Hasta La Gadget!

A bit of semantic juggling makes Apple the biggest player in both the personal computer and mobile platform markets.

A research report published today by DisplaySearch found that sales of the iPad propelled Apple past HP for the No. 1 spot in the “mobile PC” market.

To make that work, you have to count the iPad as a PC. DisplaySearch combined sales of Mac notebooks with the iPad and found that Apple sold 10.2 million, or 17.2 percent, of mobile computers shipped during the fourth quarter of 2010. HP shipped 9.3 million.

But you could also count the iPad as a mobile device, as some have done. If you lump together the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad, Apple’s iOS is the mobile operating system most often used to browse the web, according to NetMarketShare.

“While we anticipate increased competition in the tablet PC market later this year with the introduction of Android Honeycomb-based tablets, Apple’s iPad business is complementing a notebook line whose shipments widely exceed the industry average growth rate,” said Richard Shim, Senior Analyst at DisplaySearch. “Apple is currently benefiting from significant and comprehensive growth from both sectors of the mobile PC spectrum, notebooks and tablet PCs. Cannibalization seems limited at this point.”

The reports seem slanted in Apple’s favor: traditionally the iPad wouldn’t be considered a PC, and most research firms have concluded Android is beating the iPhone in the smartphone market, which doesn’t count the iPod Touch or iPad.

But it’s rational to count the iPad as a personal computer because, well, it’s a computer, even if it has more limited capabilities than a PC. And it seems fair to combine iPod Touch, iPad and iPhone sales when determining which mobile platform has the most dominance: They’re all running Apple’s iOS.

When you look at the big picture, the labels don’t matter to the manufacturers: They just want customers buying their products, and they don’t care if you call it a PC, smartphone or tablet.

The two reports also demonstrate that the lines between “PC” and “mobile” are blurring. Technically all these products — the iPhone, MacBook, iPad, iPod Touch, HP notebooks, Android smartphones and so on — are mobile computers.

So if you look at the iPad as a personal computer, and the iPod Touch, iPad and iPhone as one mobile platform (which it is), one thing is clear: Apple may have lost the PC war, but it’s winning in the post-PC era.

Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

A judge this week dismissed a lawsuit regarding iPad overheating concerns. Jacob Balthazar, Claudia Keller, and John Browning filed the suit last year, claiming that the iPad’s tendency to overheat and shut down in direct sunlight undermined the company’s claims that “reading on iPad is just like reading a book.”

The Court concludes that these allegations are insufficient. At the least, Plaintiffs must identify the particular commercial or advertisement upon which they relied and must describe with the requisite specificity the content of that particular commercial or advertisement.

It’s been available since October in beta form, but Microsoft has just turned its Windows Phone 7 Connector product to a shiny shade of gold, giving Mac owners a solid (if not Zune-free) option for hooking up their Windows Phones without firing up Boot Camp. We’re told there aren’t any new features in the latest build worth noting, so you’ll get the same options as before: media synchronization, iTunes compatibility, and support for Windows Phone firmware updates. A full Zune client would be choice, of course — but we’ll take it. And you can take it, too: it’s now in the Mac App Store.

[Thanks, Hayden]

Windows Phone 7 Connector for Mac OS goes gold, hits the Mac App Store originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Feb 2011 06:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In case you weren’t aware, Apple’s newly launched App Store subscriptions aren’t sitting so well with everybody. While the functionality could of course be a boon to services that have struggled getting paying customers, folks who have already been doing just fine, thank you very much, are balking at the new restrictions Apple has imposed. Rhapsody has issued a statement, which says that it’s not going to play ball and even levels a bit of a threat: “We will be collaborating with our market peers in determining an appropriate legal and business response to this latest development.” The big trouble stems from the fact that Apple requires anybody offering a subscription service to offer that service for the same price or less through Apple. That means you can still sign up folks through your own methods and get all the cash, but if anybody signs up through your app, Apple gets a 30 percent cut. In addition, Apple is no longer allowing applications to include a link to an external site for purchasing, which means vendors will have trouble getting new users to pay them directly instead of using Apple’s simple but heavily-taxed option. Rhapsody claims that it can’t offer its services at existing prices with Apple grabbing that much of the revenue, and it sounds like Rhapsody will be leaving the App Store soon if an agreement isn’t struck.

Of course, this is just the shiny surface of the dirt Apple’s new policies have scuffed up, and we might even have an antitrust case on our hands, according to the Wall Street Journal. Check out the more coverage link for more on that, and follow after the break for Rhapsody’s statement in full.

Continue reading Rhapsody won’t bow to Apple’s subscription policy, issues statement

Rhapsody won’t bow to Apple’s subscription policy, issues statement originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Feb 2011 17:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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