MacRumors

Mobile analytics company Flurry reports that activation of new iOS and Android devices in China has surpassed the U.S. for the first time.

February, Flurry calculated that China surpassed the United States in monthly new iOS and Android device activations for the first time in history. China is now the world’s fastest growing smart device market.

While the data shows combined iOS and Android data, it reflects the same audience of smartphone buyers. Apple has been making efforts to expand their presence in China. They even included a number of China-specific features in their upcoming Mountain Lion release.

In addition, reflective of the increase in activations, China was also the fastest growing country in app usage as measured by app session growth.

A story that is getting some traction this morning is a Wall Street Journal article about how quickly new iPad users are consuming their monthly bandwidth allotments over LTE. We covered this story on our iOS Blog. While the conclusion may seem an obvious, carriers are beginning to consider other ways to help shift the bandwidth cost away from the consumer.

In particular, the Wall Street Journal notes that AT&T is considering a plan to do just that by allowing the content providers to pay for usage of their apps:

AT&T, for example, is studying a plan to give app developers and content providers the option to pay for the mobile data their products use, thereby keeping those apps and videos from counting against a user's allotment of data, kind of like an 800-number for apps.

If implemented, this would presumably allow bandwidth usage for certain apps to be free. For example, watching shows from a TV network app such as ABC Player might not count against your monthly bandwidth allotment. Instead, ABC would pay AT&T (or Verizon) for the mobile bandwidth consumed. In return, ABC would likely see increased usage of their app to watch shows and more revenue from in-show advertising.

Mobile carriers in the U.S. have been moving away from unlimited bandwidth plans over the past few years. Instead bandwidth is sold in specific allotments (2GB, 3GB) per month with additional fees for overages.

The Financial Times reports that Apple is up against rival smartphone makers over the next industry standard for miniaturized SIM cards. (via Engadget).

In May 2011, we reported that Apple had submitted a proposal for a standardized SIM Card design smaller than the micro-SIM currently used in the iPhone 4S and iPad. A smaller SIM card design would allow Apple to create smaller and thinner devices.

Other companies including Motorola, Research in Motion, and Nokia are pushing their own standards for these so-called "nano-SIM" cards.

Micro-Sims are already common in the latest generation of smart devices, such as Apple’s iPhone 4S and Nokia’s Lumia. The nano-Sim is thinner and about a third smaller than the micro-Sim, and would allow more space for other functions.

Apple is said to be already backed by "most of the European operators". Apple has reportedly taken some controversial steps to gain more votes in the final decision on proposals next week.

One of Nokia's objections to Apple's proposal is the use of a "drawer" to protect the nano-SIM card. The drawer design is seen on the iPhone 4S and iPad, allowing the user to eject the SIM from the side of the device.

ZDNet's Mary-Jo Foley reports that she has received an internal email regarding a new purchasing policy for Microsoft's Sales, Marketing, Services, IT, & Operations Group (SMSG).

According to the email, employees of that group at Microsoft are now prohibited from buying Apple products such as the Mac and iPad using company funds. From the email:

Within SMSG we are putting in place a new policy that says that Apple products (Mac & iPad) should not be purchased with company funds.

In the US we will be turning off the Apple products from the Zones Catalog next week, which is the standard purchasing mechanism for these products.

Outside of the US — we will work with your finance and procurement teams to send the right message and put the right processes in place.

The email from Alain Crozier, the chief financial officer of SMSG, claims that the current Apple product purchase levels are "low" but they recognize there will be a bit of transition work to implement it. The email was sent two days before the launch of the 3rd Generation iPad.

When asked for comment, Microsoft returned a "no comment" rather than a denial and Foley believes her source. Microsoft already prohibits the expensing of the iPhone or Blackberry, dating back to 2009. Microsoft has since provided Windows 7 phones to their employees as of 2010.

Microsoft still has a Mac development team known as the Macintosh Business Unit. This unit is responsible for the Mac Office products and was said at one time to be the largest 3rd party Mac software developer. This new Apple purchasing prohibition only seems limited to the SMSG group, according to the article. That group, however, encompasses 40,966 Microsoft employees worldwide. This represents about 45% of their their total workforce of 92,303 employees.

Following up on reports from earlier today that the outer shell of the iPad 3 gets warmer than the iPad 2, Consumer Reports found that their iPad 3 reached temperatures up to 116 degrees after running Infinity Blade II for 45 minutes.

The piece did note that the iPad felt "very warm but not especially uncomfortable if held for a brief period" during the testing process. In a statement earlier today, Apple said that the iPad was "operating well within our thermal specifications."

We ran our test while the new iPad was propped on the iPad Smart Cover, plugged in, and after it had run Infinity Blade II uninterrupted for about 45 minutes. The device's 4G connection was not turned on, though its Wi-fi link was. The ambient room temperature was about 72 degrees. (Apple recommends not using the iPad in environments over 95 degrees.)

When unplugged, the back of the new iPad reached temperatures as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit. It was only when plugged in that it hit 116 degrees. The hottest areas weren't evenly distributed throughout the iPad's back, but were concentrated near one corner of the display as shown in the images taken from the rear of the device above.

Potentially more interesting is Consumer Reports' note that their new iPad didn't charge at all when the game was running. In fact, the battery continued to drain slightly under the extremely heavy CPU and GPU load from Infinity Blade II.

It seems that under extremely heavy processor usage, the iPad is unable to draw sufficient power from its USB connection to both power the device and charge the battery simultaneously.

When the iPad was first introduced there weren't many iPad-specific apps yet available. As a solution, Apple allowed apps designed for the iPhone's smaller screen to run on the iPad in a form of emulation. The apps could be run as if they were on the iPhone, using only a fraction of the iPad's screen. Alternatively, those apps could also be run in a 2x mode, using a technique called pixel doubling to fill the iPad's screen. However, when in 2x mode, both artwork and text would look blocky and pixelated.

Since the original iPad's launch, both the iPhone and iPod Touch has been upgraded to high resolution Retina displays. While Apple could use the Retina graphics from apps that had been upgraded to work with the iPhone 4 and 4S's 960x640 display (nearly all iPhone apps nowadays), so far, they've chosen not to. Instead, the iPad 1 and 2 continue to just pixel double the 480x320 display from the original iPhone's screen. In fact, there is even a jailbreak app called Retinapad that enables the use of iPhone Retina graphics on the original iPad, filling this gap in functionality.

The new iPad, however, now displays the Retina graphics of apps designed for the iPhone in both 1x and 2x mode, resulting in a significantly improved visual experience, as pointed out by a user on the TouchArcade forums. The user experience issue still exists -- in 2x mode, interface elements are twice as large -- but it looks much better .

I just tested this with NBA Jam, which the iphone version looked like crap on my ipad 1, but looked great through retinapad when I had it jailbroken since it was tricked into loading the iphone 4's retina enable graphic assets. Now, on my brand spankin' new ipad third gen, it looks fantastic, without retinapad, just by enabling the 2X option at the bottom right of the screen.

In this image above, the graphics of the iPhone version of Cut the Rope have been compared side-by-side on an iPad 2 (left) and iPad 3 (right). Note that while there is an iPad-native version of the app available, we used the iPhone version to illustrate the differences. The iPad 3 version uses the iPhone Retina graphics found in Cut the Rope for iPhone, resulting in a much sharper image.

In fact, the iPhone version now looks nearly identical to the iPad native version of the game:

Note that Cut the Rope HD has not yet been updated to support the iPad Retina display, so of course, native Retina iPad apps will look even better on the new iPad. In the meanwhile, iPhone apps running on the new iPad will also see a notable visual improvement, approaching previous iPad native apps.

Apple issued a statement regarding the heat complaints about the new iPad. As reported by The Loop:

“The new iPad delivers a stunning Retina display, A5X chip, support for 4G LTE plus 10 hours of battery life, all while operating well within our thermal specifications,” Apple representative Trudy Muller, told The Loop. “If customers have any concerns they should contact AppleCare.”

As we previously reported, the complaints about warmth or heat seem to vary from customer to customer and may be dependent on the mix of apps that are being used.

Several readers have noticed the appearance of 'iTunes Producer 2.6' in their OS X Software Update. iTunes Producer is Apple's submission tool for music (and books) to the Apple iTunes Store.

iTunes Producer: This free software application allows you to prepare your music for direct delivery to iTunes. Use it to encode your music in AAC format; enter album, song, and cover art information; and send your prepared files directly to Apple for consideration.

The appearance has generated some confusion amongst users who are unfamiliar with the software, suggesting it may have been inadvertently pushed to unintended users via Apple's OS X Software Update mechanism.

iTunes Producer is also the publishing software for iBooks Author books, so the update may be detecting users who have simply installed iBooks Author as well. When publishing books from iBooks Author, users are required to register for an iTunes Connect account in order to download the iTunes Producer software.

As noted on SlashGear, availability of the new iPad has improved on Apple's online store with shipment estimates down to 1-2 weeks from 2-3 weeks just yesterday.

Reports have indicated that retail stock of the new iPad has been plentiful in many locations. This seems to reflect a better job by Apple in producing enough iPads as the company announced record sales. If you are still looking for an iPad, trying a local retailer may be quicker than ordering online.

At Macworld 2012, we highlighted the newly announced My Book Thunderbolt Duo drive from WDC. Each drive enclosure held two hard drives in a RAID configuration and offered two Thunderbolt ports. The units could then be daisy chained together over Thunderbolt to create a single high performance logical drive.

WDC has since announced shipping and availability of the new drive systems.

The new My Book Thunderbolt Duo provides professionals and Mac® enthusiasts with five primary areas of performance, double-safe data protection and flexibility; ultra-fast data transfer rates for greater work efficiency; a 4 TB/6 TB large-capacity; customized dual-drive storage system with RAID 0, 1 and JBOD options; customer serviceable drives; and dual Thunderbolt ports for daisy-chaining multiple My Book Thunderbolt Duo devices or other peripherals.

Pricing for the new enclosures has been set at $599.99 USD MSRP (4 TB) and $699.99 (6 TB) and are available online.

To compare, the Thunderbolt version seems to carry a $200 premium over their My Book Studio Edition II drive system which provides a similar setup (4TB/$399, 6TB/$499), though without Thunderbolt performance and connectivity.

Both in our forums and Apple's Discussions, there have been observations and complaints that the new iPad runs warmer than the previous generation. The phenomenon was noticed in TechCrunch's review of the new iPad where they said:

One other slight downside which I have to assume is related to either the battery or the LTE functionality is that unlike previous iPad models, the new iPad does get noticeably warm in the lower left corner after prolonged use. It’s never hot, just warm. But again, I never noticed this on other models.

To investigate further, Tweakers.net (via Engadget) took thermal images with an infrared camera of both the iPad 2 and new iPad. After running GLBenchmark for 5 minutes, the hottest point was measured.

The hottest point on the new iPad was the lower right corner which measured a temperature of 33.6° C (or 92.5° F). The iPad 2, meanwhile, topped out at 28.3° C (or 82.9° F). The difference between the two was 5° C (or ~10° F).

There seems to be a mix of responses from end users, with some not noticing any extra warmth at all, while others claim it gets uncomfortably hot to handle. It seems that the use of heavy GPU apps such as games may be a factor. The added heat seems not to affect the functionality of the new iPad.

Update: Apple released a statement to The Loop about the heat complaints.

“The new iPad delivers a stunning Retina display, A5X chip, support for 4G LTE plus 10 hours of battery life, all while operating well within our thermal specifications,” Apple representative Trudy Muller, told The Loop. “If customers have any concerns they should contact AppleCare.”

Apple announced today that it has sold 3 million new iPads in less the four days of availability, calling it the "strongest iPad launch yet."

CUPERTINO, California―March 19, 2012―Apple® today announced it has sold three million of its incredible new iPad®, since its launch on Friday, March 16. The new iPad features a stunning new Retina™ display, Apple’s new A5X chip with quad-core graphics, a 5 megapixel iSight® camera with advanced optics for capturing amazing photos and 1080p HD video, and still delivers the same all-day 10 hour battery life* while remaining amazingly thin and light. iPad Wi-Fi + 4G supports ultrafast 4G LTE networks in the US and Canada, and fast networks around the world including those based on HSPA+ and DC-HSDPA.**

“The new iPad is a blockbuster with three million sold―the strongest iPad launch yet,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Customers are loving the incredible new features of iPad, including the stunning Retina display, and we can't wait to get it into the hands of even more customers around the world this Friday.”

Apple didn't announce first weekend sales numbers for the iPad 2 as they were in extremely short supply, but the company sold more than 300,000 of the original iPad on its first day, and it took 28 days to move the first million iPads.

The iPhone 4S sold 4 million units in its first weekend, with a much lower (to the customer) price point and wider availability. Considering the tremendous success Apple has seen with the iPhone 4S, the launch of the iPad 3 was very strong indeed.