News

Volume App Purchasing for Business from Apple

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

ZTE event, new phones fondled

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.

App prices rise on UK Apple Store

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.

Seven new BlackBerry Smartphones coming soon

It was only this morning that we posted about BlackBerry App World downloads reaching the 1 billion mark. Following on from that we now have some further news and figures from RIM which includes the announcement of seven new BlackBerry Smartphones to launch in the coming months. Now the big question here will be are these seven new phones actually seven separate models? We must not forget that most new BlackBerry Smartphones come in two flavors, GSM and CDMA. For example we already know RIM will be launching the Bold 9900 (GSM) and the 9930 (CDMA). So are RIM calling this two new phones when essentially it is really one? We will have to wait and see I suppose.

Anyway, it is jolly exciting stuff and if you want to see further facts and figures such as BBM stats and BlackBerry subscriber figures you can do so below.

BlackBerry App World downloads hit the 1 Billion mark!

BlackBerry App World may not have many of the same style of apps you are likely to find in Apples App Store or in the Android market but that is not to say it isn’t a huge success. Over on the official BlackBerry Blog RIM have made the following statement:

“BlackBerry App World is now in over 100 countries, seeing an average of 3 million downloads per day, and we recently crossed the 1 billion app download milestone!”

As we have mentioned recently the BlackBerry Smartphone is in decline in North America, being out sold by both iOS and Android but in many parts of the world the BlackBerry is still steaming full ahead and this new statement from RIM emphasizes that.

Coincidently, this week also sees an update to BlackBerry App World, to version  v2.1.4.9. I cant see what changes have been made so if you are waiting on version 3.0 that is being worked on you will have to carry on being patient.

Anyway, well done RIM on 1 Billion downloads.

Posted by: James

HTC Desire & Desire Z to get Gingerbread

Via their Facebook page HTC have announced that they are to start rolling out the Android 2.3 Gingerbread update to the HTC Desire before the end of July. This after the to and fro that we’ve had over the past few weeks as to whether or not their would be a Gingerbread update at all. Their was outcry when HTC originally said no to the update but it’s reassuring to see that HTC did respond to the criticism and in a u-turn statement said that they’d had a change of heart.

In a further update earlier today HTC also said on their Facebook page that they would be rolling out the same Gingerbread update to the HTC Desire Z and this would start rolling out within a few weeks.

Thanks to everyone whos been patiently waiting for the Gingerbread update for Desire Z. We are in the last stages of testing and plan to start rolling out the update over the air in the coming weeks. It may take a little time to reach all of you across every network but it should have reached everyone by the end of the month.

Well done to HTC I say for keeping their customers in the loop and furthermore to listening and reacting to customer feedback.

Posted by: Matt

iOS 5 beta 3 lands

Apple announced iOS 5 about a month ago and have been providing developers with beta versions of the new OS with updates every few weeks. Today Beta 2 is replaced with Beta 3 and is being offered to developers to download today.

Beta 2 contained updates for iTunes sync over WiFi, which works rather nicely, but temporarily dropped Facetime. Beta 3 concerns itself with location services and offers more granular controls with a raft of new toggles and a control for using voice when roaming which will be particularly useful rather than just the data while roaming.

I haven’t installed on my iPhone or iPad so don’t know if Facetime has been re-enabled but I’ll be looking at this later on today and will find out what else has changed in there too.

Oh and just in case you were interested this version has already been Jailbroken!

Posted by: Matt

Apple suing HTC, again

Yesterday Apple filed a fresh complaint against HTC with the US International Trade Commission claiming that HTC have infringed Apple’s patents on technology used in the iPad and iPhone. This isn’t the first time that Apple have gone to the ITC with such complaints, indeed the ITC are already reviewing three other cases between the two tech giants.

Apple seem to be quite happy to make such accusations at the moment as this latest claim against HTC comes just a few weeks after a similar suit between Apple and Samsung.

The exact details of this latest claim have not yet been disclosed but is looking to block US sales of the HTC Flyer and Droid Incredible, Wildfire, EVO 4G and Desire. Previous claims by Apple included the ‘swipe to unlock’ which Apple believe they own the patent for.

HTC commented:

"HTC is disappointed at Apple’s constant attempts at litigations instead of competing fairly in the market," said HTC general counsel Grace Lei in a statement.

"HTC strongly denies all infringement claims raised by Apple in the past and present and reiterates our determination and commitment to protect our intellectual property rights," she said.

Following the complaint being issued by Apple, HTC’s stock prices fell by over 4 percent yesterday. This is sure to rumble on for months yet!

Posted by: Matt

iTunes movies to go Full HD

Awesome news for movie fans, Apple are going to bring Full HD 1080p video content to the iTunes video store in Q3 of this year. Many films and TV programmes are already available in both 480p (standard) and 720p HD formats with a small premium for the HD version.

Critics of Apple and iTunes have long slammed Apple for the lack of Full HD content so this is their answer but to be honest it had to come sooner or later so perhaps it’s really no great surprise.

If there is a change to 1080p content though there’s one other thing that’s going to have to change, the Apple TV. Currently the iOS powered version 2 Apple TV’s have the trusty A4 processor from the iPad and iPhone and it doesn’t have the power to play 1080p content, even with a firmware update. Looks like there is going to have to be a new version of the Apple TV released which will, presumably have the A5 chip so that there’s enough horsepower.

I wish I’d know this a month ago before I bought another Apple TV for home though!

Posted by: Matt

BlackBerry PlayBook featured in Renaults latest concept car

Well it looks like RIM have a new friend and it is Renault. Renault’s latest concept car neatly has the BlackBerry PlayBook mounted in the console!

With the BlackBerry PlayBook integrated into its latest concept, the FRENDZY becomes an innovative office on wheels, perfectly doubling up as a commercial vehicle and a comfortable passenger car, ideal for both business and pleasure.

For business users on the road, the ultra-portable BlackBerry PlayBook simply plugs into the dashboard, delivers advanced performance, uncompromised web browsing, with support for Adobe Flash, HD multimedia and advanced security features and out of the box enterprise support.