47 posts tagged “apple”

iTunes

Not bad for not having all of the music labels, eh?

In addition to new notebooks on Tuesday, Apple announced that the latest market research data from NPD indicates that the iTunes Store recently surpassed Best Buy to become the number two music retailer in the US, behind only Wal-Mart.

The Cupertino-based company also said that there are now over 50 million iTunes Store customers who've combined to purchase over four billion songs, with an astounding 20 million songs sold on Christmas Day 2007 alone.

"We'd like to thank the over 50 million music lovers who have helped the iTunes Store reach this incredible milestone," said Eddy Cue, Apple's vice president of iTunes. "We continue to add great new features like iTunes Movie Rentals to give our customers even more reason to love iTunes."

iTunes had held the title of the No. 3 US music retail since last June, when it cruised by online retailer Amazon.com, snagging over 10 percent of the nation's overall music sales.

Apple's rank as a US music retail has been rising steadily ever since November 2005 when it passed Tower Records, Sam Goody and Borders to crack the Top-10 for the first time.

TUAW has posted this video and article detailing how StyleTap plans on accomplishing this...

I have an iPhone.
I have a Palm Centro.
I have experienced "Sprint Speed".

Sprint Ahead

For the growth of the mobile Internet on cellular networks, I have been on GSM carriers; T-Mobile and AT&T. I did not know any better, EDGE was it for me. Of course, I know the other networks had faster data, but I ignored that since I was happy with my Treo flavor of the month and focused on that. I continued this trend with the iPhone. EDGE, piss slow, with Wi-Fi as my only saving grace (well, where I could use it anyway, which was pretty much at home since it seems like most places these days are all encrypted or you need to subscribe to some other service).

So I have been looking at options for a phone. I test drive a BlackBerry Pearl and though I enjoyed the form-factor, and SureType technology, the BlackBerry OS leaves... a little... no change that, a lot to be desired. So next on my hit list was the Palm Centro. Currently, the Centro is only available on Sprint, so I signed up to try out the phone. Their policy is 30 days, so I figured why not.

I know people have been leaving Sprint in droves recently (my bet is that they are ALL Nextel customers). But I have some friends that swear by Sprint, and they have Treo's, so I knew I could trust their opinions. I have had the Centro for about 4 days now and leaving the device factor out of it, I can see why Europe snubbed the iPhone with EDGE. My God, I mean, EVDO 3G is absolutely freaking amazing and Sprint does a great job of showcasing this by giving Power Vision customers (its their all-encompassing data package) full access to Sprint TV. With this service I have TV on demand and a smattering of other random TV. ABC to Comedy Central, LOST to the Colbert Report, I've got it all and for free...well... really it is just included in my data plan. Wow. Hot stuff.

Then there is the Internet and email speeds. I get my email.... like that. Yup, about as long as it took you to gaze over the ellipse, I got my mail.

OK, now to my dilemma.  I am a huge Palm , Inc. fan. I am also a huge Apple, Inc. fan as well. I can't have two mobile

Centro Sprint

Now, the iPhone have a looming 3rd part SDK release at the end of February, the 26th to be exact. This has the potential to change the game, fo-sho. Fortunately, I don't have to return the Centro till March 5th; plenty of time to decide what I am going to keep.

What? Keep? Is he serious? I mean, how can these even be a debate? I love Palm OS, Garnet OS, Access OS, what ever you want to call it. I love the applications, the PIM's, are all best in class in my opinion. Teh first thing you might be asking yourself is what about giving up Safari for Blazer? Yeah, compared to Safari, Blazer sucks, but then again so does just about every other mobile browser, so at least the Centro is not alone in this. 99% of the websites I vist have a mobile site, so I don't really find it that much of an issue to browse the web. In the last 4 days using the Centro I have not come across an issue with the Blazer not allowing me to do what I want to do.

IPhone

What about that bad-ass iPod in the iPhone? Yeah, it sure is sweet isn't it? It is real purdy. But here is a reality check- 1) I already have an iPod if I need it, 2 of them actually, and 2) pTunes is a great music player on Palm devices. Video? Man the video on the iPhone is gorgeous, but again I have that on my 5G iPod, but the screen is not as big. Oh, and remember, I get all of that streaming content for free on Sprint, no iTunes purchase necessary, thank you.

So there you have it. Will I keep the Centro? Will I keep the iPhone? It is a tough call. I really, really love the Centro, it is the best Treo, err... I mean Centro, errr... I mean Smartphone Palm has made and with Jon Rubenstein at Palm, their future is looking bright.

For months I have secretly had issues with the iPhone. Many moons ago, I had a post discussing how a Palm Treo and do so much more than an iPhone. Every since then, in the back of my mind, I somehow still thought I was using a Treo. 

IPhone Side

IMac G5

The iMac G5. It is my stead home companion. It manages all of my music, photos and movies. It works great with

HP Laptop

The HP Laptop. This is provided to me from work and that is all I use it for. On occasion I use it for school, but I don't have to. It has come in handy on trip and such to have Internet and what-not, but other than that I lug it home every day and back to work the next. I also recently found out that I am stuck with this laptop. I was hoping to get a Macbook Pro, but that is not going to happen now and really places in kink in using .Mac to synchronize across all of my computers. So, now I have to restructure how I do things which is part of the reason for this post.

EeePC Black

The EEE PC. I just got this on Tuesday of this week. Wow, what a cool device! I have tweaked the EEE PC a little

Thanks to cjweeks and Engadget for this:

Apple vs NBC

IPhone 1.1.3

Well, as CJS226 pointed out on his blog, there is a redirect site out there that will put cool custom icons on your iPhone home page. The problem is that it redirects and is slower than going to the site. Now, "normal" websites are adding the ability without the redirect. The result looks great and I recommend you check these sites out. I am not going to list the URLS (hey, I am lazy), but you can search for them and find them if you are interested I am indicating in parenthesis what formatting the website is in; iPhone or desktop. If you find more, let's add them to the list via comments!

I found this really cool photo showing all of Apple's products up to the iPhone. Check it out!

Apple Evolution

1 comment

Google has just done a revision of their mobile apps for the iPhone. You can now have custom tabs, add/remove tabs to different Google apps, Calendar has a month view and contacts show up in Gmail as you type in the address bar. This is a nice update, but I feel they are leaving other apps such as Google Notebook, behind and not enhancing it at all. Who knows, at the next rumored Apple event in February (to coincide with the iPhone SDK) they might have actual Google applications running natively on the iPhone...

I love these commercials...