Steve Jobs, a pancreatic cancer survivor, has announced he will step down as Apple‘s CEO.
Jobs had already known he would step down if there became a time where he could no longer perform his duties as Apple‘s CEO.
“Unfortunately, that day has come,” he said when confirming his departure.
Apple is offering an ‘unforgettable learning experience’ to teachers wanting to take students on a class trip, a chance to take their students to an Apple store.
According to the Apple website, ”Your class will experience the Mac, iPad and other Apple products as learning tools – and have fun to boot,”.
There are two trains of thought here, one would argue it’s a good way to get kids into IT and learning about computers. Others would argue it’s a chance for Apple to push their brand.
What do you think?
You can read more about this at theage.com.au
This is what Australians are willing to pay, now that the iPad 2 is officially sold out in stores.
Ebay is a different story, however, as the listings for iPad 2 have an average selling price of $1141 (for the 64GB WiFi models), being over 40% increase in the store pricing.
Apple itself is not helping the over-charging done by hopeful eBay sellers, with new stock not being available in Apple stores for around the 3-4 week mark.
Whats a desperate iPad 2-lover to do? Consult eBay and get bidding!
View the full article on Sydney Morning Herald here.
The Masterchef finalists are going all out to help Telstra attract iPhone buyers, in preparation for the iPhone’s official sale date on Friday, by cooking up Apple-inspired treats to attract the Apple fans.
To help customers from having to line up in the strangely cold weather in Sydney overnight, Vodafone and 3 will allow people to register their iPhone 4 purchase at the George Street Vodafone store from 10pm today. Customers have also begun queueing at the Optus store on George St.
Click here to access the best iPhone plans.
Continuing faulty antenna issues with the iPhone 4 may lead to a product recall, an embarrassing event for Apple, which may have costs of up to $1.5 billion USD. It is harder to put a price on the cost to Apple’s reputation.
Consumer Reports stated that it could not recommend the iPhone, due to the antenna, which, if the device is held a particular way, substantially cuts the phone’s reception resulting in “signal loss issues”.
This result was upheld by Engadgets, who in their own testing, found that the iPhone 4′s dropped calls and experienced low data rates at a much higher frequency than other phones. Engadget‘s full review of the iPhone 4 is here.
Consumer Reports blog contains further detail as to why the iPhone 3 is preferable to the latest model.
So Apple’s newest gadget arrives in Australia in a week. Amongst all the hype, what professional people really want to know is how it will help with their business.
Customers in the United States have already had a chance to use the iPad. A review by Ubergizmo outlines useful features of this device:
Overall pros are that this is a good device for working with clients and customers alike, take it to business meetings to engage with your client, use it yourself with ease in many surroundings, for work and for play.
Are there any negatives? Of course, especially in a new device. There may be slower Web browsing, as well as impediments to file management such as inability to ‘drag and drop’ with the same ease of Macs.
The full Ubergizmo review is available here.
A long time after the iPhone was released in Australasia, we now get visual voicemail.
I’ve been advised via SMS this morning this has finally happened – in Australia.
Visual voicemail allows you to “see” your voicemail on your iPhone, so rather than having to trawl through messages on the Vodafone voicemail system one by one – you can listen to the most important ones first, you can see who called, when they called and just listen to that message. You can listen to messages in any order, any time you like.
Parody Site, The Onion, with a video that sums up “Apple Computer” in a nutshell.
I have just purchased the iPhone 3G and can say that it delivers on usefulness and userfriendliness.
When you start using lots of the functionality provided by 3rd party applications, such as “TrackThing” which shows you your current speed and location, as well as the distance you’ve travelled since breakfast, the battery starts draining quickly.
If you browse the biggest and best websites, the battery drains off.
However, while the battery life is a concern, I have found using it normally you can have the phone running all day without any problems.
My recommendation is, if you want something that is easy to use, and you want to run your business from your phone at times, this device will do it. Easily. Buy it, do it now.
Just don’t browse the internet too much (you can zoom in using some clever but easy finger work), otherwise your battery life will go down as fast as the Lehman Brothers stock price has this week.
With the recent launch of the iPhone 3G, a phone that allows people to access the internet at reasonable speeds, from their cellphone, they have been able to deliver the latest technology to the masses.
Avid Apple users appreciate the amount of technology available in the device, there really is a lot of features and functionality.
Novice techo’s benefit from the ease of use of the device, and the merging of different technologies to create a very useful device in a beautiful package.
Regrettably, this device suffers from the same problems symptomatic of any new cellphone technology. The manufacturers have spent so much time on ensuring the device is quick to market, they have failed to offer a device that has a useful lifespan or works to the user’s satisfaction.
Apparently, the battery life can be as low as 5 hours with normal use. Meaning the iPhone 3G needs to be recharged during the middle of the day. Technologies such as GPS no doubt suck up a lot of battery life, meaning a very handy device now becomes somewhat useless to the business traveller who needs to stop their routine to recharge their cellphone, thus hindering their business activities.
Other issues with pushing to be quick to market are that there are a lot of returns and a lot of faults. The web is littered with complaints from users who have this problem or that, with the hardware or software. The Apple service Me.com, a tool that allows the customer to store all their information in one place, and distribute that information to various devices, has been plagued with problems from the start. They didn’t have the time to get it right and so now they are playing catch up.
I always think it’s better to get the second one of something, at the minimum. This gives them a chance to fix a large number of the problems with the first one, and you are not subjected completely to being Guinea Pig.
I have seen the massive errors with these “computer cellphones” in my first purchase, the Palm Treo 750. It could be such a useful device, yet it is so useless. In fact, to the point I now need to upgrade the phone to the latest version of the software – this in itself is a user-unfriendly task. Upgrading deletes everything from the device! You need to backup everything first, then try to piece together your cellphone contents again with substandard and clumsy methods.
Clearly not much thought went into what happens when people buy this phone and things start to go wrong. Upgrading is such a major operation it has put me off completely for the meantime. And to lose all the data on the phone in the process? Someone needs to put the marketing person in touch with the programming team.
My Palm Treo 750 has just got a new habit too. Instead of ringing when someone calls, it now beeps after they have hung up. It no longer rings when they are calling. Nor does it vibrate if it’s on that mode. It doesn’t tell me anyone is calling until after they have hung up, at which point it tells me I missed their call.
Again, this all ties back to being the first to market. I can have my product out there first, and selling, or I can have it at the back of the pack, and working well perhaps. But with the advent of new technology, and consequent demand for this, it has no doubt become increasingly difficult for cellphone manufacturers to provide a high level of quality, when the time to market is slowing closing down around them.
