News for Wednesday, 4 February 2009

The first iLife 2009 is available and it is for Garageband, and comes in at 26.6 MB.

This update improves overall stability and addresses specific issues with downloading lessons from the Learn to Play Lesson Store. It is recommended for all GarageBand ’09 users.

Following today's legal decision in France and the lost of its exclusive partnership for the iPhone, the economic newspaper, Les Echos unveiled figures indicating that the iPhone was a real cash-machine for the carrier, and further explain why it keeps fighting so strongly to continue the legal action:
- iPhone= 15% of total sales
- Every customer having subscribed to an iPhone-bundled plan represents 86 Euro/month cash-in
- If Orange get the iPhone for 409 Euro, and subsidize it for 310 Euro, it is still worth 139 millions Euro obtained directly from customers.
Those figures most likely strongly supported the court in its decision to stop this exclusive partnership, judging that Orange already strongly benefited from its position, and it would impact customers' rights and anti-monopoly regulations to let such partnership continuing any further. In coming days, we will know if Bouygues and SFR offer substantially cheaper iPhone-bundled subscription plan or not, or if they simply expect to play the "cash-machine" game too.

The decision taken last December by the French Anti-monopoly Council was confirmed today by the Appeal Court. Orange will no longer be the unique carrier to be able to offer the iPhone to its customers in France. Bouygues and SFR can now fully launch their respective offers, will most likely actively promote them in the coming days and weeks.
In addition, Apple will have to give access to the iPhone distribution channel as it does for Orange. The exclusive partnership around the iPhone is almost killed in France. It will most likely impact Orange, and non necessarily Apple, as the company should expect more iPhones to be sold in France in the coming weeks, as the two alternative carriers will most likely cut their margins to attract back some customers, or push some of their customers to adopt the iPhone.
Orange decided to continue the action by claiming that this procedure was not legal, however such request usually takes time, can be appealed, and does not suspend the current decision. One should notice that today's decision concerning the iPhone will also be valid for any exclusive partnership between a carrier and a mobile phone manufacturer in the future.

Google released a new service of geo-tagging associated to its application Map. Entitled "Latitude" it will allow an authorized user to localize a relative thank to the GPS system integrated in his/her mobile phone. Of course, this will imply that the owner of the mobile phone had previously granted the right to the other person to get such information. The system is currently available for Symbian and Windows Mobile and should soon be available on the iPhone.
If some users might find this service useful, other might call it a next step towards "big brother syndrome" and an additional piece of our private life given away to the giant Google.

Apple seeded a new beta version (10A261) of forthcoming Snow Leopard to developers. Officially this version only fixes identified/reported bugs, and is much more stable than the previous one.
Apple and Microsoft might be entering a race to be the first one to release the new version of its future OS, while Apple already demonstrated its experience to offer rock solid OS with Leopard, Microsoft is willing to make Vista history as fast as possible. Indeed, some analysts think that current decrease of Windows-running computer market share might be linked to the poor performance and experience level of users with Vista. Microsoft does not plan to release any further beta version of Windows 7 before its release candidate.
So, Apple might have the choice of either being first, or let Microsoft being first, and then come with a more validated and stabilized OS. Windows 7 is being developed in a record time, and many analysts are already suspecting that it could be a repacked/refreshed Vista.

In order to react to the recent release of the first 2 TB 3.5” HD from Western digital, Seagate quickly posted a press release indicating the future availability of a new series of HD entitled: “Constellation”. Thos units initially dedicated to enterprise will offer storage spaces ranging from 500 GB to 2 TB and should be available in SATA and SAS format.
Unlike Western Digital that released the press release about the 2 TB HD when it became available in shops, Seagate already announces that the 2 TB model will only be available for Q3.

A new rumour suggests that Google and Intel would work to produce a hardware architecture able to function under Androïd and able to equip a netbook.
This rumour is relatively close to those which think that Apple could propose a sort of large iPod Touch which would act as Mac Tablet and that would also run under the Mac OS X of the iPhone.
One would thus see the emergence of a new segment that would result not from the miniaturization of the computers but of the enlargement of the mobile phones. If the difference could be subtle in term of format, it will be it much more on the level of the operating system that will really be optimized to draw the maximum from the hardware inevitably limited in power.
We will need to wait until 2010, the date estimated for this INTEL-Google product unless Apple gets there first.

In order to fight against the arrival of Blu-ray and to avoid paying royalties the Chinese government promoted another format, the CHBD. If one thought that these two formats would be enough to cover this immense population, it is time to think again. The industrialists have launched HD NVD a new format able to store between 12 to 15 GB, and manage this using a red laser that is infinitely less expensive than the blue laser.
To arrive at this capacity with hardware similar to a DVD reader, they used a technology that others had abandoned: they have put to one side the binary format and use in its place a format where the laser is able to decipher several coupled layers on the disk. This system thus makes it possible to store more; information than simply 0 and 1 and adds an equivalent of 2.
This system on which others have failed seems now reliable since marketing has started. It will make it possible to propose with lower costs HD films since the data flow will be limited to 12 Mbits/s