MacRumors

Sony today announced (via Macworld UK) the launch of new image sensor technology that the company expects will help improve performance and shrink the size of cameras on mobile devices by later this year. The new back-illuminated complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor utilizes a pixel section layered directly onto the sensor's circuitry, significantly reducing the sensor size from the previous design that utilized pixel and circuit sections side-by-side on a substrate layer.

This image sensor layers the pixel section containing formations of back-illuminated structure pixels onto chips containing the circuit section for signal processing, which is in place of supporting substrates for conventional back-illuminated CMOS image sensors. This structure achieves further enhancement in image quality, superior functionalities and a more compact size that will lead to enhanced camera evolution.

With sampling set to begin in March, the new stacked CMOS sensor includes built-in signal processing technology and utilizes the company's "RGBW Coding" that adds white-light sensors to the traditional red, green and blue, offering better low-light camera performance. Enhanced high dynamic range (HDR) technology will also improve the sensor's movie capabilities in bright-light situations.

Apple had utilized OmniVision Technologies as its image sensor supplier on its mobile devices, but Sony was able attract at least part of Apple's business with the new 8-megapixel sensor on the iPhone 4S. With its new image sensor technology, which is set to enter mass production in the fall and begin appearing in products late this year or early next year, Sony is clearly looking to remain at the forefront of the booming mobile device camera market.

According to new survey data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project (via VentureBeat), the share of U.S. adults owning a tablet device nearly doubled during the most recent holiday season, moving from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January. While the introduction of Amazon's Kindle Fire certainly played a significant role in the tablet growth, the news still bodes well for Apple's iPad performance during the quarter.

These findings are striking because they come after a period from mid-2011 into the autumn in which there was not much change in the ownership of tablets and e-book readers. However, as the holiday gift-giving season approached the marketplace for both devices dramatically shifted. In the tablet world, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble’s Nook Tablet were introduced at considerably cheaper prices than other tablets.

Apple's iPad dominated tablet sales following its early 2010 debut as competitors struggled to find traction in the marketplace, but the Kindle Fire has been seen as perhaps the best-equipped product to take on the iPad given its much lower pricing ($199) and its integration with Amazon's significant services and large customer base. But while the Kindle Fire is selling well according to estimates, its effect on iPad sales has been the subject of considerable debate given the significant differences in hardware and target markets between the two devices.

Apple is of course rumored to be introducing the iPad 3 in the coming months, amid reports that it will continue to offer the iPad 2 at a lower entry-level price. Even so, Apple will be unlikely to match or closely approach the Kindle Fire's $199 pricing given the iPad's larger size and differences in the two companies' approaches to the tablet market. Apple focuses on profitability for its hardware products with content providing a supporting role at much smaller margins, while Amazon is willing to sell hardware essentially at cost in order to support profitability in its massive shopping and content offerings.

Apple is also pushing for greater adoption of the iPad in the education market with its just-launched iBooks Textbooks initiative. Envisioning a future in which students carry all of their textbooks in the form of interactive iBookstore downloads on iPads, the company is seeking to drive innovation and engagement in education while making the iPad the tablet of choice for students of all ages.

AllThingsD reports on a new research note from Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry claiming that customers downloaded approximately 350,000 iBooks Textbooks from the iBookstore over the first three days of availability. That performance was accompanied by over 90,000 downloads of Apple's iBooks Author app from the Mac App Store.

If those numbers are accurate, Apple’s textbook effort would seem to be off to a good start. Which is good news for everyone involved — particularly textbook publishers, who stand to make more money on books sold through iBooks than those sold at retail.

With only eight iBooks Textbook titles available at launch, Apple and publishers are only beginning to scratch the surface of the digital textbook market. But it is unclear just how many of those 350,000 downloads were paid purchases, with seven of the eight titles carrying Apple's maximum $14.99 price tag.

The eighth title, E.O. Wilson's Life on Earth, is available for free, although it currently contains only the first two chapters of the book, and presumably the title accounted for a significant number of the total downloads as curious users looked to test drive the new offering. Paid titles are also required to offer free samples, and Chowdhry apparently did not mention whether these are counted as "downloads" by his tracking method.

The KAIST Institute of Information Technology Convergence has posted this video demonstrating their patented eBook interface prototype.

The prototype is implemented on an Apple iPad but reportedly uses private Apple APIs, according to the video description. The use of private APIs would prevent the app from being approved for the App Store, but the video shows a number of novel ways to navigate eBooks besides the simple "page flip" motion found on Apple's iBooks app.

The new gestures shown include:

- Page Flipping, by spreading pages and then flipping through
- Page Flipping with finger bookmarking
- Multiple page turning using multiple fingers
- Faster swipes turning multiple page
- Longer presses, then swiping can turn multiple pages
- Writing the page number

Interactive eBooks have been a big topic of discussion over this past week, since Apple's launch of iBooks 2 with their new electronic textbooks. (via Reddit)

AppleInsider claims that Apple is planning on incorporating support for the new faster 802.11ac Wi-Fi specification into products this year.

The new 802.11ac standard achieves much faster wireless networking speeds than the existing 802.11n specification (in use on the latest Mac, AirPort and iOS devices) by using 2 to 4 times the frequency bandwidth (from 80 to 160MHz), more efficient data transfers through sophisticated modulation, and more antennas (up to 8; existing standards support up to 4, while Apple's Macs currently use up to 3).

This "Gigabit WiFi" offers speeds 3 times as fast as existing 802.11n wireless networks can with speeds of over 1 Gigabit per second.

Despite the specification not being finalized, Broadcom has already announced a family of chips supporting 802.11ac Wi-Fi. The final specification is expected to be certified in the second half of this year.

Apple and other manufacturers have been known to deploy un-finalized wireless technology in the past. Apple deployed 802.11n in new AirPort base stations years before the official standard certification.

AllThingsD share some thoughts from McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw, who during a Q&A session following yesterday's iBooks Textbooks media event described how the development was part of Steve Jobs' vision for what textbooks should be like.

Sitting and listening to all of this, I wish Steve Jobs was here. I was with him in June this past year, and we were talking about some of the benchmarks, and some of the things that we were trying to do together. He should be here. He probably is [gesturing up and around]. This was his vision, this was his idea, and it all had to do with the iPad.

Jobs' interest in textbooks is of course now well-known, with Jobs himself being quoted in Walter Isaacson's authorized biography as wanting to revolutionize the textbook industry and as having had conversations with publishers such as Pearson about the possibilities.

One other interesting tidbit on the history of digital textbooks at Apple was shared yesterday by a former Apple intern. As related to The Wirecutter, former intern Joseph Peters proposed the idea of digital textbooks back in 2008 as part of an "iContest" in which Apple interns gathered to pitch ideas to mid-level executives for feedback. The textbook ideas suggested by Peters and his group were well-received by Apple's judges, with the team being awarded a free MacBook Air and a meeting with higher-level management to discuss the ideas.

Anyway, we presented and answered the Q&A pretty flawlessly. I mean they said they really liked it and every other presentation received mostly sarcastic remarks.

I remember answering a handful of questions and getting the impression that the exec's were totally on board. It was a pretty awesome feeling. [...]

At the end, they announced that we won, they gave us all a MacBook Air and it was great (for interns anyway). I was more excited about the opportunity to talk to more people about the idea. They scheduled a meeting with John Couch, head of Education a few days later. We met John and a few the people on his team in a small board room and we just gave the same pitch as before.

Peters does not suggest that his group's idea was the genesis of Apple's textbook plans, but it does provide interesting insight into a bit of the intern experience at Apple and reveals that Apple was indeed interested in the textbook idea as far back as 2008, more than a year before the debut of the iPad.

Noted iOS jailbreak author pod2g has teamed up with the Chronic Dev Team to release "Absinthe A5", an enhancement to the popular Greenpois0n jailbreaking tool which adds the ability to perform an untethered jailbreak of the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 for the first time.

A related effort from the iPhone Dev Team will include a command-line tool for more control over the jailbreaking process and to assist with diagnosis and repair. Absinthe is currently available only for Mac OS X, although versions for Windows and Linux are set to follow shortly.

Jailbreaking is the process by which users can open up their iOS device systems to load third-party software and hacks not authorized by Apple. Procedures for jailbreaking iOS devices are typically divided into two categories: "tethered" tools that required the device to be connected to a computer each time it is booted, and "untethered" tools that allow the device to be booted independently.

Untethered jailbreaks are obviously the more highly desired of the two forms, and Absinthe represents the first of these untethered jailbreaking tools for iOS devices such as the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 that run Apple's A5 system-on-a-chip.

Device and iOS version combinations that can be jailbroken using Absinthe include the iPhone 4S running iOS 5.0 (9A334) and 5.0.1 (9A405 and 9A406) and all models of the iPad 2 running iOS 5.0.1 (9A405).

Apple warns that jailbreaking can void a device's warranty, and users should be aware of the potential implications of jailbreaking their devices, but most issues can be resolved using common jailbreak tools and devices can be reverted to their non-jailbroken states if necessary.

Update: The Greenpois0n site is currently seeing intermittent availability issues undoubtedly related to high traffic coming from the new release.

With Apple announcing its iBooks Textbooks initiative yesterday, the company has been pushing its view that the iPad can help revolutionize education by keeping students engaged with unprecedented levels of interactivity.

In an attempt to assess the effect of iPad textbooks on student performance, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) performed a year-long pilot program using an iPad version of the company's Algebra 1 textbook for middle school students. The study, conducted at Amelia Earhart Middle School in Riverside, California, saw 78% students taking the course using the iPad textbook rank as "Proficient" or "Advanced" in the subject, compared to only 58% of students using the traditional print textbook.

The first assessment of the pilot— Riverside's district Algebra benchmark –took place during the second trimester of the 2010–2011 year. Students using HMH Fuse scored an average of 10 percentage points higher than their peers. The app's impact was even more pronounced after the California Standards Test in spring 2011, on which HMH Fuse students scored approximately 20 percent higher than their textbook-using peers.

Educators noted increased motivation on the part of students using the iPad app, as well as the personal level of interactivity, as factors contributing to student success. Students also found the iPad experience more natural and put them more in charge of their own learning, factors that increased student interest and engagement.

One important consideration is that the iPad textbook offered by HMH was not an official iBooks Textbook as introduced by Apple yesterday. The publisher's Fuse program has offered iPad versions of its Algebra 1, Algebra 2, and Geometry textbooks as apps in the App Store since last year. The apps are currently offered as free sample downloads with the full textbooks available via in-app purchase at $59.99 each, considerably higher than Apple's maximum price of $14.99 for titles in the iBooks Textbooks program.

HMH was the only one of Apple's three main partner publishers to not release any iBooks Textbooks at yesterday's event, with Pearson and McGraw-Hill each releasing a small handful of titles to kick off the program. It seems that HMH may now be working to transition its Fuse program to iBooks Textbooks, accounting for the later launch of its titles.

Indian business newspaper Mint reports (via iPhone Hacks) that Apple may be preparing to open retail stores in India, dramatically increasing the company's presence in the country.

Apple Inc. may open its own shops following the Indian government allowing full ownership of single-brand retail stores by foreign companies, according to a senior official of the department of industrial policy and promotion (DIPP).

The maker of the iPad and iPhone has been in discussion with the department for some time and is keen to re-enter Indian market after an earlier bid to do so in 2006, said the official on condition of anonymity.

According to the report, Apple's interest comes as Indian regulators have eliminated ownership requirements that had previously required single-brand retail outlets such as Apple Stores to have at least 49% domestic investment.

One potential hurdle does remain, as ventures with high levels of foreign investment such as what Apple would offer will be required to source 30% of their product value from small businesses in India. But regulators appear willing to address that requirement as well depending on Apple's official analysis of the viability of a retail effort in India.

When asked whether the 30% local sourcing clause will be a hindrance, the DIPP official said, “Let Apple finalize its business plan and the investment it wants to make. If they tell us that the 30% sourcing is a problem, at that stage we will look into it,” he said.

The report notes that Apple attempted to create an Indian presence back in 2006 with a tech support center, but the company quickly abandoned those plans.

Earlier today we published a story about iBook Author's exclusivity clause which generated some confusion. To clarify, Apple is not claiming exclusive sales rights to the content of published textbooks but to the specific output format (iBooks) generated by their iBooks Author tool.

Today, Apple released an easy to use tool called iBooks Author which allows anyone (publishers and users) to create interactive iBooks with text, video, images and more. As Apple mentioned during their media event, the availability of such a robust tool to make electronic books has been lacking. iBook Author can export projects in a number of different formats, including iBook format, PDF and text.

The iBooks (version 2) format is an improved format created by Apple based on ePub 3, but with additions and changes specific to Apple. These additions are believed to add new functionality and interactivity to the format as shown during today's media event.

At present, this iBook format will only work with Apple's iOS devices, and will not work on other devices. Even so, Apple has restricted sales of any iBook formatted documents coming from iBooks Author to the App Store. VenomousPorridge comes out against these terms suggesting that trying to control the output format is overreaching and falls apart in certain cases:

Or how about this: for a moment I’ll stipulate that Apple’s EULA is valid and I’ve agreed to it implicitly by using the software. Now suppose I create an iBook and give it to someone else who has never downloaded iBooks Author and is not party to the EULA, and that person sells it on their own website. What happens now?

As John Gruber points out, beyond the 30% App Store cut, Apple may simply not want to feed content to competing bookstores such as Amazon or Google.

Second, it’s about not wanting iBooks Author to serve as an authoring tool for competing bookstores like Amazon’s or Google’s. The output of iBooks Author is, as far as I can tell, HTML5 — pretty much ePub 3 with whatever nonstandard liberties Apple saw fit to take in order to achieve the results they wanted.

As we've mentioned, as a new format, the iBook format isn't even compatible with any other devices, but it's easy to imagine that compatibility could be implemented by Google or Amazon if the format takes off. Apple achieved a similar lock-in advantage with their own App Store apps, though those apps can't run on competitors' devices due to technical issue rather than licensing ones.

As for the likelihood of publisher adoption, AllThingsD points out why publishers are willing to start selling textbooks at the $15 price point when their paper counterparts go for much higher. According to the McGraw-Hill CEO, the company expects to make up the sales on volume. At least in the high school market, McGraw-Hill tends to sell $75 texts to schools which keeps those books for an average of 5 years. At $15 and sold directly to students, the company anticipates recurring annual revenue from each year's students.

Not everyone seems convinced, however, and Apple's proprietary format is raised as a possible issue. Macworld spoke with an executive at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who claims that they need to be device-agnostic in order to support a broad number of devices.

Following today's media event that saw the introduction of iBooks 2 with new iPad digital textbooks alongside expanded iTunes U functionality, Apple has now posted video of the event to its site. The video is also available as a podcast video download in HD and standard formats. Among today's announcements:

- Apple Launches iBooks 2 with Interactive Textbooks
- 'iBooks Author' eBook Authoring App for Mac Now Available
- iTunes U for iPad Retools the Learning Experience

Our additional coverage includes:

- Hands-On Video With Apple's Digital Textbooks
- Some iPad Textbooks Weigh In Above Apple's 2GB Book Size Limit
- iBooks Textbook Sales: Authors Set Pricing Up to $14.99, Apple Takes 30%, iBooks-Exclusive
- New iBooks 'Not Technically' in ePub Format