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AT&T Activates More Than 1 Million iPhone 4S’ And Saw Strong Sales Of The iPhone In Q3

AT&T’s earnings call for the last quarter is on today and they’ve revealed that last quarter they sold 2.7 million iPhones out of a total share of 17.07 million iPhones that Apple sold over the same period. Unsurprisingly however, other non-iPhone, smartphones have become increasingly popular for AT&T with activation of 2.1 million such devices. iPhone activations were down significantly from the previous quarter in which they activated 3.6 million iPhones - although keep in mind that Apple also saw a decline in iPhone sales this quarter.

At the earnings call AT&T also noted that they had activated more than 1 million iPhone 4S’ as of Tuesday this week, making it AT&T’s most successful launch. For comparison, Sprint saw 200,000 pre-orders on the iPhone 4S launch day. Verizon has yet to reveal specific numbers for iPhone 4S sales, but have said they were very pleased with the reception.

[Via ZDNet, BGR]

Pogoplug Mobile: Cloud Free Media Streaming for iPhones, iPads, and Androids

Pogoplug Mobile takes aim at cloud streaming services that charge monthly or yearly fees for serving up streaming media, such as Amazon’s Cloud Drive & Cloud Player and iTunes Match. While Amazon has been pretty generous in giving you lots of free storage right off the bat, and iTunes Match will only cost $25 a year once it launches, Pogoplug Mobile takes your entire media library and makes it accessible through the Internet for a one time fee of $79. While the upfront charge could save you money in the longrun, you still need the upstream bandwidth and a media library stored on an external hard drive or SD memory to take advantage of its streaming capabilities.

The downside to Pogoplug Mobile is that you’ll have to use Pogoplug’s proprietary media library apps on your iPhone and iPad, meaning you won’t have music synced to their default locations as you’d have with iTunes in the Cloud. The upside, however, is that you’ll have access to your entire media library including music, movies, and pictures without having to store that content locally. Media access doesn’t necessarily require a mobile device either — Pogoplug will make available your entire library from the web if you log on from an office or campus computer. Provided you own lots of content not available in the iTunes Store, Pogoplug Mobile might be a great alternative if you want to free all of your indie artists from your home network.

Pogoplug Mobile is currently available for $79 in the United States and on pre-order for €59.99 in Europe.

The Early Edition 2 Review

When the original iPad came out last year, it was immediately clear the device would be great for reading. As I outlined in my Instapaper 4.0 review, those who followed the launch of the device in April 2010 may recall that there was little doubt the iPad was going to change our reading habits: from the comfort of a couch or during a daily commute, the iPad’s bigger screen would provide a better alternative to web articles, RSS  feeds and eBooks than the iPhone’s 3.5-inch display. How reading was meant to be changed and enhanced, exactly, wasn’t really clear from the start.

The following months saw the rise of “social magazines” like Flipboard and Zite, a plethora of RSS apps – most of them abandoned now – and variations on the theme of “visual news” that would see developers building apps with a unique, at least initially, spin on the classic visualization of headlines. Among the pioneers of “iPad reading” was Glasshouse Apps, makers of some fine software for iOS devices like Barista and Gift Plan. Last year, Glasshouse Apps released The Early Edition, possibly the first popular app to take on the concept of RSS feeds rendered as a newspaper on the iPad’s screen. Whilst many would later try to copy Flipboard and come up with similar ways to build “social magazines” off your Twitter and Facebook streams, I remember The Early Edition was among the first apps to deliver a fresh RSS experience that turned RSS items into visually-appealing headlines with page layouts, subtitles, bold headlines and summaries. The Early Edition was capable of importing feeds from your Google Reader account and manually managing them inside the app, but it couldn’t sync with Google’s RSS service. The fact that, without any major feature or UI updates, The Early Edition is still in the Top Paid iPad News chart as of this morning is telling of the app’s quality. Overall, The Early Edition was a nice way to read RSS feeds in a different format; perhaps it was overshadowed by Flipboard (which also gained Google Reader capabilities later on), but it’s still a fine piece of software.

The Early Edition 2, released today as a separate app, improves on every aspect of the original application. The interface has been redesigned, the sharing menu completely rebuilt; the app can now sync back to Google Reader (while still offering you an option to manually manage feeds out of Google’s system) and it’s incredibly fun to use, as before.

One of the big advantages of TEE 1 over its many competitors, in fact, was that it was fun. As the iPad as a platform, TEE relied heavily on swipes and taps to let you navigate between articles and sites, with beautifully crafted graphical elements and page turning animations to help convey the feeling of a “real” newspaper on your iPad. The Early Edition 2 builds on the skeuomorphic guidance of the previous version: the sharing menu is a yellow envelope you send out to the world; a wooden background adorns the newspaper’s pages and columns and becomes your coffee table as the newspaper rolls back, revealing its sections. Pages turn faster, and the new Featured Feeds section resembles a newsstand you’d pick your favorite newspaper from while holding your morning coffee on the way to work. Even the Clippings section – the one that holds your “favorite” (starred) items – has been designed as an inbox that sits on your desk, right below your personal newspaper.

Some might say that The Early Edition 2 is over-designed and that it’s blindly following Apple’s trend towards real-life interfaces with textures and materials and physical metaphors – but I like it. Unlike, say, Lion’s iCal or Address Book, I think The Early Edition’s design is functional to what the app does and, ultimately, it’s got personality.

An obvious feature of digital newspapers is that, unlike physical ones, you can customize them. In The Early Edition 2, you can browse All feeds, Unread ones and Today’s only, and note that if Google Reader sync is active, unread items will change their status on all your connected Reader clients, such as Reeder for Mac or Mr. Reader for iPad. In this regard, The Early Edition has proved to have reliable sync: as soon as I scrolled past an article, that was marked as read and changes were synced back to the cloud. Sync is relatively fast, but the app will need a few extra seconds to “assemble your newspaper”, which includes deciding to preload pictures, finding Trending Words in article, and picking a position for Favorite items (which you can choose to display in the newspaper’s Front Page). Search and Trending words in particular provide a nice way to quickly skim through a freshly built newspaper, see what’s most talked about in your sections, or simply find something specific you’re looking for (you can save searches for future usage as well). Another way to customize the newspaper is to browse recent items from single sources: from the Feeds sidebar, the app will let you tap on a website to read its latest entries, but this screen won’t share the same interface design of the “regular” newspaper. It is, however, a nice option to have. You can filter feeds or browse by section, too.

Article reading view has been redesigned from version 1.0. Typographic choices look better on the eye, and the overall page design feels cleaner and more elegant. The app will fetch article information such as publishing date, author and website’s name when refreshing feeds, and as you read an article the page “disappears” underneath the main header – it’s a very nice effect. Along the top of the page, there are buttons to open an article’s web view, share it, increase font size, and email the link or open it in Safari. The reading view is extremely simple, and you can swipe between pages without going back to the main newspaper view.

The Early Edition 2 has also been enhanced with gestures to simplify navigation and provide quick access to often-used sections. Besides swiping to turn pages and navigating image galleries, you can swipe with two fingers to reveal the Browse sidebar, or swipe with three fingers horizontally to skip a section you don’t want to read. A rotate gesture with two fingers gives you access to the Featured Feeds at any time, whilst the Clippings can be accessed with a swipe up from the main view. The app offers a quick recap of available gestures through the Help menu in the toolbar (which you can reveal by swiping down), and I believe that if you’re going to spend a lot of time reading in TEE, gestures will make you save a lot taps (and thus, precious seconds).

Other miscellaneous notes about The Early Edition 2:

  • You can subscribe to feeds, manage your subscriptions, reorder items, and move them around between Google Reader folders
  • Font size controls
  • Hardware brightness controls
  • Double-tap images to enter gallery view (perfect for photography and design blogs)
  • You can “star” items and mark them as unread on Google Reader
  • You can customize Google Reader sync and how items are marked as read
  • OPML import

Overall, The Early Edition 2 is a good app – but the question is, why would you use this over your regular RSS reader or Flipboard? I think there are a few aspects to consider before dismissing The Early Edition or quickly hitting the Buy button. First, unlike Flipboard, The Early Edition bets heavily on the concept of “digital newspaper delivered to you every morning”, whilst Flipboard is more of a social-media powerhouse with support for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Google Reader items all displayed through a “magazine view”. Whereas Flipboard is deeply social both in the way it gets content and allows you to share it, The Early Edition feels to me more like an app you’d use once a day to read what’s new and relevant in the feeds you curate. Flipboard, too, enables you to subscribe to sections and feeds, but clearly its focus is on items shared by your friends, displayed through a better view than a web browser. And this is where the difference between The Early Edition and a regular Google Reader client kicks in: assuming that you’re an RSS “geek” with at least 50 subscriptions and hundreds of unread items per day, The Early Edition 2 positions itself as a nice way to read, and not skim, articles from your sources. I don’t know about you, but I use my main Google Reader clients to see what’s up, and other apps to read the good stuff that I missed while I was skimming through. With dynamic page layouts, The Early Edition 2 is also smarter than a normal RSS client, as it’s got an algorithm that decides which stories are more important than others and how they should be displayed. So here’s a first difference between the digital newspaper and a list of unread items. But the opposite is also true: what if you only subscribe to a few feeds, and you get your news via Twitter all day? In that case, you’re likely to use a Twitter client or, again, Flipboard. But when it’s time to read those few feeds, why use a client (which I believe is normally meant for heavy RSS users) when you can have a beautiful app like The Early Edition deliver them for you? It’s an interesting scenario that once again proves how the selection of iPad apps for reading web articles is changing our reading habits and empowering us to choose how we read. There’s one more possible usage scenario: assuming you use your “social magazine” for your “social news” and you don’t have a Google Reader account or even know what RSS is, The Early Edition’s standalone mode (no sync, no Google Reader integration) offers another way to manage the websites you like, not the ones recommended by your friends.

I believe RSS clients and apps like Flipboard and The Early Edition can coexist, but it depends on how you choose to read your news and feeds you care about. The Early Edition 2 is a beautifully designed app, which takes advantage of iOS 5 and nicely integrates with Google Reader.

The Early Edition 2 is propagating in the App Store right now. You will find the app here. Check out a gallery of screenshots and a promo video after the break. Read more

iOS 5 Newsstand “Booming” For Magazine Publishers→

iOS 5 Newsstand “Booming” For Magazine Publishers

paidContent reports on some initial indications that Newsstand, a new feature in iOS 5, is helping publishers achieve more sales and subscriptions:

Exact Editions, which says it made about 10 percent of the Newsstand app titles on iTunes Store, says downloads of freemium sample editions jumped by 14x in just a few days, whilst some titles’ actual sales have more than doubled.

Consumer magazine publisher Future says free container apps for its titles were downloaded two million times in three days and reports “consumer spending well in excess of normal monthly revenues”. “Future has sold more digital editions in the past four days through Apple’s Newsstand than in a normal month,” says UK CEO Mark Wood.

By integrating Newsstand directly into the OS, Apple is not only giving publishers an opportunity to showcase their publications out of the box on every iOS device, to every iOS user interested in reading magazines and newspapers, they’re also giving publishers the tools to make reading and downloading as frictionless as possible. As we detailed in our overview, Newsstand lets you easily subscribe and forget to manually download new content when it’s published. iOS does it for you.

So while geeks may despise the new default icon on the Home screen and the fact that it’s a feature they may never use, the new integrated system – as opposed to single app downloads – makes for a better experience that will encourage readers to subscribe more, manage less, and ultimately read more. I expect Newsstand adoption to grow exponentially in the next months. Looking back, it’s clear iTunes app subscriptions were meant for Newsstand.

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Apple Updates “Remembering Steve” Page with Tributes From Fans

Last night, Apple updated its Remembering Steve page on Apple.com to include a selection of memories, thoughts and tributes sent by fans and members of the Apple community since Steve’s passing on October 5th. Apple says that over a million people have sent their personal messages to the [email protected] email address.

Over a million people from all over the world have shared their memories, thoughts, and feelings about Steve. One thing they all have in common — from personal friends to colleagues to owners of Apple products — is how they’ve been touched by his passion and creativity. You can view some of these messages below.

And share your own at [email protected].

A private memorial for Steve Jobs was held with close friends and family last week. Apple is also planning a company-wide celebration of Steve’s life and accomplishments today at Apple’s campus, with some Apple retail stores closing briefly during the event.

Apple’s Q4 2011 Earnings Call: More Details & Interesting Thoughts From Tim Cook

Apple held its quarterly earnings call late yesterday and while the results from the September quarter were slightly below what analysts expected, it was still a great result and within Apple’s projections. We covered the main numbers in our post yesterday and included some graphic visualisations of those numbers (such as the one above), but if you missed that here’s a quick summary:

  • $28.27 billion in revenue (analysts expected $29.45 billion)
  • 17.07 million iPhones were sold (up 21% year-over-year)
  • 11.1 million iPads were sold (up 166% year-over-year)
  • 4.89 million Macs were sold (up 26% year-over-year)

But beyond these numbers there were a lot of interesting insights that CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer offered during the Q&A session. We’ve re-listened to the earnings call and included the most interesting snippets of that call in this article - answering questions from various analysts, the two answer questions on everything from iPhone rumors, iPad potential, Siri, China and what next quarter has in store for Apple. Be sure to jump the break to read it all.

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Apple Q4 2011 Results: $28.27 Billion Revenue, 17.07 Million iPhones, 11.12 Million iPads, 4.89 Million Macs Sold

Apple has just posted their Q4 2011 financial results. The company posted record-breaking revenue of $28.27 billion, with 11.12 million iPads, 17.07 million iPhones and 4.89 million Macs sold. The company posted quarterly net profit of $6.62 billion, or $7.05 per diluted share. iPhone represented a 21 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter; iPod sales are down 27 percent from the year-ago quarter, but Apple reported the best iPad quarter to date with over 11 million units sold and a 166% increase over the year-ago quarter. For the next quarter, Apple set guidance at revenue of about $37 billion and diluted earnings per share of about $9.30.

Estimates and Previous Quarters

Wall Street consensus’ estimate was earnings of $7.28 per share and revenue of $29.45 billion; independent analysts expected earnings per share of $9.07 and $33.47 billion revenue. In Q3 2011, Apple said they expected revenue of about $25 billion and diluted earnings per share of about $5.50 in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2011.

In Q3 2011, the company posted record-breaking revenue of $28.57 billion, with 9.25 million iPads, 20.34 million iPhones and 3.95 million Macs sold.. In the year-ago quarter, Apple posted revenue of $20.34 billion and net quarterly profit of $4.31 billion. In Q4 2010, the company sold 3.89 million Macs, 14.1 million iPhones and 4.19 million iPads, which began selling during the quarter.

Q4 2011 Recap

Apple’s fourth fiscal quarter, which ended on September 25th, saw the release of updated MacBook Air and Mac mini models, OS X Lion on the Mac App Store and, later, on USB drive, as well as a new iMac for the educational market and a new Thunderbolt Display. The company was initially expected to unveil a new iPhone in September, but a media event took place in Cupertino on October 4th, nine days after the quarter ended. iPhone 4S sales numbers will be included in Apple’s Q1 2012, but the company has already announced over four million iPhone 4S units have been sold in the first weekend of availability.

As for the Mac, the MacBook Air is widely believed to have become the crown jewel of Apple’s portable business (which no longer includes the white MacBook, discontinued in July) that, alongside Lion, was expected to boost Mac sales in the September quarter.

On August 24th, Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple, and Tim Cook was elected CEO of the company. Steve Jobs passed away on October 5th.

On October 4th, Apple also announced over 6 million copies of Lion had been downloaded through the Mac App Store since July 20th (when the operating system went on sale), with Mac users approaching 60 million worldwide.

Q4 2011 Earnings Call

Apple will provide a live audio feed of its Q4 2011 conference call at 2:00 PM Pacific, and we’ll update this story with the conference highlights. Full press release is embedded after the break.

Notes from the call

- Tim Cook: Steve Jobs’ spirit will always be the foundation of Apple.

- New record sales for Mac and iPad in the September quarter.

- Mac sales increased strongly in each operating segment.

- iPod touch continues to account for half of all iPods sold.

- iPhone sales double in Asia Pacific year-over-year.

- Ended quarter with about 2.5 million iPads in channel inventory.

- 92% of Fortune 500 testing or deploying iPad.

- 500,000 apps available in the App Store. Expanded the App Store to 123 countries in the September quarter.

- 30 new retail stores opened in the quarter, 21 internationally.

- $3.6 billion revenue from Apple retail stores.

- 77.5 million visitors in Apple retail stores in the quarter.

- Average revenue per store is $10.7 million.

- Apple has $81.6 billion in cash available.

- Tim: We’re confident that we’ll have a large supply for the 4S in holiday quarter and set an all-time record for iPhone this quarter.

- Tim: Progress in China has been amazing: Greater China revenue 2% in FY09; 12% in FY11. Fastest growing major region. $4.5 billion in revenue from China in September quarter.

- Apple placing additional focus on other promising areas: Brazil, Russia, Middle East. There are several of these markets where Apple hasn’t been historically strong.

- Tim: China – the sky’s the limit there.

- Tim: As iPad competitors came to the market, our share went up.

- Oppenheimer: Pervasive iPhone rumors had a definite negative impact on Apple’s business.

- 40 million iPads sold on a cumulative basis.

- Tim on iPhone 4S launch (4 million units) Vs. iPhone 4 launch (1.7 million units) last year: “That’s the mother of all uplifts”.

- Tim: Number of people using Siri already is amazing. We see this as a profound innovation. Over time  many, many people will use Siri in a substantial way.

- Tim: We spend a lot of time and money and resource in coming up with incredible innovations. And we don’t like when someone else takes those.

- Tim: We still see iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 as incredible products.

- iPad available in 90 countries.

- Tim: We are in the main countries with iPad.

- Tim: Everything we’re doing in the United States, we’re doing in China.

- Tim: Cannibalization of PC market happening in two ways. Some people choose to buy an iPad over a Mac: a materially larger number of people buying an iPad instead of PC.

- Tim: I’m not religious about holding cash or not holding it.

- Tim: We could not be happier with our position in the tablet market. We have some incredible things in the pipeline.

Graphical Visualization

We have compiled a series of graphs and charts to offer a graphical visualization of Apple’s third quarter. Apple’s Q4 2011 data summary is available here.

 

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#MacStoriesDeals - Tuesday

If you got a new iPhone 4S (or any model) over the weekend, why not buy some great apps at great prices? Here are today’s @MacStoriesDeals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get them before they end!

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Fantastical 1.1 Brings Editing, Deleting, Notes and Full iCloud Support

With the release of the iPhone 4S and Siri, Apple is putting much focus on natural language input and the concept of “personal assistant”, a technology the company first explored almost two decades ago, which was impossible to implement until today. With faster processing power, persistent Internet connections and better voice recognition, Siri is perhaps the most impressive feature of the iPhone 4S and one that Apple will undoubtedly promote heavily in the next months.

On the Mac, of course, the situation is quite different. Whilst one of the new functionalities of Siri on the iPhone is being able to create and schedule calendar events, on OS X we’ve had calendar apps with natural language support for quite some time, such as Fantastical and QuickCal. And today Fantastical, which I first reviewed here, has received a major update that adds two of the most requested features: event editing and deleting.

With Fantastical 1.1, you can edit and delete events without jumping to your main calendar app, like iCal. Now, instead of having to launch iCal to make edits to something you entered through Fantastical, you can simply double-click on an event to start modifying it in a separate popup window. The interface is the same you already know for calendar events; you can also delete an event and add notes, which will be synced across all your devices and, if configured, iCloud. Option-double-clicking an event still opens it in your favorite calendar app – remember, Fantastical supports BusyCal as well – and anchor mode can now be toggled with a keyboard shortcut.

Another big improvement in Fantastical 1.1 is full iCloud support. The app already supported iCloud calendars, but now that Apple’s service is public the app has been specifically optimized to take advantage of its new push technology for calendars and events. And because Fantastical features direct CalDAV integration, everything you enter in the app will be immediately synced back to the cloud, without having to open iCal (or letting it run open in the background). In my tests, iCloud integration has been extremely reliable, allowing me to enter an event (or make edits) in Fantastical and see the results appear in real-time on iCloud.com and all my iOS devices.

Fantastical was already a great app, and now that it’s gained editing, deleting and notes it really can be used as a calendar replacement, which thanks to natural language input will also act as your personal “calendar assistant”. Fantastical is available at $19.99 on the Mac App Store.