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Yes, folks: Apple started its special iPhone 4 conference by playing the satyrical Antenna Song by Jonathan Mann. Steve Jobs said he was browsing Youtube this morning and decided to use the song in the press conference.
Check out the video and lyrics after the break.
Telenor Denmark called it this morning. Steve Jobs has just announced that the iPhone 4 will be released in 17 more countries on July 30th. The white iPhone 4 will also ship by the end of July, but we don’t if these countries will actually get it.
The countries are: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Singapore, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.
We’ll keep you posted about offers and carrier plans.
This was pretty much expected, and we can’t help but be happy about it. At Apple’s special iPhone 4 conference in Cupertino, Steve Jobs has just announced that Apple is going to give away a free bumper to every iPhone 4 user until September 30. Then they’ll examine the situation.
If you bought one already, you’ll get a full refund. You’ll also be able to apply for a free case through Apple.com and Apple will send one to you.
Nice.
With the iPad being one of the only viable tablets currently on the market for consumers, it’s no wonder that Apple will dominate 93% of the the tablet space by the end of this year. 9 to 5 Mac reports,
The Chinese-language Commercial Times tells us global shipments of tablet PCs in 2010 and 2011 are predicted to come in at 16.4 and 35 million units. That’s nice, but even better (for Apple) 93% and 75% of these tablet PC shipments will be accounted for by iPads. In fact, the iPad is going to grab 40 percent of global demand for notebooks.
Which is bad news for Microsoft and related companies such as Hewlett Packard, whose shipments fell 9 percent while Lenovo and Apple have seen increases in demand.
[via 9 to 5 Mac]
Apple news seems to come in waves. Before we had all the negative iPhone 4 press, there was a period of time when Foxconn was constantly making headlines among Apple sources, and near the end of the bad press, there was a rumor that Apple would be paying Foxconn an additional 2% so that employees could receive wage increases. This never happened.
Foxconn officially denies any involvement with Apple concerning the wages of their employees, stating that they never received any subsidies from Apple. “This isn’t true.” 9 to 5 Mac reports,
The intention of these payments was to end a wave of suicides among Foxconn workers, reportedly unhappy at long hours, long wages, anti-social working conditions and authoritarian management practises.
Foxconn has moved to offer workers large pay hikes, while breaking some of its production units into plants it owns elsewhere in China.
[via AppleInsider and 9 to 5 Mac]
Looking to access your Firefox profile in the cloud? Firefox Home, approved by Apple yesterday, can now be found on the App Store. While I don’t touch Firefox too often, I still appreciate some of its features and am looking forward to the latest update. For those still using the mighty fox, Firefox Home for the iPhone can collect your open tabs, bookmarks, and other related data so that you have a portable carry-on for that workflow.
You can download Firefox Home at this link.
[via TechCrunch and CNET]
Firefox isn’t removing the choice of placing tabs on the bottom. Rather, they’ve been debating on where to place tabs after a fresh installation. They’re arguing about default settings if you will, and while it’s not the most exciting news, Mozilla has decided that Firefox will come shipped with tabs on top as the default preference. Being a Chrome user, it’s certainly what I prefer.
This time around we really don’t know what to expect. Last night, Apple surprisingly sent a very few invites to select press and invited journalists over at Cupertino’s campus to attend a special conference about the iPhone 4.
Of course they’re going to cover the antenna issue. Of course they’re going to explain the situation. But how? And most of all, what’s the exact status of this situation? Is Apple actually going to recall the first 2 million iPhone 4 models?
Stick with us tomorrow to find out. Apple special conference. One live. Invited panelists on MacStories. It’s an offer you can’t refuse.
So the rumors were true this morning: Apple has just pushed iOS 4.0.1 only for iPhone. It includes various bug fixes and improvements, including the signal formula one.
What we didn’t know, though, is that 3.2.1 for iPad was about to be released: the newest update of iOS for iPad brings many fixes, including the Wifi connectivity, video playback and PDF ones.
