Apple

Watch out Safari. There's a new browser looking for a spot on the iPhone.

Norway-based Opera announced Wednesday that it will unveil its new Opera Mini 5 browser for the iPhone at next week's 2010 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The developer of the desktop Opera Web browser is touting Opera Mini as faster than Apple's Safari, thanks to its use of compression. Opera said it compresses pages by up to 90 percent before they're sent to the mobile device.

Opera Mini 5 will also offer such features as tabbed browsing, a password manager, and Speed … Read more

Apple released on Tuesday the next generation of its professional photography workflow software, Aperture 3. Among more than 200 new features is the addition of face recognition and GPS location for photos.

Faces and Places are popular features introduced with the consumer-oriented iPhoto '09, but it didn't take long before Aperture users wanted the same functionality in the professional software too. While the basics are the same, Kirk Paulsen, Apple's senior director of photo apps product marketing, said the features have been enhanced for Aperture.

Paulsen told CNET that Apple took the Faces feature and applied it to … Read more

Mozilla wants its Firefox browser to drop support for Mac OS X 10.4--the operating system also known as Tiger that was released in 2005--but the plan is running into some resistance.

If support is indeed removed, then Firefox 3.6--the current version of the browser--would be the last one to support Mac OS X 10.4, although Mozilla would still issue updates for several months after the succeeding version of Firefox is released.

"We would like to take advantage of more modern technologies on Mac OS X, and 10.4 support has been a hindrance," Josh … Read more

The iPad's lower-than-expected price may go lower still if the device doesn't perform as well at market as Apple hopes. Recounting his recent meeting with some executives from the company in a research note issued last night, Credit Suisse analyst Bill Shope said Apple is evidently quite willing to get even more aggressive with the iPad's $499 to $829 pricing.

"While it remains to be seen how much traction the iPad gets initially, management noted that it will remain nimble (pricing could change if the company is not attracting as many customers as anticipated)," Shope … Read more

Adobe Systems, evidently stung by recent criticisms of its widely used Flash Player browser plug-in, has promised better performance on Mac systems.

"Given identical hardware, Flash Player on Windows has historically been faster than the Mac, and it is for the most part the same code running in Flash for each operating system," said Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch in a follow-up comment to his own blog post. But Adobe and Apple have been cooperating to make things better, he said. "In Flash Player 10.1 we are moving to Core Animation, which will further reduce … Read more

Google has made YouTube available over IPv6 in an effort to encourage more use of the next-generation and more capacious Internet addressing system.

The transition from the current Internet Protocol version 4 has been slow and difficult for the computing industry. But Google has been gradually making its services available over IPv6, including search in March 2008, to those with sufficiently reliable connections.

"The service most requested to have IPv6 support has unquestionably been YouTube," said Lorenzo Colitti and Steinar H. Gunderson, Google IPv6 network experts, in a blog post Friday. "Given all of this, we're … Read more

I know that so many of you have been a little undecided on this important subject, so this seriously significant information may be enough to sway you as to your own deeply conflicted feelings.

The majority of your fellow humans are not interested in owning an iPad.

No, I haven't been pounding the streets and screens of this world in order to ask everyone still living and breathing after the iPad launch announcement. Instead, I have lucked upon an article in Computerworld, which tells me of some survey work performed by online comparison shopping helper Retrevo.

Retrevo possibly performed … Read more

Although Apple's iPad has yet to hit the market, the Federal Communications Commission has expressed concern over its potential impact on AT&T's 3G network.

Without naming AT&T, which has secured a carrier deal for the tablet device, Phil Bellaria, director of scenario planning, and John Leibovitz, deputy chief of the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, outlined their concerns in an FCC blog post Monday:

With the iPad pointing to even greater demand for mobile broadband on the horizon, we must ensure that network congestion doesn't choke off a service that consumers clearly find so appealing, … Read more

Market research firm IDC on Thursday reported a record level of smartphone shipments for the fourth quarter of 2009, when vendors shipped 54.4 million devices. That's up 39 percent from the same quarter a year ago, the company said.

The handset company with the largest growth in 2009 was Apple. Apple's unit shipments for the year were 25.1 million, up from 13.8 million units in 2008. The company's market share rose from 9.1 percent in 2008 to 14.4 percent in 2009, an 81.9 percent year-over-year increase.

That represents the largest year-over-year … Read more