Apple

The BlackBerry Storm, which will go on sale later this year, is competing with Apple’s iPhone 3G and T-Mobile’s G1. 

You just can’t keep a secret in the tech industry these days. Early pictures of T-Mobile’s Google phone leaked onto the Web the week before its Sept. 23 launch, and now images are surfacing online of another eagerly awaited device: a new handheld from Research in Motion (RIM), the BlackBerry Storm. RIM hasn’t officially launched the new device yet — and it declined to comment on the leak — but the Storm is clearly a direct assault on Apple’siPhone 3G and T-Mobile’s G1. It’s also an attempt to wow consumers with both a jazzy new design and an App Center filled with games and other add-on programs.

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Apple has unveiled the latest version of its iPod Nano, featuring what it says are the thinnest measurements yet.

The fourth generation Nano was launched at a US press conference by Apple chief Steve Jobs, who announced new shuffle and library features.

He also listed the Nano’s environmental credentials, including arsenic-free glass and a mercury and PVC-free body that is “highly recyclable”.

The Nanos are expected to sell in the UK for £109 ($191) for the 8GB version.

The 16GB version will retail at £149.

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Internet users in China have been complaining this week that they cannot access Apple’s iTunes Store. The start of the problems coincided with an announcement from an activist group which said that around 40 Olympic athletes had downloaded a pro-Tibet benefit album that was also carried on iTunes.

The IDG News Service reported Friday that the Amazon.com page for the “Songs for Tibet” album, which includes 20 songs from artists like Sting, Dave Matthews and Moby, could not be reached within China. Michael Wohl, executive director of the Art of Peace Foundation, which produced the album, cited comments on YouTube which said a video promoting the album might also be inaccessible in China.

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Apple’s iconic iPhone was slated to make its debut Friday in India, home to the world’s fastest-growing mobile market, officials said. The 3G or third generation phone will sell for more than triple its US price tag in India, which has emerged as a key battleground for makers of high-end mobile handsets thanks to the nation’s increasingly affluent middle-class.

“We believe this iPhone fever we’ve seen globally will catch on in India,” said Sanjay Kapoor, mobile services president for Bharti Airtel, the country’s largest mobile operator. The launch is part of a 70-country rollout of the high-speed phone, which includes a built-in iPod and a desktop-class web browser. Bharti Airtel and rival Vodafone Essar will sell the phone for 31,000 rupees (712 dollars) for the eight-gigabyte memory model, and 36,100 for the 16 GB version. The Indian price is far higher than the 199 dollars paid by US customers to the telecom giant AT&T for the phone.

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An Alabama woman has filed a class-action lawsuit against Apple over reception and speed problems with its iPhone 3G.

Birmingham resident Jessica Alena Smith purchased an iPhone 3G in July after numerous advertisements touted the device’s increased speeds.

“One could barely turn on the television without hearing that the new iPhone 3G was ‘twice as fast for half the price,’” according to the suit.

But once she started using the phone, Smith’s Internet connection, e-mail, and text messages were “slower than expected and advertised,” according to the suit.

Smith, who had owned a first generation iPhone, said the new device appeared to connect to the 3G standard less than 25 percent of the time and frequently dropped her calls.

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Plagued by snafus from the word go, Apple is rewarding MobileMe member’s “patience” by granting them a subscription extension of two months on top of a one-month extension issued on July 15.

On its MobileMe site, Apple acknowledged problems from the transition from .Mac to MobileMe, and admitted that it was “rockier than we had hoped.”

“While we are making a lot of improvements, the MobileMe service is still not up to our standards. We are extending subscriptions 60-days free of charge to express appreciation for our members’ patience as we continue to improve the service.”

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With a new phone, a new mobile service, new software and a new online store to deal with, Apple certainly has its hands full. But its handling of the App Store has been a little puzzling. The company has approved more than 1,000 applications for sale, but at least three of them have vanished after a short period of availability. Their developers aren’t sure why.

Over the course of its existence — and particularly since the successful launches of the Macbook, the iPod and the iPhone — Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) has developed a reputation for its streamlined design ethos and user-friendly interfaces.

A stylish product that’s easy to use is just part of the equation, however. A problem-free launch of a product is perhaps almost as important to a its success as its actual quality. continue

Apple Inc. Senior Vice President Eddy Cue is now in charge of the computer maker’s newly-overhauled “MobileMe” iPhone service, which had a rocky debut. Chief Executive Steve Jobs said in a recent memo to employees that the four- week-old feature was launched too early and was “not up to Apple’s standards.”

Apple has already apologized to those who signed on and gave customers a free month of service. Now it appears the problems have led to a shakeup among those in charge. An Apple spokesman had no comment, and it wasn’t clear who Cue is replacing. Apple Senior Vice President Rob Schoeben had been in charge of the MobileMe launch. He reports to Apple’s Senior Vice President for Applications Sina Tamaddon.

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Apple this evening posted updated iPhone 2.0.1 software (249MB) via the Update feature in iTunes Summary Version). Not much information is offered beyond Apple’s ridiculously lame “bug fixes” description but I’m sure that details will start to trickle out soon.

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Apple finally rolled out a software update to fix the much-heralded Domain Name System (DNS) security flaw, but it seems the celebration may have been premature. The Cupertino, Calif.-based vendor rolled out Security Update 2008-005, a fix that Apple said plugs several security holes, including its implementation of the BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) server, which left users of its Mac OS X operating system susceptible to the DNS flaw disclosed earlier this month.

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You can never be sure what advances will find their way into the next round of Apple hardware updates until practically the moment Cupertino makes the big announcement. But that doesn’t mean it’s not fun to guess a little bit.

Soon after Intel’s recent announcement of its new Centrino 2 mobile platform, rumors began to circulate about what would be inside Apple’s next round of MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops (which are, themselves, rumored to be refreshed in the near future). Since Apple’s current laptop line is based on Intel’s earlier Centrino (aka Santa Rosa) platform, most observers assumed that Apple would adopt Intel’s new platform—despite some uncertainty caused by Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer’s veiled reference to a “product transition” during the company’s July 21 earnings conference call.

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Is having calendar information online, on the desktop, and on a mobile phone too much to ask? Google apparently doesn’t think so anymore, as the company has quietly enabled sync for Google Calendar, complete with instructions on how to plug into Apple’s iCal.

Thanks to the flexible wonders of WebDAV, or more specifically, CalDAV, Leopard users can now plug their Google Calendar account (including those run on Google Apps) into iCal via this simple set of instructions straight from the Big G’s Help Center. Setup involves plugging a few settings into iCal’s Accounts preference pane, after which the initial sync should happen in a matter of minutes. After that, any changes made on either end should sync almost instantly, though this ubiquitous calendaring doesn’t come without some drawbacks.

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