Mobile Phones

Apple iPhone 3G has second place in the U.S. mobile phone sales, leaving forward only the main bestseller Motorola RAZR V3, reported research agency The NPD Group.

Apple iPhone 3G helped win a good share of the U.S. market. So, until this device was release sales of iPhone smartphones on the market was at 11%, and after the launch of iPhone 3G Apple gained 17% of the market. Benefits had received the mobile operator At&T, whose services are used by the owners of iPhone: 30% of iPhone 3G buyers from June to August connected to At&T.

It is noteworthy that the American people chose a rather interesting model of «smart phones» - according to NPD, from June to August 2008 most smartphones have been sold by Apple iPhone 3G, BlackBerry Curve, BlackBerry Pearl and Palm Centro.

According to analysts Apple has managed to reach their 10 million sold iPhones for 2008 three months before the actual end of the year. It looks like Apple has sold from 7 to 7.5 million iPhones in Q4 of the fiscal year (Q3 of 2008). That’s from 2 to 3 million more than it was previously estimated by specialists.

How do they count all those sold iPhones? Well that’s actually pretty simple. Simply track the IMEI. The IMEI is the International Mobile Equipment Identity number composed by an unique 15 digit code. The IMEI is placed on the back of the box of the iPhone. From the 15 digits there are two 6-digit sequences which are very important. One of them, the TAC or Type Allocation Code shows a particular build or set of manufactured iPhones. The other 6 digit number is unique to each iPhones. Which means every TAC has a maximum of one million iPhones attached to it.

Therefore it wasn’t that difficult for the Mac Observer guys to track the IMEI and count the 3G iPhones sold. By September Apple had about 8 million 3G iPhones manufactured. The last IMEI number was 9,190,680 and it matches an 8GB iPhone manufactured on September 29 and sold yesterday. However that doesn’t mean that all those 10 million iPhones out there have been sold to date. But they are likely to sell in the next three months. We’ll see in a couple of months exactly how many iPhones Apple has soldz worldwide in 2008.

So AT&T, maybe it’s time to roll out that BlackBerry Bold already. It feels like you have sold enough iPhones already!

via www.mobilewhack.com  - thanks!!!

Good news from Apple. It just dropped the non-disclosure agreement for release iPhone soft and just freed hands of developers.

Here is the press release by Apple.

 —

To Our Developers

We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software.

We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.

However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.

Thanks to everyone who provided us constructive feedback on this matter.
——

Want shoes with GPS in it? Crazy but its real!!!  

Nike owns the relevant patent and apparently Apple with Nike develops Nike+ shoes with integrated GPS-module and additional sensors.

Shoes, according to the text of a patent, will help keep track of your performance at each point with the help of special software and haveing data on the age, weight and sex of athlete, Nike will help to optimize all process.

In addition, special sensors help determine how much each part of shoes are worn and offer their owner change.

System Nike+ allows the athlete to obtain information about run with the help of sensors (embedded in shoes) and with the player iPod nano (or touch) or special watches - Nike SportBand.

Greenpeace in its last report praised the work done by Apple to remove toxic substances from the new generation iPod players.

Representatives of the organization are convinced that the latest update of player is much “greener” than previous versions. Moreover, this experience once again confirms that safe for the environment can be even popular gadgets, tech rich and accessible.

Greenpeace also expressed the hope that Apple will not end up with this. The next step should be the company’s “cleaning” of other products: laptops, computers, etc. In addition, Apple should have a free recycling of devices of own production in the future international system.

ABI Research suggested significant sales growth in the segment of touch screen devices in the next year: total profit from sales of these devices (mobile phones, players, MID, UMPC, etc.) will be $5 billion.

According to a study in 2007, the number of touch screen gadgets sold  increased by 91% over 2006. In addition, this year sales growth should increase even more.

Research Agency connects significant growth of interest in devices with touch-displays with the release of Apple iPhone.

Wild times are now in mobile industry. It turns out, Apple in iPhone blocked access to Bluetooth module for software developers. In fact, this means that Bluetooth can only be used for the transmission of data between the phone and a Bluetooth device.

It’s very strange, but wait, we have more, most likely, Google will do the same and in his Android SDK also will block access to Bluetooth. Thus, the market formed a strange trend to restrict Bluetooth capabilities in high-end devices.

The reasons for such decisions are not clear and not commented.

 Hey, hold on Apple! Going crazy already!

 BusinessWeek reports, Apple plans increase sales targets   because of continuous strong demand for iPhone 3G phones, shipping until the end of August 2009 40-45 million phones.

According to the source, Apple increased production volume after the primary demand surpassed all expectations. On the day of launch Apple intended to produce about 30 million phones in 12 months. So far, Apple has not changed official targets - sell 10 million iPhone 3G-s before the end of the year.

Already, according to the informer of Business Week, factories in China produce 150 thousand iPhone 3g-s per day.

Let’s have some calculations here. Over 52 weeks with five working days - nearly a year of production - Apple will ship 39 million iPhones to the market. Supplier of the company - Cupertino don’t have any problems with this - their plants produce huge numbers of devices for the five largest companies.

Back to Apple and for our readers we have got sales statistics for iPhone 3G, and let’s have a look at them.

According to specialists, Apple sells 95 phones in each of its stores in the U.S.. The total number of stores is 188. Thus, only through Apple Stores within a day 17 860 iPhone 3G are sold. Furthermore, sales of “apple” phone are also done via operator AT&T, which has 2 200 stores around the country, selling approximately 10 000 phones.

In other regions sales are a bit slower. According to rough estimates from Piper Jaffray, in the remaining markets in the day are sold total 24 000 iPhone 3g-s. Thus: Total number of iPhones sold worldwide is 52 thousand that and that is roughly equivalent to 26 telephones per minute.

What to say!! I don’t even know, should I wish good luck to Apple, or not.

Several manufacturers of GPS-devices are up on their feet to develop step-by-step solutions of GPS-navigation on iPhone 3G the Internet resource Mac Rumors says. Details of these plans are not disclosed, although Dutch company TomTom, developer of profile software, confirmed that such work are under way.

According to the company, they already ran the TomTom navigation system on the iPhone, and it works well. However, as they claim, they need to look more closely into the strategy of Apple, before making far-reaching conclusions about the future and nature of relationships.

Now the debate starts, whether standard terms of iPhone SDK allow such applications. Some analyst said that Apple responded to this question in the style of: “company is not claiming that such applications are prohibited.” However, it is evident that there still remains a number of issues on the development of such applications that one of the leaders of Apple Greg Joswiak previously identified as “complex”.

And while some analysts suggest that Apple is developing its own solution for GPS-navigation with step-by-step instructions, others continue to believe that third-party development in this area will appear even before the end of this year.

And againg back to Apple iPhone 3G…

Scandal rises over iPhone 3G glitches. Before, there were unconfirmed rumors that Apple is preparing a new firmware, which will fix the problem - but in public, all three companies prefered either No Commenting, or directly or indirectly pointing fingers at each other.

According to the iPhone 3G users in the U.S., the problem is affecting 2% to 3% of iPhone traffic. That compares with a dropped-call rate of around 1% for all traffic for AT&T. But because the iPhone 3G users are use much more activly using web applications, a certain propensity of mistakes are seen in the phone. “This is a problem, but it’s not a catastrophe”, - quoted unnamed representative of Apple magazine to BusinessWeek.

Officially, Apple does not comment.

The representative of Infineon, the company that Richard Windsor from Nomura accused in defective chipsets, preferred not to link problems with the product of German company. “Our 3G-chipsets are used in Samsung phones, and such problems did not arise”, - said Gunter Goygler.

Also, on 12 August, on the corporate blog of Dutch operator T-Mobile the operator acknowledged problems with the 3G phone and said it will conduct a thorough investigation. The next day the company posted refinement - “T-Mobile does not intend to accuse anyone, but confirms that some customers feel similar problems”. More added Swedish magazine Ny Teknik - designed for professionals and engineers. The magazine accessed to the records of tests conducted by anonymous experts - according to which report, the ability to take signals of iPhone 3G is far below the standards set by the ITU.

AT&T representative said that the Apple’s iPhone 3G “behaves well in our 3G-network”.

Dailytech.com publication writes that Apple intends to release a new firmware for Infineon chipset - but it will happen by the end of September.

The Study Group Synergy Research Group issued a report on the results of its study of the market in the second quarter and first half of 2008. According to them iPhone is the second most sold smartphone in US. As analysts say, iPhone has already broke all records and will ensure the growth of the U.S. market of smartphones, expressed in double digit numbers.

Even taking into consideration of declined sales overall and long waited release of the new iPhone 3G, the company Apple managed to maintain second place after RIM in this segment throughout the first half of the year. 3rd place has Motorola.

Motorola is now the largest vendor in US, owning 25 percent of the total market for mobile devices, but it faces serious pressure from the growing sector of smartphones. In the first half of the year this sector had more than twelve percent of the total market shipments of mobile devices that is more than two percentage points higher than last year’s figures.

While the supply of Apple smartphones on the market in recent weeks, preceding the announcment of iPhone 3G, fell more than twice, compared with the previous year, its supply grew by 125.6 percent. Sales of Apple’s main competitor, RIM, in the market of smartphones for the same period grew by 92.1 percent, Samsung and Sony Ericsson showed growth in the region with 30 percent, while sales of Motorola decreased by 18.2 percent, the same is with Nokia, which sales level decreased by about a quarter.

According to analysts, RIM will gradually lose their power in the dollar market of smartphones. Results of the first half of the year, its share was 46 percent against fifteen from Apple. However, with the release of the second generation of iPhone, company from Cupertino can draw up a direct competition with RIM, that another year or two ago seemed improbable.

As the executive director of Mozilla John Lilly said, release of Mozilla Firefox browser version for iPhone OS is not yet scheduled.

This means that users of iPhone and iPod Touch will not be able to take advantage of popular browser on their mobile devices in the near future.

As noted by John Lilly, Apple is too difficult to work with. He also said that Apple explains this with technical difficulties, they do not want third-party developers violate iPod Touch and iPhone user interfaces.

Besides, Lilly recalled that Mozilla is part of the LiMo Foundation. It is very possible that Mozilla will intoduce browser for LiMo-phones in not too far future.

Analyst of the Cote Collaborative company and former head of mobile operator T-Mobile Kout Michael (Michael Cote) has shared information with reporters of CNN. According to him sales of iPhone 3G phones have already reached three million copies, and there is no indication that boom demand for this smartphone will soon be subsided.

As Kout said, while demand for new product is strongly ahead of its level of supply to markets, Apple starts delivery of iPhone 3G to more countries.

CNN journalists have pointed out that in its previous projections Michael Kout was accurate, so there is no reason not to trust him. However, Apple itself has traditionally refused to comment on the statements of Kouta. If three million of iPhone 3G are sold it will beat all the most optimistic projections of stock analysts from Wall Street.

Many of them expect a similar level of sales for the next quarter.