Apple will release quarterly financials on Wednesday, but the week is already off to a rousing start with news late Sunday that the co-CEOs of BlackBerry maker Research in Motion have stepped down to make way for a new voice… who sounds an awful lot like the old one, if you ask us. Judging from a survey in today’s roundup, some of RIM’s customers are definitely buying iPhones, so who knows how many may be left by the time BlackBerry 10 launches later this year. While you ponder that, have a slice off the daily news pie with a quintuplet of news for this Monday, January 23, 2012.
According to a report from AppleInsider, an awful lot of us are adding a tablet to our tech arsenal, with total tablet sales in the United States having nearly doubled over the holiday shopping season. The new data from The Pew Research Center reveals that “tablet ownership went from 10 percent of U.S. adults surveyed before Christmas to 19 percent in January of 2012.” And it wasn’t just tablets that had holiday shoppers excited: Dedicated e-book readers like Amazon’s Kindle line also reaped the benefits as well. "These findings are striking because they come after a period from mid-2011 into the autumn in which there was not much change in the ownership of tablets and e-book readers," the research firm revealed. "However, as the holiday gift-giving season approached, the marketplace for both devices dramatically shifted." Curiously, the findings fail to make any mention of the current market leader, the iPad, suggesting that cheaper alternatives such as Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet have more to do with the recent surge in buying.
AppleInsider is also reporting on a few interesting tidbits of data regarding the iPhone 4S today, courtesy of a new report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners that was made public on Monday. For example: Did you know that 21 percent of iPhone 4S buyers opt for the highest-capacity 64GB model? Meanwhile, “the survey also found that AT&T, Verizon and Sprint have maintained their market shares consistently among iPhone owners,” which is good news for them but likely very bad news for fourth-place T-Mobile, the only major U.S. carrier without the iPhone (unless you count all those jailbroken devices running on their EDGE network). Last but not least, the survey found that 36 percent of iPhone 4S users actually come from a competing smartphone platform -- likely Android, BlackBerry or Palm, although the data collected from 6,316 users from October through December, 2011 didn’t specifically break down which competitors suffered the most.
AllThingsD is reporting that the new days-old textbook initiative from Apple may already be considered a success, with Global Equities Research claiming “more than 350,000 textbooks were downloaded from the company’s iBookstore within the first three days of availability.” The firm apparently “monitors Apple’s iBooks sales via a proprietary tracking system” but fails to offer any details on how it might work -- nor does it factor in the free price tag on E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth, which is the only one of eight available textbook titles not sold for $14.99. Global Equities also claims that Apple’s free OS X app iBooks Author has already been downloaded around 90,000 times, which could mean a lot more e-books coming down the pipeline in the months ahead.
While most users are content with photo sharing giants like Instagram and Camera+, that isn’t stopping developers from trying to reinvent the wheel with offerings of their own. According to Presselite, the developers of Vintage Camera, their month-old app is already streaking up the charts, with the free version ranked at number one in both Japan and Thailand over the Christmas holiday while staking out a lower position in many other countries. The iPhone and iPod touch app has been downloaded a whopping three million times in its first month, which presumably includes a tally of both the free and 99-cent Pro edition combined. Vintage Camera offers a retro design with a full range of features, including the ability to apply filters in a variety of looks and save them to your Photo Roll as well as share to Twitter or Facebook without leaving the app.
We’d all agree that Apple’s patent assault on Google’s Android platform has been a messy affair, but a new rumor circulating today claims it may have all been for naught -- unless the company was just looking to drain their bank account. According to onetime Fake Steve Jobs scribe Dan Lyons, Apple has spent in the neighborhood of $100 million on its initial assault against Android handset maker HTC, which began with “84 claims based on 10 patents” -- a number that was soon whittled down to a mere four patents once it went before a judge. The real Steve Jobs famously told biographer Walter Isaacson that he was willing to go “thermonuclear” on Android and spent every dime in Apple’s coffers to bury the competing smartphone platform, but the odds of that happening appear slim at best -- for now, the best Cupertino can hope for is to force handset makers to stop using features that infringe on their patents, which is likely to cost them a bundle since they’re only getting started.
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