Apple

Kindle is, without a doubt, the highest profile e-reader platform running. With applications on iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Windows, and OS X as well as its own line of e-paper Kindle devices, Amazon had an estimated 90% share of the e-book sales market last year. Today, Amazon announced that a Kindle app will be launched on the Android mobile operating system this summer. Like the BlackBerry app, Android users will be able to purchase Amazon e-books inside the mobile app. That functionality is noticeably absent on the iPhone and iPad versions, where users must go to the browser to download new books. ...

Thirty-two days ago, I purchased Apple’s iPad, after proclaiming that I wouldn’t. A gadget like this one should be tested if repeatedly blogged about. I would have used a for-reviews loaner, but I’m on the same fraked list as Gizmodo. I bought my own. A month-or-so usage later, I agree with Tumblr and Instapaper developer Marco Arment, who asked about iPad yesterday: “What’s it for, really? Logically, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for most computer owners…most people will have trouble justifying the $500 entry price.” ...

Three words sum up Microsoft’s patent infringement suit against Salesforce.com: Competition by litigation. Microsoft knows plenty about competition by litigation, having been its victim through major antitrust cases on two continents. It’s simply shameful action from a company which executies rightly wagged accusing fingers at litigating competitors over the years. Microsoft’s “do unto them like they did unto us” approach cheapens the company. The proof is in the patents, which are hugely broad scope. ...

Hey Admins…. It’s that time again. The second Tuesday is upon us and May so far hasn’t been demanding as far as patching goes. So far …. this month Microsoft has only issued two security announcements. MS10-030 and MS10-031. Microsoft has rated both as critical – and both could result in remote code being executed. MS10-030 resolves an integer overflow in POP3 & IMAP mail responses to Outlook Express and Windows Mail…. MS10-031 addresses a stack memory corruption related to the way that “Visual Basic for Applications” searches for ActiveX components, when host applications provide specially crafted files to the Visual Basic runtime. ...

With competition in the Web browser field having transitioned from cold to boiling in less than a year’s time, Mozilla suddenly finds itself playing catch-up against not only Apple and Google, but Microsoft as well. In March, the organization realized it needed to completely make over Firefox 4 if it wanted to remain feature competitive against a fast-rising Google Chrome. In a live presentation yesterday, Mozilla Firefox director Mike Beltzner admitted that his group’s March roadmap, which involved an interim release of Firefox 3.7, had too many steps. Now the group has decided to straighten out its path by grafting version 3.7’s main additions onto a point release Firefox 3.6.4, and shifting gears to focus on version 4.0. ...

We need a native iPad app for Facebook but until Facebook HQ gets around to making one, the next best thing has just arrived via social media aggregator sobees. sobees for Facebook [iTunes link] is an iPad app that lets you manage your Facebook experience in a native app designed to take advantage of the iPad’s enlarged screen. The app, which is free through the end of May, provides many of the features that Facebook fans have been looking for in an iPad app. This includes the ability to: ...

Square is a mobile credit card transaction application founded by Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame. The app became available for the iPad about one month ago, and now it’s also available for the iPhone, iPod Touch and Android devices. The app is free, but in order to work, you need a small credit card reader that connects to the iPhone via the 2.5mm headphone jack. The app looks beautiful and has lots of nifty features, such as SMS receipts, the ability to track of your sales online, as well as tip and tax calculation. However, in its current iteration it also has certain drawbacks; for example, you cannot delete or refund transactions. ...

The first significant change to Internet domain names in many years was made today when ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) approved and deployed three domain names using a non-Latin script: Arabic. You can already visit http://موقع.وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر/ and two other Arabic script domain names, though they might not display correctly if your browser doesn’t have IDN (International Domain Name) support. Using Mozilla Firefox 3.6.3 and Google Chrome Developer Build 5.0.375.29 for Mac, I was able to visit that web address but it displayed incorrectly in the address bar. When I visited the site in Apple Safari 4.0.5, it was written out correctly. ...

Lately, it’s not that hard to get a direct answer to your query from Steve Jobs himself; he responds to burning questions via e-mail quite often. Unfortunately, his answers rarely contain more than a few words. Macrumors reports that a reader asked Steve Jobs via e-mail why the iPad cannot print documents. Steve’s answer? “It will come.” Even if we disregard the possibility that the e-mail may be fake, Steve’s answer gives us very little to be happy about as we have no idea when printing to the iPad will come. Will it come this summer? When the next version arrives? Sometime in the next decade? We’re optimists, so we’ll just pretend that Steve meant “soon.”

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.