Here are your Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) news items and rumors for Thursday: a new Playstation device borrows from the iPhone, the iPad2 may see some changes, Palm’s CEO denies imitating Apple, and new iPad technology recalls Kinect.
New PSP May Borrow From iPhone: When Apple’s App Store first opened in 2008, video game industry analysts predicted that the iPod Touch and iPhone wouldn’t make a significant impact as gaming devices anytime soon. Two years later, gaming applications on Apple’s iOS platforms have become huge business, with some analysts like Wedbush Morgan’s Michael Pacther claiming that declining sales of devoted portable gaming machines, namely Nintendo’s (PINK: NTDOY) ubiquitous Nintendo DS, are being “cannibalized” by the iPod Touch and iPhone’s momentum.
It’s no wonder then that the perpetual runner-up in the portable games market, Sony’s (NYSE:SNE) Playstation Portable, will design cues from Apple’s hardware. Sony Computer Entertainment President Kazuo Hirai hinted to The New York Times in an article published Wednesday that the Playstation Portable 2, heavily rumored to be introduced at the end of 2011, would be incorporating an iPod Touch-style touchscreen.
iPad 2 Already Gets Update: Japanese blog MacOtakara published several rumors regarding the design of Apple’s second-generation iPad late Wednesday. Citing an “anonymous Chinese source,” the article described the iPad 2 as 3 millimeters smaller than the current tablet, although it will maintain the same screen size. The new version, expected by many industry observers to debut next spring, also will have a new back panel that shares the same flat design as the iPod Touch, rather than the curved back of existing models.
The blog went on to say that the iPad would sport a “large wide-ranged speaker unit covered in metal mesh” at the bottom of the device, not dissimilar to current models of iPod Touch. The news of a speaker addition supports allegedly leaked iPad 2 case designs that appeared in an article at iLounge earlier this month.
Palm Denies Apple’s Influence: Jon Rubinstein, one of the engineers who helped create the iPod and is now CEO of Hewlett-Packard’s (NASDAQ:HPQ) Palm unit, has backtracked since insisting he had never used an iPhone. In an interview with Kara Swisher of All Things D, Rubinstein discussed Palm and H-P’s new webOS mobile operating system, taking stabs at both Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Apple. Rubinstein said that though he has used an iPhone, he intentionally never used one “as his own device” to keep his design for Palm’s webOS “a blank sheet of paper, from the ground up.” Rubinstein added that his company’s product is superior to other mobile operating systems because those are Apple iOS platform imitators, calling out Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Phone 7, Google’s Android, and Research In Motion’s (NASDAQ:RIMM) BlackBerry OS.
iPad Gets Kinect-like Feature: Norwegian tech firm Elliptic Labs will be demonstrating new technology for the iPad at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next month, and their product strongly recalls the Kinect, Microsoft’s new hands-free motion controller for the Xbox 360. According to report published by Mobile Magazine on Tuesday, Elliptic’s new iPad dock acts as an interface that uses ultrasound to create a one-foot field around the tablet, allowing users to control the hardware by flicking their hands in the air. Earlier this December, patent assignments owned by Apple that described similar hands-free gestural control for Apple devices were made public, implying that the Cupertino, Calif., company has great interest in the technology.
As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here.
