IPhone Price cut

As the holiday shopping season coming in, Apple has cut the price of its most hyped gadget of the year IPhone, which was launched 2 months back.

Is it Price Cut???

Yes, you read it right!!!!!

Now you will get an 8GB IPhone at $399 instead of $599. But this is was not all, Apple had to face the heat of this price cut from the early buyers of its most hyped IPhone. Soon after this news was announced, Apple’s shares went down by 5 percent, but slowly bounced up by the end of the day.


Jobs’ Say on Price Cut

Apple CEO Steve Jobs said at his company’s website that Apple disappointed some of its customers by cutting the price of IPhone 8GB model. He apologized to all his customers and announced to offered a credit of $100 to all those loyal customers. Many customers took IPhone price cut as an opportunity and rushed to their local stores. However Ryan Roth who bought IPhone at $599 on Friday chalked up his purchase,“the worst timing ever”. He has been waiting to purchase a cell phone from last four years and after researching, he purchased IPhone, but he get some relief when Apple’s spokeswoman Natalie Kerris announced that the customers who has purchased IPhone within last 14days and have a receipt can get a full refund under Apple’s return policy. Provided they haven’t opened the product, if they have opened it, then also they would get the refund but with some price difference.

Latest from Apple

The 4GB model has been discontinued, Apple also launched a bunch of IPods last Wednesday which includes a 16GB IPod at an estimated cost of $399 using which, user will be able to connect to web wirelessly and purchase songs on the go at Starbucks from early October starting with NY city. As per this partnership, the coffee chain’s icon will light up on the touch whenever a user is near a shop that has Wi-Fi access. The new IPod also incorporates a touch screen which IPhone presently has, it also has an added advantage of downloading songs from ITunes and Wi-Fi stores. Apple also announced that they are on track of selling 1 million IPhone in United States by the end of September.
Rumors

There are speculations in consumer electronics market that this price cut is probably due to a newer versions of Apple’s IPhone to be launched later this year. The new IPhone would have all the fixes to the bugs which exist in the present model. It would come with a removable battery, as it is difficult to remove the battery in the present model. It would also have an improved screen. Seeing this, Microsoft cut the price of its Zune digital music player by $50 to $199. However this was not officially announced by Microsoft, as it was written on Zune insider blog run by one of its employee’s. The software giant met its target of selling more than 1 million units before the end of June.


With Apple II in 1970 and after reinventing the personal computer in 1980 named Macintosh. Apple is a leader in consumer electronics market. The innovative products such as IPod, now the mobile product such as IPhone, the award winning computers, OS X operating systems and other professional applications has already proved Apple’s ability in today’s competing market. Apple has managed to sell more than 110 million IPods since they debuted in 2001.

Mega Outage for Skype

Skype, the most popular internet telephony and instant messaging service had to face outage in its service. This became a massive outage as Skype currently has 220 million registered users. As this is a free service, the count is massive. But for some small business organizations, Skype was the lifeline to communicate. These customers had to face a huge loss due to this outage.


The Skype network went down on Thursday 16th Aug. It was down the whole day on 16th then on Friday midnight (GMT) officials provided an update that the problem of logging into Skype is resolved. But still there were many things to do, the Chat engine was not working and also the problem was not fully resolved.

Meanwhile, there were rumours that Skype system was crashed or it has been hacked. There were also rumours that Skype outage was due to the recent update in its software. But both E-Bay and Skype declared this news as un-official and false. Skype, which was founded by Niklas and Janus was taken over by E-Bay in October 2005 for $2.1 Billion. It used peer to peer technology to communicate over Internet Protocol. The client is supported on almost every operating system available today. The best thing is that, it offers calling over VOIP for free. This is the major reason for its popularity. There was also a record that Skype had more than 9 million users at one point of time.



Check Skype HeartBeat for the full story.

Microsoft to increase the storage limit of Windows Live Hotmail

Very soon, Microsoft will increase the storage limit of its recently upgraded Windows live hotmail from present 2GB to 5GB. This was declared in public earlier this week by Ellie on his website. By this storage upgrade, Microsoft will lead the race with Google which is offering 2.8GB of storage space. Early this week, Google has also announced paid storage of about $20 for an additional 6GB. However the paid storage service of Microsoft remains same at $15 for additional 10GB. It looks like Microsoft has surpassed Google in the race of online free storage space, both in terms of capacity and cost. Google is on its way of increasing its storage space every day, whereas Yahoo users are enjoying its un-limited free storage which Yahoo has upgraded in March this year. The storage will be rolled out to all the hotmail customers over the next few weeks. Apart from the storage up gradation, Microsoft is also concentrating on the speed issue. Speed matters for the entire web based e-mail access solutions, as you all know that we-mail will be slower when compared to the mails which we access in our office.


Also, the new Windows live Skydrive was made public as a beta preview earlier this month, with a free storage capacity of 500MB. Users can store documents as well as image files in this drive. This works same like the Gmail drive offered by Google, users can just drag and drop files in another drive displayed in windows explorer. Microsoft describes this drive as the personal hard drive on internet.


Read the complete review of the upcoming updates for live hotmail on Ellie’s Web site. Ellie Powers-Boyle is a Program manager at Microsoft for windows live hotmail project. See the complete report here

I think now it is Google's turn to show off their smartness. This is a never ending race between the two competitors.

Google Is Entering WiMax

Very soon US users will be going WiMax with Sprint, the 3rd largest service provider there and they have chosen Google to provide the search, email and instant messenger services to its subscribers. To access these Google’s services, Sprit will be hosting the portal through which the users will be able to access their favorite Google service. Sprint will initiate testing this service in Washington DC, Chicago areas by the end of 2007. WiMax is expected to be ready by mid 2008 and users will be able to use it through the embedded devices specially designed for this purpose. Subscribers of this service will be able to access WiMax on their laptops, desktops and even their PDA’s or cell phones.


There is also news that Sprint is building this network along with another provider named Clearwire. Both these service providers will be building their respective network and will be enabling roaming between their frequencies. But like every time, Sprint will be the major player in this role. It will be making this service available to 185 million people where as Clearwire is expected to be some where nearly 115 million people.



Last month, Google has also declared that it will be bidding the Auction by FCC and if all the rules by FCC are in favor of Google, it is ready to bid a big amount up to $4.6 Billion. If it is so, that no one can stop Google from expanding it services in an un-imaginable way. FCC will auction its 700MHz spectrum to different service providers. Google is interested in open access demands, as they like to spread their services. I think, Google is the only company which is thinking to serve people free of cost. If this auction is won by service providers like AT&T or Telco, they will be selling this to us as a customers to use our cell phones. Imagine, if this auction is won by Google, we can soon imagine internet access at $2 a month with un-limited access and that too without any ads.

I am really looking ahead to see Google as the winner.

Attention IPhone Owners

Your Iphone can be hacked very easily.

Surprised!!!

Not to be, as this is the first time in the history of Apple that its device can be hacked. Yes it is true. The IPhone which you have owned can be hacked when a malicious code is injected into it when you browse a web site.





Though Apple decided to provide third party applications to run as a widget, it is easy for the bad guy to take total control of your phone.

Charlie Miller, Principle security analyst at Independent Security Evaluators says that IPhone and other Apple products can be hacked very easily. The hijacked IPhone can be used to send Span messages. There is also report that the operating system of this device can also be crashed. ISE and its team recommend all the Iphone users, to visit sites which they trust.

This flaw applies to the Safari browser which comes as a default browser for IPhone as well as Macintosh based Apple computers.

But one good thing in Apple devices is that , they are designed in such a way that they can autaomatically update themselves when ever a patch is released by Apple. I think Apple would be working on this and would soon release some path to over come this vulnerability. Next month, there is a conference by ISE team on internet, I am sure, that Apple will come up with a solution to overcome this hurdle.