Hasta La Gadget!

When Apple acquired Lala, the obvious use for all that local scanning and internet streaming technology would have been to serve up our hard-drive-based iTunes music libraries from the cloud. Here we are though, eight months later, and the only significant impact from the acquisition was the closure of the Lala music service. And it doesn’t look like that will change anytime soon. According to an investigative piece by CNET, Apple is telling the big-four music execs that it won’t be offering any significant cloud-based music offerings within the next few months. In fact, CNET‘s sources claim that Apple still hasn’t obtained the licenses required to store and distribute music via a cloud-based service. So what’s Apple doing with all that Lala talent then? According to CNET, the team has been working on an “undisclosed video feature” instead of music. Additional sources at the major film studios claim that Apple plans to create “digital shelves” this year letting iTunes users store movies and other media on Apple’s servers. Hmm, does that sound like Keychest to you?

Naturally, all of this makes sense in light of Apple’s plan to open a 500,000 square foot data center (pictured above) in North Carolina later this year at a cost of $1 billion. What better facility to serve up 99 cent streaming TV rentals to a completely overhauled Apple TV in the home, and highly mobile iPad, iPod touch, and iPhone devices on the go. Anecdotally, it’s not like Apple’s showing too much concern with storage limits on its iOS devices — the iPhone 4 just launched in the same 16GB and 32GB offerings as the 3GS instead of the typical doubling of flash storage we’ve come to expect from new iPhone iterations. So really, the question isn’t if, it’s just a matter of when.

Original image courtesy of Cult of Mac

Apple’s Lala music team working on video streaming service for 2010 launch? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 04:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Merely days after iTunes 9.2 hit the pipes in order to enable iPhone 4 syncing, Apple‘s software team has pushed out the first “minor” update since with 9.2.1. Truth be told, the list of changes, fixes and tweaks is rather lengthy for a simple point-point update, with this one allowing users to organize apps on the iOS 4 home screens into folders using iTunes, organize and sync PDF documents as books, etc. As for fixes? For starters, it’ll “disable older versions of some incompatible third-party plug-ins” (thanks?), while also addressing “minor issues with dragging and dropping items, a performance issue when first syncing to some devices with iTunes 9.2” and other general speed issues that users were reporting. As for iBooks 1.1.1, that one still seems to be propagating through the iTunes server factory, promising support for books with audio and video, improvements for PDF documents and other miscellaneous bug fixes. Feel free to toss your impressions of the new builds in comments below, but don’t blame us if your eagerness ends up breaking something you love dearly.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Apple releases iTunes 9.2.1 and iBooks 1.1.1, fixes galore promised originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here we go again, unfortunately. Both 9 to 5 Mac and Ars Technica are reporting a new spat of potentially-fraudulent apps climbed the iTunes charts today, now in the Travel section. This time, the culprit’s purported to be Chinese-based WiiSHii and a series of “GYOYO” Chinese- and English-language maps. The two publications have a screenshot each showing the apps climbing the charts, as well as an apparent receipt from one customer who unwittingly found charges for the software on his or her bill — and yeah, we see them, too, albeit not topping any charts as of this writing. So yet again, we advise caution and double-checking your payment history. Le sigh.

iTunes fraud takes trip to travel section? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Jul 2010 21:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve received a handful of tips this morning claiming something’s rotten in the state of the iTunes App Store, namely via the Book category. As of this writing, 42 of the top 50 books by revenue are from the seller Thuat Nguyen, whose company website (“mycompany”) leads to parked site www.home.com. A vast majority of these book apps were released in April, have little to no customer ratings or reviews, appear to be in Vietnamese (despite claims in the side bar that the supported languages are English and Japanese), and may or may not be infringing on copyrighted work — we’re noticing a lot of Dragon Ball art here. To give sales a sense of scope, Twilight series conclusion Breaking Dawn is hovering only at 34 right now.

So, how did these books hit the top of the charts? The other half of this story has to do with a claimed rise in iTunes account hacking, with a number of people reporting up to hundreds of dollars being spent unwillingly from their account to these specific books. Coincidence? Let’s not mince words here, something is definitely amiss, and it’s not looking good. Just to be safe, might wanna check your purchase history under Apple Account information. We’ve reached out to Apple and will let you know as soon as we hear back.

Update: We’ve yet to hear from Apple proper, but we do have an update of sorts — 9 to 5 Mac reports all the “mycompany” titles have completely vanished from the App Store. We’re not sure whether Apple decided to shut down the operation or the seller pulled them himself, so continue to keep an eye on your digital pocketbook until we know for sure.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Inexplicable rise in iPhone dev’s App Store sales connected to iTunes account hacks? (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 04 Jul 2010 14:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on January 24, 2008 by CyberNet.

The latest forming trend in digital music downloads seems to be that everyone wants to start offering DRM-free music.  Both Amazon and iTunes offer a DRM-free catalog of music as well as several other sites like eMusic. People like DRM-free because it means once they download a song or album, they can play the song on multiple devices. When Amazon’s service launched, it got rave reviews. People were generally happy with the selection, but even more happy with the price. Now there are rumors that Yahoo is wanting to get in on DRM-free fun too and that they have plans to launch a DRM Free music service sometime within 2008.

Yahoo has publicly denied that they are even working on such a project, however, the Associated Press is reporting that record executives have come to them and said that they have met with Yahoo and that they already had preliminary talks last month. They’re trying to work out a deal with major companies like Universal, Sony, Warner, and EMI to offer unprotected songs either for sale, or as part of an ad-supported  music service. When the AP went to the record companies to ask about such a deal, they simply declined to comment which could very well mean these rumors are true.

As Mashable points out, if these talks had occurred months before, it probably would have been a pretty big deal.  However, because there are other sites out there that offer DRM Free MP3s like Amazon, this isn’t really groundbreaking. Would you be happy to see yet another big name enter the scene? Eventually, I think DRM-free will be the new “norm” and consumers will be able to buy the unprotected songs anywhere they’d like. Perhaps record labels are finally realizing that sales of music and life do go on when they don’t have tight control?

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