Rumor: New MobileMe Launching Next Month

Two weeks ago we reported a rumor from a German blog that claimed Apple was in the process of organizing a media even in April to demo the upcoming major new version of iOS, and the new MobileMe. The new cloud service from Apple, according to several reports surfaced in the past months, is rumored to become free and include a “locker” functionality for media storage like photos, music and videos. Code strings spotted in the early developer betas of iOS 4.3 pointed to a new feature in the works called “MediaStream” that would allow users to broadcast photos and videos through the cloud.

Today iLounge reports the new MobileMe is launching next month, in April, and it will indeed be free. According to the website the new version will be radically different from the existing one, and Apple will keep providing support for subscribers that recently bought a MobileMe subscription for at least a year to ease the transition.

In addition, the source was told that Apple will be supporting the existing version of MobileMe for the next year, suggesting that the new version will be quite different from the existing service; the extra year of support would likely cover those who recently paid for a full year of MobileMe, prior to Apple removing any method through which a user could pay for the service.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs allegedly said in an email to a customer that MobileMe would get a lot better in 2011. Last month, Apple discontinued retail boxes of MobileMe making the services only available for purchase online, with a 60-day free trial. Also last month it was reported that Apple was on schedule to launch its new iTunes and MobileMe services powered by the data center in Maiden, North Carolina this Spring.

Monitoring Space On My Backup Drives with Daisy Disk

I’m serious about backups. If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you might have read I recently subscribed to Backblaze for my offsite backups: Backblaze is a service that, starting at $5 per month, can save the contents of your Mac on the service’s remote and secure servers. You can restore at any given time, and access all the service’s functionalities and settings from the preference panel that you can install on your Mac. Combined with Dropbox, Backblaze has become my ideal solution for offsite backups that don’t reside on my local setup, and thus are less likely to be subject to damages and other kinds of problems –  say my home office got robbed, Dropbox and Backblaze wouldn’t be affected by the issue.

But I don’t just rely on online services for my backup needs. For as much as storing files online is convenient and fast enough these days, I’m a strong believer that local, incremental backups on external drives need to be performed at a regular daily schedule. For this reason, I bought an AirPort Extreme station months ago to put to better use the external drives I own: Time Machine backups to an AirPort disk on my local network all the time, other media is automatically copied through Hazel to another disk shared via WiFi. With these shared disks, the extra advantage is that everyone in my house who’s connected to my same network can access media (and backup through Time Machine) whenever they want. On top of that, I’ve got two USB / FireWire 800 drives that I use for SuperDuper – which keeps a bootable copy of my Mac and runs its automated backup session every night. Read more

NFC Technology In iPhones Could Also Enable Remote Computing

According to a source of Cult of Mac, Apple is planning to use Near Field Communication (NFC) not just as a method for retail payment services but also to turn an iPhone into a pseudo-ID tag for remote login. According to Cult of Mac:

…when a NFC-equipped iPhone is paired with a guest machine, part of the user’s profile includes the apps they’ve purchased through the Mac App Store. The icons for their apps appear on the remote Mac, but aren’t downloaded, our source said.

Once the guest machine is logged into; users would be able to open any of their apps, which would download on demand, although presumably only those from the Mac App Store. Documents too could be accessed and synced using MobileMe from anywhere using this remote login system and once a user leaves, the Mac would wipe any documents and applications.

As MacRumors points out, it is similar to the once promised feature of ‘Home on iPod’ that would have allowed OS X Panther users to sync their Home directory on to an iPod for easy document storage regardless of where you were. Cult of Mac claims that this new feature is currently being developed in OS X Lion but their source stresses that it isn’t guaranteed to become public.

[Via Cult of Mac]

Market Share Research Reveals That The Swiss Love Their Macs

The Pingdom blog did a little statistical research using Statcounter to figure out which countries had the highest percentage of Macs and found that Switzerland topped that list with 17.61% market share. Meanwhile Luxembourg, USA, and Iceland were also countries with high Mac market share, all above 15%.

The UK was notably missing from the top 10 whilst as a region, Asia only had an average of 1.61% of market share – a very low figure, but one Apple is likely trying to increase with a recent push into that market with its retail stores. As for the region with the lowest Mac market share, Asia comes close but it is in fact South America, which has only 1.08% market share of Macs.

[Via TUAW]

AT&T Cracking Down On Unauthorised Tethering

Update: In the email AT&T do explicitly sate that if users do not contact AT&T or stop tethering, they will “automatically enroll you into DataPro 4GB after March 27, 2011”, if the user stops then no change will occur. It would seem that to be automatically upgrading/changing users contract plans, AT&T should have a fairly fool-proof method of checking which users are tethering compared to those just using large amounts of data.

Numerous AT&T users who use MyWi, a jailbreak tweak that allows you to enable tethering without a subscription, yesterday began receiving text messages and emails from AT&T reminding the users that to use your phone for tethering requires a subscription to an AT&T tethering plan.

The notices for most began with a text message that said:

AT&T Free Msg: Did you know tethering your Smartphone to a computer requires a tethering plan? Pls call 888-860-6789 for details or visit att.com/dataplans.

Following this text message many users also received an email (included after the break) which told the user that to “take advantage of [tethering], we require that in addition to a data plan, you also have a tethering plan.” The email also said if the user wishes to continue tethering to sign up to a tethering plan – but did not specify any consequences for continuing to use MyWi without purchasing such a plan.

At this point it is unclear how AT&T knows which users to issue the notices, the presumption is that the notices are going out to any user that uses a large amount of data (some are saying more than 10GB) and are not subscribed to a tethering plan.

Read more

Report Finds Mac App Store Is Dominated By Paid Apps

According to a market research report by Distimo, Apple’s Mac App Store is adding applications at a less frequent rate than the iOS App Store and a much larger of those in the Mac App Store are paid apps. The report tracked data from a variety of ‘app stores ‘ from the iOS App Store, Android Market, Windows Phone 7 Marketplace and more as well as the Mac App Store – which was the only ‘app store’ for computers it tracked.

As the above graph demonstrates, the Mac App Store is very small in comparison to the other App Stores surveyed at this point in time, however more interestingly is that a whopping 88% of apps in the Mac App Store are paid apps, leaving only a slither of 12% being free. Prices are also on average much higher with the average selling price of a paid app in the top 300 applications being $11.21 on the Mac App Store whilst only being $4.19 for the iPad and $1.57 on the iPhone/iPod Touch App Store.

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MacStories Product Review: JOBY GorillaMobile Ori for iPad

For those still holding onto the original iPad, have you ever thought about stepping your game up when it comes watching a family movie or utilizing the iPad as a bookstand? That folio case you have isn’t going to elevate the iPad above those popcorn jaws, and you certainly aren’t going to get a stable viewing angle on a leather cover as you tap through a recipe book. Even with a slew of gadgets and arms, the iPad is only as flat as its case. JOBY will help your iPad avoid disaster with a product that’s quite transformative.

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iPhone 5 To Have NFC, Says Person Who Knows A Man With A Friend Who Works At Apple

The iPhone 5 will feature NFC capabilities. The iPhone 5 won’t have NFC. The iPhone will indeed feature NFC, according to people familiar with the matter. That is, if you follow the Apple rumor mill you might have heard stories like these in the past months.

But the latest rumor posted by Business Insider is just so good and confusing at the same time that I could not post it here, for the sake of reference and sarcasm. Who knows, perhaps this person familiar with Apple’s plans may be right. Or not. But how familiar anyway?

If meeting with an entrepreneur who says iPhone 5 will have NFC because a friend who works at Apple said so is enough for you, there you have it. According to a tweet from Forbes reporter Elizabeth Woyke, that’s what the next-generation iPhone will do: magical near-field communication. Take it with a (huge) grain of salt, of course.

If I were to look deeper into this tweet and over-contextualize it, I’d say Woyke herself doesn’t quite believe the story, too. In fact, she said “Huh”.

For what it’s worth, several reports in the past suggested the iPhone 5 would come with NFC capabilities, although recent rumors dismissed those reports. Furthermore, a European carrier even mentioned an iPhone with NFC in a slide used at a press conference weeks ago.

Rumors are floating around about this iPhone 5 with NFC, and at this point it is unclear whether or not the device will have such a feature. Personally, I just wish there was a BlackBerry PlayBook reference in that tweet.

iPad: The Microwave Oven of Computing→

iPad: The Microwave Oven of Computing

Matthew Guay nails it in his story at Techinch: the iPad is the microwave oven of this computing era, a new device for everyone that might seem useless at first, but creates a new category for consumers.

The microwave isn’t easier for every cooking task, and perhaps it takes longer to prepare a complicated meal in a microwave. Perhaps no award winning meal will be created in one, unless it’s a special contest for microwave cooking. But it simplified simple cooking, and consumers around the world saw it as a necessary piece of equipment within in years of it becoming popular.

Decades later, the same concept works for computers and the iPad:

The world has discovered that the iPad doesn’t have to be a full computer to be successful. It’s a new form factor that makes computing more accessible to more people than ever. Sure, you might not create a new app on it, and there’s still not Photoshop on iOS. You can’t bake a medium-rare roast in a microwave, either. But now instead of waiting for your computer to boot, you can read the news, type a short document, and get on with your day all in the time your aging desktop takes to boot.

Maybe you won’t be able to manage your WordPress blog entirely from the iPad, not even in 2012, and perhaps you’d like to turn yourself to the Xbox 360 if you want motion-based games. But for anything else, you’re just as good with an iPad as millions of people were with a microwave oven when it first came out. And by the way, I also happen to get lots of things done on my iPad.

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