iPhone Daily News Digest

9to5Mac has the full, header’ed exchange between a Swede who emailed Steve Jobs about iPad tethering, and the answer he received from Apple’s CEO.

First, the question from Jezper Söderlund:

Will the wifi-only version [of the iPad] somehow support tethering thru my iPhone?

And the answer?

No.

Sent from my iPhone

[Slashhat.se via 9to5Mac]

Will the iPad Support Tethering? Steve Jobs Answers! is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

9to5Mac has the full, header’ed exchange between a Swede who emailed Steve Jobs about iPad tethering, and the answer he received from Apple’s CEO.

First, the question from Jezper Söderlund:

Will the wifi-only version [of the iPad] somehow support tethering thru my iPhone?

And the answer?

No.

Sent from my iPhone

[Slashhat.se via 9to5Mac]

Will the iPad Support Tethering? Steve Jobs Answers! is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

9to5Mac has the full, header’ed exchange between a Swede who emailed Steve Jobs about iPad tethering, and the answer he received from Apple’s CEO.

First, the question from Jezper Söderlund:

Will the wifi-only version [of the iPad] somehow support tethering thru my iPhone?

And the answer?

No.

Sent from my iPhone

[Slashhat.se via 9to5Mac]

Will the iPad Support Tethering? Steve Jobs Answers! is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

9to5Mac has the full, header’ed exchange between a Swede who emailed Steve Jobs about iPad tethering, and the answer he received from Apple’s CEO.

First, the question from Jezper Söderlund:

Will the wifi-only version [of the iPad] somehow support tethering thru my iPhone?

And the answer?

No.

Sent from my iPhone

[Slashhat.se via 9to5Mac]

Will the iPad Support Tethering? Steve Jobs Answers! is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Apple has officially announced that the Wi-Fi models of the iPad will be available in the U.S. on Saturday, April 3rd. The Wi-Fi + 3G models won’t be available until late April in the U.S., which is about the same time all models of the iPad will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK. U.S. Pre-orders for all iPad models are set to begin on March 12th. Did you get all of that? Hurry, mark it on your calendars.

“iPad is something completely new,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We’re excited for customers to get their hands on this magical and revolutionary product and connect with their apps and content in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before.”

Apple has also revealed that its iBooks app, which offers access to the iBookstore, will be available in the U.S. App Store on April 3rd for free.  Other countries will get the app “later this year.”

So now that everything is official, I think it’s time to gauge everyone’s excitement once again.  Our last “which iPad are you buying poll” indicated that nearly 67% of our readers who chose to participate in the poll intended to purchase some kind of iPad model.  Let’s see if that percentage has changed at all over the last month.  Record your vote below.

Now Which iPad Are You Getting?

(polls)

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Without being asked, Google decided to whip out an email to TechCrunch anyway and comment on the Apple vs. HTC patent lawsuit announced yesterday:

“We are not a party to this lawsuit. However, we stand behind our Android operating system and the partners who have helped us to develop it.”

This is interesting in light of suggestions that the real target of Apple’s patent offensive isn’t HTC but rather Android and Google. While some maintain it isn’t like Apple (or at least the crunchy, hippy Apple they hold dear) to use patents offensively, when combined with HTC (read: Google) as target, could it begin to make more sense?

With Nokia, Apple merely counter-sued, to go on the attack against HTC has led to speculation that, because of Google, it’s personal.

The Apple/Google relationship has been the subject of a lot of chatter lately as the once closely-tied partners have become increasingly competitive. As Gizmodo pointed out yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt sitting on the Apple board — whether or not he recused himself from iPhone discussions — and then turning around and releasing Android and Chrome OS, when coupled with allegations that Steve Jobs told employees he believed Google was trying to “kill the iPhone“, more than hints at a possible motivation.

9to5Mac also notes the lawsuit was filed one month to the day after Google enabled multitouch on the Nexus One, which was 6 months after Eric Schmidt resigned from the Apple board.

Sure, Steve Jobs made it a point to defend Schmidt at the recent Apple shareholder meeting, and Google keeps saying things are “stable“, but the best of friends can become the bitterest of rivals. Given the current patent system, Apple has a right to defend their technology — in the case of Google, they could have far more incentive too as well.

If that’s the case, then Apple hasn’t changed at all — when’s the last time we heard about feeling screwed and not retaliating?

Google Comments on Apple vs. HTC Patent Lawsuit is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

After letting the initial dust Apple kicked towards HTC settle, my iPhone-toting compatriot Rene (I think you guys know him or something) and I had a discussion about the patent lawsuit and Apple in general. It was kicked off by this video dug up by the fine chaps at Gizmodo, and it made me realize, at least from my perspective atop my pile of defective Palm Pre phones, that Apple has changed as a company over the past year. Now before you go thinking that I’m so Apple-hating bozo from Cincinnati, be warned that I do like Apple products: I’ve been using and loving a MacBook Pro of one variety or another for the last six years, upgrade to the next version of OS X the day it’s available, and own both an Airport Extreme and an Apple TV. But I’m worried that Apple’s recent successes may be leading to a dark place. And that place is the land where innovation is forgotten.

Apple’s attack on HTC underscores two things for me. One: user interface patents are silly. It’s like patenting the chair and saying nobody else can make chairs and they’ll have to figure out different ways for people to sit. And no, couches and benches aren’t cool, they’re just big chairs. Two: Apple seems to have forgotten how to innovate and sees lawsuits as the only way to protect their business model.

It seems mighty silly to me to think that Apple is worried about HTC knocking off the iPhone as king of the smartphone hill. The iPhone is still relatively fresh (two and a half years on market) and the smartphone market itself is rapidly expanding. As Palm CEO Job Rubinstein says: there’s plenty of room for several large players. And I think I’d like it that way. Not just so Palm can stay around, but because having several large players ensures that there are multiple parties spurring innovation in each other and that the failing of one doesn’t result in the complete and utter dominance of the only other platform. In this case, the smartphone market is more like the automobile industry and less like the Windows-Mac duopoly that is desktop computing.

Either way, my fear is that Apple is instead going to rely on these sort of lawsuits as a way to maintain their fledgling dominance of the smartphone market. But it’s only going to result in really bad PR for Apple. The only claims that they can make are claims in principle that HTC is violating their patents, while HTC can argue in principle that those patents are a silly thing anyway. Apple certainly can’t argue that HTC’s alleged patent violations are cutting into Apple’s ridiculous profit margin – the people that buy Android or Windows phones aren’t the type that are out to buy an iPhone anyway, and it’s not like there’s a person on the planet that hasn’t heard of the iPhone.

But as I think of it, this whole lawsuit feels indicative of a new mindset at Apple. It’s been a large, but unnoticed, shift in the way they do business. Apple has move away from being the underdog innovator to being a defensive maintainer. Look back at the products Apple has unveiled in the past year and tell me what’s truly innovative:

• 3rd gen iPod Shuffle? We moved the controls to the earbuds just because. It doesn’t make any sense, but we’ll do it anyway.

• iPhone 3GS? Make it faster and give it more memory. Pack it all into the same package as before and let’s call it a day. Wait, no, let’s call it the 3GS – it’s much more hip that way.

• iPhone OS 3.0? MMS and tethering! And a whole tone of new APIs for unexplored niche products, just because we can. The iPhone user experience? No need to change that. It works, and it can’t possibly be made better.

• New MacBook Pros? We’re going to revolutionize the laptop computer by adding, wait for it, SD card readers! Yeah, that’s awesome and totally unlike anything anybody’s ever done before. We even did a study to see if that’s what people wanted. What they don’t want is Blu-ray or HDMI. Those are bags ‘o hurt, I say. People want iTunes.

• New iMac? Make it bigger and use a better screen. Also, a screen this big doesn’t need Blu-ray either. It’s far too good for that. Use iTunes instead; who even wants the option of 1080p video off a disc? Pfft.

• Magic Mouse? Okay, I’ll give Apple this one, adding multi-touch gestures to the mouse is a really different move. But if the mouse is the only cool thing you’ve done…

• iPad? It’s magical, it’s amazing, it’s beautiful, it’s a giant iPod Touch and fails to provide and real innovation above and beyond what you can already do on an iPhone and evel loses several features, it’s the iPad! (the tech media goes wild, soils themselves, and then thinks about how silly and underwhelming the whole thing is when they’ve got new pants).

Don’t get me wrong, I still love my MBP (ExpressCard slot and all) and OS X. But Apple’s competitors are threatening to out-innovate Apple at every turn. Android 2.0 (with HTC’s help) and Palm webOS have far outpaced the iPhone OS user experience, so much so that the only thing the iPhone has going for it is all the apps and iTunes (which itself in need of something more than major innovation). Windows Phone 7 Series has turned my idea of how a mobile OS should work completely on its head, and honestly, Windows 7 ain’t that bad. I no longer dread booting up Parallels.

Now, we may very well be in a lull when it comes to Apple’s innovative progress, but these are the kind of lulls that can kill a company. Technological development is moving faster than ever and the multi-year lulls that struck Palm circa 2006 and Apple circa 1994 are the kind of lulls that can kill a company today. The market has changed so dramatically that even with arguably the most innovative mobile OS out there Palm is struggling to recover from a few years of uninspired products.

This new defensive, offensive, and numbers-touting (look at how many apps we have!) Apple worries me. Apple’s innovations have kicked the industry in the head multiple times before, but now it looks like the tables have been turned.

Of course, I could be completely wrong and be blown out of the water by iPhone OS 4.0 and OS X 10.7. But the bitter pill that the iPad, and now this lawsuit, have left me with has me concerned for Apple’s foresight. Maybe they’ve gotten too big and lost touch with what made Apple the success that it is today. But in the end, getting all defensive and trying to sue their way out of a problem is only going to hurt Apple and the industry as a whole.

Derek Kessler is editor of TiPb’s sibling site, PreCentral.net.

Guest Editorial: Forget about innovation is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

We were all impressed and actually quite excited about Condé Nast’s iPad version of their award winning magazine, Wired. Well, according to the New York Times today, these iPad plans also extend to some further publications:

GQ will have a tablet version of its April issue ready. Vanity Fair and Wired will follow with their June issues, and The New Yorker and Glamour will have issues in the summer

While this might sound like a good news, there is another side of the story.  AllThingsD is reporting that while these publications might indeed hit your iPad very soon, they won’t all be given the same treatment as Wired. Apparently, the invoked reason is that Condé has an issue with Apple refusing to integrate Flash on their device or as Kafka puts it:

it won’t create similar iPad apps for other titles unless Apple and Adobe figure out how to work together.

In consequence, most of the iPad versions of these Magazines will be most likely similar to what you can already access on your iPhone, not the “flashy” demo you saw by Wired.

So what’s the story there? Well, it’s just another game of corporate hardball.

Technically, it makes absolutely no differences to both us, the end users, or to Conde Nast whether Apple integrates flash or not when it comes to these publications. Adobe already has the possibility to convert Condé’s magazines developed on Adobe Air, like Wired, to native App Store apps.

The only difference really is a slight technicality.  For the moment, every Flash Air app running on iPhone OS needs to integrate its own copy of the Flash runtime. If Apple were to add Flash to the iPad, the app could take advantage of it directly and save a couple lines of code, as explained by Adobe’s CTO to Kara Swisher a couple days ago.

The true reason of the holding back is that Adobe is a major partner of Condé Nast, and seeing that the public uproar doesn’t have any impact on Apple, this is just another way of trying to get into the iPhone OS ecosystem.

In short, what Condé is saying here is: scratch our partner’s back and we’ll scratch yours. Unfortunately, I can assure you that Jobs won’t go for this kind of blackmail, oh no he won’t.

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We were all impressed and actually quite excited about Condé Nast’s iPad version of their award winning magazine, Wired. Well, according to the New York Times today, these iPad plans also extend to some further publications:

GQ will have a tablet version of its April issue ready. Vanity Fair and Wired will follow with their June issues, and The New Yorker and Glamour will have issues in the summer

While this might sound like a good news, there is another side of the story.  AllThingsD is reporting that while these publications might indeed hit your iPad very soon, they won’t all be given the same treatment as Wired. Apparently, the invoked reason is that Condé has an issue with Apple refusing to integrate Flash on their device or as Kafka puts it:

it won’t create similar iPad apps for other titles unless Apple and Adobe figure out how to work together.

In consequence, most of the iPad versions of these Magazines will be most likely similar to what you can already access on your iPhone, not the “flashy” demo you saw by Wired.

So what’s the story there? Well, it’s just another game of corporate hardball.

Technically, it makes absolutely no differences to both us, the end users, or to Conde Nast whether Apple integrates flash or not when it comes to these publications. Adobe already has the possibility to convert Condé’s magazines developed on Adobe Air, like Wired, to native App Store apps.

The only difference really is a slight technicality.  For the moment, every Flash Air app running on iPhone OS needs to integrate its own copy of the Flash runtime. If Apple were to add Flash to the iPad, the app could take advantage of it directly and save a couple lines of code, as explained by Adobe’s CTO to Kara Swisher a couple days ago.

The true reason of the holding back is that Adobe is a major partner of Condé Nast, and seeing that the public uproar doesn’t have any impact on Apple, this is just another way of trying to get into the iPhone OS ecosystem.

In short, what Condé is saying here is: scratch our partner’s back and we’ll scratch yours. Unfortunately, I can assure you that Jobs won’t go for this kind of blackmail, oh no he won’t.

Related Posts

• Appisode 83: Apple Takes Responsibility For Overseas Labor Practices. Old Titles Get New Updates. Plus Lots Of Food Apps!
• iMaxi: An iPad Sleeve You Can Trust
• Apple COO Tim Cook Speaks At Goldman Sachs Conference
• iPad Keynote To Support External Display Presentations?
• iPhone 3.2 SDK Hints At Video Chat For iPhone/iPad

MacRumors points us towards the Associated Press‘ announcement that they’re setting up a new digital unit to target “next wave of Internet-connected devices such as Apple’s iPad”.

The AP’s iPad app could compete with offerings from some of its member newspapers, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, which also are believed to be mulling whether to sell subscriptions on the iPad to take advantage of its format. [...] The plans reflect the news media’s hope — still untested — that consumers will be more willing to pay for content on the iPad and similar handheld devices than they have been on traditional computers that depend solely on Web browsers to surf the Internet.

There’s no definitive word on pricing, though it’s suggested it might start off free. Subscription, however, remains the goal of newspapers in order to support their news-gathering business.

Whether or not the continued talk of individual newspaper apps for the iPad, like the New York Times, means the odds for an Apple-centric solution like iBooks is diminishing is unknown.

Let us know which future you’re looking forward to, diverse App Store offerings, or a unified iNews Store?

Associated Press App Coming to iPad is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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