Today, we are pleased to announce a special holiday sale for Grand Theft Auto III: 10 Year Anniversary Edition, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars and Beaterator at the iTunes store. The sale starts today, December 22, and will end on December 29.
Reuters reports on new data from research firm Kantar Worldpanel showing strong sales for the iPhone over the last three months in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, driven by the debut iPhone 4S. The company has, however, seen weaker sales in much of continental Europe in the face of economic difficulties and strong competition.
"In Great Britain, the U.S. and Australia, Apple's new iPhone continues to fly off the shelf in the run-up to Christmas. However, this trend is far from universal," said Dominic Sunnebo, global consumer insight director.
Apple's market share in the 12 weeks to end-November rose to 36 percent in the United States from 25 percent a year earlier and in Britain to 31 percent from 21 percent, Kantar said.
However, in France its share slipped to 20 percent from 29 percent and in Germany to 22 percent from 27 percent. Similar drops were seen in Italy and Spain.
The iPhone 4S debuted midway through the reporting period in most of the countries mentioned, although it did launch two weeks later in Italy and Spain. Consumer demand for the iPhone eased in the months leading up to the debut of the iPhone 4S amid high anticipation, but sales obviously surged with the release of the new hardware.
Kantar Worldpanel also reports its data as market share, and with the global smartphone market growing extremely quickly, iPhone sales are likely still rising in countries where Apple's market share has dropped due to the influx of Android-based devices from a variety of manufacturers.
For the holiday quarter, Apple is projecting blockbuster revenue and earnings, with analysts pushing their iPhone estimates for the quarter into the range of 30 million units. That performance would shatter Apple's current record for iPhone sales of just over 20 million units sold during the second calendar quarter of this year.
Australian developer Firemint, acquired by Electronic Arts earlier this year, has moved its highly-acclaimed iOS game Real Racing 2to the Mac, launching the title in the Mac App Store.
Among the notable features of the Mac version is the ability for owners of iOS versions of the game to control the Mac version using the touch and tilt capabilities of their mobile devices.
- Test your racing prowess on a 16 car grid against highly skilled AI drivers. - Select from 30 officially licensed cars including the 2010 Ford Shelby Mustang GT500, 2010 Nissan GT-R (R35), 2012 McLaren MP4-12C, and more! - Work your way from rookie to pro in a robust Career Mode, offering 10 hours of racing enjoyment. Jump into a Quick Race for instant fun – or battle against the clock in Time Trial Mode. - Race in 15 beautiful locations, with 40 miles of highly detailed race tracks, speedways and city circuits – including twilight and night races. - Touch or tilt to steer with your iPhone, iPad – or Mac controls. This innovative control system lets you customize options to fit your personal driving style. - Experience the intensity of head-to-head racing with 5 unique camera angles and breath-taking graphics powered by Firemint’s exclusive high performance Mint3D™ engine. - Purchase Real Racing 2 currency to progress even faster!
While the iPhone control is not a unique feature given that other titles like Chopper 2 have had such functionality for some time, Real Racing 2 is a popular iOS game and will no doubt attract fans on the Mac platform as well.
Last month, Samsung released a revised Galaxy Tab 10.1N design in Germany in hopes of avoiding an injunction barring the sale of the device under its original design over claims of infringement from Apple.
Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1N
Arguing that the design changes did not go far enough, Apple quickly filed suit in an attempt to bar the new design as well. But according to Bloomberg, the judge in the new case does not seem inclined to support such an injunction, giving customers credit for being able to distinguish between the devices.
The Dusseldorf court that banned sales of the Galaxy 10.1 on Sept. 9 is unlikely to grant Apple an injunction against the Galaxy 10.1N, Presiding Judge Johanna Brueckner-Hofmann said at a hearing today. Samsung has changed the device’s design sufficiently to distance it from the iPad, she said, adding that the view is preliminary. [...]
“Consumers are well aware that there is an original and that competitors try to use similar designs, so buyers are vigilant when looking at products,” Brueckner-Hofmann said. “We don’t think that someone buys a Samsung to make his table neighbor at the coffee house believe he owns an iPad.”
A final decision on Apple's request is scheduled to be released on February 9.
After several early wins in its efforts to bar sales of Samsung's tablet devices, the tide has begun to turn against Apple in a number of locations. In Australia, where an injunction against the Galaxy Tab 10.1 has been lifted, Samsung is now using the legal fight to promote its device, calling the Galaxy Tab "the tablet Apple tried to stop".
The Recording Academy today announced the winners of its annual Special Merit Grammy Awards, with Steve Jobs being named a recipient of a Trustees Award for 2012. The Trustees Award category is designed to recognize those who have made significant contributions to music in areas other than performance.
As former CEO and co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs helped create products and technology that transformed the way we consume music, TV, movies, and books. A creative visionary, Jobs' innovations such as the iPod and its counterpart, the online iTunes store, revolutionized the industry and how music was distributed and purchased. In 2002 Apple Computer Inc. was a recipient of a Technical GRAMMY Award for contributions of outstanding technical significance to the recording field. The company continues to lead the way with new technology and in-demand products such as the iPhone and iPad.
A ceremony honoring the winners of Trustees Awards, Lifetime Achievement Awards, and Technical Grammy Awards will be held on Saturday, February 11th, with special recognition also being made during the main Grammy Awards ceremony the following day.
Jobs is one of several recipients, including Brazilian composer and arranger Antonio Carlos Jobim, spoken word soul performer Gil Scott-Heron, and audio engineer Roger Nichols, who will be honored posthumously.
TouchArcade has spotted the appearance of a free MAME game emulator on the App Store called iMAME. MAME is a popular arcade machine emulator that will run thousands of arcade games if you have the original ROMs.
iMAME ships with nine "less than stellar" ROMs to play, but apparently can load arbitrary ROMs using a 3rd party utility such as iExplorer without jailbreaking:
It seems that the same method used to get games into iDOS also works in iMAME. Twitter user @mattlukens mentions, "Yep, add a .zip rom to the Docs folder through PhoneView and it works perfect! Just tried Crime Fighters!" He also provided a screenshot. The clock is really ticking now on Apple pulling this down
Apple has had a bit of a spotty history with emulators on the App Store. While a number of individual emulators do exist on the App Store, Apple has been more restrictive about these open emulators, presumably due to potential legal issues. For example, a full DOS/Windows 3.0 emulator appeared in the App Store at one point but was quickly pulled by Apple.
iMAME is currently available as a free Universal application on the App Store. [Link]
Update: It took Apple two days to get around to it with the holidays, but iMAME has been removed from the App Store.
When the original iPhone was released, it had no third-party apps, no voice control, no games, and no to-do list -- among many other things. But it was still revolutionary, completely different than what came before, and over time many of its shortcomings were addressed by hardware and software updates.
The same is true of Siri now. It has very little in the way of third-party integration, and there are many things that it cannot do -- but there is much promise. One piece of evidence to this future potential is Vocal, a new app that allows voice control of a Mac from a Siri-equipped iPhone 4S.
Vocal works by pairing a free application that installs on the Mac with a $1.99 app that is downloaded from the App Store. It allows the user to send commands and dictate text straight to the Mac, using the voice recognition feature on the iPhone 4S.
Lex Friedman at Macworld used his copy of Vocal to "control iTunes; send emails and tweets; look up definitions; select, copy, and paste text; search Amazon and Google; print; and create new documents." He reports that some commands are more successful than others, but on the whole:
Vocal is definitely cool. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a cheaper way to get your Mac to take dictation. Its support for other actions is a mixed bag; some work well, some don’t. If nothing else, Vocal proves that Siri—natively—on the Mac could be nothing short of remarkable.
The app updates its library of commands over the air, making updates and new feature additions easy for Vocal's creator, Matthew Roberts. He explained the thinking behind the software to The Next Web:
Vocal came essentially from playing with Siri on my new 4S as a sort of “novelty” as I just acquired the device, and since I use my Mac so much I wanted to see if I could write a Siri-like app for it. After looking around the only main competitor was the software from Nuance, but it was over 1GB to download and cost upwards of $50. Considering the 4S can already dictate text, I thought I could make a super simple app “for the masses”, I guess you could say.
Vocal is available for the iPhone 4S on the App Store for $1.99 [Direct Link] and the free companion app for the Mac is available directly from Vocal's website.
Yesterday, we noted that Apple had launched a new "Complete My Season Pass" feature for TV shows purchased through the iTunes Store, offering users who purchased individual episodes of a TV show season the ability to upgrade to a Season Pass at a discounted rate based on the amount of their individual purchases.
Apple today posted a new support document outlining an FAQ for the new service and explaining what content is and isn't eligible for the program. But in addition to the the Complete My Season Pass document, Apple also posted an updated version of its "Complete My Album" support document that offers a beneficial change for consumers.
Until now, users have generally had a window of 180 days from the date of their first individual track purchase from a given album within which they could upgrade at the discounted rate using the Complete My Album program. The current iTunes Store terms and conditions still make reference to that limit:
COMPLETE MY ALBUM ("CMA")
In some circumstances, you will have no more than 180 days from the time you acquire your first CMA-eligible song or video from a particular CMA-eligible album to accept that CMA offer, and upgrading previous purchases to iTunes Plus does not affect any such time limits.
But the updated support document posted by Apple today reveals a different answer, and it now appears that the 180-day deadline has been removed entirely.
How long do I have to take advantage of Complete My Album?
When you buy individual songs from any qualifying album, you can complete the album at any time, as long as the album is available for sale on the iTunes Store.
Many users taking advantage of the Complete My Album program obviously already do so within the previously-imposed 180-day window as they decide that they like certain songs enough to purchase the entire album. The lifting of the restriction will, however, still be of use for those who decide much later that they want to upgrade.
Google has updated its iOS Google Voice app with a number of new features, including full support for Sprint integration. Google has a partnership with Sprint that allows customers to use Google Voice natively on their Sprint phone and have access to the full set of Voice features.
What's New in Version 1.4.0.2372 - Multi-recipient texting, with contact autocomplete. - Sprint integration support: sends all calls to the native dialer when the phone is integrated with Sprint - Multi-line text entry field with character count. - 1-touch Copy/Paste in dial pad
The Google Voice for iPhone app was originally released in November of 2010 after more than a year in limbo. Google and Apple squared off over the Google Voice application, with Google claiming that Apple had rejected the application, citing duplication of the core functionality of the iPhone, while Apple claimed that it had merely not made a decision on the application.
Graphisoft claims it has the world's first Steve Jobs statue in front of its Budapest headquarters, crafted in bronze by Hungarian sculptor Erno Toth.
From Graphisoft's press release introducing the statue:
The relationship between GRAPHISOFT and Apple can be traced to the 1980’s, when Jobs came across the first version of GRAPHISOFT’s ArchiCAD software at the 1984 CeBIT in Germany. His first impressions of the software led him to throw Apple’s support behind the development and distribution of ArchiCAD. “Apple’s support included cash and computers at a time when GRAPHISOFT was a small company with limited resources, working within the economic and political confines of what was, at the time, communist Hungary,” Gabor Bojar said. Apple also introduced GRAPHISOFT to its worldwide distribution network, which remains a cornerstone of the business today. “With its attention to excellence in every detail, Graphisoft Park’s environment embodies the spirit of Steve Jobs,” Viktor Varkonyi, CEO of GRAPHISOFT said. “I can’t think of a better place to commemorate the man and his legacy,” he continued.
Graphisoft makes ArchiCAD, a design program for architects.
Amazon today updated its Kindle app for iOS, taking on Apple's Newsstand feature by adding compatibility with hundreds of magazines on the iPad. In addition, Kindle for iPad can now handle "print replica" textbooks, preserving the original formatting and layout from print editions for improved usability.
- New Design for Magazines: Kindle for iPad customers now have access to the huge selection of over 400 magazines and newspapers that are available on Kindle Fire. Magazines such as Martha Stewart Living, Food Network Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Men’s Health, Popular Science and many more are displayed in rich full-color pages. Customers can buy a single issue or subscribe to popular magazines and leading newspapers and have them wirelessly delivered to the Kindle for iPad app.
- Read print replica textbooks including rich formatting and layout of the print editions and support for notes and highlights, zoom and pan, and linked table of contents.
In addition, Amazon has added support for Send-to-Kindle on all iOS devices, allowing users to send documents to their Kindle devices and apps for reading while also storing them in the cloud. Finally, Kindle for iOS now sports a new library view and support for PDF import and viewing.
Following Apple's lead in pulling out of Macworld Expo several years ago, Microsoft today announced that next month's keynote presentation at CES in Las Vegas will be the company's last at the major consumer electronics show.
In its announcement, Microsoft cites many of the same factors addressed by Apple as reasons for its ending of trade show participation. Most notably, trade shows have become less relevant for new product announcements given the increasing connectedness and interactivity offered by the Internet and social media, and in many cases the scheduled nature of trade shows imposes undesired rigidity on timeframes for new product announcements.
Our industry moves fast and changes faster. And so the way we communicate with our customers must change in equally speedy ways. To ensure it does, we constantly challenge our assumptions. For example:
- What’s the right time and place to make announcements? - Are we adjusting to the changing dynamics of our customers? - Are we doing something because it’s the right thing to do, or because “it’s the way we’ve always done it”?
Microsoft points to its own media and developer events, social media tools, and even its retail stores as venues for connecting with customers that provide better opportunities than trade show keynotes.
Microsoft will maintain a presence at CES going forward with its employees attending the event, but the company will no longer participate in the opening keynote as it has routinely done, and will not sponsor a booth on the exhibition floor after 2012.
Several times earlier this year, we covered Apple's work on "HiDPI" modes in OS X Lion for supporting ultra high-resolution displays offering greater pixel density with a similar increase in image quality to that seen with the iPhone's transition to a "Retina" display.
With new claims that Apple is set to release a new 15" MacBook Pro offering a resolution of 2880x1800 early next year, Apple's work on its HiDPI software support has also been gaining renewed attention. By doubling the resolution in each dimension over the existing 1440x900 MacBook Pro, Apple would achieve four times the number of pixels and provide developers with an easy way to scale existing artwork.
Evidence of Apple's continued work on HiDPI has shown up in developer builds of OS X 10.7.3, with the "Get Info" window for applications seeing the addition of an "Open in HIDPI mode" checkbox. But while that checkbox would presumably automatically use higher-resolution fonts and graphics that would display at the same absolute size as existing elements, it has not been functional in developer builds where it is present.
With yesterday's release of Build 11D36 to developers, Apple has now removed that checkbox from the "Get Info" window entirely. While its removal may suggest a step backward in Apple's implementation of HiDPI support, it is routine for Apple to activate and deactivate portions of features as it works on them. Consequently, the mere change in the checkbox's visibility in the new build indicates that Apple is indeed likely actively working on the feature.
Just a day after the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled that several HTC devices violate an Apple patent and scheduled an import ban on those devices to take effect in April, Bloomberg reported that HTC has already completed development on a workaround that it says will allow the company to avoid the ban.
HTC Corp. has already completed a technical workaround to skirt a U.S. agency ruling that found a user interface in some handsets infringed an Apple Inc. patent.
“It’s actually quite rarely used,” HTC Chief Executive Officer Peter Chou said of the feature. The company will continue to work with Google Inc. to “protect ourselves,” Chou said in a media briefing at the company’s Taoyuan, Taiwan headquarters today.
Google's Andy Rubin was also present at today's event to stand by his company's hardware partner, with Rubin noting that the HTC case is just part of the early stages of the patent battle involving a number of smartphone companies and which will take several years to play out. The Wall Street Journal has more on Rubin's comments:
"The majority of these patents [in Apple's complaint against HTC] were claimed in the operating system itself, but actually in this case what was allowed...is some user interface feature of an application, not the operating system itself, so that's why I'm very optimistic in basically my desire to achieve patent peace on the overall platform," Mr. Rubin said.
HTC had noted immediately after the ITC decision was announced on Monday that the company had already "created alternate solutions" for the data tapping user interface design that was ruled to infringe upon Apple's patents, but it now appears that the HTC will be able to easily transition to what it believes is a non-infringing alternative.
Squeezing in one last release before Christmas, Apple today seeded developers with an updated version of OS X 10.7.3. The new version, known as Build 11D36, comes with no documented known issues and is said to include iCloud Document Storage, Address Book, iCal, Mail, Spotlight and Safari as focus areas for developer testing.
The delta version of the new build for updating from OS X 10.7.2 weighs in at 986 MB, while a combo version good for updating from any previous version of OS X Lion weighs in at 1.2 GB.
OS X 10.7.3 will be Apple's next free maintenance update for OS X Lion users. The current version, OS X 10.7.2, was released in mid-October and brought support for Apple's new iCloud services.
Apple today upgraded its free holiday shipping offer (via 9to5Mac) for online orders in the United States to include next-day shipping on all of the company's major in-stock products. The move will help last-minute shoppers make sure they receive their gifts in time for the Christmas weekend.
The deadline for free next-day shipping is tomorrow and the offer is good on all major products with the exception of the iPhone 4S, which is in short supply and for which the holiday shipping deadline has already passed, and engraved iPods and iPads. Build-to-order Macs are also no longer available in time for delivery before Christmas.
Apple announced late last month that it would extend its usual free shipping offer to include orders under $50 leading up to the holidays. The company last week bumped the offer up to free 2-3 business day shipping for its major products, making an increased effort to capture shoppers' business as time began to run short.
As noted by iFun.de [Google translation] and Macerkopf.de [Google translation], Apple has begun posting job listings for a forthcoming retail store in Berlin, the company's first in a city that ranks among the largest in the European Union.
Kurfürstendamm 26 in Berlin with blacked-out ground-floor windows (Source: Berlin Sidewalk)
The store's location was detailed earlier this year by ifoAppleStore as a nearly century-old theater building at Kurfürstendamm 26 in one of the city's major shopping districts. The entire building, including an addition, measures in at approximately 4,500 square meters or over 48,000 square feet, but it is unclear how much of the building Apple is taking. ifoAppleStore suggested earlier this year that Apple could take a pair of 10,000 square-foot floors for retail space, which would make the store a relatively large flagship location by the company's standards.
The interval between Apple posting job listings and the opening of a new store can vary significantly, but is typically in the range of six months, meaning that the new Berlin store may open sometime toward the middle of 2012.
Last week, the BBC introduced its iPlayer for iPhone app for UK television license payers. The app allows domestic viewers to view live BBC TV and radio and watch catch-up TV over Wi-Fi and 3G.
It's a major app in the UK and was downloaded 1.1 million times in its first week of availability, with 500,000 of those downloads to users who had never downloaded the iPlayer app previously. The BBC told the Guardian newspaper that 16.5 million programs have been watched on the mobile version of iPlayer thus far this year, up 129 percent year-over-year.
Chris Elphick, senior designer leading the BBC iPlayer iPhone App project, lays out the thoughts and processes behind the design of the iPlayer for iPhone UI. For a major project that will be used by millions of people, extensive testing and design is necessary to make the app both easy-to-use and to avoid unnecessarily taxing 3G and Wi-Fi networks.
Earlier I mentioned the opportunities that designing for mobile offers us. One, of course is the ability to change orientation. There was a frequent debate within the design team as to the importance of portrait versus landscape - whether or not it was helpful, necessary or even pleasing to present content differently in a landscape view compared to portrait.
We explored multiple possibilities for landscape views dependent on where you are within the app. In early designs we considered showing as much content as possible in a single view but we felt it wasn't taking full advantage of the screen real estate, nor presenting anything new.
User research, told us that certain users including those who are dyslexic liked the simplicity of a more visual menu with fewer options.
BBC iPlayer is a universal app for iPhone and iPad, free on the App Store for United Kingdom users only. [Direct Link]
The BBC global iPlayer app, which was updated earlier this month, is available in most of Western Europe and Canada -- and is coming to the United States. The app doesn't have the Live-TV, DVR and TV catch-up features that the British version does -- instead, it's a video-on-demand subscription service that gives access to selected portions of the BBC archive.
When the original iPhone was released, it had no third-party apps, no voice control, no games, and no to-do list -- among many other things. But it was still revolutionary, completely different than what came before, and over time many of its shortcomings were addressed by hardware and software updates.
Yesterday, we noted that Apple had launched a new 
Google has updated its iOS Google Voice app with a number of new features, including full support for Sprint integration. Google has a 
Following Apple's lead in 
