks without the consent of users.' Some of the apps listed are on the Android Market as well, but there is no mention of a similar problem for Google. One wonders if Apple could be persuaded to strip access to the unique phone identifiers from apps." A followup article with an industry lawyer suggests that this lawsuit could be the first of many as users push back against privacy intrusions by app developers and ad networks.

Relayman writes "Joe Mailer wanted to download an iTunes movie recently and his Apple TV told him it would take two hours. When he switched his DNS resolver settings, the download time dropped to less than 20 seconds. Apparently, iTunes content is served by Akamai which uses geolocation based on the IP address of the DNS request to determine which server should provide his content. When you use Google or OpenDNS to resolve the Apple domain name, all the requests to Akamai appear to be coming from the same location and they're all directed to the same server pool, overloading that pool and causing the slow downloads. The solution: be wary of using Google or OpenDNS when downloading iTunes files or similar large files. Use your own ISP's DNS servers instead or run your own resolving DNS server."

tekgoblin writes "Today Skype has released an update that allows iPhone users to make video calls from their device. There had been rumors that this update was in the works and now they have been made fact. So, was the Skype outage the other day part of this internal update? Possibly. But Skype has proven to be one of the most important communication tools in the world and now has gotten even better."

An anonymous reader writes "Elliptic Labs will reveal their Touchless Gesture User Interface technology at CES 2011. Elliptic Labs sprung forth from the signal processing environment at the University of Oslo and what they've come up with is an [iPad] dock which creates a 'touchless zone' that extends out about 1 foot in front and to the sides of the iPad screen. Users can then initiate a number of gestures, much like on Microsoft Kinect, to manipulate onscreen content."

An anonymous reader writes "Lots of countries around the world have private copying 'levies,' which are effectively taxes on products that store data, which is put into a pool to be handed out to copyright holders, as a sort of payment for the 'copying' that individuals do. This was quite popular with blank CDRs, for example, but has been expanded in certain countries to cover hard drives, iPods and other such devices. Over in France, they're looking to expand the levy to tablet computers, but apparently if that tablet computer is running Microsoft Windows, it will be exempted from the tax. iPads and Android-powered tablets will have the tax. Why? Well, the argument is that if a tablet is running Windows, it's really a 'computer.' But if it's running one of those 'mobile' operating systems, suddenly it's a brand new category. Not surprisingly, makers of Android tablets — including the French company Archos — are not at all happy about this."