RIM Responds to Steve Jobs Statements

That didn’t take long. After Android Chief Andy Rubin creepy / geeky tweet, here comes the RIM Co-CEO Jim Balsillie defending BlackBerry against Steve Jobs’ assumptions and statements. As usual in the industry, he refers to Apple’s “distortion field”.

Unlike Steve Jobs, BlackBeery believes “7” tablets will actually be a big portion of the market” and that “Adobe Flash support actually matters to customer”. He goes on to say customers are getting tired of being controlled by Apple, and the numbers Jobs pulled out were referring to the August ending quarter, which is usually low on sales. But the thing is, it wasn’t a holiday season quarter for Apple either, so I don’t see the point here. Anyway, he concludes with the prediction that even the customers inside the distortion field will eventually grow tired of being told “half the story”.

Full statement below. Read more

MacHeist Confirms Tweetie 2 for Mac Is Still Coming→

MacHeist Confirms Tweetie 2 for Mac Is Still Coming

Ev’s tweet even took me by a bit of a surprise because we’ve been in contact with Loren Brichter (@lorenb), developer of Tweetie, ever since the bundle happened and even though Twitter has acquired his company,Atebits, he’s still been working on Tweetie 2 for Mac. If you carefully read Ev’s tweet, you’ll see that he was careful with the language and “not something we’re actively investing in” doesn’t at all mean that the app is in any way dead. In fact, we’ve confirmed with Loren that it’s alive and well and he’s still progressing on Tweetie 2, even though with the acquisition and his new responsibilities, it’s taking longer than he originally anticipated. It’s also worth noting that he’s added another developer to help him move things along.

And it should be free. MacHeist users will get access to an early beta.

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Mozilla Challenges Apple & Google With a New Decentralized App Store Platform→

Mozilla Challenges Apple & Google With a New Decentralized App Store Platform

Open Web Apps, the organization says, are hybrid of the web’s openness and the desktop’s convenience, access to hardware capabilities and more. The Store Framework will enable an unlimited number of interoperable App Stores to be hosted by anyone, and compete based on quality of user experience. The apps distributed through these stores can be free or paid and can run on any browser that supports HTML5, including mobile browsers.

Sounds a lot like a bigger version of the extension gallery to me, but good luck with that. Please notice the use of the word “integrated” in the video.

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Who’s The Best Apple Analyst?

They predicted. They estimated. Many of them failed, some of them got the facts right. Being an analyst predicting numbers about a fast moving company such as Apple is not easy, but these guys get paid for this, right?

So here’s a chart for you to see who did well, who miserably failed at estimating Apple’s sales, and who to keep an eye on in the future. Read more

Apple Stores vs. Disneyland

Good catch on The Atlantic: basing on the numbers provided by Apple at its Q4 earnings call, Apple’s retail stores worldwide got almost 4 times the visitors of, say, Disney World in 2009.

On Apple’s earnings call, you probably didn’t catch that Apple set a new retail foot traffic record last quarter, what with all the iPad supply fears and Steve Jobs ranting. But they did: more than 74.5 million people went to one of the 317 Apple stores across the world.

Only a small percentage of them actually bought anything, but that’s the point. Apple has managed to transform *hanging out in their stores* into entertainment.

The cultural shift Apple started is here to stay, and it’s going to be one hell of an effort for any competitor to catch up, or get even close. [via Brooks Review]

Sonos Shows You What A Great iAd Looks Like [Video]

Sonos, makers of wirelessly connected audio systems, announced they’re about to launch an advertising campaign on Apple’s iAd network.

As for all the other companies that launched iAd companies, this is a big bet: iAd campaigns start at $1 million minimum orders, so you have to make sure you have a great and stunning ad experience to bring to iOS devices. Otherwise, you’re wasting money.

Sonos’ iAd looks impressive, with videos, user interactions, menus, stuff to do. This is what an iAd should be about: providing useful information on a product and engage a user at a personal level. Check out the video below. Read more

The Cost Of 14 Million iPhones→

The Cost Of 14 Million iPhones

Great observations by Turley Muller about blockbuster iPhone sales and drop in gross margin:

Where in the hell did Apple get that production capability? There is no way Apple could have turned out 14.1M units without materially added expense.

The 3GS benefited from no change in form factor, thus the molds. tooling, assembly process didn’t change.  iPhone 4 required a significant modification to the production process.

With more units sold come more expenses. If you add that the iPhone 4 required a complete change in the manufacturing process, well you get the idea. About the iPad:

I can envision a scenario where Apple would desire to announce lower iPad units just to keep entrants from salivating.

Take iPod for example – very expensive, only worked with Macs (latest with firewire). Then USB solution came, but still PCs didn’t have iTunes, thus significant work arounds required. Nobody took Apple seriously on iPod – too expensive & minute addressable market.

Couple, three years later – all in rapid succession – Apple releases iTunes for Windows, iTunes Music Store, cut prices and introduced the iPod mini. Within 9-12 months iPod share exploded from 20-30% to 70-80%.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple adopted this strategy once again. They let others think it’s a very niche product, then they blow the competition out of the water by constantly iterating. The question is: can they really play this game with almost 8 million units sold in 6 months?

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OS X Releases Of The Day: Acorn Beta Adds WebP Support, Cyberduck 3.7

Two interesting updates for two popular OS X applications: Acorn image editor and Cyberduck FTP client got lots of new features and bug fixes worth mentioning.

The latest Acorn beta added support for Google’s WebP image format, meaning that you can now open WebP images inside the app and export them using the Web Export menu. Acorn beta also introduces Quartz Composer compositions as filters, and the very popular tilt-shift effect.

As for Cyberduck, it gets the ability to upload files with a temporary name and rename them after transfer is complete, import Transmit favorites (nice) and the possibility to copy files between browser windows in different sessions.

If you’re willing to know everything about these two new releases, check out the full changelogs below. Read more