Dive into OS X
Apple announced Monday that the battery of its widely anticipated music-playing iPhone will last longer than expected. The iPhone will have a battery life that supports 8 hours of mobile phone talk time, much better than the five hours of talk time the company originally estimated in January. Apple said its battery claims are dependent upon specific configurations and “many other factors.” It did not give further details on the longer battery life. In comparison to Apple’s eight hours of talk time, one rival music player phone from Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., the Upstage, has a battery life of up to 6.3 hours. The BlackJack, another Samsung phone, has talk time of up to 5 1/2 hours. And Sony Ericsson, a venture of Sony Corp. and Ericsson, has touted a talk time of up to 9 hours for some of its Walkman music-playing phone models. All manufacturers are battling to increase the battery life of their cell phones. This is mainly because cell phones became smart phones, which need lots of power as they also aim to handle Web browsing, personal data storage and music and video playback. And the constant communication with radio broadcast towers tends to drain power more quickly than “ancient” unconnected consumer electronics devices. Apple also pointed out that the IPhone’s top surface of the touch-sensitive screen has been upgraded to optical-quality glass from plastic, making it more resistant to scratches. Improving the iPhone’s battery life and upgrading the top surface of the screen addresses two key weaknesses that competitors and critics have leveled in the run-up to the device’s launch. So Apple upgrades the iPhone before releasing it!
Apple is preparing the iPhone launch on 29 June for the US and the company has previously promised a European release in the fourth quarter of this year. In the US the device will be available only through mobile provider AT&T and stores owned by Apple Inc. Apple has previously said that it is looking for a single partner for the entire European market. While there are far more choices in Europe (Orange, Vodafone, T-Mobile, …), Apple seems to have angered potential partners. Several operators apparently already have written off the iPhone. This is because they found Apple ‘unbelievably arrogant’, making demands that ’simply cannot be justified no matter how hot the product is’. So Apple can be forced to choose a retail-only strategy when it launches its iPhone in Europe. But selling the iPhone SIM free is not very likely because there are parts of the iPhone functionality that need service side support from a wireless operator (such as the visual voice mail).
Apple announced yesterday that Safari for Windows has been downloaded more than 1 million times within its first 48 hours of existence. But will this be enough to compete against Internet Explorer and Firefox? Safari currently holds 4.9 % market share, where Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Firefox holds 59.8 % and 33.7 % market share respectively. In addition, the company also released Safari for Windows 3.01 after security concerns arose earlier this week. The new version is available through Apple’s software update or downloaded from Apple’s site.
Amazon first offered Leopard for presale on June 12th, a day after Apple’s WWDC keynote announcing Leopard’s new features. It is already ranked as the 1st most popular software item on Amazon (as of this writing). Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is scheduled to ship in October 2007.
Apple released the 3.0 beta on Monday, and hackers started digging up bugs within hours. The Safari 3.0.1 update, released early Thursday morning, fixes three bugs in the Windows beta browser, including bugs that were discovered earlier this week by researchers Thor Larholm and Aviv Raff. According to Apple, two of the three bugs don’t affect the Safari 3.0 beta that runs on Mac OS x, but the third can also crash the Mac browser. Apple describes the bugs being patched as follow:
The updates come just four days after the company released a beta version of Safari for Windows at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. This quick update is remarkable because Apple managed to fix some serious security vulnerabilities in a very short time frame. Their usual response time is mostly counted in weeks or months. This indicates that Apple is serious about being an important browser contender for Windows users. This is the first time that Apple has released a version of Safari for the Windows platform. Because it now can be run on a much larger number of systems, the code has been getting more attention from the security community. Security analysts expect to see several more updates from Apple in the coming weeks.
This strategy is probably chosen to boost Apple’s iTunes usage and sales. The company has announced plans for a European release in the fourth quarter of the year but has yet to provide details, such as whether the European version will operate on 3G (third-generation) networks. Alos, it is not known whether the same stipulation will apply, but this will most likely be the case.
As you’ve probably heard by now, Apple released a beta of their Safari web browser for Microsoft Windows. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, said at the Worldwide Developers Conference yesterday something that is not surprisingly for Apple tools: “What we’ve got here is the most innovative browser in the world and the most powerful browser in the world”. But is this true? I have some doubts! Security vulnerabilities have been revealed within just a few hours of release. Aviv Raff claims to have found the first security vulnerability in Apple’s Safari browser on Windows only hours after the software was released. Raff tested the application against his browser security testing tool: Hamachi. Thor Larholm who described himself as “a pretty ordinary guy from a small town in Denmark”, also downloaded and installed Safari for Windows on his PC. After a few hours of testing he found a serious bug: “I now have a fully functional command execution vulnerability, triggered without user interaction simply by visiting a web site.” And also David Maynor reported security vulnerabilities on his site: “we found a total of 6 bugs in an afternoon, 4 DoS and 2 remote code execution bugs.” Yes, it is still a pre-release code, but we expected something better, especcialy from Apple! It is possibly the most crap browser on the planet! So, now, remains the question: Why produced Apple a Windows version of Safari and not do it properly? How is this helpful for the company? The clue’s on that unavoidable start page and it’s called iTunes. No doubt, Apple’s future is based on selling content, not computers, and this is a next (clumsy) step to this new goal.
Apple said today that it would make its Safari Web browser available for Windows-based PCs. Jobs also claimed that “Safari performs twice as fast as its competitors”. Safari, which was released a few years ago for Apple’s Macintosh computers, has captured about 5 percent of the world’s browser market share with more than 18 million users, Jobs said. Internet Explorer, which is built into Windows, has a 78 percent share, while Firefox has climbed to 15 percent of the market, he said. Jobs continued by saying that allowing Windows users to download the browser will help boost market share the same way that making iTunes available for Windows users helped that application. But the most important point is the fact that Apple’s upcoming iPhone will run Safari. That means, Jobs said, that any application designed to run on the Safari browser for Macs also would be fully compatible with the iPhone — Apple’s highly anticipated combination cell phone, iPod and wireless Web browser. The iPhone will be available in the U.S. on June 29. The move to make Safari available to non-Mac users is not unprecedented: Apple also makes its iPod media players and iTunes Store for Windows. The strategy is aimed in part at drawing more people to its Macintosh computers. “It will create a much more significant consumer platform for the iPhone,” said Mike McGuire, a research analyst at Gartner, an industry research firm based in San Jose, Calif. This move indicates that Apple is increasingly confident in its ability to compete against Microsoft’s desktop computing monopoly. The Safari news was unexpected; A test version of the program will be available beginning today for downloading from Apple’s Web site. Much of the rest of the presentation focused on showing of 10 new features of the company’s Leopard version of the OS X operating system.
The “I’m a Mac” campaign, created by Media Arts Lab\TBWA, just won the Grand Effie award at the 39th Annual Effie Awards gala in New York. The Effie Awards honor the most significant achievement in the business of marketing communications: ideas that work. Results from the I’m a Mac campaign included market share growth of 42%, record sales and cultural influence. You can check it out here. |
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Amazon has begun offering Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) for pre-ordering on their website.
The iPhone is due to go on sale in the US on June 29. And now, Apple has mentioned on their website that any consumer planning to buy the iPhone will need to have an iTunes Store account before he can activate the device. So, Apple will require customers to establish a separate account with its online media service in addition to one with AT&T Wireless Services, which has signed an exclusive US distribution deal for the iPhone.
