Daniel R. Hesse, Sprint CEO, during the company’s third quarter earnings call:
The time we have been selling this device is very short, but early results indicate the iPhone is breaking the previous Sprint record held by the EVO in terms of the percentage of device buyers who are gross adds or new to Sprint in the weeks following the launch.
John Paczkowski, All Things D:
That’s significantly worse than the 440,000 units shipped in the June period, and even lousier considering Apple’s iPad sales of 11.1 million in its third quarter.
That’s shipped into the channel versus iPad sales into the hands of customers.
Philip Elmer-DeWitt, Fortune, quoting a Forrester report by David Johnson:
Time is the only thing that these fierce competitors can’t make more of. Many of today’s corporate PCs are saddled with management, backup, and security agents that can bog down a PC. Employees want their PCs to boot in 10 seconds, not 10 minutes, and they don’t want to have to get a cup of coffee while opening a 20 MB spreadsheet in Excel. They’re drawn to uncluttered Macs — especially those with solid-state drives, which are more responsive and boot in seconds.
Forrester has a term for “these fierce competitors”: Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operatives or HERO.
Nick Bilton, The New York Times:
At the time, an individual who has knowledge of Apple’s prototype supply chains overseas told me they had seen some “large parts floating around” that belonged to Apple. This person believed that it “looked like the parts could be part of a large Apple television.”
It turns out no iTV is being actively being built. In other words, no prototypes. If Apple is indeed preparing for what I call the iTV then it would be a surprise if Siri wasn’t the front-end to “the simplest user interface you could imagine.“
[...] Sony will acquire Ericsson’s 50 percent stake in Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB (“Sony Ericsson”), making the mobile handset business a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony.
Corning: Lotus Glass by Corning takes advantage of rapid growth in low-temperature poly-silicon (LTPS) and the great potential for oxide thin-film transistor (TFT) backplanes. LTPS backplanes enable high-performance mobile displays like the Retina Display in the iPhone 4/4S. Corning Lotus Glass has a high annealing point, meaning it maintains dimensional stability during high temperature manufacturing processes, which are much higher in LTPS than in amorphous silicon (a-Si). Tighter design rules can be applied to LTPS and oxide TFT backplanes for more rapid response times and higher resolution.
There would be no on/off switch on the TV. You’d just sit down on the couch, pick up your iPad (or iPhone or iPod touch), start using an app, and the TV would turn itself on and start displaying the AirPlay stream. No fumbling with remotes. No numeric keypads and up/down/left/right buttons. Just touch, swipe, and speak to find what you want to watch. You’ll never plug a set-top box into this thing, and you’ll never want to.
That’s pushing it too far. There will be an on switch, and it will work as an off switch too. The reason? TVs suck vampire power when they’re sleeping. And you want to give people the option to completely turn their TVs off.
I wholeheartedly agree that the typical remote with channel up and down buttons will be history. Most likely Siri or some iTV app like it will be the main user interface to iTV. But I disagree that AirPlay will be as prominent as it is now as the gateway that connects iOS devices to TVs. Why would Apple deliver content to the iPad or iPhone or iPod touch first and then stream it to iTV? Apple wouldn’t do that. Instead iTV will be just like an iPad or iPhone where content gets directly beamed down to it via iCloud.
That doesn’t mean AirPlay won’t exist. AirPlay will be beneficial when you have friends over that want to share what they have on the big iTV screen. But for the most part content on your iPhone or iPad should already be on iTV, too.
PS: I forgot one thing. AirPlay is an important component in another way: when you’re playing games. AirPlay connects the iPod touch or iPhone or more than one of them to iTV. With iOS games gaining critical mass the ability to innately connect and play on the big screen, e.g. iTV, would be a feature that probably won’t be overlooked.
Camera+ co-creator Lisa Bettany:
The iPhone 4S is dramatically clearer and sharper than previous iPhone versions.
You can see his smile can’t you? The celebration of making something great for everybody. Enjoying the defeat of cynicism. The rejection of reason. The rejection of being told a hundred times, “You can’t do that.” So his I think, was a victory for beauty, for purity. And as he would say, “For giving a damn.”
ASUS opted against using the same EWV film as Apple, in part to improve overall brightness as well as guarantee a little bit of off-angle privacy. While the result is a brighter display than what Apple was able to accomplish, the UX21 is far more sensitive to viewing angles.
DisplayBlog is written and produced by Jin Kim. Subscribe via RSS.