Still reeling from yesterday’s blowout fiscal first quarter financial results from Apple? Then you’ll want to keep reading as we detail a few tidbits of other data culled from the company’s conference call with investors, not to mention a handful of other news that’s making the rounds in the middle of this final week of January. Ready to proceed? Then let’s get started with the latest news from Wednesday, January 25, 2012.
As we reported Tuesday, Apple had another of those “best quarters ever,” with .33 billion in revenue and a net profit of .06 billion. But those numbers were only the headlines, with plenty of details revealed in a conference call with investors after the news broke. Among them: Apple has 85 million iCloud customers currently signed up for the free service. The App Store continues its ascent, with 550,000 apps in total (170k specific to the iPad). The company’s “hobby” product, the Apple TV, sold another 2.8 million units during the last quarter, which puts the total for the second-generation streaming box at around 4.2 million thus far. Most curiously, Apple CEO Tim Cook claims that the iPad saw no positive or negative effect from the release of Amazon’s Kindle Fire back in November, with a record 15.4 million iPads sold during the quarter. Cook was quick to note: “People who want an iPad won’t settle for a limited function tablet.”
Siri has introduced voice-activated services to a new audience thanks to the iPhone 4S, but let’s not forget that other companies were pioneering the technology first. One of them, Nuance Communications, today announced the availability of a new free iPad app called PaperPort Notes, which takes advantage of the company’s Dragon voice recognition which allows users to take notes using only their voice. Of course, you’ll still have the option to write notes by hand or with the iPad keyboard, and you can access saved notes from cloud services including Google Docs, Box.net, Dropbox or PaperPort Anywhere. The same software is also capable of annotating and highlighting documents, combining pages from both the web or the cloud and even capturing documents with the iPad 2’s built-in camera. Files are saved in standard PDF format so they can be easily shared with others. PaperPort Notes is a free 3.5MB download available now from the App Store and requires an iPad running iOS 4.2 or later.
Despite Apple moving 37.04 million iPhones last quarter — largely made up of that iPhone 4S everyone seemed so disappointed by when it was announced in October — the rumor mill is already churning up word that another new iPhone model which could see a triumphant return for early sunny summer. According to 9to5Mac, “a reliable source at Foxconn” claims that the elusive iPhone 5 will soon head to manufacturing, with a confusing array of sample devices floating around the plant in China. OK, so we’ll bite: What’s new? The source claims the new handset will feature a “four-plus inch display” made by LG and a new design which departs from the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S — but not the “teardrop-shaped” version that was floating around in mockups last year. The source seems confident that Apple may unveil the iPhone 5 in time for an early sunny summer release, but color us skeptical.
It’s been rather quiet on the Netflix front after a tumultuous 2011 for the company, but judging from their fourth-quarter financials, it seems the choppy waters have calmed, at least for the moment. According to AllThingsD, Netflix reported revenue of 6 million and earnings of 73 cents per share, slightly higher than analysts’ expectations of 7 million and 54 cents per share. Although the company previously warned that it would be losing money in 2012, Netflix clocked in 22 million subscribers for its U.S. streaming service, 11.17 for DVD and 1.86 million internationally — numbers that are upwards of 25 percent more than the previous year, which seems to indicate that all may be forgiven with its customers. However, the report concludes with a New York Post tidbit claiming that Amazon may soon offer “a standalone video service,” separate from its Prime-only offering today. “We expect Amazon to continue to offer their video service as a free extra with Prime domestically but also to brand their video subscription offering as a standalone service at a price less than ours,” the company explained, without going into details of how they might respond to such a threat.
Apple and Google will likely be in a cat and mouse game for smartphone market share for the foreseeable future, but new research data revealed today appears to give Cupertino the upper hand — which should be little surprise after yesterday’s financial results. According to Reuters, Apple’s U.S. smartphone market share has doubled to 44.9 percent, narrowly passing Google’s open-source Android which slipped to 44.8 percent, down from 50 percent in the previous quarter. The data comes courtesy of research firm Kantar Worldpanel Comtech, who notes that Apple’s share climb has come at the expense of handset makers Motorola, HTC and Sony Ericsson, all of whom reported lower earnings last quarter. The news also isn’t good for Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform, whose market share is below two percent in nine key markets where such data is tracked, even after the recent launch of Nokia’s much-hyped Lumia 800 in the U.K. Analyst Dominic Sunnebo still expects Windows Phone to nab “around a 10 percent share of European smartphone sales” later this year.
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