Remember six months ago when Apple held an iTunes event just to announce iTunes LP, the premium content service that was supposed to revive the album? According to most reports, nobody’s buying LP. Not a person. It’s no surprise, really. The target audience is a bunch of audiophiles who likely buy physical media for quality’s sake and that unmistakeable pretense of being one of the remaining few to own that physical media. Your average iTunes customer just doesn’t care that much.

Granted, there are only 29 options if you want to buy LP content, so it’s not like the format has any serious support behind it. But why was LP created in the first place? Was it something the fans were really clamoring for or was it something the labels wanted so they could try to squeeze a little more money out of digital content. I’m gonna go with that second one.

Nearly good on his word, Steve Jobs will be delivering the iPad to US customers on April 3rd. I say almost because the April 3rd release is 66 days past the announcement, when Steve-O promised us 60. You can pre-order next week – next week – starting March 12th. The 3G version won’t be released until later in the month.

Some of the questions people are starting to ask include questions about shortages, lines, and the number of iPad-centric apps we’ll see on launch day. The only question I want an answer for is when does iPad 2.0 launch? There isn’t much I care to see on the iPad at this point. Nine months from now, though, that’s a different story. By then most publishers should be comfortable with platform, certainly more comfortable than the haphazard rush we’re currently seeing to try to get things ready. That’s when you get to the good stuff.

The rest of the world will be able to get Apple’s latest creation toward the end of April.

In yet another App Store obliteration, Wi-Fi detection apps have been pulled from the App Store without exception. The word from Apple is that these apps, the type that actively scan for wireless networks, use “private frameworks” to locate hotspots, which is a violation of Apple’s terms of use.

“We received a very unfortunate email today from Apple stating that WiFi Where has been removed from sale on the App Store for using private frameworks to access wireless information,” said one developer. Apple declined to say more about the removal.

I think it’s odd that Apple would start to rigorously enforce rules without explanation when so many applications continue to slip through the cracks. The most obvious example is the “titillating content” Apple barred not so long ago, though exceptions were made for both Playboy and Sports Illustrated. As The Register points out, it could be Apple is attempting to streamline everything for the iPad launch, that perhaps the tools to make these apps work won’t be available on the tablet. Even then, why all the secrecy? Why not just say, “we don’t want people exploiting certain parts of our devices for personal use.”

It seems like Apple is filing hundreds of patents a day, so it’s not really much of a surprise that the company throws out an infringement suit from time to time. Today, it’s HTC. Apple filed a suit against HTC claiming infringement of “20 Apple patents related to the iPhone’s user interface, underlying architecture and hardware.”

The suit seems more appropriately targeted at Android, though HTC is marginally involved with things like Sense UI and obviously the hardware. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that the real issue is with Google’s OS, and maybe some multi-touch stuff here and there. Whatever the case, old Stevie isn’t happy. A press release quoted him with the following: “We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it. We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

If the lawsuit succeeds it will likely end in HTC being forced to license patents from Apple for its devices. The only other recourse would be placing a halt on the import and sale of HTC devices, which seems pretty unlikely.

Source: Apple

If you want to show your Jersey Shore pride, you’re going to have a little trouble turning your iPhone into a Duck Phone. Nick Bonatsakis at Atlantia Software developed an app that would do it but he got rejected. The reason? Something Apple calls “minimal user functionality.”

Now I could be wrong, but I seem to remember the App Store as a place crowded with fart apps and other useless crap. So Duck Phone only makes your phone quack like a duck. Would people download it? Of course they would. Try telling that to the App Review Team. Here’s their note:

“Dear Atlantia Software LLC,

We’ve reviewed your application DuckPhone and we have determined that this application contains minimal user functionality and will not be appropriate for the App Store.

If you would like to share it with friends and family, we recommend you review the Ad Hoc method on the Distribution tab of the iPhone Developer Portal for details on distributing this application among a small group of people of your choosing or if you believe that you can add additional user functionality to DuckPhone we encourage you to do so and resubmit it for review.

Sincerely,

iPhone App Review Team”

Ouch. Fart app developers beware. You just might get pulled.

Source: CrunchGear

Apple’s had a rough go with its suppliers of late. If arson, among other things, wasn’t bad enough, the company now reports that several of its suppliers have confirmed child laborers in their employ. The news came in the form of Apple’s own supplier responsibility report, which is really an attempt to clean up the company image.

The report also found that 50 factories have kept employees past than the maximum 60 hour work week and 24 factories paying below than minimum wage. Some 61% of suppliers follow their safety regulations and only 57% have the required environmental permits. It’s not great news, though obviously the child labor thing is the real kick in the pants.

Though Apple wouldn’t reveal where the infracting factories were located, it did say that the children were no longer employed. Apple is still using the suppliers involved.

Source: Bloomberg

We should be seeing a new iPhone this summer, which makes Apple’s patent filings a whole lot more interesting. There’s one in particular that could make walking and using your phone a whole lot easier. Of course, it could also encourage the one hand on the wheel while the other tries to operate a touchscreen that gets so many drivers into trouble. At any rate, Apple has filed for a patent that would allow a user to navigate the iPhone interface by using gestures over the camera at the back of the phone.

The idea is that swiping one way or the other would allow you to move through voicemails, jump around web pages, skip tracks, and so on. The camera could also be tap sensitive, allowing for easy, one-handed selection in a variety of applications. Since this is all going to be built into the iPhone OS you can bet it would also show up on the iPad, though I can’t say I would find that particularly useful.

The patent is one of those rare useful filings. Since the original date on the filing was Q3 2008, we could assume that the tech would be street ready by the time Apple’s ready to make a new iPhone announcement.

Source: Patently Apple

The day Apple announced the iPad, Amazon was calling newspapers and publishers before Steve Jobs had even left the stage. As the New York Times’ Bits blog has it, Amazon wanted to hear what Apple had offered. Amazon had been trying for more than a month to sign deals with publishers that would give Amazon customers the best prices anywhere, either by matching or beating the prices given to other dealers.

Amazon tried to sweeten the deal by offering publishers bigger revenues than in the past. Unfortunately, Apple was willing to budge on a much larger issue: price. With Apple, publishers had a bit more flexibility than Amazon would give, which in turn gave publishers bargaining power over Amazon. See, Amazon will do just about anything to stay competitive with Apple.

In fairness to Amazon, it’s not like publishers want to upset that distribution channel. Amazon pretty much pioneered the ebook scene – it certainly made ebooks as popular as they were likely to become before some sort of wonder device came along – which leaves publishers keen to cater to the existing subscribers in Amazon’s marketplace until either the iPad gains enough ground or Amazon releases a new reader.

That last point is very important. If Amazon doesn’t release a new reader within the next year or so, it will pigeonhole itself into becoming solely a content provider, a position I wouldn’t think Bezos wants to be in considering he started the Kindle. Rarely would a company of Amazon’s scale introduce a middling product only to do away with it in a couple years.

Source: Bits

Shortly after Apple pulled most of the sexual content from the App Store, developers noticed a new category under the app submission software. It seemed like the perfect solution to the offensive content problem. Just give those apps the explicit label and all will be fine, right? Right, but not yet.

One developer, upon noticing the category’s sudden and mysterious disappearance, called Apple to get the scoop. He says he was told, “it’s not going to happen anytime soon.” It’s a shame, really, because it would solve so many issues with the App Store. Giving explicit apps their own home means the people that don’t want to see them don’t have to, and the rest of the world can enjoy mobile smut. It also relieves Apple of the burden of censorship, no longer requiring a definition of what is appropriate or how much money you’re required to have to publish the inappropriate stuff anyway.

Even if this thing goes live, do you really think Apple is going to let anything more than a side-boob show up in any application other than Safari? No way. If we know anything about Jobs it’s that he likes Apple to have the corner on the porn market.

Source: Cult of Mac

More clues have surfaced that suggest Apple is indeed planning a camera for the iPad. We’ve already seen that there is space in the chassis to host a small camera, now MacRumors says there is software to support video conferencing as well. The latest SDK has accept and decline commands for video chat services.

The specific API threads reveal support for at least testing front-facing cameras, zoom, and an LED flash (as in a camera, not the software). 9to5 Mac also uncovered the following buttons for video chat.

The size of the actual image suggests a screen the width of the iPad’s, so it may not be for the iPhone as well. It could also simply be for internal testing, but my guess is that, as with the iPhone, the later generations of the iPad will be where the magic is at. If anything, I’d bet Apple is waiting on a better video camera to put into the iPad.

This weekend Apple made a sweeping change to its application guidelines, banning any material that could be deemed titillating. Well, not exactly any material, but certainly that of smaller developers. In another sweeping decision that’s rife with ambiguity, Apple has denied and pulled applications from small-name developers whose content was deemed too sexy for the App Store. How do you define too sexy? Pretty much anything that involves showing some skin.

As I mentioned, though, there are exceptions. Sports Illustrated still has its Swimsuit app available and Playboy will reportedly be allowed to keep its content live. This is a surefire way to piss off a lot of people. Some four days after the ban, Phil Schiller finally talked to the New York Times about the bans. “It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see,” he said.

Wait, isn’t that why you guys implemented parental controls? And what of the objectionable material warnings? And what about the fact that anyone wanting to see boobs can still use Safari to get to every porn site on the web? As with previous app decisions, this one reeks of whimsy. Oh, did I ask why Sports Illustrated models and Playmates are somehow less offensive to those women and parents than the girls in the “Beautiful Boobs” app? I bet it’s because they aren’t just the fantasized digital mockups of women with bodies all airbrushed and touched up. These are real women, appearing in real magazines, sticking it to the misogynistic majority by using their vast intelligence to make money with the bodies that have been so objectified in the past. That must be it.

Since the announcement of the iPad, the geek world has been up in arms about Flash. When people aren’t bitching about why the tablet doesn’t have Flash support, they’re giving Apple the once over for including Flash in its marketing materials. There is at least one person outside Apple that doesn’t think Flash is right for the iPad and get this – he’s a Flash developer.

Morgan Adams is a full-time Flash developer who says he’d love to create content for the iPad, but it doesn’t make sense. His main argument focuses on one of the most widely used features in Flash: mouseover. So much of Flash content is controlled and manipulated based on the difference between a click and a mouseover that it just wouldn’t translate to a tablet. The other options for tablet users – gestures, complex clicking, multiple versions of the same site – are either a step backwards or require a lot more programming. Everyone cites video as a major issue for Flash, but video content is easily handled on the iPhone and will only get easier with HTML5.

Be sure to check Adams’ full comments at Roughly Drafted.

If you’ve ever tried to download a podcast or a lot of applications, you know how frustrating that 10MB 3G cap can be on the iPhone. For those who don’t know, any time you try to download something larger than 10MB over a 3G connection, you get a message asking you to connect to a Wi-Fi network before you continue with the download. Along with the changes Apple made to iPhone policies this week, it also doubled the download cap, from 10MB to 20MB.

The change was most likely to accommodate the difference in file size between iPhone and iPad applications. It is nice, though, to be able to pick up some shorter podcasts and whatnot on the go, even if my This American Life downloads tend to be a bit bigger.

The change is effective immediately – I was able to pick up a 15MB app no problem this morning.

An article in the New York Times today suggests Apple may have a little more control over low ebook prices than initially thought. Publishers were turning to Apple and its iPad to save them from the clutches of Amazon and the $9.99 Kindle price point. While Apple does offer more flexible pricing options, it has also made provisions for lowering the prices of the most popular books, back to that $9.99 figure the publishers so hate.

The Times cites “at least three people with knowledge of the discussions,” as the source for the news. It’s not just bestsellers, either. Apple expects publishers to reflect discounted book prices, books sold below the typical $26 hard cover price, in their ebook pricing as well, regardless of bestseller status.

This has to make you wonder what really had the publishers upset with Amazon. Obviously they’re aware of the things Apple laid out in its contract, so what’s the issue? Do they just want some extra income from less popular titles? Are there other Amazon policies that turn publishers away or is it really just a lack of flexibility?

The world has long tried to understand Steve Jobs. There have been several biographies written about him, though none of them were authorized and most have lacked the kind of personal material that make a biography really great. Luckily for all the fanboys (and the haters) Jobs has agreed to an authorized biography.

Jobs struck the deal with former Time Magazine managing editor Walter Isaacson. Isaacson has written two other bestselling biographies on historical figures that show a bit of Jobs’ hubris: Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin. Criticisms aside, the book should be very interesting. Jobs has invited Isaacson on a tour of his childhood home according to the New York Times.

Jobs has never been a fan of those other biographies, either. He’s been known to pull books by those publishers from Apple Store shelves in spite.

Source: New York Times

Rumors have been flying ever since Android launched that Apple will be replacing the search giant’s services on the iPhone. The latest, which seems completely ridiculous for a reason, is that Apple is going to build a search engine. The Business Insider says the biggest reason to keep Google on is that the search provider pays Apple upwards of $100 million a year for the iPhone deal.

For a company like Apple, $100 million isn’t exactly a lot. It’s more like mortgage payment, but it’s enough to keep Apple from entering an already saturated search market. There’s no denying that Google and Apple now have a contentious relationship. As Business Insider has it, it only took two weeks to nail down the original Google Maps deal for the iPhone. When the 3GS launched it took six months.

Source: Business Insider at Gizmodo

Currently if you want to watch a TV show from iTunes you’ll be paying two bucks per show. That’s just the standard def content – high def will run you an extra dollar per episode. Apple may be ready to change that, though, dropping the price of television content to just a dollar per episode with the potential for bundled services down the line.

The news comes courtesy of the Financial Times, which claims that the price change will come at the end of April to coincide with the iPad launch. The pricing shift would include a “best of TV” subscription service for $30/month that would potentially replace your cable bill. Oddly enough, it’s Apple that has left the Apple TV out of the discussion and not the media. Apparently the company is concerned with scaring content providers away from the lower prices once they realize that content could be viewed on full-size television screens.

Source: Gizmodo

In November of last year Apple released a new iTunes feature called iTunes Preview. The service allowed users to preview the music available in the iTunes store without launching or even installing the iTunes software. It was a nice move, long overdue, and it’s now been extended to include iPhone apps.

Basically, any time you click an iTunes link for an app, your browser will redirect to a page that contains the standard iTunes information. You get screenshots from the application along with reviews, pricing, descriptions and ratings. From there you can click to view the app in iTunes and go through your standard download process.

I’m just glad I can’t be fooled into clicking those damn links anymore. It was so infuriating to be on a site and accidentally hit a link on my touchpad only to have iTunes blow up and start loading the app store.

During News Corp’s quarterly earnings conference call, Rupert Murdoch finally revealed his true feelings about the deal between HarperCollins, which News Corp owns, and Amazon for ebooks in the Kindle Store. “We don’t like the Amazon model of $9.99….we think it really devalues books and hurts all the retailers of hardcover books.”

That pretty much says it all. Now that the company has an option coming with the iPad, it no longer needs to succumb to Amazon’s demands. Things are just the opposite, in fact, thanks to flexible pricing options from Apple. The competition is forcing Amazon to renegotiate prices with publishers for fear of losing market share or publisher support altogether.

It’s tough to say that increased ebook prices actually preserves the value of the book, particularly after prices have been so low. Fortunately for publishers, the ebook reading population was small enough that the rest of the world might not know to care about the difference.