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TheAppleBlog, published by and for the day-to-day Apple user, is a prominent source for news, reviews, walkthroughs, and real life application of all Apple products.
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iPhone Demand Seen Outstripping Supply

At least one analyst thinks Apple may have sold fewer iPhones last quarter than current estimates suggest, but not because no one wants an iPhone 3GS, quite the opposite.

As the numbers from research firm Canalys indicate, there is no customer shortage for the iPhone 3GS. According to senior analyst Pete Cunningham, “Apple has revolutionized the smart phone sector, leapfrogging more experienced rivals.” In North America, that leapfrogging has put Apple ahead of everyone but RIM, whose market share remained flat, and there’s more good news. According to Canalys, touchscreens are now the preferred interface for smartphones, accounting for 40 percent of all shipments, and Apple is the undisputed leader when it comes to multi-touch and the user interface. The only problem may be that Apple has been too successful.

While the consensus for iPhone sales in the third quarter is around seven million units sold, a pair of analysts are raising concerns. Via AppleInsider, Gene Munster from Piper Jaffray referenced Apple’s conference call from July, at which it was stated supplies of the iPhone 3GS were constrained. Munster is also concerned about supplies for the international market. Apple’s wireless partner in Italy has suggested the company could double sales from 20,000 units sold per month were supplies available. Nonetheless, Munster is still predicting iPhone sales in excess of 7 million units.

Via Apple 2.0, Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner is not so optimistic. His concern stems from comments made by Steve Jobs at the Apple music event last month in which it was “implied that ~3.5M phones had been sold with only 21 days left in the quarter.” That number is derived from Jobs remarking that 30 million iPhones had been sold since 2007, then subtracting the 26.5 million that have been reported in earnings statements. That’s a tenuous assumption, but Reiner still appears to be pulling back from his low-ball estimate of 6 million iPhones for the quarter.

It’s hard to imagine Apple keeping real iPhone shortages a secret. More likely, Steve Jobs was rounding down, and on Monday we’ll find out Apple has sold somewhere between seven and eight million iPhones, and probably closer to eight million. Even if Apple is working against iPhone supply constraints due to popularity, that’s the kind of problem beleaguered Microsoft and Windows Mobile would love to have.

As Q4 begins, online video is now mainstream. Read the, "Connected Consumer Q3 Wrap-up."

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TAB Faves: 5 Tower Defense iPhone Apps Worth Owning

Recently we looked at the plethora of tower defense games available for the iPhone. For anyone who looked at that list and wondered where they should actually spend your money, today’s article is for you. I’m not going to argue that the following five games are the best tower defense games on the platform, but I will tell you that if you decide to spend money on any (or all) of these games, you probably won’t be disappointed. I also tried to pick from a good range of gameplay types, so you can pick up a couple of these and get relatively different gameplay experiences.

The Creeps!

Price: 99 cents

This is the hands down winner for adorable iPhone tower defense games. The premise is pretty simple, there are monsters trying to get under your bed and you have to stop them by placing your towers along set paths. The graphics are cute, in a Spongebob Squarepants kind of way, and the gameplay offers a variety of interesting features.

For example, you can attack terrain like trees or small hills in order to open more space for towers. In fact one of the gameplay modes requires you to destroy terrain and build your way across the map in order to destroy the creep’s spawning point. There are also interesting towers, like a flying saucer that you can activate a couple of times during a game and move around the map using the iPhone’s accelerometer. There’s also plenty of depth to the gameplay, with a wide variety of maps.

Fieldrunners

Price: $2.99

Fieldrunners was one of the first games I bought for my iPhone, and this grandaddy of tower defense games still holds up incredibly well. The graphics are excellent, with both the towers and the creeps very distinctive. The gameplay is focused on the open field approach, which means that the creeps don’t move along distinct paths, but instead you have to use towers to herd them in the direction you want.

I prefer this style to the path-oriented tower defense games because you have a lot more options on how to set up your defense, along with more space to make mistakes, meaning you have deeper gameplay. Fieldrunners doesn’t offer the plethora of maps some other tower defense games do, but the ones that are available offer distinctive challenges as well as various selections of towers. If you’re looking for an open field tower defense games you won’t be disappointed with Fieldrunners.

Ninja TD

Price: $2.99

This game competes with The Creeps in the cuteness factor, as your “towers” are small ninjas. The graphics are also good/cute, but Ninja TD offers its own distinctive gameplay that is different from other iPhone tower defense games. To start with, the maps are a mix of open field and path based. Creeps can’t move freely across the map, but there’s enough space in the path they follow to allow for some creative Ninja placement.

In addition to the Ninjas themselves, you can also place various Ninja powers, which can do various things like send a creep flying back to the beginning of the map. There are also invisible enemies that require specific powers to be seen and attacked. These powers need to be unlocked so you’ll have to put some effort into the game before you get the full selection of gameplay options.

Star Defense

Price: 99 cents (Free version also available)

As you may have noticed I’m partial to games with very good graphics, but Star Defense may be the most impressive of this bunch when it comes to graphics. Not so much because the game is more beautiful than the others, but because of the 3-D elements. The paths in this space oriented tower defense game are found on small worldlets, which you can spin around and zoom into with your fingers.

If the ability to wow your friends with an iPhone game isn’t enough for you, Star Defense also packs in a some good gameplay. In particular, this is the tower defense game for those who like Xbox achievements, as you can unlock a variety of different achievements. You can share those achievements online, compare your score to others and there’s even a challenge feature that let’s you send your score to friends and challenge them to beat it.

Sweetwater Defense

Price: $2.99 (Free version also available)

If you look at the iTunes ratings for Sweetwater Defense you’ll see that it doesn’t rate as highly as some of the other games in this list. There’s a good reason for that…Sweetwater Defense is hard. Really hard. I almost lost the freakin’ tutorial while playing this game.

The key to Sweetwater Defense is learning how to mix and match your towers. You’re not going to be able to get away with just plunking down a bunch of cheap towers and maxing out their upgrades, even on easy. If you’re willing to be challenged you’ll also find that the game’s graphics are excellent and the gameplay interface is intuitive.

In Q3, Uncle Sam was the green IT king maker. Read the, "Green IT Q3 Wrap-up."

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Why Doesn't Opera Have More Market Share in North America?

I usually have at least three browsers open at any time. One will be a Mozilla Gecko app (Firefox, Camino, or SeaMonkey) and one an Apple WebKit based program (Stainless, Cruz, iCab, Shiira, OmniWeb, or especially since Safari 4 was released, Safari itself). Interestingly, I find I like Safari 4 better on my old Pismo PowerBooks running OS 10.4.11 than I do under Leopard on my Core 2 Duo MacBook where Stainless tends to get the nod.

However, the browser I consistently use more than all of the others combined is Opera, and it’s an abiding puzzlement to me as to why Opera has thus far been unable to carve out a more substantial market niche in North America.

According to NetApplications’ HitsLink Market Share statistics watch for August, Opera now has a cumulative global two percent share (2.35 percent when Opera Mini is included) behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Firefox, Apple’s Safari, and Google’s Chrome, thanks largely to its popularity in Eastern Europe and Asia, where it has about four percent of the market. Opera claims that in some regions of the globe, such as Russia, Ukraine and parts of Europe, it is now the most popular browser with growth last year of 67 percent and roughly 100 million users worldwide (translation into 39 languages probably doesn’t hurt either). But its penetration in the U.S. and Canada is more like one percent. Indeed, Google’s Chrome, still a beta with no general release Mac version, has now bumped Opera from forth to fifth place in the U.S. browser market.

“The reality is that in the U.S. we have some work to do,” Opera boss Jon von Tetzchner recently told BBC News.

Opera 10 reportedly hit 10 million downloads in its first week, so it will be interesting to see how that plays out in the September Hitslink stats, but there’s no indication that Opera 10 is taking the U.S. market by storm.

Personally, I warmed slowly to Opera, which has been around since 1994, and released its first Mac versions in the late ’90s, at which time it had an interesting interface and some unique features, but was pretty awful performance-wise. However, Opera’s Mac support is now impressively strong, and since the release of Opera 8, it’s been a fixture on my desktop, and most of the time it’s the browser I reach for first for general surfing and a lot of my work-related browsing as well.

Probably one of the things about Opera that handicaps it in North America is that it’s a bit — and in some instances more than a bit — different from other browsers, which is partly why I like it, but North American consumers tend to be conformists, which explains why Windows has 90-odd percent of the desktop operating system market. When there’s the slightest learning curve to scale, many people balk. With Opera, the learning curve is not steep, but it’s there.

Have you given Opera a try? Did you stick with it? Why or why not?

What was the big news that happened in your sector in Q3? Catch up with GigaOM Pro's, "Quarterly Wrap-ups."

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Layar Augmented Reality Browser Finally Available for iPhone

Late Wednesday, augmented reality (subscription required) app Layar finally hit the App Store. It received a lot of buzz early on in the days of AR on mobile devices, and was released long ago for devices running Google’s Android OS.

The idea behind the browser is that multiple points of interest (POI) are displayed on top of a live feed from your camera. The POI information is drawn from multiple sources, which you can select from using the the menu at the bottom of the app. Each source provides different kinds of information, about transit, for instance, or about general tourist destinations, etc.

Fast Company can barely contain its enthusiasm for the new app, as is evident from the following quote:

The marriage between useful/fun/vital/helpful location-based data offered by Layar, the GPS and digital compass built into the iPhone 3GS (a 3G version is coming, Layar promises), and the legion of developers building new code for the platform give it a good shot at becoming the most popular AR browser on the market, if not a genuine killer app. Especially since it’s free.

While I admit that AR and its various applications are fairly exciting, and something that I’ve keyed in on in the past, I can’t seem to bring myself to apply the term “killer app” to this particular offering from Layar (subscription required). Not that it doesn’t do what it claims to. It does, and it does so for free, as Fast Company points out.

My problem is that it does it without much grace, or flair, or without anything to make it feel particularly well-suited to the iPhone platform. Admittedly, it was an Android app first, and maybe that’s why it doesn’t feel like it necessarily belongs on the iPhone, but I think it’s more than that.

For reference, compare Yelp’s “Monocle” AR feature to Layar’s implementation. Layar features a weird horizon plane grid that seems to be more distracting than anything else. Plus, with the cramped UI which tries to do too much on a single screen, I feel like I’m not actual getting as much usable information as I am with Yelp.

In short, despite the multiple filters it offers, and neat features like having those filters specially selected based on your geographical location, I don’t think I’ll ever be using Layar again. A ho-hum interface, and some odd usability quirks make this app feel like a tech demo that showed up at the party way too late. If you’re looking for usable AR, try Yelp’s Monocle mode, or just sit tight and wait for the next generation of AR apps.

In Q3, Uncle Sam was the green IT king maker. Read the, "Green IT Q3 Wrap-up."

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Apple Planning to Sync Video Across Devices

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office posted on Thursday a very interesting application from Apple, one which shows that MobileMe could have far more in store than just personal info synchronization. Movie playback position syncing appears to be on the way, so long as this patent sees its way to fruition, which isn’t always the case.

The idea is that you could watch a show you downloaded via iTunes on your iPhone during your commute, and then pick up at home right where you stopped on your Apple TV or Mac computer. No searching for the spot where you left off, just a seamless transition from on-the-go to at-home media playback.

This suggests a move towards a more holistic view of data synched via MobileMe. iTunes Home Sharing is a step in the right direction, but imagine if you could play your entire library no matter where you were, and have playlist and playback position information synced across all your devices via MobileMe? Tell me I’m not the only one whose dream it’s been to someday listen to all of my music, from start to finish.

Not only does the patent allow for media syncing across devices, it also includes distance tracking, which would allow it to measure the proximity of devices to each other and sync your media information when two or more gadgets come within a certain range. Hopefully you won’t be near the end of the latest episode of “Dexter” on your iPhone when you walk through the door to find your wife just starting it on the Apple TV. Think of the spoiler potential.

What isn’t made clear in the patent is how media would be synced across devices. One would assume that some kind of network connection would be involved, but if proximity is playing a role, then Bluetooth is another potential prospect that doesn’t require an intermediary connection. Otherwise, Wi-Fi discovery over a shared network would be the best bet for communication between devices.

Yet another possibility is Wi-Fi Direct, the technology Apple recently threw its weight behind along with other industry heavyweights like Microsoft and Intel. In fact, I might even go so far as to say that this just-published patent application fits so perfectly with that emerging tech that the timing of both announcements seems like more than just a coincidence. Hopefully that means I’ll be syncing my Apple-based media wirelessly without even the requirement of network accessibility by mid-2010.

Growing mobile data use turned up heat on carriers in Q3. Read the, "Mobile Q3 Wrap-up."

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