Samsung’s Ad for Galaxy Note Pokes Fun at Apple Again

It’s got a pen!?

Seriously, who says that?

Apple Passes LG to Become World’s Third Largest Mobile Phone Manufacturer

Research firm IDC today released its estimates of global mobile phone sales for the fourth quarter of and full-year 2011, finding Apple moving past LG to claim third place in the rankings for the first time. Apple was rapidly closing on LG by mid-2010, but fell back into fifth place behind ZTE during the third quarter as customers held off in anticipation of new iPhone hardware. The strong surge from the iPhone 4S launch was then enough for Apple to move up in the year’s final quarter and by a large enough margin that it was able pass LG in full-year numbers as well.

Apple updates Final Cut Pro X with multicam, broadcast monitoring

Perhaps the biggest new feature in Final Cut Pro X is the addition of Multicam editing. Typical of Apple when adding a new feature, the company didn’t just think about how to add the functionality, they thought about how to do it better than before.

Apple has received a lot of flak when they released FCP X on the Mac App Store, with people saying that it was no longer a “Pro” app and lacked many of the features one needs in the professional industry. Apple just released an update to the app that brings three of the most requested features.

It’s interesting to note that Apple isn’t playing the version numbers game — this update was 10.0.3.

Apple Q1 2012 Results: Holy Shit

Apple has just posted their Q1 2012 financial results. The company posted record-breaking revenue of $46.33 billion, with 15.43 million iPads, 37.04 million iPhones and 5.2 million Macs sold. Apple sold 15.4 million iPods, a 21 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter. The company posted quarterly net profit of $13.06 billion, or $13.87 per diluted share. iPhone represented a 128 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter, while iPad reported a 111 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter.

Apple has almost $100 billion in cash.

A Fascinating Cricket Scorecard

This 3-day text match, allegedly played in the 1964/65 season between Pakistan Railways and Dera Ismail Khan teams has, without a doubt, the most fascinating scorecards I’ve ever come across.

Wed, 2 Dec – day 1 – Pakistan Railways 1st innings 415/2
Thu, 3 Dec – day 2 – Pakistan Railways 1st innings 825/6
Fri, 4 Dec – day 3 – Dera Ismail Khan 2nd innings 27 (12.3 ov) – end of match

Acer’s AcerCloud

Acer just showed off its AcerCloud service, something that already sounded suspiciously like Apple’s iCloud. Even the “PicStream” element sounds a lot like Photo Stream. Still not convinced? Acer basically ripped off Apple’s slide wholesale, outside of the font, which is a simulacrum of Apple’s font of yore.

Acer’s biggest announcement at CES was (discreetly) that they’re now Samsung.

With the launch of iOS 5, Apple introduced a very nifty feature called Newsstand. Here’s how the company describes this feature:

iOS 5 organizes your magazine and newspaper app subscriptions in Newsstand: a folder that lets you access your favorite publications quickly and easily. There’s also a new place on the App Store just for newspaper and magazine subscriptions. And you can get to it straight from Newsstand. New purchases go directly to your Newsstand folder. Then, as new issues become available, Newsstand automatically updates them in the background — complete with the latest covers. It’s kind of like having the paper delivered to your front door. Only better.

It’s a fantastic feature, specially on the iPad since the device is great for laid back reading. A number of newspaper & magazine publishers have jumped on the bandwagon and now offer their publications via Newsstand. So I was happy to see some of India’s leading magazines in the Store. You’ll find magazines like India Today, Gadgets and Gizmos, Business Today, Filmfare, Femina, Outlook, Bike India & Car India, etc.

This weekend, I decided to spend some time exploring them on the App Store. All the magazine publications I’ve listed above are offered through a digital solutions company called Magzter Inc. Magzter offers publishers a platform solution through which they can offer their magazines in digital form across iOS, Android, Web & Amazon markets. Unfortunately, this also means that you get the same boring experience across all of them. The magazines are all just digital replicas of their print counterparts, i.e they are not customizes for the tablet reading experience. Each magazine consists of individual pages that I’m guessing are single PNG images put together in a bundle. There are a few exceptions, though. At times, you’ll find embedded video on the cover page, like the current issue of India Today magazine.

Moreover, the option to preview these magazines before purchasing them is pretty much useless. Unlike magazines like NatGeo where you are offered an entire previous issue for download for free, Magzter’s solution lets you “preview” 6 pages of the current issue. If that sounds like a good idea, it’s not. Unfortunately, of these six pages that you can preview, the first page is always the cover-page, followed by 3-4 advertising pages and then a page that’s usually the Editor’s Speak.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the whole idea of a preview to increase my interest in buying the app? Isn’t a preview supposed to tell me what I can look forward to reading in the magazine? If 50% of you preview is filled with ads I probably have no interest in, there’s a high chance I’ll just skip over to the next magazine or just NOT buy it at all.

Now, I’m not sure if it’s the publishers who are uploading these pages or it’s Magzter’s solution. I have reached out to Magzter about a clarification and will update this when I receive a response. In any case, it’s just sad that even though the tablet is supposed to offer a much better reading experience than the traditional print media, our publications are still stuck in the old days.

Schools will Mint Rs. 1200 Cr selling Nursery Forms, says Study

Leading public schools in Delhi are likely to earn a revenue of over Rs 1,200 crore through sale of nursery admission forms this year, as against nearly Rs 1,000 crore in the previous year.

The report stated that parents do not wish to limit their options and, therefore, apply to almost 30 schools on an average, shelling out nearly Rs 20,000 in the process.

That is an insane amount of money being shelled out just to stand in the race for getting admissions. That’s about US$227,855,311 just by selling admission forms for the nursery level. Wow!

The Dearth of Android Software Updates

John Gruber on the death of Android Software Updates:

[…] it’s the difference between a company that simply wants to sell you a device, and a company that wants to sell you a device and make you happy that you bought it. Making a sale versus fostering a relationship between customer and the company.

No cookies for guessing which company he’s talking about here.