BlackBerry

Well, that was quick. Mere hours after holding a press conference stating that it didn’t know when BlackBerry users would have their BBM, internet, and email working again, services have begun to come back online. Apparently email is up across the globe, as is BBM. Web browsing, however continues to be “temporarily” unavailable to those on EMEIA networks in Europe, the Middle East, India, Africa and Latin America. There is, naturally, a considerable backlog of messages to get through, but the good news is that all the BlackBerry bits and bytes are flowing freely once again. Hit the source link to get the info straight from the horse’s mouth. [EN]

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Not long after Samsung announced its new Omnia W for the Indian market, we’re now hearing that two other Windows Phone Mango handsets are going to be launched there soon: the HTC Radar and the Acer Allegro.

Like the Omnia W, both the HTC Radar and the Acer Allegro will become available starting November.

The HTC Radar will be sold for 23,990 INR (about $489), coming with a 3.8 inch S-LCD WVGA Gorilla Glass display, HSPA, Wi-Fi, GPS, 3.5mm headset jack, 5MP rear camera, VGA front-facing camera, 512MB of internal memory, 1GHz single-core processor, and 8GB of internal memory.

The Acer Allegro’s price for India is not known at the moment. However, we know that the handset should cost €300 in Europe (that’s about 20,000 INR). Most likely, the Allegro is the Acer W4, so it should feature a 3.6 inch WVGA display, Wi-Fi, HSDPA, GPS, 5MP camera, and a 1GHz processor.
[UWV]

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If speed is your game, then checkout Verizon’s latest handset, the Samsung Stratosphere. It’s their first 4G phone to sport a 5 row physical QWERTY keyboard. It will ship October 13th for $149.99 after a 2-year contract.

At the center of this phone is Samsung’s 4-inch Super AMOLED screen which can playback video up to 720p in resolution. However, the 5 megapixel camera is only capable of capture DVD quality video, which is a bit sad considering the rest of the phone seems to be on par with today’s handsets – there is a 1.3mp shooter on the front. Under the hood is a 1 GHz Cortex A8 Hummingbird processor and Verizon has included their Mobile Hotspot functionality which supports up to 5 devices. In the connectivity departement there is WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0 and support for DLNA. The phone will ship with Android 2.3.

If you’re a business user, you might be interested to hear that the Stratosphere supports Cisco’s AnyConnect 2.1 SSL VPN service and variety of other business applications right out of the box.
[GR]

To say that Steve Jobs is a visionary is an understatement, and is the least of verbs we could use in his eulogy. Glad to know the ‘visionary’ bit of the late Mr. Jobs has been elevated to cult status for the umpteenth time with word that he has planned out another four years of new products that is said to propel the company forward and perhaps to a certain extent, safeguard its future. It was further revealed that Jobs did fight pretty hard to get plans approved for a spaceship-style company headquarters in California, where this unique headquarters is said to be able to hold up to a dozen thousand employees in a park-like setting that is located near the current base in Cupertino.

How much did he want it? So badly that he appeared at a town council meeting just this June in order to place his plea for the planning go ahead. Apparently, he was also checking out the development of the delayed iCloud project, which if proven worthy of a commercial release, will enable Apple users to stash their collection of music, photos and other documents remotely.
[UG]

For those living in France and were looking forward to getting on board Amazon’s Kindle, the good news is that the company has finally opened a French Kindle Store, adding to the list of stores outside of the US. For those living outside of France, not to worry as the French Kindle Store will also cover those living in Belgium, Monaco, Luxembourg and Switzerland.

On top of that, Amazon will be releasing a French edition of the Kindle e-reader, which is the lowest model among the non-touch screen Kindles (for those living in the US, this will be the $109 ad-free Kindle) and will retail for €99 ($133). The French Kindle Store supposedly will come stocked with more than 35,000 French-language e-books along with 28 L’Express best sellers, and we’re guessing more will be added along the way.
[UG]

According to new research from Berg Insight, the number of mobile application downloads will reach 98 billion by 2015. The number will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 56.6% between 2010 and 2015, the analyst firm reports. App store revenue will also grow, to reach € 8.8 billion in 2015, or $11.8 billion in U.S. dollars.

Last year, revenues from paid apps, in-app purchases and subscription services reached € 1.6 billion, or $2.15 billion U.S. This direct app store revenue will grow 40.7% from 2010 to 2015 before reaching $11.8 billion U.S.

Not surprisingly, Apple’s iOS was found to be the leader in direct monetization of mobile applications, and Berg predicts that will continue to be the case through 2015. It also predicts that Android will be #2 and Windows Phone will be #3 in terms of direct monetization.

More difficult will be how that revenue will be generated. Senior Analyst Johan Svanberg says that even though download numbers are increasing, most apps are free. That means free-to-download monetization strategies like in-app advertising and in-app purchasing, for example, will be increasingly important. This is especially true in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, which will account for over 40% of all app downloads by 2015.

Svanberg downplayed the effect of HTML5 advances during this time frame, too, saying that they’ll “eventually” be relevant alternatives to native apps, but for the next five years, the mobile app is here to stay. However, Web apps and native apps aren’t mutually exclusive, he notes, and developers looking to maximize reach should also build for the Web.
[TC]

Although Samsung and Apple are at legal war over patent disputes, the Korean giant released a statement mourning the death of Apple Chairman Steve Jobs who passed away after battling with pancreatic cancer at the age of 56. “Chairman Steve Jobs introduced numerous revolutionary changes to the information technology industry and was a great entrepreneur,” Choi Gee-sung, the chief executive and vice chairman of Samsung Electronics said in a statement. “His innovative spirits and remarkable accomplishments will forever be remembered by people around the world.” Recently, Samsung also filed preliminary injunction motion related to communication standards in Paris, France and Milano to block the sales of the recently launched iPhone 4S. Samsung as been involved in patent battle with Apple in 10 countries around the world. [SH]

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder, the legendary co-founder and former chief executive of Apple Inc, has died on Wednesday after a years-long battle with cancer. Here are his thoughts on everything from design to the internet and death itself.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” - Commencement speech at Stanford University, 2005 -

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.” - Commencement speech at Stanford University, 2005 -

“Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.” - Interview with Business week, 2004 -

“And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.” - Interview with Business week, 2004 -

“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.” - Interview with Fortune Magazine, 2000 -

“My position coming back to Apple was that our industry was in a coma. It reminded me of Detroit in the ’70s, when American cars were boats on wheels.” - Interview with Fortune Magazine, 2000 -

“These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that. But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light — that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t have to change the world to be important.” – Interview with Wired, 1996 -

“I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn’t be ours anymore. When we finally presented it at the shareholders’ meeting, everyone in the auditorium stood up and gave it a 5-minute ovation. What was incredible to me was that I could see the Mac team in the first few rows. It was as though none of us could believe that we’d actually finished it. Everyone started crying.” - Interview with Playboy magazine, 1985 – [GM]

Microsoft finally came out in open and revealed the reason behind yesterday’s Xbox Live Outage. According to the details revealed by Microsoft, Xbox Live outage was due to human error, and the service is already back up and running.

Microsoft’s Eric Neustadter said, “The root cause of this outage was human error. a change resulted in an interruption to normal traffic flow within our datacenters, which logged users out and prevented them from logging back in.”

Microsoft also says that they are already working to fix their system so that the same issue does not happen again in near future.

“We’re sorry for this, and we’ll be updating our processes to prevent this from happening again in the future.”
[GP]

Few days back, Samsung offered a quick settlement to Apple to resolve the Galaxy Tab 10.1 launch in Australia. However, today Apple refused to the quick settlement, making it difficult for the Korean giant to launch the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia. The probable reason to reject the settlement offer by Apple is that they might be sensing a victory in the court. Unfortunately for Samsung, the launch of Galaxy Tab was postponed from August to September and now there seems a further delay.

Earlier, Samsung also agreed to withdraw two features from the Galaxy Tab 10.1 bringing down the disputed patent to one. Since the launch of Android based tablets, there has been a threat to the iPad market share. However, iPad still leads the tablet market share.

Apple and Samsung have also locked horns in various countries and are suing each other for smartphone and tablet patents.
[SH]