As is all but customary in September, Apple hosted a press event this week centered around its consumer music and media lines of products. iPods, iTunes, and the Apple TV were the order of the day today, and we got some surprises out of Apple as well.

For example, a new iPod Touch with a camera on the back had been widely leaked, mostly because a number of case manufacturers had put cases in their stores earlier than they probably should have that showed space in the back for a camera. We even saw square cases for what looked to be a square, fat iPod Nano, and the truth behind those leaks was revealed as well.

Apple’s culture of secrecy is starting to show a few cracks, but not really of Apple’s own doing – it’s just impossible to get as large as Apple is and have as many partners as Apple does and not have breaches here and there – especially when your company is so popular yet so secretive that people are actively looking and scouring the web for possible leaks and clues into what your next move will be.

With that being said, let’s dive into today’s announcements. All in all, there’s little that’s earth-shattering here, mostly updates and changes that are evolutionary and not revolutionary, but that doesn’t mean they’re not worth getting excited over.

Continue reading Apple Music Event: New iPods, New iTunes, New AppleTV!…

If you’re as much of a fan of iSkin as I am, you’ll be thrilled about their most recent promotion: they’re planning to give away an 3G, 64GB iPad to one lucky back-to-school student, and they’re including a dock, cleaning cloth, messenger bag, and an iSkin Vu to keep it safe!

I was about to enter the contest, but when they asked if I was actually going back to school this fall, I didn’t have the heart to lie. I suppose I could take some classes…

Still, don’t let my folly stop you – head on over and enter the contest! I’ll be jealous if you win!

[ iSkin :: Back to School Contest ]

Fans of Google’s Android mobile phone operating system have a lot to cheer about, as the NPD just announced that in the United States, Android devices outsold Apple’s iPhone and Research in Motion’s (RIM) Blackberry phones for the first time ever. The race had been largely between Apple and RIM with RIM still in the top spot, but Android’s had the wind under its wings in the last few months with several strong devices launching across multiple carriers from multiple hardware manufacturers.

Here’s a little snippet lifted from PC Mag, who covered the story:

During the second quarter, about 33 percent of new smartphone purchases were for Android-based phones, compared to 28 percent for BlackBerry, and 22 percent for Apple’s iPhone.

“For the second consecutive quarter, Android handsets have shown strong but slowing sell-through market share gains among U.S. consumers,” Ross Rubin, executive director of industry analysis for NPD, said in a statement. “While the Google-developed OS took market share from RIM, Apple’s iOS saw a small gain this quarter on the strength of the iPhone 4 launch.”

The most popular Android phones were the Motorola Droid, the HTC Droid Incredible, the HTC EVO 4G, the HTC Hero, and the HTC Droid Eris.

A number of folks *coughcoughMASHABLEcoughcough* are incorrectly headlining this news as “Android is number one now,” which is only true if you apply the conditions of sales during Q2 2010 and sales in the United States only – it’s important to note that in the rest of the world, the battle is really a three-way between the ever-dominant Nokia and their Symbian OS which has never really caught on in the US and Canada and two upstarts named RIM and Apple.

Even in the United States more broadly and outside of Q2 2010, RIM is still on top and Apple is still number 2, but Android is making a very strong showing – and the longer Apple remains locked in to a single carrier (one that no one likes, at that), the worse off they’ll be.

[ PC Mag :: Android Tops RIM for First Time in Q2 ]

During Apple’s press conference earlier in the week, they claimed that the infamous “death grip,” or the common name given to the signal loss you get when holding the iPhone 4 a certain way, is by no means exclusive to the iPhone 4 – they claimed that just about any mobile phone manufacturer suffers from the problem, and that you can find a way to hold any phone that will reduce signal and force calls to drop.

Almost immediately, Apple’s competitors in the mobile space, like Nokia, Samsung, and HTC, all fired back claiming that this was anything but true and their handsets were immune from any sort of “death grip.” So what does a smart tech columnist do? They put it to the test!

The fine folks over at PC Mag grabbed a bunch of phones they have for testing (and other hilarious objects) and decided to see if they could death grip the signal out of them as well. The results are in the fantastic video above – those with a sense of humor only need apply, but the results are pretty interesting – sure, if you pretty much wrap both hands around some phones you can force some signal loss, but in most cases it’s slight or the grip is so unwieldy that you’ll never find yourself holding the phone that way. Even so, other phones suffer from the death grip pretty substantially. You’ll have to watch the video to see the results!

[ PC Mag :: Death Grip Testing on iPhone Competitors Shows Mixed Results ]

The blog Technologizer has the results of a series of polls of iPad owners about their general satisfaction with the device and how it informs or impacts their opinions and thoughts about Apple, the policies around the iTunes App Store, and whether or not they feel like their iPad is an essential part of their lives or something that’s just a fun gadget to have and play with when they choose to.

Here’s a spoiler: by and large, iPad owners are largely satisfied with their devices. They enjoy using them, they don’t feel like they’re particularly oppressed because of Apple’s closed-and-curated model to apps, and they admit that their iPad won’t replace a full computer or a laptop anytime soon, but they’re loathe to give it up.

This is contrary to the often loud and vocal perspective from people who generally don’t own iPads or any Apple product that the iPad is worthless, without legitimate use, or lacking in features or that the iTunes App Store model cripples the device (although they do find it troubling!) It’s another example of how the echo chamber of the Web may resound with one message, but the truth from the people who actually own and love their devices is something entirely different.

Here’s what survey respondants had to say -and while I am including this, I do think the survey results and graphs are worth looking at – in some cases just because most people said one thing didn’t mean that the combination of other responses led to a majority opinion in the other direction:

Executive summary in case you don’t feel like reading the rest of this article: They like it. A lot. Ninety-eight percent say they’re satisfied with their iPads overall; ninety-six percent think it’s a good value. In category after category–3G service, most of the individual bundled apps, battery life, speed, the absence of Flash–a majority of respondents are pleased.

In only one major area did unhappy campers dominate: A majority aren’t pleased with Apple’s App Store approval process. More than half also wish Apple had given the tablet printing capabilities, a memory-card slot, and a front-facing camera.

It’s worth noting that even with the furor around the iPhone 4 and its issues, there have been no massive problems with the iPad – no one’s reporting engineering flaws with them, no one’s returning them en-masse (to the contrary, many organizations are buying them in large numbers,) and there are no class-action lawsuits over them. The iPad may be one of Apple’s most successful first-gen new product launches in a long time.

[ Technologizer :: The State of iPad Satisfaction ]

Apple surprised everyone yesterday and announced a sweeping update to the Mac Mini, one of its most dejected and neglected platforms, adding an SD slot, HDMI ports, an easy-open bottom, and updated graphics and processors to the mini desktop, making it more and more a perfect candidate for an HTPC that slides well into your entertainment center or a small-but-powerful desktop that’s perfect for general use or if you’re just looking for a compact desktop PC that’s affordable with decent features.

Among the upgrades? The new aluminum body design, the addition of the SD card, the HDMI port, super-low power usage, and a built-in power supply (so it doesn’t have a massive brick hanging out the back of it), all of which are impressive for a machine its size and in its category. The folks at PC Mag loved it so much they gave it 4/5 stars and the Editor’s Choice award for its class of desktop computer.

Only down-side? No Blu-Ray drive in the box, or support for one in Mac OS, which is unfortunate. Still, we all know Apple hasn’t embraced Blu-Ray yet, although it’s just a matter of time.

[ PC Mag :: Apple Mac Mini Review ]

Monday was Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) and as predicted, Apple unveiled the next generation iPhone, the iPhone 4, at the show. Steve Jobs stood on-stage and acknowledged the leaks and the missing iPhone saga, and sure enough the device we all got to see on Monday looked an awful lot like the prototype that turned up on Gizmodo a few months ago.

But that’s not all that happened at WWDC, let’s take a brief look:

iPhone 4

Obviously the star of the show was the iPhone 4, newly designed and complete with sharper edges, a more slab-like feel, and specially engineered tempered glass on the front and the back of the device. The new design has individual buttons on the side for volume and other controls, dual microphones in the top and the bottom for noise cancellation, a micro SD tray in the side, a front-facing camera for self portraits and Apple’s new “Face Time” real-time video calling feature (shown above, and largely considered the biggest announcement of the show), an LED flash on the new 5 megapixel camera on the back, and longer battery life.

The new iPhone will sport the Apple A4 chip under the hood, the same processor that powers the iPad, and part of the reason the battery life is improved. Additionally, Apple’s re-engineered the iPhone display to be much sharper and have much smaller individual pixels, which increases the overall resolution and presents a sharper image – they’ve patented the new display technology and call it the Retina Display. Aside from the hardware upgrades, Apple also announced that their eBook reading app, iBooks, along with Netflix streaming video, will make their way to the iPhone this month, and Apple previewed new development tools that make use of the new built-in gyroscope and utilize HTML5 in addition to Cocoa Touch (the iPhone’s native development platform.)

The new iPhone is pretty impressive as-is, and AT&T and Apple have agreed to allow existing iPhone users upgrade to the new iPhone 4 for less than the full retail price, which paves the way for more current iPhone and iPhone 3GS owners to upgrade to the new device as soon as its available, which is currently June 24th (pre-orders will open on June 15th). The 16GB version will run you $199, and the 32GB version will run you $299.

PC Mag got hands on with the iPhone 4 at WWDC and has their first impressions here, along with a video walking through some of its new features.

iPhone OS is now iOS

This is an entertaining tidbit. Much like the word “iPhone” used to be property of Cisco, the phrase “iOS” used to describe the operating system for Cisco’s enterprise routers, switches, and other network devices. Apple was way ahead of itself this time (unlike when they launched the iPhone in 2007) and already arranged to license the phrase from Cisco going forward to describe the OS that now runs on iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads.

I have to wonder how much Apple is paying Cisco to make that happen – or even whether those discussions started in 2007 back when Apple and Cisco settled the flap over “iPhone.”

Safari 5 and iTunes 9.2

Very quietly, Apple almost glazed over the announcement of the new version of Safari, Safari 5, available now. Safari 5 is fully HTML 5 compliant, a bit faster than Safari 4, and has an interesting new “Safari Reader” view that hides ads and other fluff content away from the primary page content that you’re likely interested in reading without the distraction of banner ads and other flashy content in the margins.

PC Mag has an excellent review of Safari 5 if you’re curious what else is new – and perhaps what isn’t new – about the new browser. A quick Twitter poll showed that not too many people use Safari at all, even on the Mac, so this likely won’t make PC users download it if they don’t already love it, but Mac users will get the update as part of Software Update, regardless of whether they actually use it as their primary browser.

Almost entirely unnoticed was iTunes 9.2 – in fact, I don’t think it was mentioned at all during the keynote, other than the fact that the new iOS4, which will power the iPhone 4 and be available for the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS (and possibly the iPad) will be available later this month for download via iTunes 9.2. iTunes is currently at version 9.1.1, so this means there’ll be an iTunes update in our immediate future – although what other features it’ll bring other than being the conveyor of iOS4, we have yet to learn.

That’s all she wrote!

That’s about it – Apple has been very adamant about message control lately, so we didn’t see any additional products or announcements at the WWDC this year: no AppleTV announcements or upgrades, no iPod Touch upgrades (although the iPod usually has its own music-themed event in August or September), no iPad upgrades or announcements, and that fact left a number of Apple faithful a little wanting. Still – the iPhone 4 was the star of the day, and that’s exactly how Steve Jobs wanted it when he walked on stage on Monday.

So we’ve all heard about how the iPad is “magical,” and how wonderful a device it is from those who own one. Oddly enough, one thing I notice we haven’t heard a lot of are hardware issues with the iPad – Apple is likely paying very close attention to issues, but I haven’t heard of anyone really having to return their iPad for a manufacturer’s issue, no overheating, no random crashes, none of that.

So if you’re like me, you want one. I’m trying to hold out until it’s updated, whenever that may be (some people have speculated that the fact that we haven’t even heard rumors about a next generation or 2nd generation iPad aside from the fact that some people are waiting to buy one means that there are no real plans for one just yet) but my resistance is waning, especially with so many uses and so many amazing apps out there for it.

I got to thinking that if I could make a solid case for one with apps that I’d want to run on it, I might consider buying one. Then this Gizmodo post came along; it’s a little old, but it’s still one of the definitive guides to iPad apps available right now – and there are some really great suggestions in there.

[ Gizmodo :: Gizmodo's Essential iPad Apps ]

As an update to my last Spinning Gears Column, Lessons from the Lost iPhone Saga, Simon Owens, the man behind Bloggasm wrote me to let me know he had had the opportunity to exchange messages with Nick Denton, the man who founded and is still behind Gawker Media – the company that owns Gizmodo, as well as other blogs like Lifehacker, io9, and more.

Quite simply, and I was skeptical when I read his first message, he pointed out that Nick says that Gawker and Gizmodo have made no direct revenue from the now-famous “This is Apple’s Next iPhone” post that made Gizmodo one of the most popular sites on the internet for a while, and is probably still raking in the page views. In my column, I made a point to note that Gawker paid their source, the person who found or otherwise obtained the iPhone prototype $5000 for the device – something that’s brought up a number of questions around journalistic ethics that I’m not going to try and dissect here – I think other voices have done it better than I have, and I made my thoughts known in the last column.

But I assumed that Gawker would get the $5k back easily in terms of ad revenue and such from the post that went up (and no I’m not including any bandwidth charges Gawker would have had to absorb in order for their servers to support the traffic) and according to Owens’ email and his post at Bloggasm, Nick says that’s just not true. I thought it would have something to do with a fancy definition of “direct” versus “indirect” revenue, but it’s nothing so complicated – it’s just that ads are sold in advance:

Given that Gawker Media charges about $10 CPM, then one would think the media company raked in somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000 in advertising, making the $5,000 Gawker-owner Nick Denton reportedly paid to get his hands on the found (stolen?) iPhone well worth it.

But at a recent Paid Content event, Denton said that the scoop brought “”no immediate revenue benefits whatsoever,” and that instead it garnered “hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of publicity for the site.”

After reading this I emailed Denton asking him to confirm the no-direct-revenue claim and explain why the high page views didn’t result in more advertising dough.

“Internet advertising is sold a few weeks ahead of time,” he wrote back. “So you might guarantee 2m impressions at $10 per thousand, for instance. If you get 4m impressions, you can’t go back to the advertiser and renegotiate. It’s either a bonus to the advertiser or wastage.”

Yowch. Now granted, Gawker is likely doing much better for itself in terms of advertising now than it used to, but that doesn’t capitalize on the massive spike that came with the publication and breaking of the iPhone prototype story, and maybe some of those increases will be considered “indirect” revenue, but that’s pretty perception shattering on its own, and I’m grateful to Owens for bringing it to my attention.

It’s pretty remarkable though that even the massive Gawker, which is larger than a number of newspapers and publishing companies with a massive blogging empire that spans multiple topics and sites, still has to deal with marketing and advertising the old fashioned way, and while advertisers may be seeing the benefits of all of those pageviews, Gawker gets to absorb the costs, hoping to capitalize on them later.

Here’s hoping they can – regardless of what you think of their journalism, Gawker is a leading company in this new media space, and a pioneering organization that’s paving the way forward when it comes to journalism on the Web.

[ Bloggasm :: Gawker’s Nick Denton Says Gizmodo Made No Direct Revenue from Leaked iPhone Post ]

I had all but written off Gawker/Gizmodo’s exclusive This is Apple’s Next iPhone as an item that everyone and their mother has covered at least once – and while I admit that I was as intrigued as anyone else at the story and found it incredible and unbelievable as anyone else, I have to say that it probably is the biggest scoop pulled on Apple to date, and the biggest gaping hole in their veil of secrecy anyone’s ever found.

The poor guy who was field testing the next iPhone is likely out of work at the very least (although I hope Apple realizes he just made a mistake) and probably would like to find another job quickly at the very best (I wouldn’t want that rep to live down at work every day). Still, it was a pretty rookie mistake, but it’s not one that hasn’t been made by people at all levels of an organization in any company in the past.

This is why I was particularly interested when Anil Dash, a man for whom I have nothing but the utmost respect as a member of the technocrati, said this at Twitter earlier this week:

A simple case of human error shouldn’t be a big story. A company that treats such things as a firing offense is what’s worthy of criticism.

Now on the surface, I completely agree with Anil – he’s absolutely right. Every time someone in a company makes a mistake, it shouldn’t be some of the biggest news on the Net for the next several days, or if it keeps up like this, weeks. Additionally, I’d hate to be in his shoes, and hate to risk being fired or laid off because of a simple mistake – having a few too many beers at a bar and forgetting to pick up my phone.

Still, something about the statement nags at me a bit, and I wonder if Anil is being a little harsh because it’s clear we’re talking about Apple and the next iPhone here. Would he be as forgiving if, for example, a Microsoft engineer lost the next Zune HD prototype in a cab somewhere, and someone was smart enough to know what it was and sold it to Gawker for $5000? (the amount that Gawker paid – omitted from most of the articles about it – to get their hands on the prototype iPhone from their anonymous source)

Honestly, a Zune HD prototype found in the wild likely wouldn’t stir up quite so much media attention, but is that fact a good or bad thing? The reason why everyone’s busy covering this story – including mainstream media outlets like CNN – is because the iPhone is ridiculously popular in America and Apple has a long-held reputation for secrecy. Microsoft, for example, doesn’t have the popular product and doesn’t have the cone of silence over its labs. But when a 64GB version of the Zune HD was leaked on a couple of Web sites a few weeks back, tech blogs still covered it. Is that a bad thing, according to Anil?

What about a corporate employee or CEO who leaves a laptop on a plane or in a cab; a laptop that contains proprietary information about the company, or Personally Identifiable Information (PII) about their customers? Sure – it’s orders of magnitude of difference, but we’ve seen heavier media scrutiny when a government contractor leaves a hard drive in a cab than this kid leaving a prototype iPhone in a bar, and we summarily expect that contractor or CEO to be fired for their negligence.

Sure, sure – a laptop with personally identifiable data on it doesn’t just harm the company, it harms its customers and the people whose information has been compromised; the impact is much wider than a simple prototype cell phone, so the consequences have to be broader to match the transgression – but they’re both still simple cases of human error. If the government contractor or the bank that lost the personal data fires the employee who lost it, are they equally “worthy of scrutiny?”

I’m in the camp where I would sincerely hope that Apple doesn’t cut this poor kid loose – he’s obviously got talent and a history of trustworthiness or else he wouldn’t have gotten the prototype in the first place. Even so, I can’t deny that when a hard drive full of credit card numbers or social security numbers goes missing, we as the public expect someone to be held accountable – we’re not in quite the forgiving mood that Anil is in. It’s possible it’s just because one affects us directly and the other only affects people interested and even then in a tangential way.

Still – I have to wonder if Anil’s perspective is colored a bit. By what, I’m not certain. If he read this, he would probably take me to task for using the slippery slope argument too much, and acknowledge that 140 characters isn’t a lot of space to get into nuance, and I agree on both counts. Like I said at the beginning, I completely agree with him, I just wonder if we should be so forgiving in this case, or – more preferably – maybe we should be more forgiving in all such cases.