Leander Kahney's Blog, page 1521

RIM Service Outage Has Up To 40% Of BlackBerry Owners Eyeing An iPhone

Forty percent of Blackberry owners say they want to switch to another smartphone. Following a service outage and an upcoming move to a new operating system, business professionals surveyed in the U.K. see Apple as the preferred alternative to trouble-plagued Research in Motion.

Apple's iPhone was the choice of 64 percent of the 500 enterprise professionals expressing a desire to drop RIM's handset as their businesses smartphone. By comparison, Android was the choice of less than 25 percent of those business pros leaving the RIM fold. Only a slim 5 percent of business workers said they'd opt for a Windows Mobile phone.

The findings mirror a third-quarter survey by Good Technology finding 61 percent of business smartphone activations are for the iPhone, versus 39 percent for Android-based handsets.

Other reasons why the iPhone seems a good fit for enterprise users looking to jump ship is iMessage. The service, which allows owners of iOS devices to exchange text messages, is similar to RIM's BBM, requiring little adaptation by Blackberry users. Another reason for the affinity with the iPhone is RIM's upcoming switch to its new BBX operating system based on QNX. The upgrade would likely leave owners of current BB OS 7 devices out in the cold, reports suggest. Both factors make Apple an excellent lifeboat for the sinking RIM ship.

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Published on October 25, 2011 11:16

America's Youth Loves Apple Products As Much As They Love Stuffing Their Faces With Junk Food

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A poll of over five thousand consumers aged eight to twenty-four has found that Apple is the most popular electronic brand in America today.

Not that it's particularly flattering company. In fact, just looking at the companies kids today like, it seems as if most of our nation's youth spend the majority of their time gorging themselves on junk food. Go figure!

Here are some other brands that also ranked highly in the poll:

• Sprite — purveyors of translucent sugar water capable of melting pennies overnight.

• Oreo — A crumbly, frosting-filled cookie that makes your teeth look like a corpse's just seconds after eating.

• Capri Sun — Ectoplasmic carotene glop served in a bag of tin foil.

In electronics, America's youth seemed a bit more savvy. Nintendo ranked high in their favorite brands, and while Apple topped the computer, tablet and smartphone space, HP, the Motorola Xoom and HTC came in second in each category.

Now, if you'll excuse me, off to a lunch of Hot Pockets, Mountain Dew and Cheetos.

[via Techcrunch]

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Published on October 25, 2011 10:53

Humor: The Real Way People Use Siri Isn't Nearly As Pretty As Apple Pretends It To Be [Video]

In Apple's own soothing Siri commercial, dozens of beautiful people living in utopian cityscapes and country vistas effortlessly interact with their iPhone 4Ses by speaking alone as if they were interacting with the most soliciting of manservants.

In real life, though, things aren't quite so pretty, as TBS's Conan O'Brien is quick to point out in this hysterical parody video in which Apple's original ad is intercut with two disheveled grossies asking Siri to direct them towards the fastest way to Diarrheatown, or computer the circumference of their manhoods.

It is, I'm sorry to say, a perhaps accurate depiction of at least my iPhone 4S post-launch Saturday night.

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Published on October 25, 2011 10:31

Turn Siri Into HAL 9000 With This Cool Sci-Fi Accessory

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Back in 2001, a freelance copywriter named Vinnie Chieco who was hired to help Apple come up with a name for their MP3 player took one look at the device and exclaimed: "Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL!" And thus, the iPod was christened.

Chieco was making a tongue-in-cheek pop reference to Stanley Kubrick's transcendental sci-fi masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which a ship's onboard AI, HAL,9000, makes an evolutionary leap after coming in radio contact with a monolith circling Jupiter. Acting erratically, HAL 9000 eventually lashes out out of a murderous new self-preservation instinct when his human charges want to shut him down.

Perhaps because HAL isn't exactly cinema's most touchy-feely computer, Apple wasn't willing to embrace the association between 2001 and the iPod line. But now that HAL's soothingly detached cadence and artificial intelligence capabilities have been mimicked by Siri, perhaps it's time to revisit the connection with ThinkGeek's new Iris 9000 voice control module that will let you Siri from across the room… or trapped on the opposite side of the pod bay doors rocketing through deep space.

Make HAL proud and help Siri touch the monolith. It only costs $59.99.

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Published on October 25, 2011 10:23

Hotel WiFi Speeds Are Slowing Down Nationwide Because Of The iPad

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Photo: Flickr/HiddenPeanuts

Add free hotel Wi-Fi to the list of services Apple's iPad is making history. The bad thing about the iPad being the best-selling gadget on the planet is that the iPad is the best selling gadget on the planet. Turns out, the iPad sucks up quadruple the amount of wireless bandwidth as a smartphone — and hotels want to start metering your usage.

Hotels, which started promoting free "high-speed" Internet access in the days when most guests had smartphones that sipped bandwidth are now scrambling in the face of the fire hose of data available to the huge number of iPad owners. The head of a company providing access to hotels describes Apple's tablet as "the final nail in the coffin" for free Internet, the New York Times reports Tuesday.

So, hotels appear to be headed the way of wireless carriers and ISPs forced to deal with consumers demanding access to more and more data. People wanting to view YouTube videos or play real-time online games should pay a premium. Such tiered access will allow the idea of free Internet to survive – but only for light uses, such as checking your email.

Would you pay more to ensure you get preferential treatment the next time you and your iPad check in at a hotel?

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Published on October 25, 2011 09:46

Leaked Sales Numbers Suggest Amazon Kindle Fire On Track To Outsell iPad [Exclusive]

Six weeks before it officially goes on sale, Amazon's $199 Kindle Fire is shaping up to be the biggest tablet launch ever… and Cult of Android has the numbers to prove it.

A verified source within the Seattle based online retail giant has provided Cult of Android with exclusive screenshots of Amazon's internal inventory management system Alaska (Availability Lookup and SKU Aggregator).

These leaked shoots show that orders for Amazon's Android-based tablet are racking up at an average rate of over 2,000 units per hour, or over 50,000 per day.

In the five days since Amazon put the Kindle Fire up on their official site, over 250,000 tablets have been preordered. If this level of consumer demand for the Kindle Fire continues, Amazon will have 2.5 million preorders for the device before it officially goes on sale on November 15th.

Those numbers make the Kindle Fire's launch likely to be the biggest tablet launch in history, beating both the iPad and iPad 2 in first month sales.

The original iPad sold 300,000 units on April 3, 2010, its first day of availability. In the first month, iPad sales amounted to over a million units. By the time the iPad 2 came around in March of this year, Apple managed to rack up an estimated 2.5 million units in first month of sales.

Right now, the Kindle Fire looks like a lock to dwarf the iPad's launch. It also seems like it might outsell the iPad 2 if this level of consumer demand continues.

Amazon's wild breakaway success with the Kindle Fire is even more apparent when compared to companies besides Apple. For example, Motorola only managed to sell 100,000 Xoom units in its month and a half earlier this year. In addition, Research In Motion's long anticipated BlackBerry tablet, the PlayBook, only managed to sell an estimated 250,000 units in its first month.

Even the Kindle Fire's closest analog, the Nook Color, only shifted roughly a million units in its first two months of sales.

Of course, a preorder is not the same as a sale, and the Kindle Fire hasn't broken any sales records yet. It's possible that consumers could cancel their orders en masse, or demand could level off.

Even so, according to our source, Amazon is ecstatic about the Kindle Fire's numbers so far… and for good reason.

The Amazon internal pre-order numbers for the Kindle Touch and Kindle Touch 3G, respectively.

Cult of Android has also secured the preorder numbers for the WiFi and 3G versions of Amazon's other upcoming touchscreen e-reader, the Kindle Touch.

Despite selling for up to $100 less, the 6-inch Kindle Touch is being outsold by the Kindle Fire at a rate of ten to one, and has only racked up about 20,000 pre-orders to date.

The numbers for the $149 Kindle Touch 3G are even worse: only a few more than 12,000 people have ordered one so far.

Amazon has been notoriously secretive about its Kindle sales numbers, and has always refused to release them. This is the first time that verified order numbers of the Kindle family of e-reading devices has been made available to the public.

The numbers indicate a very rosy future for Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet, although that future may have been secured at the expense of their traditional, monochrome e-ink readers. The outlook for competing Android tablets is even bleaker: at the high end, gadget makers will need to compete with Apple's iPad juggernaut, and on the low end, the affordable Kindle tablet backed by Amazon's huge online content empire. As for Apple, the iPad's success seems unassailable… but how long will Cupertino ignore these kinds of sales numbers before they respond with a low-end "iPad mini" of their own?

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Published on October 25, 2011 09:09

The Writer Behind 'The Social Network' Might Write 'Steve Jobs: The Movie'

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Having acquired the movie rights to Walter Isaacson's authorized Steve Jobs biography earlier this month, Sony is now looking for a writer that can deliver Steve's story to the big screen. At the top of the company's wish list, according to a report from The LA Times, is Aaron Sokin, the writer behind The Social Network.

In addition to The Social Network, Sorkin has worked on A Few Good Men, The West Wing, and Moneyball. He is known for creating movies based on the life stories of "fiercely smart, if difficult figures," according to The LA Times' report, which is why Sony wants Sorkin for its Steve Jobs movie:

Sony is moving forward with a Steve Jobs movie based on Isaacson's book. And one of the writers being courted by producers to pen his story, according to a person who was briefed on the project but not authorized to speak about it publicly, is Aaron Sorkin, Hollywood's chronicler-in-chief of the complicated visionary.

Sorkin is known for penning stories about the lives of fiercely smart, if difficult, figures, of which Jobs certainly was one. Isaacson's take on the late executive as someone whose penchant for "magical thinking" was both a great advantage and a fatal liability seems particularly suited to a Sorkin script, as does the detail about Jobs' biological father, whom he met unwittingly at a Silicon Valley restaurant.

MacRumors reports that Sorkin actually had the opportunity to work with Steve on a Pixar movie, but turned down the opportunity because he didn't think he could "make inanimate objects talk":

JOBS: Once you make them talk they won't be inanimate.

SORKIN: The truth is I don't know how to tell those stories. I have a young kid who loves Pixar movies and she'll turn cartwheels if I tell her I'm writing one and I don't want to disappoint her by writing the only bad movie in the history of Pixar.

Sony's Steve Jobs movie is destined to be a success with Apple fans all over the world who continue to absorb stories about the company's co-founder. Sunday night's episode of 60 Minutes was up 47% in the 18-49 demographic compared to the previous week, according to The LA Times' report, while Walter Isaacson's biography is on course to be Amazon's best-selling book of 2011.

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Published on October 25, 2011 08:23

Steve Jobs's Quest For Perfection Could Make Even Buying A Sofa Into A Decade-Long Ordeal

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Steve Jobs's quest for perfection was pursued down to the smallest details. It made him the father of some of the greatest products and interfaces in computer history.

As Walter Isaacson's new biography on Steve Jobs makes clear, though, it could also sometimes make him nightmarish to live with… the sort of obsessive who could make even the most mundane seemingly household decisions into maddening, endless debates.

For most of his life, Steve Jobs lived a spartan lifestyle, and his home was never furnished with more than the barest essentials: a chest of drawers and a mattress in his bedroom, a card table and some folding chairs in his dining room for when guests came over.

But when Steve Jobs wed Laurene Powell and found himself soon to be a father, Jobs had to make some accommodations for married life.

Choosing simple furniture, however, turned out to be a miserable task, thanks to Steve's obsession with details. For example, when it came time to decorate their living room, Steve and Laurene couldn't agree upon a sofa.

"We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years," said Powell. "We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, 'What is the purpose of a sofa?'"

Jobs's obsession with perfection also extended to household appliances. According to a 1996 article by Wired, Steve and Laurene spent more time discussing what country to buy their washing machine from than most married couples spend discussing the name of their first born child.

"We didn't have a very good one so we spent a little time looking at them," he told Wired contributing editor Gary Isaac Wolf. "It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The Europeans make them much better – but they take twice as long to do clothes! It turns out that they wash them with about a quarter as much water and your clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they don't trash your clothes. They use a lot less soap, a lot less water, but they come out much cleaner, much softer, and they last a lot longer."

"We spent some time in our family talking about what's the trade-off we want to make," Steve continued. "We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. We'd get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design."

Powell seems to have been a pretty eager and willing party for these discussions, but I think it's safe to say that as much as most of us love Steve, and as great of a boon as his quest for perfection has been for the world at large, few of us would have liked to live with him.

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Published on October 25, 2011 07:59

The iPhone and iPad Lead In Mobile Ads, But Android's The Biggest Smartphone OS Overall

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Depending on where you stand, a recent mobile advertising study was good news for Apple or Android. While Apple's iPad and iPhone were the most connected devices for advertising, Google's Android was the leading smartphone operating system, according to the report.

Taken together, the wide variety of Android devices accounted for 56 percent of mobile advertising impressions, according to Millennial Media. But in terms of individual device brands, Apple lead with 23.09 percent of mobile advertising during the third quarter of 2011. Samsung was close behind with 16.48 percent of mobile ad impressions, followed by HTC. RIM, Motorola and LG essentially tied with about 10 percent each. Nokia was in the cellar with 2.41 percent of mobile ad impressions.

The iPhone maintained its No. 1 position in terms of the share mobile ad impressions, registering 12.55 percent of ads. The Apple handset comprised 54 percent of iOS mobile ads with the iPad and iPod touch accounting for another 46 percent. The iPad accounted for 97 percent of all tablet-based mobile ads. Apple saw its the iOS share of mobile advertising rise 60 percent compared to last year, according to the measurement firm.

Although HTC accounted for just 10 percent of mobile ad impressions, it boasted six Android handsets. Samsung's five percent of mobile ad impressions was spread across five Android phones. The dichotomy between Apple and Android was explained as Google's "contrasting strategy to iOS" with several devices launched "at every price point," according to Millennial Media.

As for in-app ads spending, Android devices lead Apple's iOS products by just 8 percent, with the most profitable apps for both platforms music and entertainment.

Another intriguing bit of data coming from the mobile ad researcher: the apparent death of the QWERTY keyboard. Touchscreen devices received 65 percent of mobile advertising during the third quarter compared to 15 percent for units supporting both touch and keyboards. QWERTY-only devices ranked just 10 percent of mobile ads, the same percentage as ancient devices with numeric-only phones keypads, according to the findings.

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Published on October 25, 2011 07:52

The Father of the iPod Has Invented The Smartest, Coolest Thermostat You'll Ever See

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Tony Fadell is often referred to as the 'father of the iPod'. He's a former Apple engineer who helped develop Apple's first portable music player along with Jeff Robbin, and he's just announced a new 100-person startup called Nest Labs.

Having been a former DJ and overseeing 18 iterations of the iPod and the three generations of the iPhone, we've been keen to find out what Fadell and his company have been working on. But it isn't a revolutionary new music player or communication device. It's a thermostat.

Of course, it's not just a bog-standard thermostat, but a "Learning Thermostat" — a device that brings Apple-esque design and innovation into home heating appliances. Nest claims the Learning Thermostat is easy to use, it programs itself, and it learns every time you use it. And according to CNET, it'll save you 20%—30% off your energy bills:

With its Learning Thermostat, Nest is going all in and telling the world that a ubiquitous but hard-to-master device that hasn't had a major redesign in decades is due for a shot of iPod and iPhone design magic. Fadell and his team think they've come up with an alternative that's easy to use and that learns from what we do. Along the way, the company thinks it could cut 20 percent to 30 percent off the average household's $1,000 or so in annual energy bills.

Like the iPod that Fadell helped create, the Learning Thermostat is a compact device that features a small digital display and is controlled by a wheel. You simply push the front of the device to make selections within the menus. To control the device remotely, there's an iOS app for your iPhone, and another coming soon for Android devices.

Fadell also enlisted the expertise of former Apple colleagues Matt Rogers and Mike Matas to help develop the Learning Thermostat. Rogers helped design the device while Matas focused on its simplistic user interface.

The Learning Thermostat isn't just good-looking, but it's also incredibly clever. Nest says that after a week of use, the device picks up your preferred temperatures and schedule, and automatically adjusts the temperature in your home accordingly.

Not only will it learn simple changes to the temperature at certain times throughout the day, but a promotional clip for the device claims, "And if Tuesday is bowling night and you usually raise the temperature after you get home late, Nest will learn that, too." Alternatively, you can adjust the schedule manually. When Nest "senses that the house is empty," its Auto-Away will automatically adjust itself to an energy conserving temperature.

The Nest Learning Thermostat is compatible with 85% of American household HVAC systems and goes on sale in November at Best Buy stores, with a price tag of $249.

What do you think of the Nest Learning Thermostat?

[via 9to5Mac]

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Published on October 25, 2011 07:47