Latest news

After yesterday's report from Bloomberg saying Apple was aware of the iPhone 4's antenna issues last year, Apple has denied the claim.

A company spokesman told the Wall Street Journal, "We challenge Bloomberg BusinessWeek to produce anything beyond rumors to back this up. It's simply not true."

As with many Apple statements, this one doesn't necessarily mean what it appears to on the surface.

For starters, Apple doesn't allow employees to disclose what goes on inside the company. In particular, they declined any comment on the story when approached by Bloomberg & denied their request for an interview with the antenna engineer who supposedly reported the issue to Apple management.

Apple's claim is disingenuous at best, & perhaps downright dishonest. It would be impossible for Bloomberg, or anyone else for that matter, to prove much of anything that goes on behind the scenes at Apple thanks to their nigh impenetrable wall of non disclosure agreements.

The latest rumor today circulating the Internet is that HP has discontinued development of its Android tablet, instead moving all those resources towards its WebOS tablets.

Says AllthingsD: "Sources in position to know tell me that HP's Android slate has been delayed and won't ship before the end of the year as planned."

While that could mean the tablet simply is just delayed, most likely HP has scrapped it.

Futhermore, the site says LG has abandoned their Windows 7 tablet in favor of an Android model.

Says an LG source: "The Windows 7 tablet was always sort of a concept exercise and should never have gone public at Microsoft's stand at Computex. As you can imagine, Microsoft was very eager to show off this device even though it has never been green-lighted for production at LG."

Earlier in the year, HP scrapped plans for the Windows 7 tablet dubbed "Slate."

The BusinessInsider has reported today that both Apple and RIM bid on Palm before HP eventually purchased it in April for $1.2 billion.

Citing talks with someone close to the discussions, the site says Apple wanted Palm's library of intellectual property and their patents. Palm has 450 patents on file and 400 more applications on file.

Furthermore, Apple seemed willing to leave Palm independent, funding their operations. It is believed that Apple wanted to take a bite of rival RIM's dominance of the smartphones with keyboards market.

On the other end, RIM had the deal locked up but "had to work incredibly hard to blow it," and they did.

Other giants, like Nokia and Google, did not get into the bidding although it appears Google looked into it when it became clear Apple was interested as well.

According to AndroLib, the Android Market has reached 1 billion downloads in just under two years since the app store was launched.

For comparison's sake, Apple's App Store has just over 5 billion apps downloaded since the store launched in 2007.

Google says there are 160,000 Android-based devices being activated daily, and the Android Market continues to expand on its way to 100,000 apps available. Once again, for comparison's sake, the Apple App Store has 225,000 apps available. The Android Market has added 11,000 new apps already in the first two weeks of July, for a total of 93,000.

61 percent of the apps are free compared to 39 percent paid, but a strong majority of the apps downloaded are free ones.

With the launch of the Droid X there are now over 60 Android models available globally.

According to a report in the Chinese-language Commercial Times, HTC will launch six new smartphones in the Q4 which will boost sales to 8.5 million, a record quarter.

The devices will be launched in the U.S. and Europe.

Citing sources within the industry, the report implied that HTC will be launching the HTC Vision in Europe later in the year (possibly October), an Android device that runs on dual 1.2GHz processors.

Additionally, the company will be launching its first Windows Phone 7 smartphone, codename "Mondrain."

Mondrain is expected to have a 1.3 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. Current high-end phones have 1GHz processors.

For T-Mobile in the U.S., two mid-end phones, the "Vanguard" and "Emerald" are expected in November.

Palm's updated WebOS firmware, version 1.4.5, has now made it to three countries in Europe, via O2 in Germany, France and the UK.

However, there appears to be a bug in the software that causes the "media/internal drive to be marked as read-only for PDK applications," says MobileBurn.

Despite the bug, Palm will continue a full European rollout of the update.

1.4.5 is expected to hit Bell in Canada in the upcoming weeks, also, while American fans are still waiting.

Says Palm, of the bug: "We've spent the last week attempting to address this issue in a way that would not require restarting the carrier certification process, but we've concluded that this is not possible. Restarting certification would delay 1.4.5 substantially and could result in some wireless operators not taking the update at all."

In late April, HP announced it was purchasing the struggling smartphone maker Palm for $1.2 billion, including all patents, licenses, and the rights to WebOS.

Amazon's German-language site has posted an Xbox 360 4GB Arcade bundle today for pre-order, a unit that is likely the cheaper slim hardware that Microsoft promised last month.

The 4GB means the system will include that amount of storage, likely as a USB flash drive or built-in NVRAM.

Microsoft's current Xbox Arcade model only has 512MB of NVRAM.

Amazon's listed system is priced at €148.99 (about $190 USD), which will make it the cheapest Xbox 360 console to date.

There is also the addition of "bundle" into the name, which means there is the possibility of a game bundled, or at least some Xbox Arcade credit.

The e-tailer has the street date listed as August 20th, 2010, which is during the Gamescom 2010 event.

While users have been able to playback Audible audiobooks on their iPhones/Touches for some time, the company has finally launched a standalone app for the devices.

The new app, available in the Apple App Store, is also available for the iPad. The app features Wi-Fi delivery of the Audible books, iOS4 multitasking, listening stats, and other smaller features.

Included is the standard audiobook features of chapter navigation, bookmarks, viewing/listening controls and the ability to control audio playback with gestures, eliminating the need for buttons.

Using iOS 4 to the fullest, the app has background audio playback and downloading.

As an incentive to get non-members to sign up, if you create an account through the app, you will get a free excerpt of David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

According to an article from Bloomberg, anonymous sources are claiming Apple was aware of the iPhone 4's antenna design problem months before it went on sale.

One source at Apple, reportedly said senior Apple enginner and antenna expert Ruben Caballero brought the issue to the attention of management as early as last year. Another source indicated that one of Apple's carrier partners raised similar concerns prior to last month's launch.

Apple has declined to make Caballero available for comment on the matter. Hardly surprising considering the company's long established policy of secrecy regarding all internal matters.

Since the iPhone 4's debut there have been numerous complaints about reception problems related to its external antennas. To date they've characterized it as nothing more than a typical issue experienced with all mobile phones despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

Every iPhone launch has been followed by a certain number of people complaining of reception issues. But in this case those voices are being joined by more influential sources like Consumer Reports.

Netflix is expanding its lineup of TV shows available for streaming through their Watch Instantly service thanks to a new agreement with Warner Bros. Home Entertainment. The deal will make all 100 episodes of Nip/Tuck available to Netflix subscribers for the next four years.

Also included in the agreement, which really just extends the two companies' existing arrangement, are other TV series, including Veronica Mars, Pushing Daisies & Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

The existing license for streaming a selection of Warner's catalog movie titles has also been renewed for the same four year period.

A deal made earlier this year, which forces Netflix customers to wait 28 days from the DVD/Blu-ray release date to get Warner Bros. new releases on disc remains in place. In fact, increased availability of streaming content was almost certainly a factor in Netflix's decision to make such a deal.

As they continue to improve their streaming lineup this is likely to be less and less important to them. Although disc rentals continue to be the cornerstone of their business, Netflix executives have made it clear in recent years that they believe streaming will eventually replace it.

Consumer Reports has tested out a case sold by Apple Inc. and confirmed that it does fix antenna problems with the iPhone 4. The antenna problems affect signal levels when the iPhone handset is held in a certain way. The problem particularly affects lefties. Apple has called a press conference for Friday that is expected to address the issue.

The influential publication has refused to recommend the iPhone 4 to consumers until Apple comes up with a free fix for the antenna problem, even though it praised the handset for other features such as its high quality display and video camera. It tested a "Bumper" with the iPhone 4, which is sold by Apple for $29, and confirmed that it works.

"The Bumper solves the signal-strength problem," Paul Reynolds of Consumer Reports said in a blog posting. "So does a piece of duct tape, as we reported earlier, or just being careful how you hold the phone. But these options all put the onus on consumers to solve or pay for a fix. We're still calling on Apple to provide an acceptable free solution to the iPhone 4's signal-loss problem."

Apple has announced that it will hold a surprise press conference on Friday to address antenna issues with the iPhone 4 handset. The issue has plagued the iPhone 4 launch, which originally looked like a complete success. Whilst features like its display and video recording quality have received considerable praise, the antenna issue has been a thorn in Apple's side and a threat to its sales.

Apple spokesman Steve Dowling made the announcement late on Wednesday. The press conference will be held at 10am on Friday at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino. He declined to give any details about how Apple plans to address the problem. The company is facing at least three lawsuits related to the issue, which causes signal loss when the device is held in a certain way.

After appearing to dismiss or ignore the problem, the company has only caused itself more public relations damage, turning a possibly minor issue into global headline news. Analysts don't expect Apple to announce a full recall, but urge the company to at least offer free iPhone cases that will fix the antenna issues or find another way to make the problem go away for end users.

The NPD Group has conducted research that shows a significant amount of interest in a cloud-based music subscription service using the iTunes platform in the United States. It surveyed users of iTunes, iPod and iPhone models about various music subscription model concepts.

The "iTunes usage report" showed that more than a qaurter of respondents expressed "strong interest" in a free cloud-based music option, while "many others were willing to pay to access their music libraries from multiple devices or platforms."

"Between 7 million and 8 million iTunes users in the U.S. would have strong interest in one of the paid subscription options," NPD concluded. "These consumers indicated a willingness to pay a minimum monthly fee of $10--either for streaming music or access to their personal music libraries on multiple devices."

Apple is rumored to be working on a music subscription service and had already spoken to several executives from the four major record companies in January. Meanwhile, Apple's growing arch-rival Google Inc. is also working on its own music services.

Google Inc. has announced on one of its blogs that it is testing mutliple accounts sign-ins using a single browser. The post admits that it has big limitations for now, such as only being available for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Code, but said it is likely more services and support will be added in the future.

If you use a service that doesn't support multiple sign-in, it will default to the first account that you signed in using your browser. Another limitation is that Gmail's offline mode is disabled if you turn on multiple sign-in.

After being shown to an audience at E3 2009, the virtual character "Milo", who can be interacted with using Microsoft's Kinect, was not seen again until now. At the TED Global conference in Oxford, Microsoft showed off the virtual boy and how he reacts to a person's emotions, body movements and voice.

"I want to introduce a new revolution in storytelling," games designer Peter Molyneux told the audience. He declared that films, television and books were rubbish to him because they do not involve the audience, adding that he wanted to make a character that seemed alive, and that would "look me in the eyes and feel real."

An assistance conducted a demo showing Milo exploring a garden. "We're changing the mind of Milo constantly," he said. "No two people's Milos can be the same - you are actually sculpting a human being. Some of the things you are doing will change the course of his life."

He said Milo was built using artificial intelligence technology developed by his firm, as well as technology "hidden away in the dusty vaults of Microsoft." Milo exploits psychological techniques to make a person feel that he is real. "Most of it is just a trick - but it is a trick that actually works," Molyneux said.