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iTunes gifting grifter cleaning out British bank accounts
On January 25th, The Register reported that one unlucky bloke saw his bank account emptied through a series of iTunes monthly gift purchases sent to an unknown Hotmail account. He was informed of the theft by an e-mail from Apple, saying his gift purchase had been confirmed, but alas, he'd already been taken to the tune of £1,000. It's been over a week since the story appeared, but accounts continue to pour into an Apple customer support forum, echoing the accusations made to The Register -- and, boy are people mad. Apparently, customers seeking Apple's help have received a pat response that sounds awfully familiar: cancel your credit card and report the charges to your bank. We've yet to hear of this happening anywhere outside the UK, but we're still interested to see how the great iTunes heist shakes out. If a suspicious Hotmail account is sucking you dry, we want all the sordid details.
Deutsche Bank says IT warms to iPhone
Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore says corporate IT is warming up to the iPhone. In a research note published yesterday das analyst says, "There is growing evidence that the iPhone is making inroads into the Enterprise." Whitmore thinks Apple will sell 2 million iPhones to big business by the end of the year, some through reimbursements to employees and some through IT department purchases. If those numbers hold, the iPhone will own about 7% of the Enterprise smartphone market in 2009, up from the 2% it controlled in 2008. What's up with the shift? Whitmore notes four reasons: User satisfaction - highlighted by the recent J.D. Power surveys of both consumer and business smartphone users Enterprise applications The iPhone's level of innovation The virtual keyboard - according to Whitmore, the thought that business users have to have a physical keyboard on a smartphone has turned out to be a 'fallacy.' However, businesspeople might not agree that they don't need a physical keyboard if their first virtual keyboard isn't on an iPhone. UK researcher Canalys has taken a look at touchscreens and future smartphone purchases. The firm finds the ground shifting the touchscreen's way. Of the 3,000 survey respondents in the UK, Germany, and France, 38% say their next phone will have a finger-oriented touchscreen, while 16% say theirs will have a stylus-operated touchscreen. But a lot of people who have virtual keyboard-only phones miss the physical keys. According to Canalys, 53% of people who own a touchscreen phone say they won't buy another one, though they may have bought the wrong one for them to start. A majority of iPhone and HTC users say they'll keep the virtual keys on their next phones, while less than a third of Sony Ericsson touchscreen phone owners say their next phone won't have buttons. [via Fortune, The Register]
On doubting the iPhone and making the wrong comparisons
John Gruber already pointed out some flaws of The Register's Lance Davis who doubts the iPhone, but I have an even bigger problem with the line of thinking Davis used in his analysis. He writes: Remember, the mobile industry is one where some of the biggest companies in the world have tried and failed: Siemens, Philips, Fujitsu. None of them have creditable [sic] market shares. Even IBM put a toe in the water in the late nineties and then stayed away.Obviously, no one can truly say one thing or another about the iPhone until we all get our hands on one and the market decides whether the device sinks or swims. Until then, everyone is free to say what they want as long as we all take it with a grain of salt. The qualm I have with Davis' analogy is that the manufacturers he cites - Siemens, Philips and Fujitsu - are using Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform on their smartphones. Setting aside the debate about Microsoft's ability to write software for a moment, the more significant factor here is that these manufacturers are using someone else's software on their products, which means they're susceptible to all the circumstances that come with pairing one's hardware with software they have an inarguable lack of knowledge and experience with.
2006 was "the year of PSP"
It appears that more media sources are praising the PSP's surprisingly good year, filled with high-quality games, and maturing media capabilities. UK tech website, The Register, spoke about the PSP's success in 2006. They note that although the PS3 came nowhere close to as successful as they thought, the PSP has been performing quite handidly: "But with the PSP, Sony has outstripped Microsoft and its Xbox considerably."Of course, while the PSP platform grew in 2006, it's far more exciting to look towards 2007, where the machine may finally tap into its wide capabilities: "To say that Sony PSP sales would sell over half the numbers of the iPod was bold, but it has turned out to be bang on with around 20 million devices now sold since last March when they were launched. During 2007 the PSP will come into its own, we said, and there are big signs that it is doing just that, although it will need the Sony launch of an online film service for the PSP and the promised interaction with the PS3 to make the success spectacular."
Apple considered small chip startup over Intel?
Steve Jobs' announcement -- almost a year ago, now -- that Apple was transitioning to x86 processors was one of the most shocking bits of news that the industry had ever heard, and yet there were a group of employees at a startup chip manufacturer called PA Semi who were even more shocked than most, according to reports, because right up until that keynote, they were sure that their company, and not Intel, would be chosen to supply the brains for what's now known as the MacBook family of laptops. The Register is reporting that PA Semi had a close relationship with Apple in the months prior to the switch, and that the two companies were working together to gauge the feasibility of running native PowerPC-coded software on 2GHz dual-core chips that PA Semi claims run at only a third of the 21 to 25 watts consumed by Intel's Core Duo models. Sources who spoke to El Reg say that executives were virtually positive that they'd win the contract, and that CEO Dan Dobberpuhl was understandably "furious" when he found out PA Semi had been passed over. The company still has a bright future developing chips for the embedded market and storage devices, but they'll probably never again have the opportunity to become an instantly-recognized name like Intel, AMD, or IBM.
Qtek 8500 / HTC Star Trek gets UK price, launch date, new name
Contradicting an earlier report that the Qtek 8500 / HTC Star Trek smartphone would available in the UK sometime this month, The Register is now citing an official announcement from HTC that claims the Windows Mobile-powered clamshell won't hit stores until "late June." Furthermore, Reg Hardware is reporting that the Star Trek will henceforth be known as the STRTrk, probably to avoid trademark issues with Spock and friends, due to the fact that the internal codename has seen widespread adoption. (Not sure that this will do any good, as now we'll have to include a "the phone formerly known as the HTC Star Trek" every time we mention one of the rebadges). Whatever you want to call it, the music-centric device will supposedly come in black, silver, or pink, and go on sale during the third week of June, at least according to distributor 20:20 Logistics, for around $500 before carrier subsidies.
