Gadget News

Apple’s US carrier partner, AT&T, sure has one big smile on its face — it has recorded the highest number of iPhone activations ever and is stealing swathes of cellphone market share from its competitors.

The company’s financial results announced today confirm it activated 3.2 million iPhones in its just gone quarter. (It also made $30.8 billion in revenue in the period). That comes with much help from the iPhone, which the carrier again stated it was activating new units at a clip of 10 times the iPhone 3GS the previous year.

“On June 24, AT&T began offering iPhone 4, the most powerful iPhone yet. Preorder sales of iPhone 4 were 10 times higher than the first day of preordering for iPhone 3GS a year earlier. For the full second quarter, AT&T iPhone activations totaled 3.2 million, the most quarterly iPhone activations ever. Approximately 27 percent of those activations were for customers who were new to AT&T,” the company said.

The company also delivered substantial year-over-year wireless margin expansion, it said.

The number of 3G postpaid integrated devices on AT&T’s wireless network increased by 2.9 million to 29.7 million, an increase of 98.2 percent year over year and 10.8 percent sequentially.

Government officials will have to find something else to do during work hours than visit those other ‘Tube video sites following a recent vote in the U.S. House of Representatives to block viewing or downloading porn.

Seems like a no-brainer, but in typical government fashion, it took a 111-page amendment to get the point across, along with some controversial wording.

“None of the funds made available in this act may be used to maintain or establish a computer network unless such network blocks the viewing, downloading, and exchanging of pornography,” the bill states on the second to last page.

The problem with that, says John Morris, general counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C., is “how broad the reach of this is, and will lead to constitutional problems and economic problems.” Morris used the example of a mom-and-pop business landing a contract to deliver toilet paper to a military base that includes overhead. In this scenario, they would have to pay to filter their computer networks, even though no one but the owner would ever use it.

That wasn’t the only point of contention.

“The Supreme Court has made clear that government attempts to eliminate sexually explicit speech on the Internet raises serious free speech concerns,” said Laura Murphy, director of the ACLU’s Washington legislative office. “Congress should not pass such vague and potentially speech-restrictive provisions that are constitutionally suspect.”

Ultimately, Congress voted in favor of the legislation by a 239-182 vote.

Apple already has a hit on its hands with the iPad, which is seemingly pushing the company into new markets as it sold its first three million in just 80 days — but how many will Apple sell next year?

Speculation based on data analysis is usually slightly more accurate than speculation based on reading runes or tea leaves (though arguably a whole lot less interesting to watch), but that’s just what Bernstein Research analyst, Toni Sacconaghi, sat down and did, before sharing his iMusings with Digital Daily.

Danish e-commerce website Fleggaard has recently made a “not-safe-for-work” commercial that depicts a group of topless skydivers who, during their descend, come together in mid-air to spell out an advertisement for a washing machine.

Tests taken across a small (24-person) sample group suggest reading eBooks remains slower than reading paper, with the iPad being faster to read than a Kindle device.

Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group set out to determine reading speed differences between the different platforms (book, ebook, iPad etc).

His initial findings are that there are significant speed differences. Participants were required to read a short Ernest Hemingway story on their device.

Using an iPad to achieve this worked out to be 6.2 percent slower than reading the story from a book, while using a Kindle 2 was slower again, 10.7 percent slower in fact.

Test subjects disliked using a PC for reading, giving this a satisfaction score of 3.6. iPad scored 5.8, Kindle 5.7 and the book — the book threw a 5.6.

The researcher notes, “For example, they disliked that the iPad was so heavy and that the Kindle featured less-crisp gray-on-gray letters. People also disliked the lack of true pagination and preferred the way the iPad – actually, the iBook app – indicated the amount of text left in a chapter.”

He thinks the future of the eReader and tablet category for book reading looks good, predicting, “We can expect higher-quality screens in the future, as indicated by the recent release of the iPhone 4 with a 326 dpi display. But even the current generation is almost as good as print in formal performance metrics — and actually scores slightly higher in user satisfaction.”

As Computerworld notes, Apple changed the terms of its return policy today in releasing its iPhone 4 memo. You now have a month (from ship date if purchased online) to return your iPhone 4. There is no restocking fee.

That’s a change from the company’s normal policy, which demands a 10% restocking fee for returned iPhones. According to the company’s Web site, Apple typically charges $19.90 for a returned 16GB iPhone 4 model, and $29.90 for a 32GB device.

Computerworld attributes the dropped restocking fee to a defense against some of the forthcoming lawsuits over the iPhone 4 antenna issues. Some of the people suing are claiming the restocking fee as losses and hope to move the suit to class action status.

Do you think this change in policy will have people going on 30 day ‘iPhone vacations’ and returning them right before the return policy is over?

BRUSSELS – It may soon be easier to block Internet porn: The agency that controls domain names said Friday it will consider adding .xxx to the list of suffixes people and companies can pick when establishing their identities online.

The California-based nonprofit agency, ICANN, effectively paved the way for a digital red light district to take its place alongside suffixes such as .com and .org, finally ending a decade-long battle over what some consider formal acknowledgment of pornography’s prominent place on the Internet.

While the move may help parents stop their children from seeing some seedy sites, it wouldn’t force porn peddlers to use the new .xxx address — and skeptics argue that few adult-only sites will give up their existing .com addresses.

Still, it’s seen as a symbolic step in the opening up of Internet domain names and suffixes, coming on the same day the agency said it would start accepting Chinese script for domain names.

The decision is primarily a victory for U.S. company ICM Registry LLC, which has applied repeatedly to be able to register and manage the .xxx suffix.

The Internet names agency has rejected its application three times since 2000, partly under pressure from Christian groups and governments unhappy with the spread of online porn, said ICM’s chief executive, Stuart Lawley. He pitches the suffix, in part, as protection for parents, arguing it will make it easy for Web blocking software to filter out “.xxx” sites, marking them clearly as porn.

“People who want to find it know where it is, and people who don’t see it or want to keep it away from their kids can use mechanisms to do so,” he said

ICANN’s board, at a meeting Friday in Brussels, said it had not treated the company’s application fairly three years ago when it reversed an earlier decision recognizing .xxx as the representative of the porn industry. ICANN is now promising to move swiftly with standard checks on Lawley’s company.

Peter Dengate Thrush, the chairman of ICANN’s board, said the Friday decision “does not mean the .xxx application has been approved … It means that we are returning to negotiations with the applicant.” He estimates that it could take a year for full approval, far longer than the few months ICM says it would take.

He shrugged off criticisms that ICANN was creating a new platform for Internet porn.

“We’re not in the content business, and that’s up to national governments and lawmakers and people who are qualified to make judgments,” he said.

He also warned that .xxx might not necessarily be a success — and that some new Internet suffixes have failed to attract many signups. Some note that most porn sites would likely keep their existing “.com” names, to allow their businesses to be found more easily.

“If it is still going to be available on other domains, it just sounds ineffective” as a way of regulating adult content, said Cathy Wing, of Media Awareness Network, a Canadian nonprofit that advises parents and teachers about Web use.

She also said filters are “easily bypassed” and would not stop children accessing porn.

Pornography is a huge business: The adult entertainment industry is worth some $13 billion a year, according to the California-based Adult Video News Media Network.

Lawley said he thinks the new address could easily attract at least 500,000 sites, making it — after “.mobi” — the second biggest sponsored top-level domain name. He expects to make $30 million a year in revenue by selling each .xxx site for $60 — and pledges to donate $10 from each sale to child protection initiatives via a nonprofit he has set up.

In comparison, a .com address costs just $7 but ICANN sells 80 million a year.

There are already 112,000 reservations for the new .xxx domain, Lawley said — with the publicity over Friday’s decision attracting an extra 2,000 in the previous day. The company could get the Internet suffix up and running within six to nine months after ICANN checks that ICM has the financial means and technical know-how to run it, he said.

“I think we could do a million or more. There are several million adult top-level domain names already out there,” he told the AP.

The porn industry isn’t completely behind .xxx, Lawley says, because some see the site as creating a ghetto for adult content and setting rules where they don’t want any. But, he claims to have the support of many large providers and between 60 percent to 70 percent of the entire industry.

“Many pornographers, adult entertainment providers, are acting in a responsible manner but nobody knows it,” he said. “Having the .xxx suffix on the end, that’s a clear quality assurance label.”

Loic Damilaville, deputy director and spokesman for AFNIC, the association that manages the French .fr suffix, said the moral debate between some family groups and porn firms has been more of an American than an international issue.

“It’s mostly a debate on symbols: on the space porn should be allowed on the Internet,” said Damilaville, who attended the ICANN board meeting in Brussels.

What’s really at stake, he said, is setting the ground rules for how Internet suffixes will be created in the future and how much say governments have in the process. The availability of new suffixes is in itself a good thing for freedom of expression on the Web, he said.
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