Apple’s iOS platform seemed to come out of nowhere and take the world by storm in 2007. The introduction of the first-generation iPhone set in motion a chain of events that lead up to the holiday quarter in 2011, when Apple recorded the most profitable quarter in technology history thanks mainly to unbelievable iPhone, iPod touch and iPad sales. No platform is selling as quickly as Apple’s mobile platform right now, but iOS is still in its infancy and the fact remains: as hot as iOS is right now, and as popular as smartphones and media tablets are, no platform installed base on the planet even comes close to approaching the size of Windows right now.

The Future

Microsoft said this past December that there are now more than 1.25 billion PCs running the Windows operating system. Billion, with a “B.” Smartphones are the hottest segment in consumer electronics right now and people are buying Apple’s iPad in droves, but even still, more people around the world rely on Windows than ever before. This is because the software that powers countless businesses from the ground up is built on Windows. From web browsers to accounting software to point-of-sale systems to 3D animation software to word processors to custom proprietary solutions and far, far beyond… Entire industries are built on Windows.

The future is anything but “post-PC.”

We are now entering the post-post-PC era, and its focus is the PC. A new, smarter, more versatile PC. A PC that lets users browse the web casually in bed and work with massive databases in SQL Server. A PC that can run a $0.99 news reader as well as it can run proprietary $99,000 CRM software. A PC that is as ideal for playing Angry Birds as it is for running a modeling environment that allows its user to build schematics for a skyscraper. This is the future of computing.

That is not to say Windows 8 is an “iPad killer” or that media tablets are going away. Far from it. While their functionality may overlap in a number of areas, light-duty tablets and full-fledged PCs serve different purposes and will continue to coexist for some time. What we will see, however, is media tablets becoming more capable and more powerful as PCs become better suited for touch input. At some point down the road the two categories may merge, but neither will “win” or “lose.”

The OS

I’ve spent the past week playing with and working on a Samsung tablet powered by Microsoft’s new operating system. It’s nice to be able to work and play on the same tablet.

While Windows 8 is not quite in a state where it is ready to be released to the public, it is a completely different beast than the Developer Preview Microsoft released more than five months ago. During a meeting with Microsoft executives, I was told that the Consumer Preview version of Windows 8 includes tens of thousands of changes compared to the version that was released to developers in September. Thousands of changes are system-level items that I’m sure I didn’t notice, but thousands more are user-facing changes that have helped improve the user experience dramatically.

One of my favorite features is the implementation of swipe gestures. As can be seen in the second and third images within our Windows 8 screenshot gallery, Microsoft has tweaked the main menus used to navigate the OS and perform a variety of key functions. While using a touchscreen to interface with Windows 8, these menus are opened using gestures.

A swipe from the bezel around the screen in from the right opens the start menu, which includes a search button to search for files and apps, a share button to share the current page via email or using other services, a start button, a devices button that lists devices connected to your PC, and a settings button that provides quick access to basic settings such as brightness and speaker volume, as well as a link to more system settings. A swipe in from the left switches between open apps, and a swipe in from the left and back out to the edge of the display opens the app-switcher. Within an app, a swipe down from the top or up from the bottom opens app-specific menus.

While using a keyboard and mouse, gestures from the sides are replaced by keyboard shortcuts or mouse touches to the corners of the screen. A touch to the top-right or bottom-right corner mimics a swipe in from the right and opens the start menu while a touch to the top-left or bottom-left corners opens the app-switcher.

There are countless other great features new Windows 8 Consumer Preview; from picture password, an enhanced security feature that lets the user unlock a PC by tracing preset patterns on an image of his or her choosing instead of using a simple alphanumeric password, to “roaming,” which automatically syncs settings, apps and other data between different Windows 8 computers. While one convertible slate can handle duties as a tablet, notebook and desktop computer, Windows 8 is all about choice. Some users may opt for a single device while others will want a lightweight 7-inch ARM-based tablet in addition to an eight-core beast of a desktop PC.

In terms of performance, Windows 8 exhibited the smoothness and stability we’ve come to expect in a post-Vista world, and this is just a preview version. There were hiccups, of course, but overall the experience was vastly superior than it has been with any other version of Windows. The setup is remarkably fast and easy, touch responsiveness is iPad-like and I was quite impressed with the versatility of this platform. To understand the concept of one device for work and for play is one thing. To sit in bed hopping around lightweight apps and then walk over to your desk, dock your tablet, and have desktop-grade productivity software running on the same device is something else entirely.

The machine I tested Windows 8 on is a pre-release dockable Samsung tablet with a 1.6GHz Intel Core i5 processor and 4GB of RAM. Yes, it’s a tablet with a fan. It’s also a tablet that can run your existing desktop-grade enterprise software, consumer software and lightweight Metro-style apps. Get over it.

The Endgame

Windows 8 gives us a glimpse at the future of computing, but it’s not quite there yet. While the version I spent time with is merely the Consumer Preview and not the release build of Windows 8, it gives us a very good idea of what Microsoft’s new operating system will look like when it launches. The concept is fantastic and I very much like Microsoft’s execution thus far, but it still feels like a marriage of two completely different operating systems rather than a fusion of two experiences.

This is by design, in part. Because the function of a true PC varies so greatly from the function of a media tablet (as we know this category of devices today), Microsoft has created separate experiences for each category. There is a tablet experience with the fantastic Metro UI, a desktop experience reminiscent of Windows 7, and a bit of overlap with each, intended to create some amount of cohesiveness. The end result, however, is not a consistent experience.

There is a disconnect that can be felt across Windows 8. Again, this is mostly by design. In what I call “tablet mode,” the user is presented with an interface that is quite clearly built to be touched. It is characterized by a cascade of large tiles that display live data and can be poked to open apps. The Metro-style apps that are revealed house nice big buttons and a touch-friendly design. Metro-style apps also take up every last pixel of the display, which is a fantastic canvas on which developers can paint terrific experiences.

In “desktop mode,” Windows 8 has the look and feel of Windows 7. In fact, it basically is Windows 7. There are some elements of Metro that spill over into desktop mode — such as the app-switcher and Windows Phone-like lock screen, which displays notifications from up to five apps — but they are effectively completely separate platforms.

Desktop mode has not been optimized for touch at all. In fact, tapping in a text field while no physical keyboard is attached to the tablet doesn’t even bring up the virtual keyboard. Instead, the user must tap on a small keyboard icon in the task bar to open the keyboard, and then he or she must tap another two buttons to close the keyboard once finished typing. And while in desktop mode, by the way, I found that the keyboard often obscured the text field in which I was typing.

Perhaps I can better illustrate my point about the disconnect with this simple example:

Windows 8 ships with two completely separate web browsers. One is called “Internet Explorer”. The other is called “Internet Explorer.”

Internet Explorer is a fantastic Metro-style browser that is designed with touch in mind. Controls are large and easy to poke, menus retract and let web pages occupy every inch of the display, and pages load lightning-fast in this lightweight tablet browser. Then, in desktop mode, users can browse the web using Internet Explorer, the same robust web browser hundreds of millions of people currently use around the world on their Windows PCs.

Confused yet?

Microsoft’s inclusion of two completely different web browsers that share the exact same name is indicative of the separation present in Windows 8. One tablet OS and one desktop OS, together on the same machine.

In the end, this disconnect is probably a good thing for now. Windows users come in all shapes and sizes, and millions of people who will upgrade to Windows 8 in the coming years will be terrified of doing so. They are used to Windows as we know it today, and the look and feel of Metro is a complete departure from the Windows they currently rely on day in and day out. After the initial shock wears off, these people who are so scared of change will find themselves eased into the new Windows because desktop mode is so familiar, and because “tablet mode” is so separate from it.

But this is not the future of post-post-PCs.

Windows 8 is the tip of the iceberg. The start of a shift that will eventually see the “tablet” UI and the “desktop” UI merge into one comprehensive user experience. Apple is taking a different approach; as we’re seeing in OS X Mountain Lion, Apple is slowly readying its desktop user interface for a touch environment by taking some of the elements from its gorgeous mobile UI and adapting them for desktop computers. This varies dramatically from the path Microsoft is taking with Windows 8, but the endgame is the same: one experience that is as capable as it is versatile, and as user-friendly as it is beautiful.

This is the future of computing.

Microsoft’s Windows 8 Consumer Preview will become available to the general public on Wednesday as a free download with an initial cache of more than 100 apps in the Store, all of which will be free during the preview period.

This post originally appeared on BGR: The Three Biggest Letters In Tech.com

Apple on Tuesday circulated invitations to a press conference on March 7th where the Cupertino-based technology giant will unveil its next-generation iPad tablet. The event will be held in San Francisco rather than in New York, as had been reported earlier on Tuesday. Apple’s iPad 3 is expected to feature a high-definition 2,048 x 1,536-pixel Retina Display, a new quad-core Apple A6 processor, a larger battery, embedded 4G LTE connectivity, an 8-megapixel camera and an exterior design that is very similar to the current iPad 2 but with a slightly modified case. New features tied to the next major build of Apple’s mobile platform are expected to be on display next week as well, and we took a quick hands-on look at iOS 5.1 earlier this month. Tune in to BGR on March 7th for all the news surrounding Apple’s iPad 3 unveiling as it breaks.

This post originally appeared on BGR: The Three Biggest Letters In Tech.com

ABC recently became the latest news organization to be given a look inside consumer electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn’s facilities in Shenzhen and Chengdu, China, and the Nightline special that resulted from the trip will air on Tuesday. In the meantime, ABC News has posted a 90-second teaser video containing footage from reporter Bill Weir’s trip to China. Apple, of course, is the only Foxconn partner mentioned in the preview so we can expect the forthcoming report to focus on the Cupertino-based company’s wares, but the teaser promises a never-before-seen look at Foxconn’s facilities so it could be an eye-opening segment. Foxconn and its premier partner Apple have once again taken center stage in a human rights debate that recently saw protesters deliver a petition to Apple’s Grand Central Terminal store demanding the technology giant play a more active role in improving working conditions in the Chinese factories that assemble its hardware. ABC’s teaser video follows after the break.

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This post originally appeared on BGR: The Three Biggest Letters In Tech.com

Apple is currently working with suppliers on a smaller version of the iPad, The Wall Street Journal reports. Citing unnamed sources from within Apple’s supply chain, the report claims that the Cupertino-based company is currently showing off designs for a new iPad that packs the same resolution as the iPad 2 into a display that measures around 8-inches diagonally. This new report is in line with earlier reports claiming Apple is planning a 7.85-inch iPad with the same display resolution as the iPad 2, though The Journal’s report indicates that Apple is not as far along in the build process as had been previously indicated. The Wall Street Journal also notes that Apple “works with suppliers to test new designs all the time” and could drop its plans to build the new iPad.

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This post originally appeared on BGR: The Three Biggest Letters In Tech.com

The “Apple is worth more than” meme has gotten plenty of play over the past year, but a new measure of Apple’s success emerged on Monday that is as simple as it is monumental: a single share of Apple stock now costs more than an iPad. As of the open of the market on Monday, Apple’s stock rose just above $499 — the entry-level price of Apple’s iPad 2 — undoubtedly on its way to $500 and beyond. The Cupertino-based firm that once teetered on the brink of bankruptcy and was saved in part by a $150 million investment from Microsoft is now worth more than Microsoft and Google combined. Read on for more.

Apple shares exploded last month after the company reported earnings for its first fiscal quarter. The firm’s $13.06 billion in profit was the most ever recorded in a single quarter by a technology company, and the second most ever recorded by any company in the United States.

Apple now has more than $100 billion in cash — the company reported that the total value of its cash and marketable securities reached $97.6 billion at the end of the first fiscal quarter — and it is about to unveil a brand new version of its popular iPad tablet, the Retina Display-equipped iPad 3. Apple is then expected to enter brand new territory for the firm when it launches the “iTV” this summer, and a completely redesigned iPhone will likely follow this fall.

No company stays on top forever, but things aren’t expected to slow down any time soon for Apple. In fact, those sky-high price targets some scoffed at last year really aren’t looking so outlandish anymore. OK, maybe a few of them still are.

This post originally appeared on BGR: The Three Biggest Letters In Tech.com

Facebook on Wednesday formally filed documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in its first step toward an upcoming initial public offering. Facebook said it is looking to raise $5 billion with its IPO, which has been eagerly anticipated by the Street and by investors. Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and others will underwrite the offering, and Facebook could raise as much as $10 billion following its IPO. Reports surfaced this past Friday stating that Facebook had plans to file for an IPO this week at a valuation of between $75 billion and $100 billion. At $5 billion, Facebook’s IPO would be the biggest Internet IPO in history, besting Google’s $1.9 billion 2004 offering by a huge margin. Facebook’s IPO also has the potential to top Infineon’s $5.9 billion offering, which is currently the biggest global technology IPO on record. In 2011, Facebook recorded sales of $3.71 billion and earnings of $0.43 per share on net income of $1 billion according to its S1 filing. Facebook also noted that it currently has 845 million monthly active users, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg owns 534 million shares, or 28.4% of the company. Zuckerberg’s public letter regarding the IPO follows below in its entirety.

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.

One result of making it easier to find better products is that businesses will be rewarded for building better products — ones that are personalized and designed around people. We have found that products that are “social by design” tend to be more engaging than their traditional counterparts, and we look forward to seeing more of the world’s products move in this direction.

Our developer platform has already enabled hundreds of thousands of businesses to build higher-quality and more social products. We have seen disruptive new approaches in industries like games, music and news, and we expect to see similar disruption in more industries by new approaches that are social by design.

In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well.

We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.

We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.

By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.

Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them.

Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing what we can to help this progress.

Our Mission and Our Business

As I said above, Facebook was not originally founded to be a company. We’ve always cared primarily about our social mission, the services we’re building and the people who use them. This is a different approach for a public company to take, so I want to explain why I think it works.

I started off by writing the first version of Facebook myself because it was something I wanted to exist. Since then, most of the ideas and code that have gone into Facebook have come from the great people we’ve attracted to our team.

Most great people care primarily about building and being a part of great things, but they also want to make money. Through the process of building a team — and also building a developer community, advertising market and investor base — I’ve developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems.

Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.

By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term — and this in turn will enable us to keep attracting the best people and building more great services. We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we understand that the best way to achieve our mission is to build a strong and valuable company.

This is how we think about our IPO as well. We’re going public for our employees and our investors. We made a commitment to them when we gave them equity that we’d work hard to make it worth a lot and make it liquid, and this IPO is fulfilling our commitment. As we become a public company, we’re making a similar commitment to our new investors and we will work just as hard to fulfill it.

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.

The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook:

Focus on Impact

If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.

Move Fast

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.

Be Bold

Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.

Be Open

We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.

Build Social Value

Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.

Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. We believe that we have an opportunity to have an important impact on the world and build a lasting company in the process. I look forward to building something great together.

This post originally appeared on BGR: The Three Biggest Letters In Tech.com

Samsung on Friday reported record earnings for the fourth quarter last year. In line with the company’s estimates as reported earlier this month, Samsung recorded an operating profit of 5.3 trillion won, or approximately $4.72 billion USD, on sales of 47 trillion won, or approximately $42 billion USD. Samsung had never reported a profit of more than 5 trillion won in a single quarter and its 5.3 trillion won profit represents a 76% increase over the holiday quarter in 2010. Samsung’s mobile business registered an operating profit of 2.6 trillion won in the fourth quarter thanks to mobile phone shipments totaling a record 35 million units, and operating profit from its semiconductor business accounted for 2.3 trillion won. The company’s full-year net profit of 13.7 trillion won was down 15% year-on-year, however, though full-year revenue rose 6.7% in 2011 to 165 trillion won. “Despite intensified competition amid the global economic slowdown, our telecommunications businesses continued to post solid earnings with an enhanced line-up of high-end smartphones, resulting in higher average selling price,” Samsung senior vice-president Robert Yi said in a statement.

This post originally appeared on BGR: The Three Biggest Letters In Tech.com

Apple on Thursday unveiled a new version of its iTunes U product from a press conference in New York City. Apple’s Eddy Cue was on hand to reveal a new iOS version of iTunes U, bringing users an iBooks-like interface through which they can access iTunes U content. iTunes U has served 700 million downloads to date, and it has primarily been used for lectures. The new version of iTunes U gives teachers a variety of new tools to create and manage curriculums, and they can also use the app to give assignments to their classes or even stream live content. Students can take notes in the app just as they can in Apple’s new digital textbooks, and courses from a number of universities including Yale and Harvard are currently available. iTunes U for iPad is available immediately for free in the iOS App Store.

This post originally appeared on BGR: The Three Biggest Letters In Tech.com

Pent up demand for Apple’s latest smartphone caused the company to halt sales of its just-released iPhone 4S in Beijing, China on Friday, fearing for the safety of its sales staff. According to Chinese tech blog M.I.C. Gadget, Beijing residents eager to get their hands on Apple’s iPhone 4S began to line up more than 12 hours before stores opened on Friday. A massive crowd had gathered at the Sanlitun Apple Store, and workers were forced to delay its opening. The crowd seemingly then became unruly to the point where Apple Store employees’ safety could not be guaranteed, and an announcement was made that the launch had been canceled. At that point fights reportedly began to break out, several members of the crowd began to throw eggs at the Apple Store, and SWAT teams had to be called in to restore order. Apple’s only comment on the matter was that the company has already sold out of its initial iPhone 4S supply in China. A video of the massive crowd that gathered outside Apple’s Sanlitun Apple Store follows below.

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This post originally appeared on BGR: The Three Biggest Letters In Tech.com

Apple’s iPhone 4S is set to launch in China and 21 more markets on January 13th. The popular smartphone was previously rumored to be scheduled for release in the region on January 23rd, but Apple announced on Tuesday that the launch of its latest smartphone will occur 10 days sooner. “Customer response to our products in China has been off the charts,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement. “With the launch in China next week, iPhone 4S will be available in over 90 countries making this our fastest iPhone rollout ever.” China is seen as a key growth market for Apple’s mobile devices as well as its MacBook line of notebook computers. Apple announced in October that it sold more than 4 million iPhone 4S handsets during the phone’s debut weekend alone, and the smartphone has launched in dozens of additional regions since that point in time. Apple’s full press release follows below.

iPhone 4S Arrives in China on January 13

CUPERTINO, California―January 4, 2012―Apple® today announced that iPhone® 4S, the most amazing iPhone yet, will be available in China and 21 additional countries on Friday, January 13. iPhone 4S is packed with incredible new features including Apple’s dual-core A5 chip for blazing fast performance and stunning graphics; an all new camera with advanced optics; full 1080p HD resolution video recording; and Siri™, an intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking. iPhone 4S comes with iOS 5, the world’s most advanced mobile operating system with over 200 new features.

“Customer response to our products in China has been off the charts,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “With the launch in China next week, iPhone 4S will be available in over 90 countries making this our fastest iPhone rollout ever.”

Beginning Friday, January 13, iPhone 4S will be available in Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Botswana, British Virgin Islands, Cameroon, Cayman Islands, Central African Republic, China, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Grenada, Guam, Guinea Conakry, Ivory Coast, Jamaica, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Niger, Senegal, St. Vincent and The Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos and Uganda.

iPhone 4S comes in either black or white for a suggested retail price of $199 (US) for the 16GB model, $299 (US) for the 32GB model and $399 (US) for the new 64GB model.* iPhone 4S is sold through the Apple Online Store, Apple’s retail stores and select Apple Authorized Resellers. iPhone 4 is available for just $99 (US) and iPhone 3GS is available for free with a two year contract from participating carriers.

*Qualified customers only. Requires a new two year rate plan, sold separately.

This post originally appeared on BGR: The Three Biggest Letters In Tech.com

Apple will further extend its lead in the technology sector this year as it launches a number of new products that will leave its competition scrambling, a new report suggested on Tuesday. Ticonderoga Securities analyst Brian White made Apple his top pick in 2011 and the stock was his top performer, having grown 26% during his coverage. In 2012, Apple remains White’s top stock pick as a trio of new products is set to extend Apple’s lead in the new year. Read on for more.

“We believe Apple’s portfolio in 2012 has the opportunity to create more excitement around the story with our expectation for the unveiling of iTV, [an] ‘iPad mini’ and a major upgrade with the iPhone 5, while we expect the company to finally come to grips with its surging cash balance and issue its first cash dividend,” White wrote in a research note on Tuesday.

The analyst first reported in October that Apple would launch an “iPad mini” in 2012. While a number of reports suggested the new slate would in fact be a smaller iPad positioned between Apple’s high-end iPad and the iPod touch, White used the term “mini” to describe the upcoming tablet’s price point rather than its size. He sees Apple launching a new high-end iPad in 2012, and a less expensive mini model priced in the high to mid-$200 range will accompany it, White believes. More recent reports suggest that Apple will continue to sell the iPad 2 at a lower price once it launches the iPad 3.

Beyond a new iPad that will attack the market at a lower price point, the analyst sees two other Apple products as being huge for the Cupertino, California-based company this year.”We believe 2012 will be the year that Apple unveils iTV in pursuit of a new $100 billion plus LCD TV market opportunity, reinventing a product category with a Smart TV that delivers a clean, crisp and simple experience that connects seamlessly with the Apple digital ecosystem,” White wrote. “Last April, we were the first on the Street to uncover concrete evidence that a full blown Apple TV was already flowing through factories in China for prototype production and we believe it’s about time for the company to unveil its latest innovation.”

Finally, Ticonderoga believes Apple’s next-generation iPhone will feature a cosmetic redesign and a huge feature upgrade. “The iPhone 4S has been a big hit but we expect iPhone 5 to be even bigger with our expectations of a new unibody form factor, larger screen, NFC and 4G,” White wrote. BGR exclusively reported last month that Apple will launch a new iPhone this fall with a redesigned aluminum case.

This post originally appeared on BGR: The Three Biggest Letters In Tech.com

In light of increased pressure from shareholders, Research In Motion is preparing to replace current co-chairmen of the board Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. The Financial Post on Tuesday reported that RIM will soon shake up its corporate structure, likely removing both company co-founders from their current board seats. The pair would remain co-CEOs and a new single chairman would be appointed in their place. According to the Financial Posts’s unnamed sources, independent director and RIM board member Barbara Stymiest is currently the front-runner to replace Lazaridis and Balsillie. In response to increased shareholder unrest, RIM agreed this past summer to assemble a committee that would investigate splitting the co-CEO and co-chairmen roles. Stymiest is a member of the committee carrying out the investigation, and she has been a member of RIM’s board of directors since 2007. RIM’s stock was up 2% on the rumor in pre-market trading.

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This post originally appeared on BGR: The Three Biggest Letters In Tech.com

Apple reportedly has plans to launch two new iPad models next year according to a recent report. Set to be unveiled at a press conference in January, the two new iPads will join Apple’s iPad 2 to create an iPhone like tablet lineup. The iPad 2 will remain available at an entry-level price point, DigiTimes claimed citing unnamed industry sources, while new mid-range and high-end iPad models will launch early in 2012. Both new iPads will feature dual-LED backlit 9.7-inch displays with a resolution of 2,048 x 1,536 pixels. It is unclear what features might distinguish the new mid-range iPad from the high-end model. The report also claims that Apple’s rumored 7.85-inch iPad will not be among the models to launch early next year. Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair recently said in a note to investors that Apple would continue to sell the iPad 2 at a lower price point following the launch of its next-generation tablet model.

UPDATE: Loop Insight’s Jim Dalrymple noted that according to his sources, Apple has no plans to unveil an iPad 3 at the iWorld expo in January as noted in DigiTimes’s report.

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This post originally appeared on BGR: The Three Biggest Letters In Tech.com

Apple sold 925 iPhone 4S handsets each minute during the device’s debut weekend, and it sells 81 iPads every 60 seconds on average. Research In Motion sells 103 BlackBerry phones, Amazon sells 18 Kindle Fire tablets and Microsoft sells 11 Xbox 360 consoles every minute. More than 700 computers are purchased around the world every 60 seconds, and 232 of them are infected by malware. That malware stat seems surprisingly low, however, when you consider that 2 million people watch online porn every minute. Read on for more.

Website design firm GO-Globe recently spread a variety of technology-related stats out across an infographic and the result helps us put a lot of things in perspective. Beyond the scary amount of Internet porn watched around the world, we can see just how entrenched various consumer electronics and digital goods and services have become in modern life.

Eleven million conversations take place using various instant messaging platforms every 60 seconds, 2,100 people check in using foursquare and 1,100 acres of virtual land are farmed in FarmVille. Thirty-eight tons of e-waste is generated around the world every minute, though we’re not sure if that stat includes all of the virtual land in FarmVille.

Every minute, $219,000 worth of payments are made using PayPal, $10,000 of which is sent from mobile devices. EBay is used to purchase over 950 items each minute and more than 180 of those purchases are made using mobile phones or tablets.

Surprisingly, perhaps, physical media maintains a huge presence in our lives despite the advent of the digital age. Four hundred and fifty Windows 7 discs are sold, 1,400 Redbox DVDs are rented and a staggering 2.6 million CDs containing 1,820 terabytes of data are created each minute. Four thousand USB devices are sold every 60 seconds as well, along with 2,500 ink cartridges.

It’s amazing how much happened every 60 seconds in 2011 and as the year draws to a close, we can’t wait to see what each minute will hold in 2012.

This post originally appeared on BGR: The Three Biggest Letters In Tech.com

News emerged earlier this week that Apple had acquired Israel-based fabless chip maker Anobit for as much as $500 million. Beyond the team and flash memory technology Apple will gain from the acquisition, the company reportedly plans to use the Anobit’s facilities as a research and development center. The deal is big for Apple on several levels — Anobit’s class-leading flash memory chips are already used in the iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air — but one former Apple executive believes fear was among the factors that motivated Apple to enter Israel, which is heralded by many as the “second Silicon Valley.” Read on for more.

“I think Apple is now entering Israel because of the loss of Jobs,” Eric Sirkin, a former senior director at Apple, told Israeli economic newspaper TheMarker in an interview. “Apple is afraid – it must be at the front of innovation. I believe that the company is now trying to inject innovation and Israel is part of the solution.”

Sirkin was with Apple for more than seven years in the nineties, having led a team within the company’s Macintosh unit. The executive managed the group responsible for creating FireWire technology as well as the Pippin, a low-cost computer designed to extend the Mac’s reach.

The former Apple director believes the company’s move into Israel is logical not only because of the country’s reputation as a technology hub, but also because the general mentality in the technology industry there is one that encourages innovation. ”The Israeli mentality fits with Apple thinking outside the box,” Sirkin said.

Anobit designs flash memory solutions for smartphones, tablets and other devices, and the company currently has contracts with a number of leading firms including Samsung, Intel and Hynix. Anobit’s website says that its proprietary technology “significantly improves endurance, performance and cost of flash storage products and systems.”

TheMarker notes that Apple’s acquisition of Anobit closed last Friday, and the deal is valued at between $300 million and $400 million according to the paper’s sources. Israeli financial newspaper Calcalist reported earlier that Apple spent between $400 million and $500 to acquire the fabless chip maker.

This post originally appeared on BGR: The Three Biggest Letters In Tech.com