According to Canaccord Genuity analysis of Apple’s third quarter, the company “captured more than half of the handset industry’s overall operating profits — 52 percent…And it managed it with only a 4.2 percent global handset unit market share,” reports The Wall Street Journal.
“With the iPhone, Apple is doing to the smartphone business what it has done to the PC business with the Mac: Generating a disproportionate share of profits relative to revenue,” suggests the article.
With other manufacturers faltering and iPhone 4S sales soaring, Apple may hit 60 percent of the industry’s operating profits soon.
According to AllThingsD: “…with the iPhone 4S the top-selling smartphone at AT&T, Sprint and Verizon, and its international rollout in full swing, it seems pretty clear Apple has a very good chance of hitting that big number — and soon.”
Nintendo Wii is the most popular video game console with young Americans (ages 8-to-24), according to a new Harris Interactive survey.
Nearly 6,000 young consumers participated in the study conducted in August 2011.
The poll also lists Apple as the top brand among the 13-to-24 demographic for computers, mobile phones and tablets.
“It’s interesting that the Nintendo Wii rated so highly given that it’s been the lowest selling console for the last year,” reports IndustryGamers. “This shows that Nintendo still has plenty of brand equity among consumers, and with the right products and marketing there is no reason they can’t be the #1 selling console again. The dangers are also clear in this study, as Apple leads in mobile phones and tablets, where games are one of the top categories that seem to be having an effect on handheld console sales.”
AirCassette is a $1.99 iPhone app that mimics the look of an audio cassette tape while playing (including the handwritten script of a label sticker).
“The reels actually spin and you can create and share mix tapes with your friends via e-mail or Facebook, just as we used to do back in 1986,” reports The New York Times.
The AirPlay-compatible app is from Finnish programmer Majasalmi, known for its “Russian Roulette” iPhone game, and features its own iTunes music interface.
The app includes multiple cassette designs that resemble popular blank tapes of the audio cassette era.
“Watching a cassette tape spin on the iPhone’s high-resolution display is oddly calming and, thanks to digital compression, the audio is far superior in AirCassette than it ever was on my Sony Walkman,” comments John Biggs in Gadgetwise.
Forbes speculates that the rumored future Apple TV would create a demand for single channels, which could potentially break up the cable pricing monopoly.
Rather than paying for a package of a hundred channels, users would pay a la carte for content just as single-channel apps have become popular in the mobile sphere.
“Presumably, Apple wants to disrupt this market the same way the iPod and iTunes made it easier for consumers to buy music, and the way the iPhone is slowly moving the cellular industry to data plans over voice plans (see: iMessage, Facetime),” suggests the article.
Providers such as Time Warner Cable, Optimum and DirecTV already have apps for live streaming of channels. And ESPN, CNN and Major League Baseball have their own apps.
“[Cable providers] might consent to separate channel apps as long as each still requires an overall subscription…that would certainly put a crimp in [Apple’s] potential plans to revolutionize television,” explains Forbes. “And if Apple provides incentives for channels to go it alone, the fight could be massive.”
A recent study by EyeTrackshop showed that Apple’s iPhone 4S and iPad 2 “drew more glances and held people’s attention longer than Google Android devices from Amazon, HTC, Motorola and Samsung,” reports Forbes.
The study showed participants a picture of six smartphones and five tablets. EyeTrackshop’s software tracked where subjects’ eyes went, in what order and how long, using webcams.
“EyeTrackshop said the results equate to respondents dwelling on the iPhone 4S 42 percent longer than the other phones and on the iPad 138 percent longer than the other tablets.”
Additionally, a follow-up survey indicated that 40 percent found the iPhone most visually appealing; for tablets, 35 percent for the iPad; and disregarding price, 47 percent said they would buy the iPhone and 48 percent preferred the iPad to other tablets.
A newly uncovered Apple patent suggests 3D gesture control may be in the works for the company’s mobile devices.
“Forget relying solely on touch to control your Apple device,” writes Wired. “On future iPads, you may be able to control your tablet from across the room using 3D gestures, such as a swirl or swipe of the hand.”
Employing a front-facing camera, it may be possible to use 3D gestures to control graphical elements such as icons, media files, text and images on an iPad or iPhone. A toolbar would teach beginners pre-set options as well as allow users to customize their own gestures.
Another Apple patent indicates the company is working on an integrated projector for iDevices that would incorporate gesture controls for manipulating projected images.
Tech analyst Tim Bajarin says both Google and Microsoft have been downplaying the significance of Apple’s Siri because they know it could seriously impact their core search businesses, especially as it gains access to even more online databases.
“You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone,” Google mobile chief Andy Rubin told Walt Mossberg at the recent AsiaD conference.
Microsoft’s Andy Lees suggested that Siri “isn’t super useful” and added that the voice interactivity of Windows Phone 7 when connected to Bing harnesses “the full power of the Internet, rather than a certain subset.”
Bajarin counters that, “Apple has just introduced voice as a major user interface and that its use of voice coupled with AI on a consumer product like the iPhone is going to change the way consumers think about man-machine interfaces in the future.”
Siri is not just a voice UI, but a gatekeeper to natural language searching of online databases that may eventually make Apple the third major search company worldwide.
App downloads on Google’s Android platform now top iPhone and iPad combined, even in the absence of any competitive Android tablets.
The OS accounted for 44 percent of all app downloads for Q2 of this year, according to a recent study by New York-based ABI Research.
In the new Steve Jobs’ biography, the Apple founder rails against Android as a “stolen product,” one that he vowed to go to “thermonuclear war” in order to stop its success. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently derided the OS as well, adding you need to be a “computer scientist” to understand Android phones.
“But a flood of low-priced handsets this summer has catapulted Android ahead of Apple for the first time in terms of app downloads,” reports the Daily Mail.
However, Apple still leads in the per user category. “Android’s app downloads per user still lag behind Apple’s by 2 to 1,” explains Dan Shey at ABI.
In a post that describes what should follow after Siri, GigaOM suggests, “Apple’s artificial intelligence is only the tip of the iceberg as we combine ubiquitous connectivity, sensor networks, big data and new methods of AI and programming into a truly connected network.”
The next generation of the Web will “connect machines to machines and connect those machines back to people” with advancements in low-power, cheap sensors and “better ways of programming computers so that they can understand data from several million end points.”
The necessary connectivity exists currently and improvements of sensors for tracking everything — weather, inventory, traffic conditions, etc. — will provide the necessary information.
From there, programming and better AI like Siri, “will allow machines to parse the data from billions of sensors and notify people to take action only when needed.”
Sprint announced it will replace its unlimited 4G mobile broadband for mobile hotspots and devices with three new tiered data plans.
Starting in November, “users of mobile hotspots, USB modems, tablets and notebooks will pay $45 for 3GB of combined 3G and 4G, $60 for 5GB and $90 for 10GB of combined data,” where before only 3G data had limits.
“Sprint was already showing signs that it couldn’t keep up the unlimited game forever,” reports GigaOM. “It announced last month that it was doing away with unlimited data for its smartphone hotspot feature and was capping data at 5GB a month.”
Some are concerned that this prefaces the end of Sprint’s unlimited data plans for smartphones, a differentiating factor from other providers and a selling point for the Sprint iPhone.
According to The Wall Street Journal: “It turns out that Siri, the new voice activated personal assistant for Apple iPhone 4S has a dry sense of humor.”
For example, when asked “Who’s your daddy?” the phone answered: “You are” in an authoritative tone — and in response to “Beam me up,” the phone reportedly responded: “Sorry, Captain, your tricorder is in Airplane Mode.”
The article adds that in response to “Open the pod bay doors” (a reference to Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which also features a “talking” machine), users say the iPhone responds in a frighteningly slow voice, “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Consumers are reacting to the artificial intelligence by asking the iPhone outlandish questions as websites dedicated to the concept are already emerging. The “personality” of Siri’s software could very well be the first step in driving consumer adoption.
The MoPix digital platform allows filmmakers and content creators to inexpensively distribute their projects as paid apps.
“Filmmakers choose from templates and customizable options to create a DVD-like experience that bridges video content with the interactivity, enhanced features, and extra content of an app,” according to the LAUNCH blog.
Filmmakers can target multiple devices including the iPad, iPhone, Kindle Fire and Android devices. The developers charge a one-time fee and a percentage of sales.
MoPix will demo the app at the LAUNCH PAD Tablet Conference this Friday in Mountain View, California.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak likes the excitement of a new product release and tries to be first in line, despite the fact that Apple will ship him products.
He was #1 on line at the Apple store in Los Gatos, California and stayed up all night tweeting about it.
TechCrunch interviewed “Woz” (on iPhone video) as he discussed his enthusiasm for Siri: “This is the way I want all mobile devices to be in the future.”
“I’m so tired of pushing buttons, tapping things to get the right things done on a phone,” he added. “I just want to talk my thoughts to it.”
He also notes that he no longer wants to be sent somewhere that might have answers: “Google is known for search engines. I say search engines should be replaced by answer engines.”
Geek.com writer Will Shanklin believes Siri’s capabilities would be enormously expanded with access to third party apps. Currently, “Yelp and Wolfram Alpha appear to be the only ones in that elite group.”
Third party apps could enable users to play music among different streaming services, quickly use music ID, combine data from multiple services (“How about a combination of Netflix and IMDb data?”), get real-time navigation and a range of other convenient possibilities.
Siri access to Facebook could expedite posts, messages and notifications and quickly get information from friends’ profiles.
“As much as you might be blown away by Siri’s capabilities now, we will likely look back at this as ‘Siri 1.0’ five years from now,” writes Shanklin. “In much the same way that the first iPhone’s single-paged homescreen – with no third-party apps – looks primitive now, this introductory version of Siri will pale in comparison to where ‘she’ will be then.”
If consumers take to the new virtual personal assistant technology Siri, featured in Apple’s iPhone 4S, we may see significant change to other devices such as the TV remote control.
Norman Winarsky, VP of ventures at SRI (involved in the development of Siri), told MIT’s Technology Review that, “within a decade, virtual personal assistants would be ubiquitous, integrated into the fabric of many devices,” and that their value could hike into the 100 billion dollar level.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to finally do away with the remote control, a device that begins to look so clunky and antiquated in our era of iEverythings?” asks Technology Review. “Apple has not announced any plans to bring Siri to devices other than the iPhone 4S, but the idea doesn’t seem so farfetched. It’s quite possible that the next refresh of the Apple TV could use a speedier A5 dual-core chip, speculates Cult of Mac — which would give the device the processing power necessary to run Siri.”
According to the article, Siri offers much more than just voice recognition: “Siri is good at parsing the words you say, but more importantly, its impressive artificial intelligence is able to discern their meaning, and take appropriate actions… As smart TVs become a next battleground for Internet-connected devices, let’s hope our remote controls get smarter, too.”
