Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Oh, Snow Leopard Frees Up Disk Space All Right
Apple has finally acknowledged that a bug in its new Snow Leopard operating system can, on rare occasions, result in a catastrophic loss of data. The glitch, which first surfaced in support forums in early September, is triggered by logging in and out of a guest account and wipes the main user account of all data. Clearly, this is not what Apple meant when it claimed the OS would free up as much as seven gigs of space upon installation.
Some 740 billion text messages were sent in the first half of 2009 in the U.S. This according to the CTIA’s semiannual wireless industry survey, which helpfully breaks down that astonishing figure to an even more astonishing 4.1 billion texts per day. That’s about double the number sent during the same period last year. 
A complete reversal of its earlier policy restricting Internet telephone services to Wi-Fi only, AT&T’s decision to allow iPhone owners to use such services on its 3G network has gone over well with consumers and with Apple. But it hasn’t gone over well with AT&T investors. Shares in the company slipped on news of the decision yesterday and they’re falling still further today.
Development for Palm’s new webOS platform will begin in earnest come winter with the official opening of the company’s developer program. At a small gathering in San Francisco Monday night, Palm said its developer program will open in December and when it does, it will be a different beast entirely from rival programs by Apple, Google et al.
As launch dates go, the timing could not be better. Less than a week after Google’s Gmail suffered its fourth service disruption this year, IBM announced a competing Web mail service intended to undercut it. Called LotusLive iNotes, it’s an email, calendaring, and contact management system aimed squarely at the enterprise space Google has been so diligently courting.
Now this is just getting silly. Pali Research says sales of the Palm Pre are slowing. RBC’s Mike Abramsky says they aren’t and claims 325,000 to 375,000 have been sold to date, ahead of his expectations. Jesup and Lamont analyst Kevin Dede says the device is plagued by high exchange/return rates of potentially 40 percent. Abramsky says it’s more likely between two and three percent. Who’s right? Who cares?
“We will enter Asia with the iPhone in 2008,” Apple COO Tim Cook declared in March 2008. “And we will one day enter China, we’re not saying when.” How’s September of 2009 sound? Because China Business Network claims that China Unicom and Apple have finally inked a deal that will bring the iPhone to the country around that time.
So Google has finally copped to developing an operating system–Chrome OS, a software platform “created for people who spend most of their time on the Web, and…designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.” It is an extraordinary market play. And an unsettling one. For it seeks to place Google, which already collects vast amounts of data about our Internet use, at the very center of our information experience. The privacy implications of that are, of course, horrendous. 
A week after launching Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook with great swagger and pomp, Google is taking heat for unwittingly disabling one of the mail client’s key functions. Seems the service, which allows enterprise to use Outlook without shouldering the costs of running an Exchange server, doesn’t play well with Windows Desktop Search.
Hard to believe, but social networking has eclipsed email in popularity. The latest Nielsen survey found that 66.8 percent of the global online population spends time at “Member Communities”–a category that includes both blogs and social networks. That makes social networking about two percent more popular than email.
