In a surprise move, the company recently shocked fans by announcing this year’s event is its last.

It also revealed that chief executive Steve Jobs would not present the keynote address, reigniting speculation his health has deteriorated following pancreatic cancer surgery in 2004.

Some analysts, however, see Mr Jobs’ decision as part of a succession plan.

“Steve is clearly beginning to share the spotlight with some other executives and sooner or later someone has to step up to the CEO role,” said Van Baker, vice-president of research for IT consulting firm Gartner.

“I don’t think this is about Steve’s health. I think he is trying to back off from being a ‘one man band’ and he is trying to make way for a possible succession and spread the wealth among the executive team that Apple has,” explained Mr Baker to BBC News.

Apple has said the reason for pulling out of future shows is because it feels the forum does not provide value for money.

In an earlier statement, the company said that “every week 3.5m people visit our retail stores. And like many companies, trade shows are a minor part of how Apple reaches its customers”.

Rumour mill
With Apple refusing to answer questions about Mr Jobs’ health, concern and rumour continues to take on a life of its own. Much of it was sparked off in the middle of last year when he appeared at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference looking very thin and gaunt.

Just last week Gizmodo.com, a popular tech and gadget website, posted a report from an anonymous source who said Mr Jobs’ health was “rapidly declining”.

Within minutes, Apple stock dipped from $87.92 (£60.60) to $84.72 (£58.42). It rallied at the end of the day but this demonstrates how sensitive the market is to the issue.

Mr Baker, however, believes there really is nothing to worry about when it comes to either the health of Apple’s boss or that of the company he has been credited with turning into such a dominant force.

“I think it’s much ado about nothing, to be honest with you. Of course I could be wrong, but I think if he had anything that was truly life threatening there is an onus on the board and on him to share that with shareholders,” stated Mr Baker.

However, some analysts believe that Apple will suffer without Mr Jobs at the helm.

“Apple can’t survive the way it is without Steve Jobs,” Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, told the San Jose Mercury News.

“It will have to change dramatically because it’s been so designed around Steve.”

That view is upheld by LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik, who asks what he calls the crass question – “What is Apple Inc’s plan if CEO Steve Jobs dies?”

Mr Hiltzik wrote: “I hope the day when Apple has to contemplate life without Steve Jobs stays far, far in the future. But the value of the company and the perception of its future are now tied, at least in the short term, to the public perception of his future.”

Silent protest
Mr Jobs’ decision not to present Tuesday’s keynote speech now means the spotlight will be turned on Apple’s senior vice-president of worldwide product marketing, Phil Shiller, who will stand in.

The presentation has in the past been likened to that of a rock concert, with the audience cheering every announcement. It has also been a highly visible platform for Steve Jobs, who has delighted the Mac fans by giving them a first glimpse of new products such as the iPhone, the iPod and the Mac Air book among others.

“This really feels like we are making a pilgrimage to the mother ship to see what Steve is going to give us for the next year,” explained Lesa Snider King, who met her husband at Macworld and planned the wedding around the expo in 2006.

As a long time Mac user, regular Macworld attendee, and Mac training instructor, Ms Snider King told the BBC she was so disappointed at Apple’s decision to pull out of future shows that she had organised a protest. She has called on the Mac community to stay silent during Mr Shiller’s keynote address.

“I don’t want anybody to be rude, or throw things or heckle or anything. Our anger will speak volumes by us not saying anything. This isn’t personal against Mr Shiller but it’s aimed at sending a message to Apple,” Ms Snider King explained.

“There is a whole ecosystem that centres around Macworld and it’s not just about Apple. There are hundreds of mom-and-pop companies who will be adversely affected,” she said.

Ms Snider King added that while she has had a lot of positive response, there has been something of a backlash to her idea.

“There have been quite a number of very vile, mean personal attacks over it which I have found shocking. I never dreamt in a million years that I would have people calling me names that I don’t dare repeat. But this is important. Apple pulling out of Macworld has the potential to kill the show.

“Apple have always had this thing about eating their young and I feel that is what they have done here,” said Ms Snider King.

Original URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7810293.stm

But, on Friday, Verizon Wireless and Research in Motion, the BlackBerry’s maker, will do the unthinkable: They will introduce a BlackBerry model without a physical keyboard, one where typing and navigating require tapping on glass, just as users do on the iPhone. This new model is called the BlackBerry Storm, and will sell for $250 with a two-year contract, though a $50 mail-in rebate can bring the price down close to the $199 that Apple charges for the base model of the iPhone.

Despite its lack of a keyboard, the Storm is a real BlackBerry in every other respect, with push email, corporate features and the familiar BlackBerry menus. In many respects, the Storm is a touch-based, large-screen version of the recently released BlackBerry Bold, which is the most polished version of a traditional BlackBerry. It is also the latest member of the new class of hand-held computers, the super-smart phone category kicked off by the iPhone last year and joined by the Google G1 earlier this year.

The Storm sports a large, high-resolution touch screen that fills most of its surface and automatically switches from portrait to landscape mode when the phone is turned. There’s also a forthcoming souped-up download store for third-party software, meant to be similar to the ones on the iPhone and the Google phone. And the Storm can even be used in European and other countries where most Verizon phones don’t work.

However, the biggest innovation in the Storm is a clever feature RIM hopes will give it a big advantage over the iPhone. When you strike a key or icon on the Storm’s screen, you feel a physical sensation, as if you were pressing down on a real key or button. That’s because you are, in fact, pressing a real button. The entire glass display is one large button, mounted on a mechanical substructure that allows it to be depressed when pressure is applied.

The idea behind this feature is to make typing on glass feel much more like typing on a real keyboard, and thus to make the virtual keyboard, and the touch interface, more acceptable to people used to physical keyboards and buttons. This push-down screen also replaces the side-mounted scroll wheel or track ball on other BlackBerrys for activating menu choices and icons.

But, in my tests, this physical feedback feature, which RIM calls SurePress, didn’t magically turn the Storm’s touch interface and virtual keyboard into their physical counterparts. The feature does provide a more reassuring confirmation that a key has been struck or an icon has been clicked than the mere visual feedback one receives from the iPhone. But neither I, nor any of the several BlackBerry addicts I asked to try it out, considered typing on the Storm’s keyboard to be very similar to using the keyboard of a traditional full-sized BlackBerry.

In my opinion, using the Storm’s keyboard is much more like using the iPhone’s keyboard than a traditional BlackBerry’s. I found that I could type quite well on the Storm after awhile, but that a greater adjustment, and more practice, were required than with a physical keyboard.

The Storm also has a keyboard oddity that I found annoying, and that may put off others. It presents you with a full virtual keyboard only when you are holding it horizontally. When you hold the Storm vertically, you get a mashed-up keyboard, like the one on the narrower BlackBerry Pearl, which has multiple letters on each key. This keyboard design relies on software to guess which letter you meant to press. You can also switch to a virtual cellphone-style keypad that requires you to hit each key multiple times.

This is a curious design decision. Once a company ditches a physical keyboard for a virtual one, it can create all kinds of keyboard variations. RIM could have offered a full, vertically oriented keyboard, even if it would have had smaller, more closely spaced keys.

RIM also failed to customize the Storm’s virtual keyboard for some common, specific tasks. For instance, on the iPhone, when you are typing in a Web address in the browser, the keyboard morphs to offer a convenient key that automatically enters “.com”. Not so on the Storm.

There’s another glaring deficit in the Storm: It lacks Wi-Fi capability. This means that, unlike on the Bold, the iPhone or the Google G1, if high-speed cellphone data service is absent or pokey, you can’t fall back on speedy Wi-Fi connections in public places. And, at home or in the office, you can’t take advantage of Wi-Fi connections that are often much faster than cellphone data networks.

The Storm has some important advantages over the iPhone. Its screen, while 7% smaller physically, offers about 13% higher resolution. Photos and videos look beautiful on it. It has much better battery life for phone calls than either the iPhone or the Google G1. While the latter two phones deliver just under their claimed five hours of talk time, in my tests, the Storm lasted a bit over six hours, which is actually half an hour more than its claimed 5.5 hours of talk time. And the Storm has a removable battery, unlike its Apple rival.

This new BlackBerry comes with more memory than the similarly priced base model of the iPhone — nine gigabytes versus eight gigabytes. And, unlike the iPhone’s memory, the Storm’s is expandable, via larger flash cards.

The Storm’s camera is much better than the iPhone’s, at 3.2 megapixels, versus just 2 megapixels for the Apple device. It also has zoom and flash, features the iPhone’s camera lacks. And, unlike the iPhone or the Google G1, the Storm can record videos. In my tests, all of these camera features worked well.

Also, the Storm has copy and paste functionality; MMS (a service for sending photos directly to other phones without using email); voice dialing; and the ability to act as a modem for your laptop. It also allows you to edit, and not just to view, Microsoft Office documents. All of these features are missing from the iPhone out of the box.

The Storm also has a better speaker than the iPhone, and a noise-canceling microphone system. Phone calls, even on speaker phone, were crisp, clear and plenty loud. Physically, the Storm is attractive but hardly svelte. While it’s about the same length and width as the iPhone, it is 15% thicker and 17% heavier — almost as heavy as the chunky G1.

The Verizon high-speed network on which the Storm runs is older and better-established than either the T-Mobile high-speed system the G1 uses or the AT&T 3G network used by the current iPhone. Where Verizon’s high-speed data coverage is strong, the Storm flies.

But, because it lacks Wi-Fi, the Storm can be much slower at Web access than its main competitors. I tested these Web speeds in two hotels in Silicon Valley. In the first, where Verizon reception was strong, the Storm trounced the iPhone on cellphone data speeds, averaging over 800 kilobits per second to the iPhone’s 621 kbps over AT&T. But, when I switched the iPhone to use the hotel’s Wi-Fi network, it beat the Storm by 100 kbps or so.

At the second hotel, barely a mile away, the Storm’s lack of Wi-Fi hurt much more. There, Verizon’s signal was poor, and data speeds on the Storm averaged a horrible 96 kbps. But the iPhone on AT&T averaged 459 kbps, and on Wi-Fi the iPhone averaged 785 kbps.

My test Storm, which was a near-final model missing only a few minor software tweaks, was also sluggish at some tasks. It took noticeably longer than the iPhone to flip the first photo from landscape to portrait orientation, or to start the process of flipping through a series of photos by swiping them with a finger. And some other tasks were also slow. It’s possible that production models will be quicker.

BlackBerry Storm’s touch screen switches from portrait to landscape mode when turned, and aims to make typing on glass feel more like typing on a real keyboard.

Rim has tweaked the familiar BlackBerry user interface for the touch screen, and in general these changes worked well. You select the menu item or icon you want with a light touch, then press down on the screen to activate or confirm your choice. There are even a couple of cool new touch features. For instance, in a list of emails, if you lightly touch and hold one entry, the Storm shows you all messages in that thread.

But this combination of a light touch followed by a hard press on the large screen took some practice, just like typing did. It befuddled several BlackBerry veterans at first.

And some common tasks took more steps than on the iPhone. For instance, emailing a link from a Web page required four steps on the Storm, versus two on the Apple device. The Storm’s email system will be familiar to every BlackBerry user. It has the same corporate email features as other BlackBerrys, and I was easily able as well to use a BlackBerry Internet email account and to set up several personal email accounts, including Gmail.

The Web browser is much improved over the one in older BlackBerry models, and offers multiple ways to view and navigate pages, including one in which a finger moves a cursor, just as on a PC. But I found that panning and zooming in the browser was a bit slower and more awkward than on the iPhone. And, to make some Web sites work properly, I had to dig through menus to change options.

Using the BlackBerry desktop software, I was easily able to synchronize my calendar and contact data over a cable from a Windows PC. (There’s also Mac software for the same task.) But, unlike the iPhone or the G1, the Storm doesn’t offer wireless synchronization from consumer services, only from corporate servers.

The Storm’s multimedia software isn’t as fancy as the iPhone’s, but it’s better than the G1’s, and worked very well in my tests.

Overall, the Storm is a very capable handheld computer that will appeal to BlackBerry users who have been pining for a touch-controlled device with a larger screen. And it offers yet another good option for anyone who is looking to buy one of the new, more powerful, pocket computers.

Original URL: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122714533895043229.html

Anyone who has followed Apple since its inception knows that the very idea that Apple could actually compete on the same level as its competitors on price is a shocker. For years, the company has wanted to be considered a boutique vendor that doesn’t submit to price leadership to sell units.

Steve Jobs went out of his way to create good-looking devices with a unique experience so he wouldn’t have to charge less for his computers and it worked like a charm.

Mac sales have never been higher, and it’s quickly becoming apparent that people are more than willing to spend the additional cash to own a Mac. And yet, the rumors that Apple will sell an $800 Mac simply won’t go away.

Now, I’m a firm believer that Apple should start lowering its prices to appeal to more consumers and take the fight to Hewlett-Packard and Dell, but if Apple’s plan next week is to offer cheaper Macs, I can’t help but wonder if this is Apple’s new strategy going forward.

I think it is.

Remember when we all made a fuss over how high the price of the original iPhone was? Do you remember when we all rejoiced as Apple announced that the lower-end iPhone would retail for $199?

And if you look at the iPod, now you can spend as little as $49 for the iPod Shuffle, $149 for an iPod Nano, and $229 for the iPod Touch. And just in case you want an Apple TV, the entry-level price of $229 isn’t too bad for a set-top box with that kind of functionality.

Do you see what I’m getting at here? Apple is quickly becoming a company that offers high-quality products at a relatively affordable price. And if it decides to sell a Mac for $800, I don’t think there’s any debating the fact that Jobs has decided to change his company’s business model.

And what a change that would be. As I mentioned, Apple is a boutique vendor on a number of levels and has decided that it would rather offer products for a higher price than play the pricing game. But as economic conditions change and people need to think more about their wallets than they may have over the past few years, Apple feels it needs to change its course and compete more effectively against HP and Dell.

Will it work? I can guarantee that it will. But what will it do to Apple’s image? As long as the company continues providing high-quality products that easily eclipse the competition, I don’t think it will have anything to worry about on that front either.

Apple’s decision to offer a cheaper Mac is a smart one. But it goes beyond a cheaper product. In reality, Apple is now a changed company that will compete on price. And it’s because of that that its competitors should be scared.

Original URL: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10063239-17.html

Steve Jobs was rushed to the ER just a few hours ago after suffering a major heart attack. I have an insider who tells me that paramedics were called after Steve claimed to be suffering from severe chest pains and shortness of breath. My source has opted to remain anonymous, but he is quite reliable. I haven’t seen anything about this anywhere else yet, and as of right now, I have no further information, so I thought this would be a good place to start. If anyone else has more information, please share it.

Was this just a short seller trying to make a quick buck, or someone trying to see how fast and far they could spread a false rumor? And what does it say about the value of citizen journalists?

CNN’s iReport site lets anyone put up posts and videos about the news. Its tagline is “Unedited. Unfiltered. News.” Sometimes these reports get on CNN proper (presumably, after being vetted). But as this incident shows even the an unvetted report carries more weight than if it had appeared on Twitter or a random blog because it is on a CNN site. And that may be purely because it gets distributed more broadly.

Original URL: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/03/citizen-journalist-hits-apple-stock-with-false-steve-jobs-heart-attack-rumor/

Nokia’s service, which will officially launch in the second half of this year, is called Comes With Music. It will be built into certain Nokia handsets and will allow customers to download unlimited amounts of music from participating labels. The downloaded music can be kept on a PC or mobile-phone forever. In theory, a consumer could download every single song from the labels’ catalogs; they’d simply need a very big hard drive on which to store the files. Nokia and its partners have not disclosed pricing for the service, but they believe it has plenty of potential. “We believe this will be a significant contributor of revenue over a long-term basis for Nokia,” says Liz Schimel, global head of music for Nokia.

(Almost) All Aboard
The record labels seem to be buying that argument. Universal Music Group in December signed up with Nokia, and Sony BMG Music Entertainment partnered with the service in April. A spokesperson for EMI Group, the sole major label yet to join, says the company is talking with Nokia, although no deal has been reached. Nokia says it is in talks with independent labels as well.

For the music industry, the Nokia venture represents a departure from the old ways of doing business. Susan Kevorkian, program director of consumer markets at research firm IDC, says there is “broader experimentation” as CD sales decline and music revenues slide overall. For record companies, it may make sense to look for new ways to sell the work of their artists. Ringtones, for example, have become a multibillion-dollar business in only a few years. “We have a long-term sustainable business for Nokia, the music industry, and the artists,” says Schimel.

It’s hard to evaluate the service before pricing and other specifics are known. Nokia remained tight-lipped about the details of Comes With Music as it unveiled the Warner Music partnership. But Apple has said that it makes little money on music sales through its iTunes store, instead generating profits from sales of iPods and other hardware. Will the music business for Nokia and its partners also be of marginal financial benefit? Schimel says such comparisons are off-base. “We feel it is apples and oranges,” she says. “We are offering a structure that will attract new customers and new revenues.”

Will It Pay?
Some analysts are skeptical that Comes With Music will help Nokia attract new customers for its mobile phones. James McQuivey, a principle analyst at Forrester Research says, “There won’t be the same rush to buy Nokia phones” as there is for iPhones. Apple is expected to sell 10 million iPhones by yearend. McQuivey guesses that at most Nokia could sell between 2 million and 4 million handsets in the year following Comes With Music’s launch. The amount of revenue the company earns from downloads will depend on how much Nokia intends to charge consumers. But it is sure to be insignificant at a company that made $10.6 billion last year on sales of $75 billion.

IDC’s Kevorkian sees this as part of a bigger move by Nokia and the music industry. “It is a slim revenue margin, but it makes sense as part of a volume play for Nokia, who is in the midst of transition,” she says. Kevorkian sees Comes With Music as fitting into Nokia’s Ovi service, a broad effort to sell services to mobile-phone users.

Still, McQuivey thinks Nokia and its partners may find few takers for the new music service. He argues that music enthusiasts won’t be satisfied with a phone that’s merely adequate for listening to tunes, while other people won’t be willing to pay money for such music services. He says it’s a lot like digital cameras. Some people use their phone as a digital camera, but people taking lots of photos will generally purchase a separate, higher-quality digital camera. “It’s a mismatch in market opportunity,” says McQuivey.

Original URL: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2008/tc2008071_969873.htm

Safari 4 has just been seeded to the developers at Apple’s developer conference. The manufacturer claims that the software has a 53% faster JavaScript engine than the preceding and current version 3.1 (based on the SunSpider JavaScript Performance test conducted on iMac with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor at 2.8 GHz, with 2 GB of RAM and running under Mac OS X Snow Leopard.) Although Firefox 3 RC3 was the first to deliver significant JavaScript performance improvement, Apple apparently is exceeding those gains with Safari 4.

Apple uses a new and improved JavaScript interpreter code-named SquirrelFish, which is provided on an open-source basis from the WebKit project, the same organization that makes the open-source engine used by Safari to render web pages. According to the WebKit project, the SquirrelFish engine is 1.6 times faster than the JavaScript engine in Safari 3.1.

SquirrelFish does its magic by turning JavaScript script into so-called bytecodes, an optimized code much more suitable for run-time execution than natural language-based JavaScript commands, which are longer and more complicated to interpret – and therefore are slower.

Why JavaScript performance matters
Most today’s web applications and web 2.0 sites rely on the JavaScript scripting language originally created by current Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich while he was employed by Netscape. JavaScript acts as glue that connects a user interface rendered in a web browser with a database and programming logic running in a web server. The browser’s JavaScript engine is solely responsible for interpreting and executing JavaScript commands embedded in HTML code. As a result, a browser’s JavaScript engine performance is directly related to the performance and responsiveness of a web application, contributing to an improved user experience.

The fact that many applications grow in size and become more bloated with each release means that a browser that can run web applications faster and make user interfaces more responsive on any computer is actually a big deal. You don’t have to have any specific market forecasting talent to predict that this trend may be impacting browser market shares: Speed can directly translate into more usability for most of us. Clearly, JavaScript handling is on its way to become a powerful weapon in the browser market.

SpiderMonkey, SquirrelFish, Tamarin and more
Mozilla was the first to introduce significant speed gains with Firefox 3 beta 5 (the final version is expected to ship by mid-June). Firefox has its Gecko engine to render web pages, which is generally considered to be slightly slower than Safari’s WebKit – which is largely responsible for the “fastest browser in the world” status Safari enjoys. Firefox’ JavaScript implementation is based on Mozilla’s own and decade old SpiderMonkey technology, which many considered to be the fastest JavaScript interpreter until SquirrelFish came out.

Although in beta, Firefox 3 scored with many reviewers who are praising the browser’s performance improvements, with WSJ’s Walt Mossberg declaring the browser a “winner.” But now that the SquirrelFish/Safari combination appears to be offsetting the speed gains in Firefox 3 and may set a new benchmark, we can expect more direct competition between Mozilla and Apple. Mozilla has plans to expand SpiderMonkey with Adobe’s JavaScript engine called Tamarin, included in Flash 9, which has a so-called “tracing” feature designed to enable faster code execution. However, the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark claims that SquirrelFish is at least 1.9 times faster than Tamarin.

Mozilla plans to wedge Tamarin into Firefox and match the API’s of both technologies “There are areas in which SpiderMonkey is faster than Tamarin and areas where it’s not. We’re looking to build hybrids that are best-of-breed for both worlds and we’re going to pull those into the Firefox release when ready,” Mozilla co-founder Mike Shaver recently said.

Can IE8 compete?
The big variable in this game is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8, currently in beta 1 phase. IE8 is expected to deliver speed gains in JavaScript performance as well. However, Microsoft is facing a tough task. The fact that the software giant is often criticized for delivering bloated and inefficient software certainly doesn’t help. In our tests, the first beta of IE8 shows no noticeable speed gains in running web applications.

Quite the opposite is the case, actually. Websites and web applications run noticeably slower than in IE7. The whole browsing experience generally appears to be less responsive. Of course, IE8 is in an early development stage and you can bet Microsoft is going to tweak its performance. The only problem is that the software giant will have to work to raise the stakes in the browser race. If IE8 under-delivers, the market could respond with further market share erosion for IE. It is evident now that JavaScript engine performance has become a key metric in the newest race for the title of fastest browser.

The battle ahead is nicely summed by Mozilla co-founder Mike Shaver who said the following: “They [Apple] have dropped SquirrelFish in now and got a big speed up there. We’ve got more coming on our side. You’ll see this leapfrog pattern over and over. We’re not going to let anybody slack on that and the other browser vendors need to keep up, too.”

According to Net Applications, Firefox 3 captured almost one fifth (18.41%) of the browser market in May, followed by Safari 3.1 which hit 6.25%. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer continues on its pace of a slow but steady decline, ending up at 73.75% in May. Microsoft has scheduled second beta of IE8 for an August release, with a generally expected final release in the fourth quarter of this year.

Original URL: http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-37904-113.html

More than 700 titles will be on offer from the launch date, 100 of which will be available in high-definition.

Many of the titles on sale for downloading via iTunes will be going on sale on the same day they are released on DVD, said Apple.

New releases cost £10.99 to buy and £3.49 to rent. Movies from the iTunes library cost £6.99 to buy and £2.49 to rent. HD versions cost £1 more.

Those renting films have up to 30 days to watch what they have downloaded and once they have started watching it have 48 hours to finish viewing.

Once downloaded films can be watched on an iPod, iPhone or through Apple TV.

Apple said films from Fox, Disney, Paramount, Warner, MGM, Sony International and Lionsgate would be available via iTunes.

Early titles available for download include I Am Legend, National Treasure 2, Hitman and Into The Wild.

ITunes in the US started offering movies for sale or rent in early 2008.

In the online movie watching market Apple faces competition from rivals such as Amazon, Netflix, Blockbuster and even Microsoft via its Xbox 360 gaming console.

Original URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7435523.stm

But Apple is now exploring another hardware technology that has the potential to realign a multibillion dollar industry.

Apple has once again got an itch for gaming.

This isn’t necessarily a new frontier. Fans of the Cupertino-based company may recall how a Steve Jobs-less Apple entered the console gaming fray in 1996 with the troubled Pippin. At best, the Pippin ended up being a costly lesson. At worst, it served as a stinging footnote to the company’s strained relationship with gamers.

Fast forward to the present — the company has enjoyed a string of hardware and software hits and has disrupted the music and mobile phone industries soon after entering them. Today’s Apple certainly has the means to release another console, but let’s face it — a rehashed Pippin would be a huge gamble, considering the established relationships and competition represented by Sony’s PlayStation3, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, and the Nintendo Wii.

This doesn’t mean that Apple has abandoned ways to break into the gaming market with its desktop hardware. A beefed-up iMac offers an interesting possibility. Adding horsepower to the iMac line isn’t exactly new for Cupertino, but with an overclocked Intel CPU and an nVIDIA 8800M GTS under the hood, the new iMac could easily pass for a leading gaming rig — at least, if there were more developers creating games designed to run on it and OS X.

It seems much more likely that Jobs and Co. may be following a different path to gaming success — domination of the mobile gaming market.

A trademark extension filed last February with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is one of the strategy’s biggest tells. The filing extends Apple’s trademark in regards to:

“Toys, games and playthings, namely, hand-held units for playing electronic games; hand-held units for playing video games; stand alone video game machines; electronic games other than those adapted for use with television receivers only; LCD game machines; electronic educational game machines; toys, namely battery-powered computer games.”

Skeptics could easily dismiss this as Apple casting a wide net for future expansion, but a swift call to action seems more likely. Not only are executives well aware of the strong interest in gaming among Mac users (and vendors), but also new conditions exist for gaming to be pushed to the forefront in the Apple hardware and software ecosystem. The faltering company behind the Pippin now dominates several hardware segments, which makes a huge difference in launching a new (and potentially related) product. The problems that the Pippin faced – such as the development and marketing costs associated with an unproven device – would be negated by a gaming platform tied into Apple’s market-dominating and innovative mobile devices.

And here’s the really sneaky part – the iPod Touch and the iPhone are already fully capable of playing games. Apple highlighted this home-court advantage with the recent release of the SDK for the iPhone/iPod Touch. By doing so, Apple let a community of eager third-party developers tackle designing games like “Spore” as well as casual games for its devices that utilize innovative features such as the multitouch screen and motion-sensing accelerometer. Along with all of the development tools necessary for building applications, developers will have the ability to upload and sell their creations through the iPhone App store (naturally, Apple will take a cut).

Consumers are already ga-ga over Apple’s mobile devices to begin with, so whether they should be re-imagined as gaming gadgets is more of a marketing issue. But with the developer community in a tizzy to create the next great Apple-friendly game, it’s only a matter of time before Cupertino announces that it’s ready to connect the dots. Don’t be too surprised if it ends up being Steve’s “one more thing” at next year’s Macworld.

Original URL: http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/05/…/imac

Over 10,000 iPhones were sold by Friday afternoon in Germany, a T-Mobile spokeswoman said, after it went on sale at midnight in a Deutsche Telekom shop in Cologne.

“It was love at first sight,” said one 50-year-old man.

T-Mobile representatives handed out blankets and umbrellas as well as hot tea, coffee and pretzels for those waiting outside, before sales staff cheered loudly as the first customers entered the store.

In Britain, fans had to wait until 1800 GMT before the music-playing, Web-browsing phone went on sale at stores from Apple, mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse <CPW.L and mobile operator O2.

The queue outside central London’s main Apple store stretched around the corner and long lines also formed in the city’s financial area.

First in the queue, clutching a mug of steaming tea, was student Graham Gilbert, who arrived at 0830 GMT on Thursday and endured a wet and cold night on the street.

Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica’s O2 and Carphone have pinned high hopes on the iPhone after more than a million sold in the United States in a few months.

“It’s probably the most important phone this year in terms of the impact it will have on the mobile phone market but it’s going to be a long way from being a best seller,” CCS analyst Ben Wood told Reuters.

“But one of the things that Apple do very well is they spend a lot of time thinking about the consumer experience and we’re going to see their competitors taking more of that approach.”

Most analysts expect the device to be popular with a niche audience, in part due to its price tag, and those queuing on Friday in Germany and Britain were mostly young men.

Most European handsets are subsidised in return for long-term contracts but the iPhone costs 399 euros ($585) in Germany and customers must agree a two-year contract with T-Mobile for monthly fees between 49 and 89 euros.

In Britain the iPhone costs 269 pounds ($568) on top of an 18-month contract costing a minimum of 35 pounds per month.

“It’s a magnificent product and it’s very well marketed by Apple,” said Greenwich Consulting’s Fred Huet. “The real question will be how many they sell once the novelty wears off.”

The phone will go on sale in France at the end of the month.

Original URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202804476

Google’s plans for the mobile phone market have caused quite the stir Monday, even though the company’s press conference Monday morning didn’t add much to what we already knew about Android, a collection of software that could be a catalyst for Linux on mobile phones over the next few years. Still, when any company the size of Google makes noise about steering its ship in a certain direction, people take notice.

One nice development is that we can stop calling the damn thing the Gphone, which stopped being cute awhile ago in the fine tradition of J-Lo, A-Rod, and K-Fed. But while both Apple and Google will be selling mobile phone software in late 2008, the companies seem determined to walk a fine line in their new dual relationship as trusted partner and wary competitor.

Android is a nice idea; take the promise of Linux as a mobile operating system and finally give it a backer with some legs. This could set Google up nicely for the future if mobile phones continue to turn into little computers, since companies like Symbian and Microsoft are far from entrenched in this market.

Apple is also eying that future. Much of what Google said about Android during its press conference–such as the desire for a better Internet experience on mobile phones–was uttered by Apple CEO Steve Jobs in January during the presentation of the iPhone. And it’s already sold 1.4 million iPhones in three months.

So this time next year, are we going to be talking about the looming showdown between Google and Apple in mobile computing, or the surprising resignation of Google’s Eric Schmidt from Apple’s board of directors?

Today’s discussion was about Android the concept. We won’t really know what Google has developed as far as Android the product until at least next week, when the company releases a software developer’s kit.

Much of the iPhone’s initial success can be traced to the user interface and we have no idea what Google has cooked up in that sense, although Andy Rubin (the brains behind the project) said it would be cool. “We hope Android will be the foundation for many new phones and will create an entirely new mobile experience for users, with new applications and new capabilities we can’t imagine today,” he wrote on the Official Google Blog Monday morning. Fair enough, for now.

Apple is extremely unlikely to directly compete with Google in one sense: OS X is probably not going to be sold on a licensing basis anytime soon. In that sense, Google is really butting heads with Symbian and Microsoft, fighting for design wins at companies beyond Motorola and HTC, who pledged support for Android on Monday. Apple will continue to compete against hardware makers like Nokia, Motorola, and Research in Motion, although software is certainly a selling point for the iPhone.

It also sounds like Google and its partners are focused more on mainstream phones than the high end of the smartphone market where the iPhone plays. Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs said his company hopes to develop chipsets for Android phones that bring the cost below $200, although that might take some time. And Rubin said Android can run on 200MHz processors based on the ARM9 core, which ARM’s Rob Coombs, director of mobile solutions said was very much a mainstream processor by today’s standards. The iPhone uses a 620MHz ARM chip made Samsung that’s based on the current leading-edge ARM11 core.

But I can’t ignore the obvious: If you’re shopping for a smartphone late next year, and you search pages for information on what you should buy, you’ll probably see Android phones from HTC or Motorola compared to phones running Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm (maybe), and, of course, the iPhone.

In a way, Android could be good for Apple. One of Intel’s public relations representatives, besieged with requests to comment on AMD’s advantage over Intel’s lackluster server processors in 2004 and 2005, used to always declare that “competition is good for the soul.” Right now, the smartphone industry is trying to come up with an answer to the iPhone, and we’ll all benefit if the bar is continually raised by Apple, Google, Symbian, or any other number of companies.

Also, the more people that embrace the notion of smartphones and sophisticated mobile computers, the better life will be for companies in that industry. A rising tide does lift all boats to a certain extent, and Apple could attempt to position itself as the thought leader in mobile computing and let other companies have the less-profitable segments of the market.

The interesting thing here, however, is that no one from Microsoft, Symbian, Palm, Nokia, Motorola, or Verizon sits on Apple’s board of directors. Google’s Schmidt does. As director, Schmidt is privy to Apple’s future strategic priorities, if not actual details of its product plans. Might Apple now wonder if that’s a good idea?

Apple declined to comment on the notion, other than to note that Google remains an important partner to the company. During the conference call, Schmidt sort of addressed the question of competition with Apple, noting for the record that he’s “a very happy iPhone user, but it’s also important to state that there are going to be very different mobile device experiences.”

It’s not like this is the first time in history that companies have been both partners and competitors; just look back to when IBM was making chips for Apple, but selling Windows PCs. And it’s very common in the software industry, where companies like Oracle and SAP compete fiercely but also have to make sure that their products can work together.

But Larry Ellison isn’t attending board meetings in Germany. There will be many compelling stories that come out of Android and the iPhone during the next year, and the makeup of Apple’s board of directors could be one.

Original URL: http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9811421-37.html