By Wilson Rothman

 

Apple CEO Tim Cook took to the stage Wednesday to announce a new iPhone and, if rumors are true, a few new iPods as well. He was joined by Phil Schiller to launch the iPhone 5.

Made from aluminum and glass, it's 20 percent lighter than the iPhone 4S -- 112 grams. Thinner too: at 7.6mm it's 18 percent thinner. As the rumors suggested, it looks like a taller version of the iPhone 4S.

You can pre-order the iPhone 5 on Sept. 14. On Sept. 21, it will be available. The iPhone 5 price is same as old 4S, so in the U.S., $199 to $399, depending on the memory. The iPhone 4 8GB is now free with contract, and the 4S is $99. 

 

 By Fred Schruers at TheWrap

By Rob Enderle
TechNewsWorld 
12/27/10 5:00 AM PT

Google was named Company of the Decade in August by an overwhelming majority in the United Nations. Said UN head Eric Schmidt: "Despite the rumors that this was due to our having access to all of the personal information on politicians everyplace, we earned this through hard work and perseverance." In related news, the UN was moved to Silicon Valley and renamed "Google NewWave."

Instead of looking back at 2010, I thought it would be fun this Christmas week to jump ahead in the Enderle Time machine and look back at 2020. It was an amazing year with new faces and old hitting the tech and political headlines.

Wikileaks, which had started printing tell-all books in order to get people to read what it put out in 2015, released the best seller Gay CEOs of Silicon Valley. Neither Mark Hurd nor Larry Ellison would comment, but Hurd's wife and a room full of Ellison girlfriends and wives were quoted as saying "duh!?!" 

Posted on: Monday, 27 December 2010, 06:55 CST

Apple Inc. surpassed Microsoft Corp. this year as the world’s most valuable tech company, amid surging popularity of the company’s iPhone4 and touchscreen iPad tablet computer.

Just last week, the Financial Times named Apple co-founder and chief executive Steve Jobs its "Person of the Year".  The newspaper said Jobs’ unveiling in January of the company’s new iPad capped "the most remarkable comeback in modern business history."

"It wasn't simply a matter of the illness that had sidelined him for half the year before, leaving him severely emaciated and eventually requiring a liver transplant," the newspaper said.

"Little more than a decade earlier, both Mr. Jobs' career and Apple, the company he had co-founded, were widely considered washed up, their relevance to the future of technology written off.”

During a White House news conference on Wednesday, President Obama cited Jobs, 55, as an example of the virtues of the "free market."

"We celebrate somebody like a Steve Jobs, who has created two or three different revolutionary products," the President said.

"We expect that person to be rich, and that's a good thing."

By Matt Egan

Apple's iPad is a success. The speed with which Apple flogged a million units of its sugar-coated 9.7in tablet PC was unprecedented, and anyone who's visited a U.S. hotel recently will have thrilled at the site of business titans hanging around the lobby to get online. (Note to hoteliers: the iPad has no ethernet port. Give the rooms wireless.)

The biggest sign that Apple has a winner is when punters start using its product names as generic names. Just as every digital audio player is referred to as an...

NEW YORK — Apple shares broke through the 300-dollar mark to hit a new record Wednesday, powered by booming sales of the iPad and iPhone.

Apple shares were up 0.94 percent at 301.35 dollars about an hour after the opening bell on Wall Street.

Apple is to report its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings on Monday and analysts are predicting another blockbuster quarter from the Cupertino, California-based maker of the Macintosh computer, iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Apple shares have received a boost this week from reports the gadget-maker plans to begin producing a new iPhone that will be sold by Verizon Wireless next year, ending the run of AT&T as the exclusive US carrier.

AT&T has been the sole carrier of the iPhone since the touchscreen smartphone was launched in 2007.

On Tuesday, US retail goliath Walmart announced that it will start selling the iPad in hundreds of its stores and on its website on Friday, joining Apple stores, Target, Amazon and Best Buy in offering the device.

...

Less than one year ago, most of my clients were requesting iPhone app design.  Today they are still asking for iPhone app design but many also say, “Do you do Android, too?”  Most of them plan to start with one platform, see how things go, and then decide whether to invest in the second platform.  This roll-out strategy is often tied into engineering costs.  Since few developers possess the coding skills required for each platform—Objective C for iPhone and Java for Android—it’s often necessary to hire two development teams. But what about design?

Carriers and handset makers are rallying to make it cheaper and easier to deliver applications on phones using the "official" brand of Java on mobile.

A report from hotspot locator WeFi will be released this week showing key metrics in mobile data consumption across platforms. Laptops and netbooks go through a lot of data over Wi-Fi hotspots, as you’d expect, but the report suggests smartphone owners are using hotspots instead of 3G in increasing numbers. With the recent surge in WiFi-enabled smartphones, WeFi’s report shows an uptick in smartphone data consumption, much of it by users on the Android platform. However, the data is limited by the absence of a major player in the smartphone arena.