Here are your Apple news items and rumors for Tuesday:
TouchPad Resurrection: Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) announced on Aug. 19 that it was bowing out of the portables game, discontinuing its efforts to compete with the iPad not even two months after releasing its own TouchPad tablet to the market. According to a Tuesday Reuters report (via 9 to 5 Mac), the head of HP’s PC division believes the TouchPad might not be dead at all, but merely resting. Todd Bradley said, “Tablet computing is a segment of the market that’s relevant” and that the rumored sale of HP’s consumer PC business to a competitor is “not a desirable alternative.” Could the sellouts of $99 TouchPads have turned around HP’s approach to the market?
Sprint Sets a Date: Word on the street is that all the major telecom players in the U.S. will support Apple’s iPhone come fall. Good news for T-Mobile USA and especially Sprint (NYSE:S), whose role as a competitor for Verizon (NYSE:VZ) and AT&T (NYSE:T) diminishes with each passing quarter. Previous reports have hinted that Apple will host an event at the end of September to show off the new iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S — new high-end and cheaper models of the smartphone, respectively — with a release to follow in October. A Tuesday report at The Wall Street Journal (via Apple Insider) supports this prospective schedule. The report said Sprint will hold a “Strategy Update” presentation on Oct. 7 with presentations from senior management and a Q&A session.
iTunes Match Sees iCloud Brewing: Apple began public testing of one of its numerous iCloud services on Monday night, according to TUAW. iTunes Match lets iTunes users store their entire hard drive-bound music library on Apple’s servers. They then can access those songs on any connected Apple device regardless of how much memory it has, meaning iPhone users that have filled up their memory with Angry Birds downloads no longer have to worry about how they’re going to listen to their complete Peter Frampton collection at the same time. The service is similar to the CloudPlayer “music locker” opened by Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) earlier this year. iTunes Match officially will open for business later this fall and will cost $24.99 per year.
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.
