Starting on a positive note, the NDA restrictions on the iPhone SDK have been dropped in regards to applications that have been accepted and released onto the App Store. This means that all those "How to write iPhone apps and get filthy rich"Apple PowerBook G4 Battery, Apple PowerBook G4 15inch Battery books and magazine articles that have been held in reserve to this point ought to be hitting the shelves any day now. Note that this only applies to apps that are selling on the store, so if yours gets rejected, you're still not supposed to complain in public.
The National Music Publishers' Association aiming to increase artists' per-song download royalty from 9 to 15 cents, and Apple is threatening to shut down the iTunes store altogether if this happens. Nobody know exactly how much Apple makes on the iTunes store -- I've actually heard whispers that it's in fact a loss leader designed to sell iPods and iPhones -- but a 6-cent drop in revenue on a 99-cent purchase does seem like it would eat into what must be fairly narrow margins. Most people think this is an idle threat, though.
Oh, and the Apple-Psystar war still rages, with Apple's saying that Psystar's antitrust claims "ignor[e] fundamental principles of antitrust law, and the realities of the marketplace." Ouch.
Apple, Google, and Google Voice: It gets weird
Your faithful blogger has been studiously ignoring this month's slow-mo kerfuffle over Apple's failure to approve the Google Voice app for the App Store. This is because I'm becoming bored with App Store kerfuffles generally, as it continues to strike me as a very insular debate within a narrow community,laptop battery albeit one loudly represented in the tech press and blogosphere. In a nutshell (illustrated by various posts from Jon Gruber, who has been following it rather closely), the official Google-approved app that used Google's voice over IP service, was rejected from the App Store; first Gruber's sources told him that AT&T made this call, but then Apple told the FCC that the decision was theirs alone. (Gruber also explains how he and his source made the initial mistake, in an interesting game of Telephone.) Problem solved, right? Well, except for the BBC trumpeting the fact that AT&T is also sort of claiming credit for the move.
As it happened, I was reading an item in the New Yorker's Talk of the Town column this morning about false confessions, which are more common than you might think. Generally, the way that these confessions come out is that the innocent individual is made to believe that not confessing will result in a fate even worse than the false confession; in the case discussed in the New Yorker item, Apple PowerBook G4 Battery, Apple PowerBook G4 15inch Batteryfour men whose connection to a murder was circumstantial at best were convinced by police that they would be successfully prosecuted and sentenced to death unless they pled guilty to the crime they didn't commit. So what would lead AT&T to, when pressed by the FTC, say essentially that they had put Apple up to it -- "AT&T and Apple agreed that Apple would not take affirmative steps to enable an iPhone to use AT&T's wireless service (including 2G, 3G and Wi-Fi) to make VoIP calls without first obtaining AT&T's consent" -- even though Apple is willing to take the heat?
Well, what about power? There's a lot of speculation about the power dynamic in the Apple-AT&T iPhone relationship, with most people admitting that Apple holds the upper hand. Perhaps AT&T wants to sort of imply, to the insiders following this thing, that it can put the smack down on Apple when it feels the need. It might sound kind of jerky to normal people, but as noted normal people are very much not following this story.
UPDATE: Apple PowerBook G4 Battery, There are some definite goofs on my part in this post, discussed here.
If there's one thing I've been trying to pound home about the frequent iPhone-on-Verizon rumor, it's this: it won't happen because the technology underlying Verizon's wireless network, CDMA, is incompatible with the iPhone. There's only been one version of each of the iPhone models made, and that's based on GSM, a rival wireless standard. GSM is used around the world, whereas CDMA is much less widely deployed. In order to sell a Verizon iPhone, Apple would have to build a new handset model, with a CDMA-capable chip, and would have to deal with CDMA-licensing issues to boot -- something the company has shown no inclination to do. The coming 4G networks will be backwards compatible with GSM, not CDMA, and CDMA has been publicly slagged by Apple as a dead end.
I touched on some of these issues this past summer when I discussed Apple's entry into the Chinese mobile phone network.Apple PowerBook G4 Battery, Apple PowerBook G4 15inch Battery Apple is partnering with China Unicom, not the much larger China Mobile, not least because China Unicom has a 3G network and China Mobile uses -- you guessed it -- CDMA (though it's a CDMA variant that's incompatible with Verizon or any other network). At the time I pegged this as more proof that the iPhone on Verizon is a pipe dream. Apple would go into China with the same phones it was selling everywhere else.
Except that turns out not to be true. The Chinese iPhones are GSM phones, all right -- but they lack Wi-Fi capabilities, which is a huge gap. This is because Apple wouldn't put China's WAPI authentication technology into the phone (WAPI not being a recognized standard, and a possible back door to government surveillance to boot). Apple PowerBook G4 15inch Battery, The AP story on the subject has China Unicom promising a resolution later this year; it will be interesting to see if the phones already have Wi-Fi-capable hardware, in which case once this tiff is resolved Wi-Fi can be activated with a simple software update. But if not -- if there really isn't any Wi-Fi capable hardware in the guts of the phones being sold in China -- then it seems that Apple is willing to make devices specialized for different markets, if the price is right.
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