It’s the last Friday of the year, and that means the final installment of our daily news recap for 2011. It’s been a busy year for Apple: From Thunderbolt Macs to the iPad 2, OS X Lion to the iPhone 4S and of course, the death of co-founder Steve Jobs, many of us are apprehensive about the future of our favorite tech company heading into 2012. For now, let’s sit back and reflect on the year with a few final news tidbits for this Friday, December 20, 2011.
Are you a Dropbox user still in search of a better way to sync your files? If you have a Google account (or are willing to get one), there’s now another option. TechCrunch is reporting that Insync 2.0 is now available and best of all, it’s totally free to use. Billed as “Dropbox for Google users,” the service uses only a Gmail address to join up and the Mac client software adds the contents of your Google Docs account to a sidebar folder in the Finder; anything placed there is synced to Google’s cloud, where all users have 1GB by default. GDocs storage is much cheaper than Dropbox -- for example, $100 per year with Dropbox gets you a mere 50GB, while the same dough lands you a whopping 400GB from Google. To sign up, jump over to the Insync website and within minutes you’ll be ready to go.
While the general consensus is that Nokia’s smartphone business is in the toilet, the numbers show a different reality. According to AllThingsD, recent metrics compiled by Pingdom show that the cell phone giant’s sagging Symbian OS actually holds 33.59 percent of the global mobile OS market -- more than the sexier iOS with 22.56 percent and even more than Google’s Android freight train at only 21.74 percent. Even more bizarre, Symbian is actually grew in market share over 2011 after starting at 30.25 percent in January! So, next time you get into an argument with iOS or Android tech snobs over who dominates in the world market, just point ‘em back here and have their minds blown.
There’s no end in sight for the patent battles between Apple and Samsung, who has been aggressive in recent months in their efforts to mock iPhone users on U.S. television commercials. According to MacRumors, it’s a very different story in Samsung’s home turf of South Korea, where the company is openly copying the look and feel of Apple’s iPad commercials for their own Samsung Galaxy Tab. As shown in the embedded video below, “the ad depicts a father and daughter playing with a Galaxy Tab in a sequence of shots reminiscent of Apple’s own iPad ads.” MacRumors even posted a rough translation of the narration: “You try to have fun with me, you try to win against me, you ask me millions of questions, you sit on my lap, you want to stay beside me all the time, strangely, when I stay with you time passes very quickly. This is a precious time.” It’s not likely that Apple will be able to sic their legal team against this kind of thing, but it’s fairly shameless on Samsung’s part...
While Nokia’s Symbian OS is kicking ass and taking names worldwide (see above), the aging platform is sagging here in the U.S., and it’s not alone. comScore has just released a Mobile Subscriber Market Share report for November which clearly shows Google Android and Apple iOS chewing away at the market share formerly dominated by Research in Motion’s BlackBerry. RIM dipped from 7.1 percent to 6.5 percent between August and November, while Apple rose from 9.8 percent to 11.2 percent during the same period. Symbian dipped by a lesser amount (1.5 percent, down from 1.8 percent) and Microsoft is clearly failing to gain traction with Windows Phone after slipping half a percentage point from 5.7 percent to 5.2 percent. It’s a pretty rough market out there if you’re not producing Android or iOS devices, that’s for sure.
Right on the heels of the iOS 5.0.1 untethered jailbreak earlier this week comes news from FireCore, LLC that the same exploit has been introduced to its Seas0nPass Mac and Windows software for the second-generation Apple TV. Today’s update finally allows ATV owners to update to the latest 4.4.4 software (which is technically a variant of iOS 5.0.1) while remaining completely untethered -- no more need to run Seas0nPass at each power up. The update supports all of the aTV Flash plugins with the exception of Plex, but those developers are hard at work on an update which will hopefully arrive in the near future.
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chirpity
January 02, 2012 at 12:28am
So, the Insync service is just like Dropbox, but you only get 1GB with a free account instead of 2GB from Dropbox. They are using the word Insync (like the band) and the phrase "Resistance is futile" (from Star Trek).
Can't Google ever do anything without totally copying someone else?
And, considering that Box gives away 50GB for free, this is not impressive.
