You made it through Wednesday and the weekend will be here soon enough, so give yourself a pat on the back! It was also a challenging day for some of Apple’s partners, with a Swedish carrier predicting gloom and doom for Cupertino over the lack of LTE in its handsets, and AT&T swinging back and forth with good news about iPhone 4S activations and less good news for the last quarter overall. Here’s what’s making news for Thursday, October 20, 2011.
Here’s a bit of trivia for iPhone 4S owners: Did you know your shiny new device comes with not two but but three methods of acquiring your position? Wi-Fi triangulation and the common GPS aside, the new device also quietly adds GLONASS, an acronym for the Russian GLObalnaya NAvigatsionnaya Sputnikovaya Sistema first launched in 1976. According to 9to5Mac, the Russkies created the system in order to reduce their reliance on U.S.-based GPS technology, but with the Cold War well behind us, it appears everyone gains by having both satellite signals beaming into our iPhone 4S -- and is likely to help expand the handset’s domination into the former Soviet Union as well.
Once exclusive U.S. iPhone carrier AT&T is feeling a bit of a sting in their quarterly profits without a new Apple handset over the summer, even though the company passed the 100 million subscriber mark by adding an additional 2.1 million. AllThingsD is reporting wireless data revenue grew 18 percent to $857 million, with total revenue ringing the registers up to $31.5 billion, just shy of the $31.62 billion analysts were expecting. So how many iPhones did the company move last quarter? “Only” 2.7 million, which is their lowest level in more than a year.
9to5Mac is reporting on claims made by the senior vice president of Swedish carrier TeliaSonera over Apple’s decision to ignore 4G LTE (at least for now) is a “bad mistake” that will open the company to being “run over by the others” -- meaning other handset makers who are tripping over themselves to adopt LTE early on. Of course, Apple has been here before with the original iPhone in 2007, which used the more available EDGE for wireless data rather than 3G, which came the following year.
On the heels of AT&T’s dip in quarterly profits (see above), the company managed to find a silver lining in their dark cloud thanks to the iPhone 4S. The carrier announced that more than a million of Apple’s new handsets were activated as of Tuesday, which marks AT&T’s most successful iPhone launch ever. So, things are looking up for their next quarterly report due in January, at least...
Now that iOS 5 is out in the wild, Apple has announced a nine-city world tour to help developers get the most out of the new technology. The iOS 5 Tech Talk World Tour 2011 events kick off in Berlin, Germany on November 2 and wrap up in Austin, Texas on January 23, hitting several other cities in Europe, Asia, North and South America along the way. According to the company’s website, the London event on November 7 and the New York City event on January 13 are already booked up, so you might want to register today if you want to get your foot in the door.
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