Here are your Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) news items and rumors for Wednesday:
Two Percent: A new study from Net Applications paints a compelling picture of Apple mobile-platform penetration in the global market. The company’s iOS handheld devices, including the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch media player were the source of 2.1% of all Web browsing in the world during January — the first time the Mobile Safari browser has broken 2%. The report also revealed that Apple portables accounted for nearly 10% of all Web browsing in Singapore, and more than 5% in both the U.K. and Australia. In the U.S., Apple-connected devices made up more than 3% of all Web browsing last month.
Fighting The Daily: News Corp. (NYSE:NWS) and Apple’s new iPad-exclusive newspaper The Daily will be shown to the public for the first time on Wednesday. Other publishers, meanwhile, are pumping up their own alternatives for the tablet. Tech Crunch reported tuesday that New York Times (NYSE:NYT) has teamed with Betaworks to create a social news software application called News.me. Rather than create exclusive content for a devoted tablet publication like The Daily, News.me will be a news aggregator pulling story links from Twitter and link-sharing website Bit.ly. The service is still in the development phase but its core design and layout are already finished.
Three-Way Tie: A new Nielsen survey shows that more than one-third of Americans have made the switch to smartphones. After a year of fierce competition, the three major operating system competitors appear to be neck and neck in the U.S. Based on operating system penetration, Nielsen says Apple’s iPhone has a 28% share of the U.S. smartphone market, while Research In Motion’s (NASDAQ:RIMM) BlackBerry and Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android each control a 27% share. Of the three, however, only Android has shown significant growth in adoption over the past year, its rate of new users growing by 30% since December 2009. Apple’s iOS and BlackBerry adoption fell year-on-year however, by 5% and 12%, respectively.
Verizon iPhone Preorders Begin: Apple and Verizon (NYSE:VZ) have told customers they can begin ordering iPhone on Thursday, one week ahead of its Feb. 10 release by Verizon. The companies said orders will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis “due to high demand.” Wall Street analysts are divided on how many new iPhone customers the new device will bring to Apple, as well as how many new subscribers could join Verizon’s network. William Power of RW Baird told the Wall Street Journal last Thursday that, under the right conditions, the Verizon iPhone could possibly grow the iPhone user base by 25 million. If that’s the case, Apple probably won’t be able to fulfill all those preorders.
At the time of publication, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here.
