Scooplet: the Palm Pre syncs with iTunes
It came up briefly at CES in January when a Palm (PALM) representative let the cat out of the bag (see here). Nobody followed up.
But with more and more Palm Pres appearing in the wild — in the hands of Palm employees, Elevation partners, one of my high-school buddies, even the Boy Genius — we can now confirm this little secret:
Plug a Pre into a Mac and it syncs, seamlessly, with Apple's (AAPL) iTunes.
In fact, the iTunes Store treats the Pre just as it would an iPod or an iPhone with one two exceptions: it can't handle old copy-protected songs or, naturally, iPhone apps.
Third party programs that sync music with various non-Apple MP3 players — including the Palm Treo and 700p – have been available for some time. But team Pre has apparently built the necessary code right into the device's firmware.
They certainly have the know-how. The team is chock-a-block with former Apple employees and is led by Palm president Jon Rubinstein, who built the original iPod for Steve Jobs.
How Apple legal will respond to a presumably unauthorized invasion of their music store remains to be seen.
Asked about the Pre during a quarterly earnings call in January, COO Tim Cook said Apple would use whatever weapons it has at its disposal to fight companies that rip off its intellectual property.
An Apple spokesperson, reached for comment earlier this week, would only say that the company does not respond to rumor and speculation.
UPDATE: From John Paczkowski's coverage of the Pre demo given Thursday afternoon by Palm's Jon Rubinstein at D7: All Things Digital:
- Plug the Pre into a PC and you’re offered the option of using the device as a USB drive, charging it or beginning a “media sync.” Interesting, using media sync the Pre does indeed sync with iTunes, though it’s hamstrung by Apple’s DRM protected songs. Can’t imagine Apple’s too happy about that. Presumably, Apple legal is already drafting a letter. Pre appears to make iTunes think it’s an iPod.
- How is Apple going to feel about that, asks Walt. Rubenstein dodges a bit noting that there are a variety of ways of getting music out of iTunes. Walt pushes back pointing out that this is the first non-Apple device that is recognized as an Apple device by a Mac. Rubenstein dodges again. McNamee jumps in, refers to Apple as a monopolist and says people should be able to use music that they purchase in what ever way they see fit.
- Media sync feature also works with iPhoto and syncs photos to the Pre. That’s not likely to go over well at Apple either.
For an explanation of how the Pre does this — and how it is different from how, say, RIM and Nokia translate iTunes library files — see Jon Lech Johansen's primer here.
UPDATE 2: Palm lists "Palm Media Sync" first among the features it trumpets in its post D7 press release:
Palm media sync is a feature of webOS that synchronizes seamlessly with iTunes, giving you a simple and easy way to transfer DRM-free music, photos and videos to your Palm Pre.(2) Simply connect Pre to your PC or Mac via the USB cable, select "media sync" on the phone, and iTunes will launch on your computer desktop. You can then choose which DRM-free media files to transfer.
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Yahoo CEO says everything's for sale, at a price
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| Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz says she'll sell, but there's more to it than that. Photo: Yahoo |
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, not one for mincing words, took the stage at the D7 conference in Carlsbad, Calif. on Wednesday and said yes, she is willing to sell Yahoo's (YHOO) search business or all of Yahoo – for "boatloads" or "big boatloads" of money, respectively.
As always, the tech press ate this up. TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld, a smart guy and a former colleague, called it "a softening of her public stance," since when she arrived in January she said Yahoo was not for sale. While he's technically right – she even said she had softened her position – I see something different in her comments.
I say Bartz still doesn't plan on selling Yahoo, or even the search business. Why? In reporting on Bartz for a recent feature in Fortune, I got a sense of how pragmatic she is. When Bartz arrived in January, she knew she had to announce that she was there to run the company, not to break it up and sell it, as a way of defining Wall Street's expectations. But Bartz is also a veteran executive who knows how this game is played. The truth is that in a well-managed public company, shareholders expect that everything will be for sale at a price. So her statement is probably more a statement of her philosophy than a shift in perspective.
Then there's the matter of how she phrased this. "Boatloads" of money? Come on. That's not the language of someone who's looking to make a deal during a global economic bust.
Even though Microsoft (MSFT), the only likely buyer of anything Yahoo's selling, is a very wealthy company by any standard, it's in no position to blithely spend boatloads of money on anything these days. When Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer first offered a $45 billion boatload of money for Yahoo many moons ago, he planned to take on debt and mortgage his future profits to finance the deal. Today, with Windows and Office sales struggling in a recession, Microsoft is slashing jobs to boost a sagging stock price and praying that its upcoming Windows 7 operating system gives the company a boost. He's looking to do a search deal with Yahoo that makes him look thrifty, not generous.
If you have any lingering doubts left about Bartz's intentions, look at the conditions she set on any sale of Yahoo's search business. Not only would she require boatloads of money, but also continuing access to all search-related data and the right technology. In other words she wants to "sell" it, but maintain access to the most valuable parts.
This is a great idea for more than just search, actually. It works just as well for real estate. In fact, I would like to sell my home for boatloads of money, so long as the buyer does some renovations and lets me continue to live in it. Any takers? (GOOG)
The iPhone casts a giant shadow on the Web
Here's a pie chart that should warm Steve Jobs' heart.
That big blue slice covering 59% of the pie represents Apple's (AAPL) share of the U.S. smartphone traffic in April as measured by AdMob, the world's largest purveyor of ads on mobile apps and websites.
By the same measure, Apple also had the lion's share — 43% — of the mobile Web traffic worldwide.
The point of the "AdMob Mobile Metrics Report" for April 2009, released Wednesday morning, was not to give comfort to Apple's CEO. Rather it was to measure the large and growing shadow cast on the Internet by smartphones in general.
It cites a Gartner report that smartphones represented 12% of total mobile sales in 2008, and points out that those devices represented 35% of AdMob's traffic in April — nearly three times their market share.
But Apple's handheld devices — whose Internet shadow is more than five times their share — ended up dominating most of the report's charts. Among the highlights:
Of the 7.5 billion AdMob ads displayed on mobile devices in 160 countries around the world, 2 billion were displayed on iPhones or iPod touches- The iPhone OS has only 8% of global smartphone market share, but generates 43% of mobile Web requests and 65% of HTML usage
- In the United States, 20% of ad requests come from iPhones, 14.8% from iPod touches (globally, those numbers are 15.1% and 11%, respectively)
- Apple's share of U.S. ad requests grew 5.6% month over month
- The iPhone's share grew 3% in April; the iPod touch's grew 2.6
Those growth figures for Apple contrast with its competitors, most of whom lost share in the same period, including Motorola (MOT), Research in Motion (RIMM), LG, Kyocera (KYO) and Palm (PALM). The exceptions were Samsung, Nokia (NOK) and HTC, which grew marginally. See charts below the fold.
According to its website, AdMob stores and analyzes every ad request, impression and click from more than 7,000 mobile websites and 1,600 applications every day. Its most recent analysis of all that traffic, issued Wednesday, is available here.
See also:
- iPhone now represents 51% of U.S. smartphone traffic — report
- iPod touch use “exploded” Christmas day
Below the fold: AdMob's Web traffic numbers by manufacturer and model.
Analyst gives Apple a boost
Eight months ago, Morgan Stanley and RBC Capital both downgraded Apple (AAPL), triggering the company's worst selloff in eight years, a 23-point drop that lopped nearly $18 billion off its market cap.
RBC's Mike Abramsky reversed his position last month, raising his price target for Apple from $95 to $165.
On Tuesday Morgan Stanley's Kathryn Huberty followed suit, raising her target from $105 to $180 and sparking a rally that lifted Apple's stock price 8.28 points (6.67%), to close at $130.78 a share.
Like most Apple analysts, Huberty expects the company to introduce a new iPhone this summer and to cut its prices on existing models — and she makes a strong case that the resulting revenue spike will offset any slowdown in Apple's Mac and iPod business.
But the most interesting part of her report to clients is the fresh look she takes at the mobile Internet market — a market she describes as "one of the biggest opportunities in the history of the technology industry."
Among her findings:
- The iPhone has already dramatically changed the behavior of mobile device users
- Its ultimate target are the 4.1 billion people worldwide currently using cell phones
- The opportunity to connect those users to the Internet is arguably 40 times the opportunity to connect 100 million PCs to the Internet in the 1990s
- Apple is emerging as the "clear leader" in the race to get those users connected.
Accompanying her report are some particularly well-designed charts. Our favorite is the one that shows how Apple has changed user behavior:
The expanded slices in the upper left-hand quadrant of the pie chart correspond roughly with our own experience — without, of course, all that game playing.
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Palm Pre launch plans leaked
It's labeled "Sprint confidential information for internal use only," and accompanied by a warning that any "improper sharing" is considered a leak, will be investigated, and could result in "termination."
But that didn't prevent a copy of Sprint's business/executive launch guide for the Palm Pre from falling into the hands of the sleuths at Engadget, who published the 21-page document in its entirety on Sunday.
It's chock full of juicy details — including the dates of a Hollywood promotional event (June 3), a New York executive breakfast (June 5) and invitation-only VIP events at 10 flagship stores (June 5).
For the rest of us, who have to wait for the official June 6 launch, there are instructions to staff about who should and shouldn't be sold Palm's (PALM) bet-the-company device.
"We Can't Afford to Sell the Pre to the Wrong Customers," warns the call-out text.
But most relevant for would-be buyers — and competitors — are the details of Sprint's (S) pricing plans, which start at $69.99 (for "Everything Data" and 450 calling minutes per month) and $99.99 (for "Simply Everything," which includes unlimited minutes). See the chart below:
There's also a handy "Smokes the Competition" chart that compares features and pricing with AT&T (T), Verizon (VZ) and T-Mobile (DT) for Apple's (AAPL) iPhone, Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry Storm and Google's (GOOG) and HTC's G1, respectively. See below:
For anyone thinking about buying a Pre, it's a must-read. Get it here.
Rumor roundup: All about the new iPhone
With two weeks to go before Apple's (AAPL) World Wide Developers Conference — the venue at which Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone 3G last year — rumors about the next-generation iPhone are reaching critical mass.
Many signs — including the spot shortages of current-generation iPhones that appeared this week — point to June 8 as the day of the unveiling and mid-July as the launch window, although nothing about the timing is certain. (More on that below.)
But that hasn't stopped Apple watchers from papering the Web with speculation about the new device's features, specs and price points. The latest tidbit, which broke Friday afternoon, is that the new iPhone will allow users to purchase movies and TV shows from the iTunes store, perhaps using the faster 802.11n Wi-Fi protocol.
The new iPhone rumors started in 2008 and began gathering steam after the March 17 release of the iPhone 3.0 software developers kit (SDK), which contained, among other things, configuration files suggesting that the device would have voice controls, a digital compass, an autofocus camera and would be capable of making, editing and sharing video clips.
The next wave hit in mid-April, when Chinese language newspapers 1) reported that Apple had placed orders for 4 million next-generation iPhones and 2) listed purported suppliers for the phone's chips and key components — including a 3.2 megapixel camera.
A third wave of landed in early May, when someone on a Chinese forum posted what appeared to be an iPhone screen shot with more detailed specs, including:
- 32 GB of storage (up from a max of 16 GB)
- a 3.2 megapixel autofocus (as opposed to fixed focus) camera
- a 600 MHz CPU (up from 400 MHz)
- 256 MB of RAM (up from 128MB)
- a digital compass and FM receiver.
Last week saw the publication of the kind of reports that immediately precede a major Apple release: two sets of detailed specs presented as if they were fact.
The first set was leaked to a relatively new site — AppleiPhoneapps.com — by an unnamed source whose credibility the author could not vouch for. The second came from Daring Fireball's John Gruber — a veteran Apple watcher with one of the best track records in the Valley.
Both take as a given — or nearly given — the Chinese specs published in May.
Gruber writes that if he were a betting man, he would "wager heavily" on a June 8 announcement and July release of an iPhone with roughly double the CPU horsepower, an improved video-capable camera, and 16 and 32 GB storage capacities.
He would wager "a small amount" on 256 MB RAM and new price points of $199 and $299 for 16 and 32 GB, respectively.
And he would wager "a sandwich" on improved battery life for the new iPhone, despite the beefier CPU.
Gruber pointedly did not endorse several items offered by AppleiPhoneapps.com (and reposted on Wired.com):
- OLED screen
- Discontinuation of the metal band surrounding the edge of the device
- 1.5X The battery life
- Apple logo on the back to light up
- Rubber-tread backing
- Sleeker design
- Revolutionary combination of the camera, GPS, compass, and Google maps to identify photo and inform about photo locations.
- July 17th, 2009 release date
"OLED" refers to a technology known as organic light-emitting diode — very cutting edge, very low power, very expensive. It's easy to see how an OLED screen could extend the phone's battery life, harder to see how Apple could switch from LCD to OLED and still maintain its prices.
The timing of all this is tricky. July 17 has the virtue of falling on a Friday — which is the day of the week Apple released its first and second generation iPhones. And it gives Apple plenty of time after the June 8 WWDC keynote address to organize a nationwide — or worldwide — launch.
But at least one well-connected analyst — Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster — doesn't think Apple will introduce new hardware at WWDC at all. He expects marketing VP Phil Schiller's keynote speech to concentrate, as Apple's press release said it would, on previously announced software releases: iPhone 3.0 and OS X Snow Leopard.
Munster expects Apple to unveil a new family of iPhones at a separate special event, in late June or July, coinciding with the end of Steve Jobs' six month medical leave and timed to allow Jobs himself to unveil the new device.
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Analyst: 'Dramatically' different Apple tablet in 2010
The touchscreen tablet computer that is widely expected to be Apple's (AAPL) answer to those $300 netbooks will cost more, come later and be more dramatically different than most investors expect.
That's the thrust of a note to clients posted by Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster early Thursday.
According to Munster, the device will fill the gap between the iPod touch and the MacBook, cost between $500 and $700, run App Store apps and arrive some time in the first half of 2010.
"We are anticipating a new category of Apple products," he writes, "with an operating system more robust than the iPhone's but optimized for multi-touch…
"We expect the end result … to be launched later but with more dramatic differentiation than the Street is expecting."
Making the case for a touchscreen tablet, Munster ticks off the signs:
- Apple's consistent message that it refuses to launch a "cheap" portable netbook
- Its gradual addition of multi-touch technology to all of its core products (iPhones, iPods and Macs)
- Its acquisition of P.A. Semi along with other recent chip-related hires (making it increasingly clear that Apple is investing more in its mobile computing franchise)
- Apple's desire to differentiate itself in a maturing market before it's too late (similar to the timing of iPod and iPhone)
Rumors that Steve Jobs was working on a successor to the ill-fated Newton date back to at least Sept. 2007, 18 months after a team of Apple engineers is said to have begun working on it. According to AppleInsider, the tablet team was pulled off the project in 2006 to help get the iPhone out the door.
What's holding it up now, according to Munster's sources, is the operating system. "Its complexity, along with our conversations with a key company in the mobile space, leads us to believe [the new device] will not launch until calendar year 2010."
Munster does not address the question of whether the tablet will come with a real keyboard like the MacBook, or a virtual one like the iPod touch.
A touchscreen tablet wouldn't need a keyboard for videos, Web-surfing, iPhone apps or e-books. But some analysts believe it couldn't really serve as a netbook without a physical keyboard — if only as a peripheral.
On that other hand, it's hard to imagine Jobs or Jonathan Ive signing off on a design as clunky as, say, the Asus t91 pictured here, with its hinged, rotating keyboard.
Will Apple solve this dilemma? Apparently we're going to have to wait a little longer to find out.
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PC biz headed for a wireless shakeup
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| A sign of things to come? In its Atlanta stores, AT&T is selling the Acer Aspire One for $49 with a 2-year wireless data plan and DSL signup. Image: Acer |
PC retail is in rough shape again, and it's about to get rougher.
Evidence of hardship is everywhere. Hewett-Packard (HPQ), the world's largest computer maker, says it's selling about the same number of computers as a year ago, but getting a lot less money for them – sales dropped 19% in the most recent quarter. When Apple (AAPL) reports earnings in July, analysts expect Mac sales to be off as well. And while Intel (INTC) says it's hopeful that its chip sales are bottoming out, chip revenues are lower than they have been in years.
Why are things so bad? The easy answer is that PCs cost hundreds of dollars, and consumers don't have a lot of extra cash floating around these days. Unless your computer has been struck by lightning and given up the ghost, chances are you're holding off on purchasing a new one. One tech industry executive recently confided to me that it's not just U.S. consumers thinking this way – the entire global PC market headed off a cliff at roughly the same time late last year, forcing computer makers to cut workers and rethink their strategies.
In the midst of all that, wireless carriers are poised to shake up PC retail. AT&T (T) announced this week that beginning this summer, it will begin selling small, low-cost Windows XP netbooks from Acer, Dell (DELL), LG and Lenovo in all 2,200 of its U.S. stores. (In case you're counting, that's about twice as many locations as Best Buy (BBY) has.) Rival Verizon (VZ) has already begun selling an HP netbook.
Why buy a computer from a phone company? Price, of course. Sign a two-year wireless data contract with AT&T, for example, and you get $50 knocked off the price of a netbook. Get home DSL service too and save $100. In Atlanta, where AT&T has been testing the deals, the cheapest Acer netbook sells for $49 after rebates.
Sales there have been brisk enough that AT&T execs are confident that cheap laptops will lure customers nationwide the same way cheap phones have in the past. And the deals will only get better: It's easy to imagine that in a year or two, customers who sign up for two years of voice and data service (at a cost north of $100 per month) will leave a store with both a "free" phone and a "free" computer. Exciting, huh?
While this is great news for netbook-loving consumers, it's a downright scary prospect for PC makers. If the phone business is any guide, carriers will fuel demand for the cheapest and least profitable computers out there, and put pressure on traditional PC stores to sell low-price PCs. And that will force tech companies to work harder to lure shoppers toward more powerful (and more expensive) hardware.
That's not an impossible upsell, as the iPhone and BlackBerry (RIMM) have proven in the phone business. But it's yet another challenge the PC gang doesn't exactly need right now.
iPhone market share doubled in Q1 – Gartner
Apple (AAPL) and Research in Motion (RIMM) were the big winners in the first quarter of 2009, according to a report on the mobile phone industry issued by Gartner, Inc. on Wednesday.
Against a backdrop of weakening sales, smartphones — and in particular, touchscreen smartphones — were the exception.
According to Gartner, worldwide mobile phone sales totalled 269.1 million units in 2009 Q1, down 9.4% from 2008. But smartphone sales exceeded 36.4 million units, up 12.7% from the same period last year.
"Much of the smartphone growth during the first quarter of 2009 was driven by touchscreen products, both in midtier and high-end devices," said Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner. "'Touch for the sake of touch' was enough of a driver in the midtier space, but tighter integration with applications and services around music, mobile e-mail, and Internet browsing made the difference at the high end of the market."
Nokia (NOK) and "Others" — which apparently included Microsoft (MSFT) Windows Mobile — were the big losers in the smartphone market. RIM, however, grew its market share nearly 50% year over year, while Apple's share increased 109%.
See chart below.
Curiously, Gartner reports that Apple shipped 3.938 million iPhones in the first quarter of 2009, while Apple reported selling 3.79 million in the same period. The difference, according to an Apple spokesperson, is that Apple reports the number of iPhones it "shipped in" to its customers, while Gartner estimates "ship through," and includes the number of units it believes are sitting in inventory.
Stanford's iPhone U: The rise of the armchair coder
The news from Stanford University this week that the free video podcasts of computer science course CS 193P — iPhone Application Programming — have been downloaded a million times is at once a bigger deal, and a smaller one, than it seems.
Smaller because the number is a little bogus. The university is counting each video separately, so although the total is more than a million — 1.2 million to be precise — that's the sum of all the course videos (15 so far). A far smaller number of people, 186,500, downloaded the introductory lecture. More recent lectures, representing the meat of the semester, have a sustained download rate of more than 200,000 per class.
But the fact that 200,000 armchair coders are auditing a university level iPhone programming course — many of them doing the assignments and meeting after class in the Google auditors study group — is still pretty mind boggling.
The course, taught by a pair of engineers on loan from Apple (AAPL), packed a lecture hall when it began on April 1 and was quickly oversubscribed. But the podcasts, available here, opened it up to the masses.
Having muddled my way through the first couple lectures, I can tell you that this is not easy material. As prerequisites it assumes that you've taken both Stanford's introductory and accelerated object oriented programming courses, and it launches fairly rapidly into the arcana of Objective-C and Cocoa Touch: classes, instances, methods, ivars and a lot of brackets, curly and square.
In another lifetime I had a summer job at BBN, where Seymour Papert and Wally Feurzeig were developing Logo, a dialect of the programming language Lisp. Logo was designed to be easy enough for children to master, and Papert's big idea was that early exposure to programming in Logo could help kids learn how to model problems and construct creative solutions — in other words, how to think.
There was a lot of discussion then, and in the years that followed, about what the proper role of computers in the classroom ought to be. Should kids should be taught to program the things, or should they learn more practical computer skills, like how to use a word processor?
Word processing, for the most part, won out — with a little ill-formed Basic thrown in for the after-school crowd. The result, to vastly oversimply the situation: an education system that turns out lots of graduates qualified to fill low-paying jobs in the typing pool and a shortage of first-rate software developers.
So the idea that anyone with a Mac, half a brain, and some spare time could download these lectures, learn the elements of Objective-C, snap together the pieces of an iPhone application like so many Lego blocks, and make real money on the App Store had a certain appeal to me. And, apparently, to a couple hundred thousand others as well.
If so, they soon learned, as I did, that programmers' tools may be more sophisticated than they were back in the day, but none of this is a snap.
"Writing good code is as hard today as it was 20 years ago," says Stanford lecturer Julie Zelenski, the university's liaison for CS 193P. "There's some additional scaffolding to help you build things, but the bar for building what's considered an acceptable program is higher too."
So how many of those 200,000 online auditors will actually finish the course, write an original app, and get it up on the App Store?
As first approximation, more than 50,000 people paid Apple $99 for an iPhone developers license and 11,735 have published something on the App Store — a ratio of about 5 to 1. That's roughly the same ratio of Stanford undergraduates who take the School of Engineering's introductory programming course and end up pursuing a career as a developer.
Zelenski says she would be very surprised if CS 193P yielded anything close to that. She figures that of the 200,000 who gave the course a look, perhaps 100,000 have been keeping up with the material. Of those, she estimates, fewer than 50,000 will try to write anything original. "If 5,000 get something on the App Store," she says, "We're doing above average."
At last count, according to 148Apps.biz, the App Store's 11,735 developers had published 43,465 applications, of which 40,365 are still active.
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