Friday, January 8, 2010
Google’s Nexus One, Palm’s Pre, and Motorola’s Droid all ship with an LED flash beside their cameras and the next iPhone may as well. That’s the word from AppleInsider, which claims some insight into the next iteration of Apple's iconic device.







Bay Area iPhone users, relief is on the way. AT&T has almost completed a $65 million upgrade to its network in the region. The carrier has upgraded close to 850 cell sites in an effort to better handle the massive surge in data traffic it has seen in and around San Francisco since the debut of iPhone. And make no mistake: The surge has been massive.
iPhone exclusivity officially came to an end in the U.K. yesterday when, joining O2, Orange became the second carrier to offer the Apple smart phone in the country. And judging by Orange’s first-day sales, the debut was quite a success. The iPhone went on sale at 7 am Tuesday and by 4 pm, Orange had sold more than 30,000.
At 37.9 percent, Nokia’s share of the global handset market is the largest in the industry. Odd then to learn that it is not the most profitable. And odder still to learn that that honor belongs to Apple, which has been in the handset market for just two years.
If AT&T took offense at Verizon’s “There’s a Map for That” ad campaign, wait until it gets a load of its rival's newest ad spots. Unfazed by AT&T’s litigious reply to its first effort, Verizon rolled out a trio of new anti-AT&T ads over the weekend and they are brutal in their criticism of the carrier's network coverage.
What do you know: China Unicom just coughed up some first weekend sales numbers for the iPhone and...well, they’re not much to look at, despite what I said earlier. The carrier sold just 5,000.
Apple’s internationally coveted iPhone finally arrived at market in China last week and by most accounts its debut was uncharacteristically muted. There is "no sign of the sort of sellout reception that greeted the smart phone at its introduction in other countries," The Wall Street Journal reported. Clearly, the device’s Chinese launch wasn’t the rousing success to which we’ve become accustomed. That said, it probably wasn’t quite the bust it’s been made out to be, either.
Apple’s iPhone finally arrived at market in China today and is evidently selling fairly well, despite wallet-emptying prices. ChinaNews.com found about 300 people queued up to buy the device at China Unicom’s flagship store in Beijing.
How badly does AT&T want to renew its iPhone exclusivity contract with Apple? Pretty damn badly. Posting third-quarter earnings that topped Wall Street expectations this morning, AT&T said it activated a record 3.2 million iPhones during the period. Of those, 40 percent were for customers new to the carrier.
Demand exceeding supply for the Apple iPhone 3GS is one of the big takeaways from Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster’s earnings preview for Apple’s September quarter and it obviously bodes well for the company’s investors. Munster sees Apple beating the Street’s estimates thanks to increased Mac and iPhone sales.
Customer satisfaction with the iPhone continues to run high--among both casual and business users. Apple’s smart phone scored highest in the both consumer and business categories of JD Power’s Smartphone Satisfaction Study, besting rivals like Research in Motion and LG.
It has taken far too long, but AT&T has finally warmed to the the idea of voice-over-Internet services on its wireless network. On Tuesday afternoon, the carrier opened its 3G network to telephony apps, ending a restriction that had limited them to Wi-Fi.
AT&T’s iPhone exclusivity deal with Apple is set to expire as early as next year, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be renewed--despite complaints about the carrier’s network. That’s the word from iSuppli, which predicts Apple will extend its agreement with AT&T because it has no reason not to.
Looks like Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster’s second estimate of Apple’s weekend iPhone sales underestimated demand just as badly as his first. Apple didn’t sell 500,000 units of the iPhone 3GS over the weekend, as Munster first predicted. Nor did the company sell 750,000 as he said in a research note this morning. It sold over one million. Moreover, downloads of Apple's new iPhone 3.0 software, launched last Wednesday, have already reached six million.


“iPhone 3G S Available at AT&T Tomorrow.” That’s the title of the press release that just landed in my inbox--even as the lines form in New York City and Tokyo. Never hurts to state the obvious, I suppose.

10 am PDT, 1 pm EDT.
Forstall returns to the stage for some final words about iPhone 3.0. Free for iPhone owners. $9.95 for iPod Touch owners. Available worldwide June 17. GM seed available to developers today. And with that he hands the keynote back over to Schiller. Schiller talks up the iPhone 3G, noting that two thirds of all mobile browsing is now done from iPhones and iPod Touches. He pulls up a graph of various app stores and the number of apps available at each. Apple’s App Store far exceeds them all.
