Here are your Apple rumors and news items for Thursday:
Monopoly Muck: Research In Motion’s (NASDAQ:RIMM) debut tablet PC, the BlackBerry PlayBook, has been a long time coming. Announced last October, it was expected out by the end of 2010, but the PlayBook will finally hit shelves in about two weeks, well after Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) released its own new tablet, the iPad 2. According to a Thursday report from DigiTimes, though, the two tablets should have been out at the same time, but Apple’s control of the supply chain delayed the PlayBook’s release. Touch-panel makers told the Taiwanese paper that Apple had “booked up most of the available capacity” of the pressure sensitive displays used in both the iPad and PlayBook. However, the monthlong gap between the iPad 2 and RIM’s device can only help PlayBook in the long run; going head to head with Apple, which may have sold 2.5 million iPads in March, would have guaranteed that PlayBooks would’ve been on clearance by June.
Button, Button: A new Apple patent discovered by AppleInsider shows off designs for future iPad and iPhone models that would see a number of secondary buttons added to the black “bezel” that surrounds the touch display on both models. The new design, described in “Electronic Devices with a Primary Display and a Secondary Display,” would make the bezel touch sensitive as well, with small portions devoted to navigation tasks, freeing up more of the touch display from a user’s hands. These “buttons” would be marked by a “printed segmented electroluminescence display,” or in layman’s terms, big glowing words. The display would also be customizable. Previous rumors about the iPhone 5 have suggested that its screen would extend over the entire face of the phone. It’s possible this technology would fit that description.
Android’s Ascent: Research firm IDC recently predicted that Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android operating system would control 45% of the mobile market by 2015, growing by 5.5% over the next four years. On Thursday, Gartner projected that Android would actually control 49% of the mobile market by 2015, growing at a rate double that of IDC’s projections. Gartner’s report, reprinted at Electronista on Thursday, expects Google to sell 593.3 million Android phones by the middle of the decade. Apple’s share of the market meanwhile will sink to 17% by the same period, opting to keep its profit margins high rather than aim for total market domination.
As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here. Follow him on Twitter at @ajohnagnello and become a fan of InvestorPlace on Facebook.
