Home » Archives for July 14, 2011
Archive for July 14th, 2011
Earlier today we reported that Apple had increased the standard pricing of apps on the App Store following their brief down time yesterday. If you missed it, many apps have increased in price by an average of about 15%.
However, if you run a business that uses or provides apps for employees then there is some good news. Today Apple announced their new Volume Purchasing for Business programme. Whether you are buying one or thousands of copies of an app there are discounts to be had.
At the moment, if you look at the details released by Apple, it quite specifically says: “Any business in the US can participate in the Volume Purchasing Program” but one would hope this will get extended to other countries in due course.
No exact date as to when the service will go live, simple “Coming Soon” but as always we’ll be keeping a close eye.
Buy apps in volume.
Streamline your purchasing process and put more power and productivity in the hands of your workforce. Every paid app in the App Store is available for businesses to buy in volume through the program website. Simply search for the apps you need, enter the quantity you want to buy, and complete the transaction with your corporate credit card. Apps are available for purchase at the same price listed in the App Store.
Posted by: Matt
Obviously predictive text entry is nothing new, been around for ages and although it has evolved a bit over the years the same frustrations still exist, the default predicted word is all too often the wrong one!
The Swiftkey X app from TouchType is a bit different. The next step of the evolutionary step in predictive text, artificial intelligence and machine learning. It gets to know your habits and how you enter text in order to improve accuracy. TouchType say this increases text entry speed by up to 50%
Check out the full press release below or head over to the website.
Matt posted earlier the details of the three new ZTE phones we got to have a play with at last nights London event. The main purpose of the event though was to announce the partnership ZTE now have with Brightpoint for UK distribution. This will mean that instead of just having carrier branded devices here, like we have seen with last years Orange San Francisco, you will soon be able to buy ZTE branded phones through the normal sim free retailers and high street shops.
ZTE certainly offer value for money and we have seen that with recent devices. Could the company follow in the footsteps of HTC and soon be one of the most common brands in the industry? I don’t see why not. They expect to sell more than 80 million handsets this year!
You can read the full press release below:
Last night James and I attended an event with ZTE where we had a chance to get our hands on several new ZTE phones. The ZTE Skate, ZTE Libra and ZTE Tureis were all on show at the event at the Ice Bar in central London.
At the event ZTE also announced a distribution partnership with Brightpoint UK.
The three phones are set to go on sale, SIM-free, here in the UK sometime next month. Interestingly the ZTE Skate is getting a CPU specification bump for the UK market, rather than the ‘standard’ 800MHz CPU that you’ll find listed in many specification tables the Skate will ship here with a 1GHz CPU which to my mind makes it a much more viable proposition.
Images and a few details of each handset can be found below.
When the Apple store went down yesterday for several hours for ‘maintenance’ many of us thought that this was the time that OS X Lion would be added to the store and when the expected new MacBook Air would go on sale. However, looks like we were wrong as a look through the app store changes reveals no new hardware and Lion is nowhere to be seen.
Instead Apple have been re-jigging and re-pricing all of their apps. It has long been the case that apps on the US store, taking exchange rates in to consideration, were cheaper than here in the UK. But following this down time apple have actually increased the price of all the apps within the store so an app that cost just 59p yesterday will set you back 69p today. As the cost of the app rises so too does the percentage increase, the price increase goes as high as 20 percent in some tiers.
You can see a breakdown of the price increases below. Bizarely though, we’ve just heard that the prices of apps on the Australian store have gone down by a similar margin!
Getting back to OS X Lion though, we’re still expecting to see this arrive on the App Store within a matter of days rather than weeks and we’re pretty sure that there’s a hardware refresh for the MacBook Air and Mac Mini just around the corner.
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