Apps Store Online

BBC reports that Apple’s Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, Jonathan Ive, has been awarded a knighthood in the United Kingdom.

Mr Ive, who can now style himself Sir Jonathan, has been made a Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE).

Ive began work at Apple in 1992, but found himself frustated during the early years before Jobs’ return. Ive is seen as responsible for many of the iconic designs coming out of Apple over the past decade. Jobs described Ive as his “spiritual partner” and had given him complete operational freedom at Apple.

Mercury News quotes a statement from Ive, reacting to the news.

“I am keenly aware that I benefit from a wonderful tradition in the UK of designing and making,” Ive, 44, said in a statement. “To be recognized with this honour is absolutely thrilling and I am both humbled and sincerely grateful. I discovered at an early age that all I’ve ever wanted to do is design. I feel enormously fortunate that I continue to be able to design and make products with a truly remarkable group of people here at Apple.”

Recent Mac and iOS Blog Stories
• Verizon Drops $2 'Convenience Fee' Due to Complaints
• Best Buy Again Offering Buy One, Get One Free 32GB iPhone 4 This Weekend
• Verizon to Charge $2 Fee for One Time Payments Online or Over the Phone
• 60beat Gamepad for iOS Offers Dual Analog Joysticks
• Untethered iOS 5.0.1 Jailbreak Available for Non A5-Devices

As noted by The Verge, Verizon has announced that they are not going to charge the $2 ‘convenience fee’ that was originally planned to go into effect on January 15th.

Verizon Wireless has decided it will not institute the fee for online or telephone single payments that was announced earlier this week.

The company made the decision in response to customer feedback about the plan, which was designed to improve the efficiency of those transactions. The company continues to encourage customers to take advantage of the numerous simple and convenient payment methods it provides.

“At Verizon, we take great care to listen to our customers. Based on their input, we believe the best path forward is to encourage customers to take advantage of the best and most efficient options, eliminating the need to institute the fee at this time,” said Dan Mead, president and chief executive officer of Verizon Wireless.

The company had planned to charge customers $2 for one-time payments made online or over the phone.

We received a tip that the following image had been posted to a Korean forum (registration required). Unfortunately, little other information was offered, but it was claimed to be an image of the upcoming iPad 3 Display panel.

Top: iPad 2, Bottom: iPad 3?

We believe the top image represents the current iPad 2 screen, while the bottom image is the supposed iPad 3 display. Both are 9.7″ in diagonal, but the bottom screen has a different configuration for the attached cabling.

For reference, iFixit provided us with this photo of what the current iPad 2 display looks like disassembled.

iPad 2 screen

As you can see there are 3 brown ribbon cables leading from the screen itself to the circuit board. The small brown cable to the far left is the power cable, while the other two wide cables are for display data. This configuration matches with the top display in the leaked photo (though the power cable is missing).

The claimed iPad 3 photo shows 3 wide ribbon cables that might be used for data. The iPad 3 is expected to carry a high resolution screen of 2048×1536 which is four times the number of pixels of the current iPad 2, so the need for additional data bandwidth would be understandable.

No other details are available, though the increasing number of parts leaking on the web suggests that Apple is getting closer to production. Just last night, Apple was said to be using a new type of display (IGZO) to achieve higher resolutions and require lower power in the iPad 3. The iPad 3 is expected to be launched during the first half of 2012.

Recent Mac and iOS Blog Stories
• Best Buy Again Offering Buy One, Get One Free 32GB iPhone 4 This Weekend
• Verizon to Charge $2 Fee for One Time Payments Online or Over the Phone
• 60beat Gamepad for iOS Offers Dual Analog Joysticks
• Untethered iOS 5.0.1 Jailbreak Available for Non A5-Devices
• Siri for Pre-iPhone 4S Jailbroken iPhones Available, but It Remains Complicated

In a replay of their Christmas Eve offer, BestBuy is again offering the 32GB iPhone 4 in a Buy One, Get One Free offer.

Apple doesn’t officially offer the 32GB iPhone 4 anymore. After the introduction of the iPhone 4S, the iPhone 4 is being officially sold now as an 8GB model only, but 32GB models must remain from previous inventory. The 32GB iPhone 4 costs $199 with a 2 year contract. Both phones need to be signed up for the two year contract, but this still represents a $199 savings if you are in the market for a new iPhone 4.

The offer is for in-store purchases only this Friday and Saturday.

The Associated Press was recently given access to Stanford’s Silicon Valley Archives which houses the largest collection of history on Apple. The collection of historical documents and videos was originally maintained by Apple with plans to make a company museum. Shortly after Steve Jobs’ return in 1997, Apple contacted Stanford University and offered to donate the entirety of the collection to the school’s Silicon Valley Archives.

The collection, the largest assembly of Apple historical materials, can help historians, entrepreneurs and policymakers understand how a startup launched in a Silicon Valley garage became a global technology giant.

The collection takes up more than 600 feet of shelf space, but is not open to the public.

Amongst the archives:

- Thousands of photos by photographer Douglas Menuez, who documented Jobs’ years at NeXT Computer, which he founded in 1985 after he was pushed out of Apple.

- A company video spoofing the 1984 movie “Ghost Busters,” with Jobs and other executives playing “Blue Busters,” a reference to rival IBM.

- Handwritten financial records showing early sales of Apple II, one of the first mass-market computers.

- An April 1976 agreement for a $5,000 loan to Apple Computer and its three co-founders: Jobs, Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, who pulled out of the company less than two weeks after its founding.

- A 1976 letter written by a printer who had just met Jobs and Wozniak and warns his colleagues about the young entrepreneurs: “This joker (Jobs) is going to be calling you … They are two guys, they build kits, operate out of a garage.”

There’s no indication when or if Stanford plans to make the documents available for public viewing.

Recent Mac and iOS Blog Stories
• Verizon to Charge $2 Fee for One Time Payments Online or Over the Phone
• 60beat Gamepad for iOS Offers Dual Analog Joysticks
• Untethered iOS 5.0.1 Jailbreak Available for Non A5-Devices
• Siri for Pre-iPhone 4S Jailbroken iPhones Available, but It Remains Complicated
• Best Buy Offering Buy One, Get One Free Offer on 32GB iPhone 4 Today

A Droid-Life story from yesterday has generated a lot of complaints about Verizon’s billing practices. The site posted a Verizon memo that detailed a new “convenience” charge that the company would be charing for online payments.

Big Red will start charging you a $2 fee both over the phone and online for your monthly bill transaction unless you have your account set up to pay automatically.

Those enrolled in auto-pay or pay by mail or electronic check will avoid the fees. The new charges kick in on January 15th.

The legal battle between Samsung and Apple has going on around the world with Apple claiming that Samsung had “slavishly” copied the iPad design. Apple and Samsung have traded lawsuits in a number of countries trying to get each other’s products banned from sale.

Outside of the lawsuits, Samsung has been aggressive with their recent set of U.S. TV ads openly mocking iPhone users.

Their newest Korean ad, however, seems to take cues from Apple’s own advertising style, focusing on a more emotional connection with the viewer.

The ad depicts a father and daughter playing with a Galaxy Tab in a sequence of shots reminiscent of Apple’s own iPad ads. The voice over says (rough translation):

You try to have fun with me, you try to win against me, you ask me millions of questions, you sit on my lap, you want to stay beside me all the time, strangely, when I stay with you time passes very quickly. This is a precious time.

The ad was posted to YouTube on December 14th. For reference, Apple’s own ads have long followed a similar style, focusing on experience than specs: We’ll Always, Love, and Learn. While Apple doesn’t have an exclusive claim to this style of ad, it just shows how Samsung is trying to position their products comparably to Apple.

The song in the background of the ad is Blue Sky by Rabbit!

Recent Mac and iOS Blog Stories
• 60beat Gamepad for iOS Offers Dual Analog Joysticks
• Untethered iOS 5.0.1 Jailbreak Available for Non A5-Devices
• Siri for Pre-iPhone 4S Jailbroken iPhones Available, but It Remains Complicated
• Best Buy Offering Buy One, Get One Free Offer on 32GB iPhone 4 Today
• Woot.com Offers Entry-Level 21.5" iMac For $150 Off

The latest Digitimes report claims that Apple will be utilizing IGZO (indium gallium zinc oxide) flat panels instead of IPS (in-plane switching panels) in its “next-generation mobile display products” such as the iPad 3.

Starting with the new iPads, Apple will utilize IGZO panels from Sharp in order to upgrade the display resolution of the new tablets to full HD level, the sources indicated.

Given Digitimes’ misstep just yesterday about Apple’s plans for Macworld, it might be hard to take their new report at face value.

However, this is not the first time that we’ve heard that Apple will be pursuing this new technology for the iPad 3. A research note from Jefferies analyst Peter Misek back in November made very similar claims:

Also, we believe that Apple and Sharp together have a modified IGZO (indium, gallium, zinc) technology to achieve 330 dpi, which is sufficient for an HD display while not using IPS nor having to include dual-bar LED backlighting. In our view, this should lead to several design advantages, namely the device can be thinner, battery life should be longer, and the overall experience for users should be meaningfully improved.

Sharp announced plans in April to commercialize these new IGZO panels for mass production later this year. The advantages of the new technology that should allow for lower power consumption and higher resolution displays. DisplayBlog recaps the advantages of this new technology:

The benefits of IGZO are plenty: lower cost of manufacturing, up to 30x higher electron mobility than a-Si (amorphous silicon), increased aperture ratio for improved light transmittance, higher resolution in terms of ppi, etc. IGZO would allow for significant cost reductions compared to LTPS (Low Temperature Poly-Silicon) based high resolution LCDs like the rumored 9.7-inch 2048×1536 IPS LCD for the iPad 3.

It sounds as if this new technology will allow Apple to avoid adding a second light bar system to the more traditional IPS display that is presently used in the iPad. It may also allow Apple to avoid making the iPad 3 thicker than the current iPad, and should consume less power.

Recent Mac and iOS Blog Stories
• 60beat Gamepad for iOS Offers Dual Analog Joysticks
• Untethered iOS 5.0.1 Jailbreak Available for Non A5-Devices
• Siri for Pre-iPhone 4S Jailbroken iPhones Available, but It Remains Complicated
• Best Buy Offering Buy One, Get One Free Offer on 32GB iPhone 4 Today
• Woot.com Offers Entry-Level 21.5" iMac For $150 Off

comScore released their latest numbers for the relative market shares of the mobile market. Apple continues to inch upward with 11.2% of total U.S. Mobile Subscribers.

This percent share is up from 9.8% in August and 10.2% in September. Apple’s growth was greater than its competitors during this time which covers the introduction of the iPhone 4S. Apple has historically trended well with steady gains in this measure over time. These numbers are for both smartphone and non-smartphone subscribers in the U.S.

Amongst Smartphone platforms, Google’s Android continues to lead at 46.9% over Apple’s 28.7% but both platforms grew in the past few months as compared to both Microsoft and RIM.

Microsoft, RIM and Symbian saw continued declines in Smartphone marketshare over the past quarter. The difference in change between Apple and Android’s growth is even smaller (1.3 points vs 2.1 points) when comparing the November numbers to September numbers. The iPhone 4S’s launch in October should have been covered in these figures.

comScore’s data tracks installed user base rather than new handset sales, making it more reflective of real-world usage but slower to respond to shifting market trends than some other studies.

Recent Mac and iOS Blog Stories
• 60beat Gamepad for iOS Offers Dual Analog Joysticks
• Untethered iOS 5.0.1 Jailbreak Available for Non A5-Devices
• Siri for Pre-iPhone 4S Jailbroken iPhones Available, but It Remains Complicated
• Best Buy Offering Buy One, Get One Free Offer on 32GB iPhone 4 Today
• Woot.com Offers Entry-Level 21.5" iMac For $150 Off

LoopInsight’s Jim Dalrymple weighs in on the questionable rumor that Apple would introduce the iPad 3 at the 2012 Macworld|iWorld conference in January. Dalrymple says plainly:

I checked with a number of my sources today and an iPad 3 is not planned for release at Macworld. In case you’re wondering, an iPad 3 won’t be released at CES either.

He also goes on to say that Apple won’t be releasing a new TV during each of those shows either. Dalrymple’s information has been shown to be reliable in the past.

As we noted in the earlier article, Apple officially withdrew from Macworld in 2008, citing the diminishing importance of trade shows in their business. Digitimes’ claim that Apple would again play a part in the show was met with pretty universal skepticism.

Recent Mac and iOS Blog Stories
• 60beat Gamepad for iOS Offers Dual Analog Joysticks
• Untethered iOS 5.0.1 Jailbreak Available for Non A5-Devices
• Siri for Pre-iPhone 4S Jailbroken iPhones Available, but It Remains Complicated
• Best Buy Offering Buy One, Get One Free Offer on 32GB iPhone 4 Today
• Woot.com Offers Entry-Level 21.5" iMac For $150 Off