Posts Tagged ‘San Francisco’
Written by admin on 17 February 2012
San Francisco, Feb 17 (IANS) Amazon.com shipped nearly 3.9 million Kindle Fire tablets in the last three months of 2011, making the online retail giant the world’s second-largest tablet maker in the quarter, market research firm IHS said Thursday.
With the soaring sales of Kindle Fire, Amazon captured 14.3 percent of the global tablet market share in the quarter, surpassing Samsung Electronics to take the No. 2 position, according to a new report by IHS.
Apple remained the dominant player in the tablet market, shipping 15.4 million iPads, but its share dropped to 57 percent in the fourth quarter from 64 percent in the previous three months, said Xinhua.
The debut performance of the Kindle Fire, which hit the market only in mid-November of 2011, played a strong role in Apple’s share shift, but it was Apple’s own newly introduced iPhone 4S smartphone that proved to be the strongest competitor for the iPad, IHS analysts noted.
“The rollout of the iPhone 4S in October (in 2011) generated intense competition for Apple purchasers’ disposable income, doing more to limit iPad shipment growth than competition from the Kindle Fire and other media tablets,” Rhoda Alexander, senior manager of tablet and monitor research for IHS, said in a statement.
Looking forward, analysts predicted that Apple will reclaim its tablet market share when it starts to sell the next version of the iPad, which is expected in the second quarter of this year.
As for Kindle Fire, the long-term viability of the product will hinge on the success of Amazon’s business gamble, “which depends on tablet sales driving substantial new online merchandise sales at Amazon.com in order to attain profitability”, Alexander said.
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Written by admin on 17 February 2012
San Francisco, Feb 17 (IANS) Apple Thursday released a developer preview of the next version of the company’s Macintosh operating system, bringing some popular features from iPhone and iPad to its Mac computer.
The new software, named OS X Mountain Lion, is available to developers as a preview release starting Thursday, and Mac users will be able to upgrade to it in late summer this year, reported Xinhua.
Mountain Lion will include over 100 new features, including Messages, Notes, Reminders and Game Center which are familiar to users of Apple’s mobile devices powered by the iOS
operating system.
The software, Apple’s first OS X after the company launched its iCloud cloud-computing service, will enable users to easily set up the service and access documents across their devices.
The developer preview of Mountain Lion also introduces Gatekeeper, a security feature that gives users control over which applications can be downloaded and installed on their Macs.
With an eye to the fast growing Chinese market, Mountain Lion also has a number of features specifically designed to support Chinese users, including significant enhancements to the Chinese input method and making Chinese search engine Baidu an option in the Safari web browser, as well as system-wide support for the Chinese micro-blogging service Sina weibo.
“The Mac is on a roll, growing faster than the PC for 23 straight quarters, and with Mountain Lion things get even better,” Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said in a statement.
Latest numbers from Apple showed that the company sold a record 5.2 million Macs during the fourth quarter of 2011, representing a 26-percent unit increase over the year-ago period.
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Written by admin on 15 February 2012
San Francisco, Feb 15 (IANS) Apple is working with component suppliers in Asia to test a new version of its popular tablet computer with a smaller screen, US media reported Tuesday.
Officials at some of Apple’s suppliers, who declined to be named, said the company has shown them screen designs for a new tablet with a screen size of about eight inches, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
In comparison, the iPad tablets Apple has launched so far feature 9.7-inch screens, said Xinhua.
A smaller tablet would help Apple broaden its product offerings, and therefore compete better with rivals such as Samsung Electronics and Amazon to maintain its dominant market share.
Latest numbers from market research firm IDC showed that Apple captured 61.5 percent of global tablet market share in the third quarter of 2011, down from 68.3 percent in the previous quarter.
The news of Apple testing a smaller tablet comes as the company is reportedly preparing to unveil a new iPad in early March which is expected to have a similar screen size of around 9.7 inches with the current generation of iPad 2.
But the Wall Street Journal report also noted that Apple, which works with suppliers to test new designs all the time, could opt not to proceed with the smaller tablet.
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Written by admin on 10 February 2012
San Francisco, Feb 10 (IANS) Apple will introduce its latest iPad 3 here next month, media reports said Thursday.
The next generation iPad will have faster chips and better graphics, Xinhua reported quoting the technology news site AllThingsD.
It did not say when it will hit stores.
The new tablet, which will probably be named iPad 3, will feature a Retina Display or something close to it. The iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S have Retina Display.
As the human eye can only see around 300 pixels per inch, the screen of these smartphones have 326 pixels per inch, making texts and images look more similar to a high quality printed version.
It expected the device to follow the same schedule as that of the iPad 2, which was available for purchase about a week after the event.
Apple has declined to comment on the timing of the event.
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Written by admin on 27 January 2012
San Francisco, Jan 27 (IANS) Global tablet shipments reached nearly 27 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011 with Android jumping to a record share of 39 percent, said a new research released Thursday.
According to the research by consulting firm Strategy Analytics, global tablet shipments reached a record high of 26.8 million units in the last quarter of 2011, surging 250 percent from 10.7 million units in the same period a year earlier.
Android captured a record 39 percent share of global tablet shipments, rising from 29 percent in the year-ago quarter, reported Xinhua.
Global Android tablet shipments tripled annually to 10.5 million units in the last three months of 2011 and the platform so far is relatively popular with tablet manufacturers, said the research.
However, Apple shipped 15.4 million iPads worldwide and maintained its market leadership with 58 percent share during the fourth quarter last year.
“Apple shrugged off the much-hyped threat from entry-level Android models this quarter,” Peter King, director at Strategy Analytics, said in a statement.
The research found Microsoft captured a mere 1.5 percent global tablet share in the quarter, noting that “the upcoming release of Windows 8 this year cannot come quickly enough for Microsoft, so its hardware partners can start competing more effectively in the tablet space”.
In the full year of 2011, global tablet shipments hit 66.9 million units, increasing by 260 percent from 18.6 million units in 2010. Consumers are increasingly buying tablets in preference to netbooks and even entry-level notebooks or desktops, said the research.
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Written by admin on 27 January 2012
San Francisco, Jan 27 (IANS) A patent application published by the US Patent and Trademark Office Thursday showed that Apple is working on a universal touchscreen remote capable of controlling multiple devices, shedding lights on the company’s much-anticipated plan on a smart TV product.
The patent, titled “Apparatus and Method to Facilitate Universal Remote Control” was filed Sep 30, 2011, said that the remote will be capable of controlling multiple devices including “a television, a video tape player, a video disk player, stereo, a home control system or a computer system”, reported Xinhua.
“Manufacturers have created so-called universal remote controls, which can be trained to mimic several remote controls, and can then control each appliance for which they have been trained. While universal remote controls attempt to address the problem of multiple remote controls, these devices are even more complex to operate, further confusing the user,” said the filing.
According to the filing, Apple’s universal remote control will include a touchscreen which functions as the display screen and the user input mechanism and a discovery mechanism that would discover available appliances to control.
AppleInsider, a technology news site focusing on Apple, first discovered the filing. It said that the application is particularly noteworthy as rumours of a full-fledged Apple TV set have gained considerable steam since the release of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs late last year.
In the book, the late Apple co-founder told his biographer that he had “cracked” the concept for a TV set with “the simplest user interface you could imagine”.
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