After strong holiday sales and the launch of the new iPhone 4S, allied to the much-delayed drop of iOS 5, we did indeed expect Apple’s earnings call to break records once again, and like clockwork, Tim Cook’s company did not disappoint shareholders.
With so many different ways of measuring how well both Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating systems are doing, it's almost impossible to work out just which is on the up and which is on the decline. If you throw enough figures at something then you can always make then read what you want them to.
If you take a journey back into the not-too-distant past, and ask people to give a breakdown of the makes and models of mobile devices they used before they made the leap across to a smartphone, I am pretty confident that a small number of handsets will appears in everyone's list who is of a certain age. If I go back approximately a decade, Nokia was probably the dominant handset manufacturer with the latest release being the must-have phone amongst school kids and business men alike.
Since the launch of the original iPhone nearly 5 years ago, Apple has prided itself on keeping customers coming back for more with every new release.
If the speculation is to be believed, then Apple has plans in place to adopt and support the new 802.11ac specification across Airport base stations, Time Capsules, Apple TV, Notebooks and potentially the company’s range of mobile devices.
The ongoing patent ware between Apple and Samsung has been promising to brew beyond control since September 2011 when Apple notched notable rulings over the Korean giants which related to the sale of certain Samsung tablet devices. It is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with who is actually launching lawsuits against who in the mobile industry, with Apple and Samsung continuously going at each other and Motorola Mobility also being dealt a blow recently with the ITC making an initial ruling against their suit against Apple.
To coincide nicely with the impressive educational announcements made today in New York, Apple have also released iTunes 10.5.3 which adds synchronization support for the newly announced interactive books.
Roger Rosner demonstrated the beautiful new iBooks 2 application for iPad, which allows users to view and interact with beautifully presented, and highly engaging virtual books, but just where do these books come from? Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, there is an app for that.
With Apple said to be at the business end of producing the third installment to it’s iPad range, the question many analysts will be asking is, can rivals launch a serious challenge to the undisputed king of the tablet market?
In the last three months the world has gone Siri mad. We've had jailbreak tweaks, GUI ports, proxy servers, YouTube videos and even the inevitable Suri Cruise parody video making its way around the web. I'm pretty sure Apple expected the new digital assistant to be popular, but I don't think even they could envisage just how many people would actually want the intelligent software on their older generation devices.
