Here are your Apple rumors and news items for Friday:
Paid Support: Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs will debut the iCloud music service on Monday, letting Apple iTunes customers stream purchased music (and eventually videos) from servers rather than by downloading them onto their own computers or iPhones. This streaming service has been rumored since 2009. What’s been holding it up? One issue has been reticence by major record labels like Comcast’s (NASDAQ:CMCSA) Universal Music, EMI, Sony (NYSE:SNE) and others to sign new deals that will, in their eyes, devalue their intellectual properties. These companies were furious when Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) opened its CloudPlayer service (presumed to be quite similar to iCloud) earlier this year. A Friday report in the New York Post claims that Apple has had to shell out $150 million in advance payments to four major record labels to gain their support for the new service. If iCloud is able to keep Apple’s iTunes business growing, that’s a small price to pay.
Android’s Destiny: Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE) CEO Shantau Narayen spoke with Walt Mossberg at All Things Digital’s D event on Thursday, shedding new light on his company’s feud with Apple and making a prediction as to where the tablet market is headed. Narayen said, “What you saw with smartphones hitting an inflection point with Android, you’ll see it again with tablets.” He then highlighted Research in Motion‘s (NASDAQ:RIMM) Playbook and Hewlett-Packard‘s (NASDAQ:HPQ) Touchpad as tablets that will drive the tablet market away from the iPad. Android phones outsold iPhones for the first time in July 2010, almost two years after Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) released the platform. On that timeline, Android tablets should begin outselling the iPad by fall 2012, two years after Samsung released the first Android tablet, the Galaxy Tab.
iPhone Predictions: It seems no two analysts agree when Apple will deliver the next iPhone update. A report Thursday on Barron’s said Hudson Square analyst Todd Rethemeier predicts Apple will indeed deliver a new iPhone this fall. More shocking, however, is Rethemeier’s claim that the new iPhone will only be compatible with AT&T‘s (NYSE:T) current 4G network in the U.S., rather than a similar network that both and Verizon (NYSE:VZ) are still developing. This contradicts recent evidence that Apple was preparing an iPhone with broader compatability — a recent Marketwatch report said that Apple had agreed with China Mobile (NYSE:CHL) to produce an iPhone for that company’s network, which would pave the way for AT&T and Verizon’s coming networks.
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.
