Looking for some light Christmas Eve reading? Touch Arcade has a retrospective on iPhone gaming in 2009 (and a look forward to 2010).
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One of my favorite Intel foibles to ridicule is the way that the company continues to stress Flash support as a rationale for x86 in handheld portables—x86, we’re told repeatedly, gives you “the full Internet experience,” by which Intel means, “you can run Flash on it.” This is supposed to make x86 a better option than ARM for portable CPUs, but the chipmaker doesn’t bother to mention that ARM Flash support is here as of Flash 10.1, making their favorite talking point inoperative.
The four of you who have been eagerly awaiting an update to MSN Messenger will have to wait a few more months, according to a post on the Office for Mac Team Blog, Mac Mojo. The update, which will bring A/V support, has hit some speed bumps along the way, causing a longer than expected delay in beta deployment. Apparently the trouble is in connecting to “the most current A/V code running on the Windows Live servers”.
The news might be somewhat of a disappointment to those of you who remember a post on the very same blog from last year detailing the team’s plan to get A/V support running sometime in 2009. The Microsoft employees went as far as to say that they hoped to have a demo with A/V working at this year’s Macworld Expo.
Back in July of this year, we previewed a device that was supposed to add stereoscopic depth to any PSP game, even video files. We expressed some skepticism at the company’s claims, and the product has since been delayed until January of next year. RealView recent sent Ars Technica what seems to be a production model of the device, and now that we have the thing in our hands… it’s actually very cool.
Apple is telling “select” developers to prepare their apps for a demo in January—one that won’t be limited to a fixed 320×480 iPhone screen—according to sources speaking to Business Insider. This is offered up as the latest evidence that Apple is planning to introduce its long-rumored tablet very soon, although it’s not expected to go on sale in January.
Apple apparently hasn’t told developers much, except that apps for the demo next month should be available in full resolution. This, of course, indicates that they will run on a device with a larger screen than that of the iPhone and iPod touch, and the latest rumors about the as-yet-unannounced tablet indicate that Apple may be going for a 10″ or 11″ screen.
Apple’s iPhone was the most popular headset in the US for the majority of 2009, according to recently published data from Nielsen, owning four percent of an “embedded base of all subscribers” from January to October. The iPhone just squeaked past the BlackBerry 8300 series (3.7 percent), but handily beat out the RAZR V3 series (2.3 percent), and the LG enV2 (2.1 percent). While Apple has the title of the most popular handset, it is important to note that both LG and RIM hold a higher total market share when all of their handsets are combined.
During the same time period, Apple also scored in the top 10 of the most accessed brands over mobile phones, according to Nielsen. While the Cupertino company barely broke into the top 10 (finishing 10th), the brands ahead of Apple are certainly nothing to sneeze at. ESPN, Facebook, and the CNN Digital Network were just a few of the top 10 companies. Perhaps most curious is that Yahoo was the number one brand, beating out the 800-pound gorilla named Google.
The runaway success of the iPhone App Store, which Apple didn’t even launch until a year after the first iPhone became available, caught even Apple by surprise. The 2-billion-apps-sold milestone, reached in late September after just a year and a half of sales, surpassed even the most optimistic expectations inside of Apple.
“We had no idea there would be 2 billion downloads by October,” Kleiner Perkins partner Matt Murphy, manager of the then $100 million fund, told Financial Times. “Most people within Apple, if you had told them it would be a fifth of that by now, they would have been pretty happy.”
When we asked our faithful readers what technological advances had made the biggest difference to their lives, Prospero424 stepped up to the plate to deliver a humdinger: video compression.
Last week, Dow Jones Newswires quoted a Psystar lawyer, Eugene Action, who said that the company was shutting down and firing its eight employees in order to comply with an injunction issued against the company. Though Psystar still plans to appeal an unfavorable ruling in its California lawsuit with Apple, don’t count the company out just yet, according to lead counsel Kiwi Camara.
“Regrettably, Mr. Action was misquoted in an early story that seems to have been picked up elsewhere,” Camara told Computerworld. “Psystar does not intend to shut down permanently.”
Ford plans to offer WiFi on its vehicles starting next year. You’ll need to provide your own 3G connectivity, however.
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