Here are your daily Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) news items and rumors for Wednesday:
And So Ends Exclusivity: The original agreement that kept the iPhone exclusive to AT&T’s (NYSE:T) network in the U.S. expired at the beginning of 2010, fueling 12 months of rampant speculation as to when Apple’s smartphone would finally make the jump to other carriers. Now that the mystery of when and how the iPhone would come to Verizon (NYSE:VZ) has been solved, mobile industry followers have been wondering when Apple would reveal what its future with AT&T will look like. On Tuesday’s earnings call, Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook said his company has signed a “multi-year non-exclusive deal” with AT&T, precisely the same words the executive used to describe his company’s deal with Verizon last week. Cook did not, however, give any hints as to whether or not Apple would continue to produce multiple models of the iPhone to accommodate AT&T and Verizon’s disparate 3G network technologies. As to whether the new CDMA iPhone headed for Verizon would be coming to other international carriers, Cook said Apple is “always looking at opportunities to grow,” but failing to provide specifics.
Playboy, As You Know It: Apple will begin allowing adult content on the Apple App Store this spring when Playboy (NYSE:PLA) begins selling full, uncensored issues for download on the iPad. Playboy Chairman Hugh Hefner announced via Twitter that both new and archival issues of Playboy will be made available for download on the tablet PC in March. Playboy already had a Playboy App in the App Store, but the app has limited content and no nudity. The timeframe for the release of an iPad edition of Playboy coincides with the suspected release window for the new News Corp. and Apple iPad newspaper The Daily, as well as the new subscription payment model for digital periodicals in the App Store.
Video Games Drive Handheld Apps: Downloadable software for Apple’s iOS-platform handheld devices is big business these days, but no one type of software is bigger on the platform than video games. Apple said Monday that its App Store had now totaled 10 billion downloads, with the company also releasing a list of the store’s best-selling apps since it opened for business in 2008. In the U.S., nine out of the 10 best-selling paid apps on the iPhone and iPod Touch are gaming apps. The list is dominated by familiar titles by independent studios such as Rovio’s Angry Birds and Zynga’s Bejeweled Blitz. On the iPad, which was released in April of 2010, only 4 out of the 10 best-selling iPad apps are games. The 10 best-selling free apps meanwhile are predominantly functionality and service applications, with just one game on that list.
Too Good to Be True: Amid the rumors swirling around the second-generation iPad’s features have been claims that the new tablet PC would have a vastly improved touch screen display. The speculation is that the new screen would be a Retina Display like the kind in Apple’s iPhone 4, with a 2048 X 1536 resolution that’s four times that of the existing iPad screen. John Gruber of Daring Fireball wrote on Wednesday that rumors of an iPad screen with such a resolution are “too good to be true,” and that the iPad’s screen would likely see smaller improvements such as improved brightness with less battery consumption. Gruber said that high-resolution images included in the recently updated iBooks iPad application, which fueled the iPad 2 screen rumors, were likely included by an Apple interface designer who was “thinking ahead.”
As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here.
