NPD has released initial sales figures for the month of April, and Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster sees the year-over-year sales declines as generally good. According to his analysis, the declines should meet or beat Wall Street’s expectations for Apple’s third fiscal quarter.
It looks like the service upgrade that LiveSide warned My Phone users of yesterday was more than just your typical service downtime. Microsoft today announced that its new My Phone service is now available as a public beta. In celebration, Microsoft has given My Phone a new icon (pictured on the right). Any Windows Mobile 6.x user can download and try the service, which is now available in all 25 Windows Mobile languages (the remaining 19 were added), over at myphone.microsoft.com. An official announcement was made on the My Phone Team blog; here’s the most important part:
Mac use among students at UC Davis has increased significantly as of late, to over 23 percent, since it bottomed out at a little over two percent in 2002. This was revealed as part of the results of an annual survey by US Davis’s Computer Lab Management. Additional network tracking data from the Information and Educational Technology department further corroborate the trend, as well as showing that Macs are even more popular among the university’s teaching faculty.
Apple is fortifying its phone-based support team with as many as 450 “Apple At Home Experts,” or remote tech support staff, according to recent job ads from the company. The boost could be due to new iPhone hardware expected to be released this summer, though there is reason to believe that it may be due to an as-yet-unrevealed new product introduction.
The limitation of one third-party app running at a time has been a major criticism of Apple’s iPhone OS, though Apple has contended that the limitation is necessary for adequate battery life. However, the company may be devising a system to allow iPhone apps to run in the background, if recent rumors are true.
With just over three weeks to go before WWDC ‘09, news in the Apple world is approaching a healthy roar. Apple has made a number of high-profile hires lately, the WWDC keynote speaker was announced, Mac OS X 10.5.7 was released, and more rumors have cropped up over what to expect in June. Missed out on all the news this week? Read on:
Two weeks ago, we were watching Sheila look for a laptop under $2,000 during the fourth advertisement in Microsoft’s Laptop Hunters marketing series. Microsoft has a fifth ad up now, and it’s dj vu all over again. Just like in the first ad, we have a Lauren, and we have a stab at Macs and their hefty price tags. Let me introduce you to Lauren #2, and her mother Sue, who are looking for a laptop under $1,700 that has speed, portability, and battery life.
A number of non-Apple netbook users that have installed Mac OS X on their systems are reporting that the recent update to 10.5.7 for Leopard has brought significant improvements to the diminutive mobile computers. “A bunch of people running a hackintoshed Dell Mini 9 or MSI Wind are reporting an extra hour of battery life with 10.5.7 over 10.5.6,” a developer told Ars.
Again to sum up, TechEd 2009 has brought us fresh headlines for Windows 7, Office 2010, and Windows Mobile 6.5. So, what else is worth talking about? How about the Microsoft Surface. The company quietly (sans press release) announced that Service Pack 1 for the super-duper coffee table has been released. Apparently the service pack is the result of feedback from more than 180 partners in 11 countries who are developing on the Microsoft Surface. SP1 is meant to make development on the platform faster and easier: the SDK supports development on any .NET framework and is optimized for WPF and XNA.
As if we needed more evidence that Apple is preparing to roll out an updated iPhone, a newly published screenshot of Best Buy’s inventory system adds fuel to the fire. Posted on iPhoneArena, the screenshot shows three new AT&T phones that have a description of “Project Charlie.” The devices have SKUs that are new to the system, and of course, the site speculates that the devices represent different storage sizes and/or colors of new iPhones.
