Apple

Just as Apple promised last week, international iPad pre-orders are underway as of today. Customers from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK can pre-order the iPad from their respective Apple stores; the actual device is slated to ship on May 28. As you can see, the prices are quite a bit higher in the UK than in the U.S. but, unfortunately, European customers are already used to paying a premium for Apple products. ...

Smartphones carrying Google’s Android operating system outsold the iPhone in the first quarter of 2010, according to new research out today from NPD. During the quarter, Android handsets accounted for 28% of Smartphone sales, beating out iPhone OS and its 21% share. BlackBerry was the bestselling OS, with its devices capturing 36% of the market. NPD attributes the shift to strong sales of the Motorola Droid and Droid Eris. The news follows a report last month from AdMob that showed Android’s share of the mobile OS market had actually grown past that of iPhone OS, at least in the U.S. Worldwide, iPhone OS still has a big lead, however, with 46% share compared to Android’s 25%. AdMob’s data is based on ad requests across mobile websites and applications. ...

It was speculative before given the lack of independent confirmation, but now apparently Apple has gone on record to confirm that the original deal signed with AT&T for iPhone exclusivity back in 2007 was a five-year deal. That means at least some legal hoops would need jumping through if we’re ever going to see that oft-rumored Verizon iPhone before 2012. Engadget reports that court documents filed by Apple in a California class-action suit confirm the original AT&T exclusivity deal had a five-year duration. The suit, ongoing since 2007, claims that Apple and AT&T were exerting a monopoly over iPhone service by surreptitiously locking iPhone buyers into renewing contracts with AT&T once their initial two years was up. ...

According to Australian Macworld, a new version of the MacBook Air may show up in the Apple Online Store tomorrow morning. The same source who correctly predicted the MacBook Pro refresh last month alerted Australian Macworld of a new Apple product number in the Apple database. The product number, MC516LL/A K87 BETTER BTR-USA, suggests that it is a Mac product (the “BETTER” nomenclature is the big clue there, as it often refers to the different tiers of Mac products). As AppleInsider also notes, it is possible that the number could refer to a new Apple Cinema Display, one that is 27″ and matches that of the 27″ iMac, but we’d place our bets on a new MacBook Air. ...

Jailbreaking and Unlocking with iPhone is fun, but these days apple is trying to make people life harder by introducing new changes in iPhone hardware and software which could stop or prevent people from jailbreaking their devices. One of the change done by apple is the fix they had done in iPhone 3GS bootroom, they have fixed the potential bug found in old iPhone device which allows to unlock the iPhone to use a different carrier. There is no tool which can unlock an iPhone with new bootroom. Now the question arise here, how could one know whether his / her iPhone has a newer or old bootroom so that he /she gets to know whether their apple devices can be unlocked or not. ...

Poor iPad. It’s only been on the market for a month, and it’s already been crashed to bits with a baseball bat, blended and generally abused in every possible way. In hopefully the last act of agression against this beautiful piece of technology, the iPad has now also been microwaved. As always, it’s not hard to guess what the outcome is, but you just have to see the inevitable result. ...

If you’re a fan of cloud storage service Dropbox and own an iPad, it’s your lucky day. The iPhone version was already quite good, but Dropbox have now updated the app for better iPad support. The new version of the app, available for free here [warning: iTunes link], makes great use of the extra screen real estate afforded by the iPad and takes advantage of both portrait and landscape modes. A few other visual niceties separate the iPad from the iPhone version, making an overall slicker appearance and implementation on the larger device. ...

For the first time, Microsoft’s share of the browser marked has slipped below 60 percent, according to figures from Net Applications, a Aliso Viejo, Calif., web app and metrics firm . Browser market share: Microsoft — 59.95 percent Mozilla’s Firefox — 24.59 percent Google Chrome — 6.73 percent Apple’s Safari — 4.72 percent Opera — 2.30 percent. Story Here.

Many bloggers and commentators are making much of the fact that San Mateo police served a search warrant on the home of Gizmodo blogger Jason Chen and confiscated computers, servers and other equipment, probably as a result of his postings about the capabilities of the lost prototype Apple 4G iPhone. Gawker Media, which owns Gizmodo, made public the fact that it paid $5,000 for the prototype iPhone which was accidentally left in a bar by one of Apple’s software engineers last month. ...

Dear Microsoft, We’d like you to consider developing a PDF reader for your Windows OS. Something such as Apple’s Preview would be great: “To view a PDF file, just double-click it to open it in Preview.” Mac doesn’t require a third-party application to view PDFs, so why does Windows? Heck, you don’t even need to build it into the OS. Just make it an optional download such as your Save As PDF add-in for Office. ...