MacRumors

Last week, we noted that Apple was still pushing to have its "nano-SIM" design adopted as the official next-generation standard to further reduce the size of the removable cards that include subscriber information and activation capabilities for mobile phones and other devices connecting to cellular networks. While the company has received the backing of a number of European carriers in its effort to roll out the new standard, other hardware companies are putting out their own proposals.

FOSS Patents now reports that it has seen a letter sent by Apple to the European Telecommunications Standards Institutes (ETSI) committing to offer royalty-free license to its nano-SIM design patents should it be adopted as the next-generation standard and holders of other patents related to the standard offer similar terms to ease adoption.

A perfectly reliable source that I can't disclose has shown me a letter dated March 19, 2012 that a senior Apple lawyer sent to ETSI. The letter addresses the primary concern of critics of the proposal. The FT said that "the Apple-led proposal has caused some concern among its rivals that the US group might eventually own the patents". But Apple's letter has removed this roadblock, if it ever was any, through an unequivocal commitment to grant royalty-free licenses to any Apple patents essential to nano-SIM, provided that Apple's proposal is adopted as a standard and that all other patent holders accept the same terms in accordance with the principle of reciprocity.

A move to a smaller SIM card standard would enable Apple to design smaller and thinner devices or to utilize some of the space within existing device volumes for other components. With the tightly-packed configurations of today's mobile devices, even minor size reductions for a given component can open the door to smaller or better-peforming devices.

Apple has also reportedly been developing a micro dock connector for future iOS devices, a move which would similarly free up space for other uses given the substantial size of the 30-pin dock connector used in all iOS devices released to date.

Sina.com notes [Google translation] that Apple CEO Tim Cook has been spotted in Beijing today, taking time on his trip to visit the Xidan Joy City retail store and pose for pictures with customers.

The purpose of Cook's trip to Beijing has not been confirmed, but the report suggests that he is meeting with top officials at Apple's iPhone carrier partners including China Unicom and China Telecom. The iPhone launched for the first time on China Telecom earlier this month, breaking China Unicom's exclusivity on official availability of the device.

Cook was also seen at China Mobile's headquarters last June before officially taking the reins as CEO of Apple. But China Mobile, the world's largest mobile phone carrier, has yet to begin offering the iPhone.

Update: Marketwatch reports on comments from an Apple spokeswoman sharing that Cook had "great meetings" with unnamed officials regarding Apple's plans for increased investment in China.

Cook "had great meetings with Chinese officials today. China is very important to us and we look forward to even greater investment and growth here," said Apple spokeswoman Carolyn Wu. She declined to give further details on the meetings.

83-year old Evelyn Paswall is suing Apple after walking into the glass doors at the Apple Store Manhassett on Long Island reports CBS New York. She is asking for $75,000 in medical expenses plus punitive damages for negligence totaling $1 million.

Paswall claims that she didn’t realize that she was walking into a wall of glass as she approached the store, and says that she broke her nose as a result of the collision.

Her suit claims that “the defendant was negligent ... in allowing a clear, see-through glass wall and/or door to exist without proper warning.”

The Manhassett Apple Store has floor-to-ceiling glass walls at the front and rear of the store, with doors in the middle at both ends. It's a similar design to the Scottsdale Quarter and Lincoln Park stores.

Last year, Apple had white stickers installed on the transparent glass of all Apple Stores to help prevent such collisions from occurring. However, the plaintiff's lawyer says that any markings that were on the glass are insufficient, saying his "client is an octogenarian. She sees well, but she did not see any glass.”

Last week, we reported on long return lines at Apple's 5th Avenue retail store filled with Chinese iPad resellers. Resellers try to buy up as many iPads as possible on launch day to quickly turn around and sell them for a profit. According to our report many of these resellers were returning their iPads with some individuals returning up to 30 devices at one time. We speculated the reason for the returns was due to a an adequate launch supply of new iPads by Apple.

Reuters dug deeper and found that these resellers are having trouble making a profit on Apple's most recent launch, despite a healthy demand for the product in China.

Reuters reports that some of the new pressure comes from Chinese custom authorities which have told shipping companies to stop accepting iPad shipment orders. Meanwhile, the iPad has been added to a list of taxable items entering China. The end result has been much tighter margins than in the past.

An electronics dealer in Oakland, California, said he struggled to break even this year, a far cry from previous iPad releases when he shipped upwards of 1,000 tablets and pocketed profits of $50 to $100 per device sent to his buyer in Hong Kong.

The other major factor seems to be an abundance of supply and a simultaneous launch in 10 countries including Hong Kong. As a result, black market prices for the new iPad in China has been falling.

One dealer even said "This whole game is over", due to the overabundance of supply, describing the market as "flooded".

TechCrunch reports that Apple has begun rejecting iOS apps for the use of a unique device identifier known as the UDID. The site notes that several developers have reported rejections for the use of the UDID in the past week, and Apple is said to be ramping up the enforcement of this policy over the next few weeks.

As the name suggests, the UDID is a unique identifier for every iOS device. It's tied specifically to the hardware and can't be changed by the user. Apple had previously warned developers with the introduction of iOS 5 that the use of the UDID was deprecated and would be phased out. The sudden rejections, however, have caught some developers off guard:

“Everyone’s scrambling to get something into place,” said Victor Rubba, chief executive of Fluik, a Canadian developer that makes games like Office Jerk and Plumber Crack. “We’re trying to be proactive and we’ve already moved to an alternative scheme.” Rubba said he isn’t sending any updates until he sees how the situation shakes out in the next few days.

The reason for the phasing out of UDIDs from developer use is due to increased pressure on Apple due to the privacy implications. Apple and several App developers have been sued over the use of the UDID to track users across different apps. While the UDID doesn't specifically identify a user, the sharing of UDIDs across ad networks and apps can help piece together a valuable picture of activity and interests of the user of a specific device. Apple seems to be requiring apps to generate their own unique identifiers for each installation to avoid this ability to share such information across apps.

Macgasm notes an interesting tweet by former Apple TV engineer Michael Margolis who claims that the new Apple TV interface designs were "tossed out 5 years ago because [Steve Jobs] didn't like them."

Alongside the 3rd Generation iPad, Apple also introduced a new version of the Apple TV that supports 1080P video. With it came an updated interface for the set-top box, (shown above) with icon-based category buttons and large billboard-style artwork for content. The interface was also rolled out to previous 2nd Generation Apple TV owners in a software update.

Margolis goes on to say that "now there is nobody to say 'no' to bad design", referring to Steve Jobs' passing. Some MacRumors readers have complained about the new design, and others felt it was a paving the way for Apple TV apps in the future.

Five years ago (2007), when the design was reportedly "tossed out", Apple's product landscape was quite different. Both the Apple TV and iPhone were first introduced in January of that year, and the App Store would not be launched for another year in mid-2008.

Update: Margolis clarifies what he meant to TheNextWeb:

The new UI shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. There is a clear effort at Apple to make everything match the look and feel of their popular iOS products – starting with Lion and increasing momentum with Mountain Lion.

To be clear – he didn’t like the original grid. This was before the iPhone was popular and before the iPad even existed.

Given that the iPad is far more successful than the AppleTV, migrating the AppleTV to look more like the iPad was probably a very smart move – even if some of the users of the old UI don’t prefer the new one.

Update 2: TechCrunch posts a longer response from Margolis who seems to be downplaying his previous tweet:

Steve rejecting a design five years ago isn’t a huge deal. Steve was well known for rejecting ideas, tweaking them, and turning them into something even better. And that’s a very good thing. One of my favorite parts of working at Apple was knowing that SJ said “no” to most everything initially, even if he later came to like it, advocate for it, and eventually proudly present it on stage. This helped the company stay focused and drove people to constantly improve, iterate, and turn the proverbial knob to 11 on everything.

iOS developer David Smith has been posting iOS version stats for his Universal app Audiobooks [Direct Link]. Smith gets about 100,000 weekly downloads to both his paid and free versions and believes it is a statistically meaningful data set.

With the launch of iOS 5.1 on March 7th, 2012, Smith has been tracking the adoption rate which he suspected would be faster than in the past due to the availability of over the air (OTA) iOS updates. Indeed, after only 5 days after its initial release, Smith found that 50% of his OTA-eligible customers were already at iOS 5.1. Now, after 15 days, he's found that 77% of OTA-eligible iOS customers have upgraded to the latest version.

When he backs out to include all versions of iOS, including versions such as iOS 3 and iOS 4 which don't offer OTA updates, he finds total adoption at 61% in 15 days.

This seems to represent a significant boost in adoption for OTA-eligible upgraders.

While we don't have directly comparable numbers, it took iOS 4.0 one month to hit 50% usage by web traffic. Unfortunately, the numbers aren't entirely interchangeable, as there they are from different data sets (app usage vs web usage), but gives you an idea of the scale. If anything, factors should have contributed to a faster uptake for iOS 4 than would have been expected as it was a major new feature release (vs 5.1) at the time and was included in the successful iPhone 4 launch.

As Smith points out, this is the same level of adoption Android currently sees for Gingerbread (v2.3) which was launched much earlier (mid/late 2011). Meanwhile, the latest version of Android (Ice Cream Sandwidth/v4.0) is only at ~1.6% adoption after about 5 months.

Apple introduced "over-the-air" iOS updates as of iOS 5.0 -- allowing users to upgrade without connecting their device to a computer. They've since deployed two different upgrades (5.01 and 5.1) to users.

In his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson shared a story of Jobs' meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama. Along with sharing his displeasure at the difficulty in building a factory in the United States, he also disassembled America's education system.

It was absurd, he added that American classrooms were still based on teachers standing at a board and using textbooks. All books, learning materials, and assessments should be digital and interactive, tailored to each student and providing feedback in real time.

Jobs wanted to hire great textbook writers to create digital versions, and make them a feature of the iPad. He wanted to make textbooks free and bundled with the iPad, and believed such a system would give states the opportunity to save money.

A panel of four Dutch educators and politicians is proposing to fulfill Steve Jobs' vision and create a school where students are taught with iPads. The proposal will be presented on Monday [Google Translate] in Amsterdam. The plan, called Education for a New Era, is designed to help students learn "21st century skills" and push the limits of what can be done in a classroom.

It is just a proposal for the time being, but the promoters wish to test existing educational apps and encourage more to be developed. The so-called "Steve Jobs schools" would open their doors in August 2013.

Earlier this year, Apple rolled out a digital textbook initiative. The company partnered with McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt -- the three companies together control 90% of the textbook market in the U.S. -- and is focusing on high school textbooks initially. Apple presumably wants to expand the project to include all grade levels, and eventually fulfill Jobs' vision of a digital classroom.

iMore weighs in with information it has heard about the new iPhone that is due later this year.

According to their sources, the new iPhone will be 4G LTE compatible, as expected. It will also be arriving in the fall, though the exact date will be determined close to the time. Finally, their source also claims that contrary to 4-inch rumors, the new iPhone will retain the same 3.5-inch screen, or very close to it.

So to sum up, iPhone 5,1 is on track for:

- Similar if not same sized screen (currently 3.5-inch but not set in stone)
- 4G LTE radio
- New “micro dock” connector
- Fall/October 2012 release

iMore had previously reported that they believe the new iPhone will carry a miniaturized dock connector to help reduce the overall size of the iPhone, itself.

iMore has recently been the source of some accurate information. Most recently, they pinpointed the announcement date for the iPad 3 and LTE support.

ArsTechnica reports on the discovery of Retina-sized artwork in OS X Mountain Lion's.

A source with access to the latest Mountain Lion preview alerted Ars that double-sized graphics have popped up in some unexpected places, once again suggesting that Apple may be close to releasing MacBooks with high pixel-density screens.

We'd previously spotted these same Retina-sized graphics in the Lion beta of Apple's new Messages application.

As well, we've found in our testing that Apple's HiDPI mode in Lion is already fully functional and will use the Retina assets appropriately. These screens show the Lion Messages app running in HiDPI mode.

The left image shows that Lion with HiDPI mode enabled uses the full resolution Retina artwork from the Messages app to improve the pixel sharpness of the images. When the Retina assets are selectively removed from the app (right), you can see it fall back to the normal non-Retina images bundled.

Users will be able to test this themselves to full effect when Air Display is updated to support Mac HiDPI mode on the new iPad. Apple's Messages Beta for Lion is one of the few Mac applications that are already Retina-enabled to a large degree. Some elements, such as font rendering will automatically scale upwards as it does on the iPad.

BusinessInsider reports some strange activity on Apple's stock today. Trading was halted due to an abrupt drop of over 9%.

The stock crashed 9% to $542.80 before trading was stopped. When the stock started trading again, it opened at $598.39

Trading has since resumed, but there has been no clarification on what happened. StreetInsider speculates that it was "an apparent errant trade".

With news of the dividend and record iPad sales, Apple's stock has been at all time highs in the past week.

Update: Bloomberg pinpoints the issue to a single trade for 100 shares executed by Bats Global Markets Inc.

A single trade for 100 shares executed on a Bats venue briefly sent Apple, the world’s most valuable company, down to $542.80, triggering a circuit breaker that paused the shares. The order was executed at 10:57 a.m. New York time. Two more transactions, which sent the stock back above $598, were made before the halt. The stock stayed around that level once trading resumed.

Reuters profiles Samsung Electronics and their design process in the setting of Apple's ongoing legal battle accusing Samsung of "slavishly copying" Apple's products.

Samsung Mobile's vice president for design Lee Minhyouk takes Apple's charges personally and denies the allegations:

"I've made thousands of sketches and hundreds of prototype products (for the Galaxy). Does that mean I was putting on a mock show for so long, pretending to be designing?"

"As a designer, there's an issue of dignity. (The Galaxy) is original from the beginning, and I'm the one who made it. It's a totally different product with a different design language and different technology infused."

Lee admits that he may not be at the level of Apple's VP for design Jonathan Ive, but believes Samsung "will produce such iconic products one day."

Samsung has proven to be the largest Android smartphone manufacturer and one of Apple's biggest competitors. Samsung is also one of Apple's biggest suppliers and the manufacturer of Apple's 3rd Generation iPad's Retina Display. Apple and Samsung are in an ongoing legal battle over design and patent claims.

AllThingsD reports on findings of a survey by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners which investigated where iPhone owners purchased their device.

The found that the breakdown of retail vs online sales was 76 percent retail vs 24 percent online. Of that 76% from retail stores, the breakdown showed that Best Buy was almost as big as Apple's own retail stores as a point of sale:

Carrier stores are clearly the dominant point of sale for most consumers, but Best Buy's presence has also proven to be a significant location for iPhone sales.

“Apple Stores and the Apple Web site are tremendously productive, but they are limited by their relatively small retail footprint,” CIRP’s Josh Lowitz told AllThingsD. “There are four times as many Best Buy stores, and probably 20 times as many AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint stores, so aggressive distribution through all these channels is critical to Apple’s U.S. strategy.”

Tag: Apple Store

The popular 1998 role-playing game Baldur's Gate is seeing a PC remake called Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition by Overhaul Games.

The company has since announced that the new version will also be available for iPad and be available in the summer of 2012.

IGN has already had some hands on time with an early build.

The iPad port will include all the improvements and additions found in the PC version, including full integration of the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion pack. The title is also running on the refined Baldur's Gate II Infinity Engine, allowing gamers to experience the original adventure with the sequel's refined graphics options and other engine tweaks.

IGN reports that the new version of thegame will feature new content, more quests and a new party member. The early build of the iPad version runs smoothly though the interface has not yet been revamped to be more touch friendly. Those changes are still in the works, though pinch and zoom has already been implemented. The iPad version is expected to launch this summer.