New Technology 4 U

Apple announced the retail sales of ipad in US from April 3.  The pre orders will be taken from March 12.

The ipads features only Wi-Fi without 3G radios and prices as per model; 16GB costs $499, 32GB for $599 and 64GB for $699. The AT&T 3G-enabled models will be available in late April for $629 for 16 GB, $729 for 32 GB and $829 for 64 GB. At that time, the device will also launch internationally in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK.

The launch includes the application designed specially for ipad  is Ibooks. The application is free  and enable  the ipad to use as eBook reader  which have a built-in Apple iBookstore. This iBookstore was expected to only support ePub formatted books at first, but publishers are taking advantages of ibook application.

On Monday, Rescuecom released its led the pack in Rescuecom’s last quarterly survey.

A computer support and repair outfit, Rescuecom creates its rankings by comparing the number of computers shipped by each manufacturer with the number of support calls Rescuecom receives for that same maker. Rescuecom says that reliability depends on both the quality of components and the strength of customer support. If that support is lousy, customers will go looking for third-party options like Rescuecom.

According to Rescuecoms analysis, Macs had an 8 percent market share in the four quarters of 2009, but accounted for only 2.2 percent share of service calls. That gives Apple a score of 365, well ahead of rivals like Asus and Levono (tied at 305), and way ahead of Toshiba (199) and HP (149). But Apples score is a bit below the 374 it received in the third quarter report for 2009, and well under the 394 it got in the second.

Nonetheless, the good news for Apple comes at the same time as word that the company has claimed the number three position in BusinessWeek’s annual customer service survey.

Microsoft’s effort to address the digital music market has largely focused on its Zune player and Zune Pass subscription service, which have won favorable reviews but few customers. But with the recent unveiling of its Windows Phone 7 Series operating system at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, Microsoft hopes to reboot its struggling digital music strategy.

Even the well-received Zune HD device, introduced last fall, hasn’t been enough to convince music fans to convert to the Zune Pass. The company says it has sold only 3.8 million players since 2006, and NPD Group estimated in November that it has a 2 percent share of the U.S. portable media player market, compared with 70 percent for Apple’s iPod.

So Microsoft has made it a priority to expand the Zune service to other platforms. In November, it added the Zune’s video service to its Xbox Live network, consisting of more than 20 million worldwide users of the Xbox 360 gaming console. Since then, Zune communications director Jose Pinero says the number of daily HD video downloads and streams has doubled. Now, Microsoft plans to use its Windows Phone 7 platform to bring Zune to mobile customers.

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By now, every time you wanted to download a podcast or application from the App Store that was over 10 MB, you got an annoying message asking you to use Wi-Fi because the file was too large. But not anymore.

Apple lifted the 10MB cap, only to double it to 20MB, which should be a more reasonable figure for video and podcast downloads when out of Wi-Fi range. If you try to download files over 20MB though, a message will prompt you to switch to Wi-Fi.

Besides giving iPhone users a wider variety of content they can download over 3G networks, the cap increase may be a sign that the iPad will require larger file downloads over 3G because of higher resolution graphics and more complex applications.

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MeeGo is an operating system that blurs the line between a robust mobile phone OS and a lightweight netbook OS.

MeeGo is a hybrid of two operating systems. One is Nokia’s Maemo, which recently appeared in the N900 smartphone. The second is Intel’s Moblin, an OS primarily intended for netbooks. Both platforms are open-source and Linux-based, as MeeGo will be.

MeeGo is intended for advanced smartphones, tablets, netbooks, in-vehicle technology and even connected televisions. It supports ARM architectures — commonly used in advanced smartphones and smartbooks — and Intel’s Atom processor. The first devices should launch in the second half of 2010.

We can only imagine what MeeGo will look and act like, but it’s interesting that Intel and Nokia are targeting a range of mobile devices that aren’t necessarily smartphones or notebooks. MeeGo is intended for a new OS category that doesn’t yet have a name — revolving around tablets but not specifically for them.

The competition has taken a different approach of scaling its existing operating systems. Apple tweaked its iPhone OS to support the iPad. Other tablet designers are trying to make Android work. Microsoft is trying to cram Windows 7 Starter onto netbooks and tablets, such as the Archos 9 and an unnamed HP tablet. Meanwhile, Lenovo has gone rogue, creating its own operating systems for the Skylight smartbook and the tablet portion of its IdeaPad U1.

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Apple now charges $1.99 per episode for standard resolution and $2.99 for a high-definition episode. Those are very high prices for content that is free over the air or with a cable subscription and that can be viewed only on PCs, iPods and iPhones.

But with the March release of the iPad, Apple is hoping that reasonably priced content plus the iPad’s huge, high-resolution screen will make paying for TV content more compelling.

The Apple Store Experience

The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple met with at least one network last week to discuss the 99-cent pricing model. Apple is trying to “ignite the video part of iTunes,” a source said. Apple had originally been trying to strike subscription deals with TV networks and producers, but those efforts have stalled.

Will 99-cent TV shows drive adoption of the iPad? “That in itself probably won’t drive a lot of sales,” said Greg Sterling, principal analyst with Sterling Market Intelligence. Sterling believes the conventional wisdom that consumer disinterest in the iPad will dissipate when the device actually appears.

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Google sees Apple as a valuable partner and sees no reason for that to change, a senior executive said amid rumors that Microsoft’s Bing search engine may replace Google on the iPhone.

“Apple is a very close and valuable partner and we’re very excited about the relationship we have with them today. We have no reason to believe that’s going to change,” Vic Gundotra, who leads Google’s mobile engineering, told journalists on Monday.

“We don’t want to comment on those rumors,” he said when pressed on the issue of the iPhone at a roundtable at industry trade fair Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. “We think that relationship is stable.”

Asked about the Nexus Two, a second Google-branded phone aimed at enterprise customers that the company is expected to bring out, he said no decisions had been made yet about how many Google phones there would be or who would manufacture them.

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Nokia and Intel are merging now: Nokia and Intel are to merge their top-end smartphone operating systems, they announced on Monday, as they face increasing competition from newcomers Google and Apple.

The cellphone industry has started to focus increasingly on handset services and operating software after Apple launched its iPhone and Google rolled out its Android operating system — helping to boost sales of top-end phones.

Now Nokia, the world’s biggest maker of mobile handsets, will merge its Linux Maemo software platform, used in its flagship N900 phone, with Intel’s Moblin, which is also based on Linux open-sourced software, the companies said on Monday.

“They have understood the only way to beat Microsoft and Apple is to do it through the scale — get the platform to more devices,” said John Strand, owner and chief executive of Strand Consult.

“However, they have not realized its not about getting to many platforms, its about making something the consumer likes — the bees don’t go for the biggest garden, they go for the most beautiful flowers,” Strand said.

Nokia rolled out its first Maemo phone — the result of a five-year development project — only three months ago, with analysts seeing Maemo boosting the firm’s chances of succeeding in the higher end of the market.

The market for software platforms on cellphones is led by Nokia’s Symbian operating system, but it has lost much ground lately to Apple, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion and Google.

Nokia said it was still committed to using Symbian in most of its smartphones, but would use the new Meego in the most advanced models.

The software deal announced on Monday is also set to boost Intel’s chances of getting its chips into the cellphones of the Finnish company, which controls around 40 percent of the global phone market.

“We believe the partnership … will result in significant sales volumes for Intel,” said CCS Insight analyst John Jackson.(Source: Yahoo news)