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Digital Top Stories
New iPhone revealed, but with no iStream music service
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 8 June 2010
So, as sort of expected, Apple top man Steve Jobs yesterday said nothing about his company’s rumoured intent to leap into Spotify territory by adding a streaming content component to the iTunes player. As previously reported, rumour has been rife for ages now that Apple is planning on entering the streaming music market, and those rumours have only escalated since the IT firm bought Lala.com – a streaming music service – last year.
With speculators speculating that Apple acquired the loss-making digital start-up in order to access the company’s streaming technology, when it was announced the Lala.com service itself would close at the end of May, just a week before Jobs was due to keynote at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, many put two and two together and pre-wrote the headline “Apple to launch streaming content service”. Yet record company insiders insisted they’d not spoken to Apple about any new iTunes streaming service, and as new licences would be required to enable such a service, in reality an imminent iStream always looked unlikely.
Instead, yesterday’s Jobs keynote focused on the next edition of the iPhone, and on some upgrades that will apply to all iPhones, iPad touches and iPads. Among the innovations you’ll find on the iPhone 4 is a thinner design, sharper text, pictures and video, longer battery life (up to 40 hours of music listening), enhanced motion-sensing (for gamey type whatnots), a better camera and the arrival of the iBooks service on the Apple mobile device.
There’s also a front facing camera so people can make video calls, should they want to. Techie people have been trying to inflict video phone calls on us for years now, but 99.9% of people have generally resisted the development, there being about seven actual scenarios where a video phone would be useful. But still, now it’s Apple trying to inflict video calls on us, everyone will probably want to see what building the person they’re talking to is standing by and whether they’re wearing a hat.
Perhaps the most interesting development iPhone-wise is iAds, something already hinted at by Apple when the iPad launched. This is a new mobile advertising network that will make it easier for app developers to incorporate advertising into their products. Apple will sell and host ads that appear in the apps Google Ads style, with app developers getting 60% of ad revenue. If Apple can match Google in ad sales success, it could revolutionise the ad-funded apps market. Jobs reckons US advertisers have already committed over $60 million of ad spend to the iAds network this year.
The all new iPhone will retail at $200 and $300 in the US (for 16GB and 32GB models respectively). It will launch simultaneously in the US, UK, France and Germany on 24 Jun.
But, to confirm again, the iPhone 4 owning world will have to survive without an iTunes streaming music service, for the time being at least. In related news, Apple has started dishing out refunds to former Lala.com subscribers who still had live subscriptions when the service was turned off last week. In a bid to placate the Lala faithful, refunds – which are provided in the form of iTunes vouchers – are being rounded up to the nearest dollar or five dollars (depending on the size of the refund).
