News to make iPhone girl smile? Surely, labor and social welfare campaigners will claim their pressure tactics are working, which may be true to extent. Yet, with hundreds of thousands of workers spread across a vast geographic region, guilty American and European consumers alone aren’t enough to move wages in China.
Score one for Apple — Motorola won’t be able use “slide to unlock” in its phones. And, one presumes the ruling will apply to other Android device makers, as well. However, whereas Motorola is seeking punitive monetary awards in its legal offensive against Apple, the iPhone maker’s goal appears to be much more straight forward — it just wants competitors to stop using ideas created in Cupertino.
News flash — Apple’s biggest and most ruthless competitor is itself. The company dominates the plain jane media (a.k.a. mp3) player segment, which many believe is terminal decline largely due to competition from Apple’s iPhone, iPod touch and iPad product lines. Now, some people are saying iOS is starting to eat the Mac’s lunch, though there are reasons to quibble over that assessment.
Apple and Facebook started the ball rolling and have directly paid out billions to developers to date. Insatiable hater vituperation aside, the iOS space is still far n’ away the most lucrative and innovative place for devs to be. However, like so many created in Silicon Valley innovations, the app-conomy has taken on a life of its own, reshaping how software is made, sold and used.
Apple opened the App Store back on July 10, 2008 with the promise to developers that they would keep 70 percent of whatever price they chose to charge for their apps. Since then, an entire new industry sprang up to meet the needs of iPhone, iPod touch and iPad users, as well as take a stab at getting rich and some did.
Apple’s iTunes Ping, the company’s social network for music, was supposed to arrive with Facebook integration baked. In fact, non-public betas clearly had integration, but the final product arrived with it. Although it is still early days, another non-public beta, this still time iOS, shows that Facebook integration is making a comeback. Is this the real deal?
These days it seems even toaster ovens ship with Angry Birds installed. Thereupon, there are mobile time wasters and then there’s Epic’s game changing title that’s only available on the iPhone and iPad, which marries truly stunning 3D graphics and innovative player interaction — quite naturally, Infinity Blade is bringing home to booty as a result.
The mothership has gotten heat from developers and pundits over its apparent inaction vis-a-vis app piracy, a problem observers say has only gotten worse in recent months. Although criticism of Apple is unlikely to subside, the biggest iOS pirate site has been pushed off shore and the problem has moved to countries ‘that do not have copyright laws.’
Google’s Andy Rubin claims that 700,000 Android handsets get activated every day. While that’s a lot phones, users seem to be only using them as — surprise, surprise — dumb devices. Thereupon, no better proof of this is Apple iOS’s near complete dominance of mobile shopping with fresh statistics showing more than 90 percent of the over 3 billion sessions tracked originated from an iPhone or iPad.
Is your shopping finished yet? Even if it is, chances are you will be heading out again after Christmas to do returns and spend those gift cards. To make the best use of your time, not mention find the available coupons and deals, you must be properly armed and here are five great free apps to get you on the right path.
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