News for Friday, 23 May 2008

The last beta firmware version of the iPhone sport a new feature which is currently praised: geo-tagging of photos taken by the iPhone camera. Such information could also be used in iLife or Pro Apple applications to either draw the map of a journey based on geo-tagging of your photos or/and help you to organize and manage your photo library.
To respect your private life, this feature remains an option and can be deselected.

As reported by Digitimes, with years of price cuts, burners dedicated to notebook became cheaper and cheaper, to such extend that a DVD burner has the price than a Combo drive... (we do not thank Apple for still offering such drives on MacBook models). However, it might end, as the price of components should increase again, as announced by Quanta and Lite-On, and it should translate into 3 to 10% more expensive drives. To justify such increase, manufacturers indicate that spinning engines are 10-15% more expensive, while PSU value rose up by 25%.
In parallel, manufacturers of metal case/parts for computers have also claimed that they will increase the price of their products, so at the end notebook and computers in general might become more expensive in a near future.

Currently, most of notebook LCD panel, including those of our notebook, features a 16:10 format. According to Digitimes, 16:9 format should gain 10% per quarter in 2008 to become the default format next year.
The main reason might be driven by the ability of such LCD panel able to display full HD movie. But also for marketing interest, as it would allow to increase the size of the display in inches while not changing much of the true LCD area (in other words 17.1" with a display surface identical to 16:10 15"...)
So in a near future, we should see the MacBook Pro models to switch to 15.6", 17.1 or 18.4", while the MacBook could adopt 14" LCD.

After having failed to acquire Yahoo, and its pool of daily users, Microsoft is aiming to boost visits and usage of its search engine, Live Search. In order to push, or convince, web surfers that Live Search is worth it, Microsoft is offering financial interest.
By using Search Live CashBack before passing an order, customers will have their Live Search account credited with variable amount of money depending on the value of the purchased product. When the cumulated value reaches 5 USD, customers can claim to get the cash back.
It resembles some marketing actions used to promote websites at the beginning of the internet revolution; such business models did not really succeed nor demonstrate any real mid-term impact.

Following the business of the backdated Stock Options which cost a lot at Apple; the pension funds, the new uncontested masters of the worldwide economy, wanted to sue the company for this lost revenue.
They have just been turned down by a judge who considers that they can not continue with this matter beyond what has already been done.
This is excellent news for Apple and especially for Steve Jobs; these funds having announced that they had new incriminating evidence in this business. Thus he will not be worried by the courts.

One of the means that Apple could use to generate more money from the iPhone is the sale of ring tones via the iTunes store. This system never attracted us, primarily because of the prohibitory tariff of the pieces that are sold twice.
The myxer.com site throws a spanner into the works and proposes to download free ring tones ready to install, in the format .m4r.
To obtain them, it is enough to choose the piece, to click on "Download to iPhone" then to take the downloaded piece and place it in the section 'ring tones' of iTunes. Once synchronized, it will be usable.
We imagine that Apple, in one way or another, will try to stop with this all too generous offer.

Many hardware manufacturers and software publishers dream of becoming essential in all walks of life and to become king of the electronics that are increasingly more present in all the home devices.
A report from Forrester Research considers that the winner of this race could be Apple and even forsees that it will be in 2013. This victory follows these eight products:
- The Apple Macintosh
- The Apple TV
- The Apple Store
- iTunes and its successors (where consumers will be able to manage more than just music)
And four new product concepts:
- Apple home server product
- AppleSound universal music controller
- Network-enabled gadgets (i.e. music, digital photo frame, and alarm clock devices)
- In-home installation services
Of course, this kind of reporto does not have great value on the course of the history. It can only add a little more pressure on Apple and its competitors.