In the United States and several other countries, Apple has sold millions of iPhone devices. But in China there has not been a good number of sales whatsoever. China Unicom reportedly sold only about 5,000 iPhones in a week. Two of the biggest problems with selling the iPhone in China so far is that the price is too high and it does not come bundled with WiFi.
The iPhone costs $1,025 in China while it costs $299 in the United States with an AT&T contract. China Unicom is selling the iPhone for a price that is 26% higher than what it is selling for in Hong Kong.
“We believe that eventually China will emerge as a major market for iPhone sales, but it could take a year or two to gain meaningful unit traction as it did in the U.S.,” stated Piper Jaffray & Co. analyst Gene Munster.
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has officially announced today in a press release that the App Store on iTunes has surpassed 100,000 applications. These 100,000 applications have been downloaded well over two billion times. The applications are divided up into 20 different categories which includes travel, games, finance, and medical.
“The App Store, now with over 100,000 applications available, is clearly a major differentiator for millions of iPhone and iPod touch customers around the world,” stated Apple SVP of Worldwide Product Marketin Philip Schiller. “The iPhone SDK created the first great platform for mobile applications and our customers are loving all of the amazing apps our developers are creating.”
Over the summer, the iPhone OS 3.0 was released and developers began to add push, in-app goods, MMS, copy and paste, and shake to shuffle features into their applications. Over 2 billion push notifications have already been delivered to iPhone customers.
The Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone is now available in China through the China Unicom telecommunications company. The problem with the iPhone in China is that there isn’t any built in WiFi. Apple did this in order to comply with a government regulation. In China the iPhone costs between 4,999 yuan ($730) to 6,999 yuan ($1,025).
Given the high price in China, it seems unlikely that the phone will be as big of a hit there as it was in America. That seems unfortunate considering that the iPhone is manufactured in Shenzhen. WiFi was banned by the Chinese government in order to replace it with WAPI technology. WAPI stands for WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure. WAPI was rejected by the ISO and was one of the reasons for a U.S. and China Trade dispute.
“We are talking with Apple and expect the problem to be solved by the end of this year,” stated Unicom spokesman Yi Difei. Do you think that this will hinder people in China from buying the device?
John Carmack is the man behind Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. He as the lead programmer behind the games and is the co-founder of id Software. Carmack has confirmed that Doom Classic has been submitted to Apple for approval in an interview with TouchArcade.
Doom Classic will be running on the OpenGL rendered graphics engine. The sound engine will have better quality and a crafted control system. It’d be cool if the modded versions of Wolfenstein 3D make it on the App Store too such as the Barney and Beavis/Butt-head version.
Great news for Canadian Apple fans. Bell Canada will soon start selling the iPhone 3G S. This 3G S announcement is coming fresh after the Palm Pre and BlackBerry Bold announcement. So far the details have not been revealed about when it will be released on Bell Canada, but there is a details page where people can sign up for additional information.
Kris Rowley is the CISO of the state of Vermont. While she went hiking, a bear had approached her. Rowley backed away slowly, but the bear come coming closer. The only thing Rowley had to toss at the bear to distract it was her iPhone.
“In a semi-panic, I threw the phone at the bear,” stated Rowley in an interview with CIO.com. It turns out that there was an “app for that” bear. Because the phone distracted the bear while Rowley had a chance to escape. Later on Rowley wanted to get her phone back so she took a bat and went back to the scene. It turns out that the iPhone was not edible enough for the bear. The iPhone was laying in place where it was thrown with teeth and claw marks all over it.
Rowley took the iPhone to the Apple store to see if there’s anything they can do. But the Geniuses at the Apple retail store did not believe her story. “I had to buy a new phone or forfeit my contract if I canceled, so I purchased a new phone at full price,” added Rowley. “While saddened about my mangled iPhone, better the phone than me.”
Earlier this week, I wrote that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) will be shipping iPhone 3G S devices that will be jailbreak-proof because it will be using a more secure bootrom. Whoa! That took less than a few days. The bootrom that Apple is placing on the iPhone 3G S devices does not prevent the 24kpwn exploit made by Dev Team hackers, it just interferes with it. But here’s the catch.
In order to boot up the jailbroken iPhone 3G S device, you will need to tether it using a computer in order to boot it up as of right now. The same thing happened with the iPod Touch 2G. Initially when the Dev Team created a jailbroken version of the iPod Touch 2G, it also needed to be tethered in order to boot but later on a more secure boot ROM was made.
Apple: 0, Dev Team: 1 (Points will be redistributed in follow-up posts about iPhone 3G S jailbreaking news)
There are rumors starting to surface that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is not messing around anymore when shipping iPhone 3G S mobile devices. The new 3G S devices will have a bootrom that resists the 24kpwn exploit that is used by the Dev-Team for jailbreaking iPhone devices. MuscleNerd, a member of the DevTeam said that the bootrom update which is known as iBoot-359.3.2 would make jailbreaking new iPhones “impossible” for now.
Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) announced that Arthur Levinson is leaving their Board of Directors. Levinson is a Corporate Director at Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and is a former Chairman and CEO of Genentech. I believe it is safe to say that Levinson’s departure has something to do with the FTC’s investigation of Google and Apple. Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt stepped down from the Apple Board of Directors this past August.
Levinson’s departure from Google is effective immediately which ends his 5.5 year tenure on the Board. Levinson will continue to serve on the Apple Board of Directors where he has worked for the last 9 years.
The FTC said that they were prepared to sue Google and Apple if they did not take care of their potential conflicts of interest. “Google, Apple, and Mr. Levinson should be commended for recognizing that overlapping board members between competing companies raise serious antitrust issues and for their willingness to resolve our concerns without the need for litigation,” stated FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz in an interview.
The Tap Tap Revenge franchise was started by Nate True and is published by Tapulous. Tap Tap Revenge was the most downloaded game on the Apple App Store in 2008. The game features tapping on different colored balls before moving from the top of the screen to the bottom. The colored balls are in sync with the song playing with the game. This concept is similar to the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchise.
Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS) has already been successful on the App Store and now they are bringing their Rock Band franchise from gaming consoles to the Apple iPhone/iPod Touch. The game announcement was made at the CTIA conference.
The Rock Band iPhone application will have 15 songs and 5 more that can be unlocked as you progress in the World Tour. There will also be an option to buy additional tracks. The game will have single player, multiplayer over Bluetooth, and Facebook Connect integration.
All the instruments will work too. That means you can select the guitar, drums, bass, and vocals. No word yet on the release date, but it is expected to arrive within the next few weeks.
When 38-year-old Donald Goodrich walked into the Apple store at the Kenwood Towne Centre in Cincinnati, Ohio he probably did not know he was going to end up being arrested shortly after. Goodrich was upset that his iPhone was not working properly and he told an Apple employee that he was upset. As a matter of fact, Goodrich stated he was, “So mad, I could pop a 9mm at it.”
The Apple employee told the employee that there wasn’t a need for shooting the iPhone. Goodrich insisted “I’ll do it right now. Look!” After that, he took opened his shirt which had a 9mm hand gun in it. The employee said that she’d get the iPhone fixed, but told the manager to cal the police. Goodrich was charged with aggravated menacing and causing fear of harm to the employee.
Goodrich was also charged with a concealed weapons charge for not telling the police he had a gun. However Goodrich did have a concealed weapons permit. The incident took place on October 1.
Sesame Street does a very good job of staying current. I remember as I was growing up, Sesame Street attempted to find ways to keep the audience appealed even as they were growing. When I was kid I remember just caring about learning how to count with The Count and how to control greed with Cookie Monster. As I grew up and became more into sports, I noticed that David Robinson was in an episode of Sesame Street and taught Big Bird how to tie his shoe.
Now Sesame Street is taking a page out of Apple’s book by using an iPod-inspired video to encourage people to dance. Apple takes their marketing very seriously so I would not be surprised if this video clip had to clear the company’s legal department.
Jimmy Kimmel made a Sesame Street spoof where Ernie and Cookie Monster explained the Bernie Madoff scheme back in March and it went viral on YouTube, reaching nearly one million views.
When Manoj Gupta walked into the Apple store in the SoHo area of New York, he did not expect the employees at the Genius Bar to tell him that his phone is acting normally. Gupta came in to find out why his iPhone was dropping so many calls. It turns out that the average iPhone user in New York was seeing a 30% dropped call rate, while Gupta’s iPhone was seeing about a 22% dropped call rate.
The Genius Bar at the Apple store found out how Gupta’s iPhone was performing by doing a stat dump. Since Gupta’s phone was acting normally, they could not really do much to fix his phone. AT&T does plan on launching a service to improve the wireless service within a household or office by using 3G micro cells, but improving the overall service around the country will take the telecommunications company some time.
Essentially what this means for iPhone users in New York is that you are getting the shaft. However AT&T does plan to add wireless spectrum to the Big Apple as announced earlier this month. If you live in New York and have an iPhone, please let us know what you think in the comments section of this post.
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has hired Michael Tchao as the VP of Product Marketing. Tchao was one of the original developers of the Apple Newton PDA. Tchao joined Apple this past Monday as the VP of product marketing. Tchao will be reporting to Apple SVP Phil Schiller. Tchao joins Apple after leaving about 15 years.
Tchao’s most recent job was at the Nike Techlab as the general manager. Nike Techlab designs armbands and sneakers for the iPod. It is uncertain what Tchao will be working on specifically at Apple. Tchao had convinced former Apple CEO John Sculley to make the Newton a consumer device. After that device failed to take off, Tchao parted ways with the company. “He’s got the scars and the great ideas,” stated a former Apple employee in an interview with The New York Times.
This may indicate that Apple is making a tablet computer after all. An Apple tablet with App Store download capabilities would be awesome.
“The rate of App Store downloads continues to accelerate with users downloading a staggering two billion apps in just over a year, including more than half a billion apps this quarter alone,” stated Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a press release. “The App Store has reinvented what you can do with a mobile handheld device, and our users are clearly loving it.”
Apple has announced today that over 2 billion applications have been downloaded from the App Store. The App Store is currently the largest applications store in the world. There are about 85,000 applications available for download as of today and there are about 50 million iPhone and iPod Touch customers around the world. In the Apple iPhone Developer program, there are 125,000 (registered) developers.
As Peter Kafka points out, in the last 76 days Apple sold 500 million applications. On average, that is about 6.6 million downloads per day in the last 76 days. Between the 85,000 applications, it is estimated that Apple is making roughly $200 million per month. Since Apple keeps 30%, that means the company would be making $720 million per year just from the applications business.
