The iPhone is finally coming to the world’s most wired country. South Korean regulators on Wednesday cleared the iPhone for sale. Great news for Apple. The South Korean market is a robust one, and analysts say that with the right carrier partner, Cupertino could be looking at first-year sales ranging from 500,000 to two million.
If the netbook market is a race to the bottom, then Sony is bringing up the rear. Not a year after Sony execs disparaged netbooks as undeserving of its premium brand attention, the company announced its token entry into the market: the Vaio W.
Here’s an interesting metric: Apple’s Web site last month drew more than 55.7 million unique visitors, more than the site of any other computer hardware manufacturer, according to a report released this week by Nielsen Online. The number of visitors was more than double that of Hewlett-Packard, which drew 21.9 million people, and triple Dell’s, which drew 16.8 million.
If Macworld isn’t on its last legs after Apple’s withdrawal from the event, the Consumer Electronics Association is clearly hoping the annual Apple-only convention soon will be. The group, which hosts the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas every January, said Thursday that it is expanding the amount of show floor space dedicated to Apple.
Repudiating claims that Blockbuster intended to file for bankruptcy earlier this month, spokesperson Karen Raskopf said the troubled video rental chain has “lots of plans to grow our business.” If inking a video-on-demand deal with a declining DVR pioneer is one of them… well, that’s not much of a plan, is it?
Palm’s long-suffering investors are today basking in the company’s “new-ness”–specifically, a stock that’s continuing the big rally it began last week after the announcement of the Palm Pre handset and Web OS. As I write this, Palm is trading at $6.10–up an astonishing 85 percent since its big announcement. And it seems destined to go higher still, given the enthusiastic reception analysts have given it.
Since 2005, the South Korean government has required all cellphones sold in the country to support WIPI (Wireless Internet Platform for Interoperability), the country’s cellular middleware platform. And for Apple, as well as other handset manufacturers like Nokia and Sony Ericsson, redesigning their devices to do so is a costly proposition. So costly, in fact, that they didn’t bother, leaving the country’s handset market to Samsung and LG, which now dominate it.
On April 1, 2009, that will all change.
If a global manufacturer of computer hardware like Belkin’s not exhibiting at CES, who is? I posed that question jokingly earlier this morning, but turns out there’s a very real and ugly answer to it: Not Seagate. Not Logitech. Not Cisco. Not Philips. Not Yahoo. And not Sanyo, either.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
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