Apple unveils the 7.9-inch iPad Mini to take on Kindle, Nexus 7; prices start at $329

Apple has finally unveiled its much-awaited iPad mini tablet. With a screen measuring 7.9 inches on the diagonal, the iPad Mini is about half the size of the regular iPad. It's slightly larger than the 7-inch tablets from Amazon.com Inc. and Google Inc. The regular iPad is 9.7 inches. 

The new iPad mini is 23 per cent thinner and 53 per cent lighter than the third generation iPad. The new iPad mini features FaceTime HD and iSight cameras. It is claimed to offer up to 10 hours of battery life.

The iPad mini comes in 7.2 mm thin and weighs 0.68 pounds. The dual-core A5 chip is said to deliver responsive graphics and a fast, fluid Multi-Touch experience. The iPad mini features a front-facing FaceTime HD camera and a 5 megapixel iSight camera on the back with advanced optics for taking still pictures and recording full 1080p HD video. 

The new iPad mini with Wi-Fi models will be available in black and slate or white and silver on Friday, November 2, for $329 for the 16GB model, $429 for the 32GB model and $529 for the 64GB model. 

The iPad mini with Wi-Fi + Cellular will start shipping a couple of weeks after the Wi-Fi models, beginning in the US on AT&T, Sprint and Verizon. iPad mini with Wi-Fi + Cellular will be available for $459 for the 16GB model, $559 for the 32GB model and $659 for the 64GB model. The Apple iPad Mini will be initially released in 34 countries globally. 

The company has also updated its full-sized one. Besides, the company launched new Mac computers, including a 13-inch version of a MacBook Pro with sharper, Retina display and new iMacs.

Apple's iPad Mini could be branded as iPad Air

AThe announcement of Apple's iPad Mini is right around the corner. Speculations are rife about the device, especially regarding its hardware and price-range.ccording to iMore, the Cupertino-based company may go the way of the MacBook Air, and introduce an 'iPad Air' that is smaller, more portable, lighter, and features a screen that doesn't have retina display. 

John Gruber from Daring Fireball said, "You know what other Apple product’s primary attributes are thinness, weight, and price? The MacBook Air. And, no coincidence, the latest revisions to the Air lineup debuted on stage at WWDC without retina displays. We’re a couple of years away from Apple going retina across the board."

Earlier, it was revealed that Apple may discontinue the iPad 2 to make way for the new iPad Mini, or 'Air' as we earlier speculated. According to AppleInsider, Rob Cihra with Evercore Partners has said in a note to investors that Apple may phase out the iPad 2. The reason stated mentions Apple's visions of "clearer product tiers." This could point to Apple's aims of lowering the entry-bar of iPad products. 

So if one wants to purchase an iPad 2, now would be a good time as the product may be not available when the next line-up of Apple devices hit the shelves. 

Apple may launch the iPad mini as soon as November 2, 2012, which is roughly 10 days after its announcement taking place on October 23. Apple has sent out media invites for an event slated for October 23 with the caption, ‘We’ve got a little more to show you.’

The invite could mean that Apple has more gadgets in the offing for the year 2012. This invite also confirms a recent report, which stated that Apple would be hosting an event on October 23.

As far as the rumours of the iPad mini go, it appears that the Cupertino-based company is not holding back any punches with this smaller iPad, and launching it in various storage capacities such as 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and the top-of-the-line model at 64GB of internal storage. The top of the line iPad mini is expected to be sold at approximately €649 for the 64GB Wi-Fi plus cellular version. The cheapest model, an 8GB Wi-Fi only version is believed to retail for approximately €249.

Rumours claim that Apple will introduce a redesigned version of the iPad which was launched earlier this year and the new model is expected to come with the Lightning connector as well as making it lighter.
It is also believed that the Apple event will also play host to a number of other announcements, which include the updated line up of Macs and on the software front, iBooks.

Apple drops Java from Mac OS X after experts warn users on its security

Apple is removing old versions of Oracle's Java software from Internet browsers on the computers of its customers when they install the latest update to its Mac operating system. 

Apple, which has previously included Java with installations of Mac OS X, announced the move on its support site. It said that customers need to obtain Java directly from Oracle if they want to access web content written the widely used programming language. (support.apple.com/kb/DL1572)

Apple did not provide a reason for the change and both companies declined to comment. 

Java is a computer language that enables programmers to write one set of code to run on virtually any type of machine. It is widely used on the Internet so that Web developers can make their sites accessible from multiple browsers running on Macs or Microsoft Windows PCs. 

Two years ago both companies said they had agreed that Apple would one day stop providing Java software to Mac customers and that would Oracle to take on that responsibility. They did not provide a date for that transition. 

Apple is implementing that change in the wake of a Java security scare that prompted some security experts to caution computer users to only use Java on an as-needed basis.

Security experts in Europe discovered Java bugs in late August that hackers had exploited to launch attacks. It took Oracle several days to release an update to Java to correct those flaws.

Adam Gowdiak, a researcher with Polish security firm Security Explorations, said on Friday that he has since found two new security bugs in Java that continue to make computers vulnerable to attack.

Gowdiak said that removing Java from Mac browsers reduces the risks of an attack.

Yahoo to exit South Korea in first Asian pullout

Yahoo Inc's South Korean operation said on Friday it will quit the country, underscoring its struggle against Google Inc and local competitors expanding aggressively into mobile advertising and online services. South Korea is the first Asian country Yahoo is leaving, the firm said. An industry pioneer and household Internet brand, it has been overshadowed by global rivals including Facebook Inc and Google in recent years. 

"Yahoo has faced several challenges in the past couple of years and decided to pull out of the (Korean) business to put more resources on global business and become more powerful and successful," Yahoo said in a statement. Yahoo Korea, which started business in 1997 and is wholly owned by the US search company, has around 200-250 employees in South Korea. It will terminate Korean online portal services in December, the company said. In the South Korean market, it has failed to beat local rivals such as NHN Corp, Daum Communications Corp and SK Communications Co.

Yahoo appointed Google veteran Marissa Mayer as its chief executive in July, its third CEO in less than a year. Former CEO Scott Thompson resigned after less than 6 months in the job over a controversy over his academic credentials. Before that, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang had stepped down as CEO, and an internal reorganisation cut thousands of jobs. Yahoo remains one of the world's most powerful websites, with more than 700 million monthly visitors who use products like its email service and read its news pages.

Russian search engine Yandex targets Google

Russia's leading internet search engine, Yandex, will take the fight to Google in emerging markets like Turkey in a bid to offset the inroads made by the US giant in its home market.

Yandex founder and chief executive Arkady Volozh told Reuters on Friday the firm was likely to use its own experts to expand into new countries, but would not rule out acquisitions or partnership deals.

"We are focusing on the markets with Google dominance in search ... where they have 90-plus per cent market share," Volozh said in an interview in Dublin, adding Yandex would stress to consumers the dangers of one firm dominating the internet. 

Yandex is currently focusing on Turkey, where it has eked out a 1 per cent market share since it entered the market last year. It describes this as a base for a significant expansion and says it will look to other large markets where it sees no real competition to Google, though Volozh refused to name them.

Yandex, which raised $1.4 billion in an initial public offering (IPO) in New York last year, has seen its share of the Russian search market fall to 60 per cent in the second quarter from 64 per cent a year earlier, according to LiveInternet.

That is partly due to inroads made by Google.

"We'll be growing 30 per cent or something next year, but it's not doubling every year as we used to have four or five years ago. We need to find some new markets, new opportunities ... it could improve our revenues dramatically," Volozh said.

Yandex posted revenues of 20 billion roubles ($648 million)last year and has a market capitalization of $7.2 billion.

Google is also under pressure from slowing revenue, shocking analysts on Thursday by reporting quarterly revenue growth of 17 percent year-over-year, the first time its growth has fallen below 20 per cent since 2009.


Defending its lead

Despite the drive to expand abroad, Yandex will defend its market share at home against rivals like Google and Microsoft, which use proprietary browser and operating systems to encourage users onto their search products, Volozh said.

Last month Yandex launched a browser to compete with Google's Chrome. Norwegian mobile internet browser maker Opera has signed a licensing deal with Yandex to share its browser technology.
The Russian search engine has no plans to follow Google into the hardware market, where it builds mobile phones and tablets, but it would consider it if necessary.

"We will see where we will need to go. Whatever we need to preserve our market share we will do," Volozh said.

While Yandex is building a platform of applications to work on its browser, it expects most revenue to continue to come from search rather than display ads or paid-for services.

Apple has blazed a trail selling applications, music and video through its iTunes store. But that market is only a fraction of the size of the tens of billions earned every year in search, Volozh said.

Yandex would not rule out deals to help its expansion abroad, he added.

"It may be one of the models to buy somebody or partner with someone or just to build something from scratch," he said.

The key was to persuade consumers of the importance of maintaining choice and competition.
"We have ended up with these platforms where you are gardened in ... you can't step out of it. This is completely contrary to the initial idea of the internet," Volozh said.

Mobile revolution, economy trip up tech giants

Mobile may be the future for technology, but even with the worldwide proliferation of high-powered devices like smartphones and tablets, some companies are struggling to maintain consistent revenue streams.

Earnings disappointments this week from Intel Corp, Microsoft Corp, Google Inc and AMD underscore how Silicon Valley, both the old guard and new, is struggling to profit from consumers' waning love affair with the stalwart PC and infatuation with mobile - the most significant tectonic shift in the industry since the advent of the Internet.

That bodes ill for companies reporting next week that are highly leveraged to mobile advertising and services - most famously Facebook Inc, which raised a tumult by warning about over-inflated expectations of its mobile business just before its seminal IPO. 


Amazon and Apple Inc are expected to fare better, analysts say. Apple, which reports Thursday, is struggling with capacity constraints and supply hiccups - but analysts contend that's a good problem to have because it's spurred by raging mobile hardware demand.

Amazon and eBay Inc, meanwhile, are succeeding in reaching consumers through mobile devices, particularly Amazon with its cut-rate Kindle Fire tablets. About 800,000 shoppers made their first-ever eBay purchase through a mobile device.
But others are struggling.

"Companies are realizing that it is not easy to find a formula that works with mobile," Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi said. "Mobile is not proving to be as straightforward as people thought."

Signs that some of the most innovative of today's Silicon Valley titans are struggling with how to make money off mobile users come at a bad time for an industry already struggling with a worsening macroeconomic environment.

The biggest stunner was perhaps Google, which shed more than $20 billion of market value after it reported that its core advertising business had slowed. Critics said it was no anomaly.

"Click prices declined for the fourth consecutive quarter after rising for eight consecutive quarters before then. That's a negative. This is the mobile problem," said BGC analyst Colin Gillis.

Then there is Zynga, the poster child for mobile transition woes. In 2011 the casual games maker was a consumer Internet darling. In 2012, it has cut its outlook twice and lost three-quarters of its market value amid a lack of mobile hits, leading analysts to warn of massive layoffs.
Google CEO Larry Page, however, argued the shift represented a long-term opportunity.

"We're really starting to live in a new reality," he told analysts on a conference call. "It will create a huge new universe of opportunities for advertisers, where they ... will be dynamically adapting across a whole bunch of different devices, to reach the right audiences at the right time."

Internet companies in China, the world's largest Internet market by number of users, are also struggling to make money from those who access the Internet from mobile devices. Top China search engine Baidu Inc saw its shares tumble last week after Credit Suisse downgraded it to "underperform" on concerns about its money-making plans.

At the end of June, the number of Chinese users accessing the Internet from mobile phones surpassed those accessing the Internet via personal computer. Because of this trend, many Chinese Internet companies such as social-networking and online games firm Tencent Holdings have upped their mobile Internet offerings in order to capture growth.

"If you look at the evolution of mobile Internet, social networking is usually the first to spread around the world, followed by games and then advertising," said Elinor Leung of CLSA. "You have stages to mobile Internet development, but eventually everyone will be there".


From bad to worse
Perhaps hardest-hit are Intel and others closely tied to the PC chain. Intel's weak outlook for the fourth quarter ended any hopes the PC market would pick up at year's end. While Intel dominated that space in its prime, in smartphones its market share is less than 1 percent.

Intel's one-time rival AMD is in even worse shape, saying this week it will cut 15 percent of its staff -- more than 1,600 people -- as part of yet another restructuring to cut costs while it tries to figure out its future.
On Thursday, Microsoft revealed a 22 percent dive in quarterly profit as sales of computers running its Windows operating system dipped.

Marvell, yet another chipmaker being battered by the lagging PC market, on Thursday cut its revenue outlook by as much as 10 percent as its customers in the storage business suffered.


Winners win
Those doing best are the one with an established foothold in mobile, having figured it out years earlier.
Verizon Communications posted a record quarterly profit on the strength of the wireless business it co-owns, which came largely from demand for the iPhone.

Apple's ubiquitous handset even figured in the blockbuster $20 billion purchase of a majority in Sprint Nextel Corp by Softbank Corp. Softbank, the first to offer the phone in Japan, was said to admire Sprint's efforts to bring the device to its own network.

The memory maker SanDisk also easily beat expectations for the third quarter, as demand for chips to be used in smartphones and tablets drove up pricing.

If technology companies only had to deal with a platform transition, that would be one thing. The problem is they are struggling with that transition in the face of a weak economy, when technology upgrades are often the first budget line item to be cut and consumer spending crumbles.

"It seems like the macro conditions certainly deteriorated in the third month, and no tech company will be immune to it," said Trip Chowdhry, analyst at Global Equities Research.

Microsoft prices Wi-Fi Surface tablet below new Apple iPad

The world's largest software company, which announced its surprise foray into computer manufacturing in June, said it would sell a 32-gigabyte (GB), Wi-Fi only version of its tablet at $499, versus $599 for a comparable version of Apple's new iPad.

Microsoft's tablet, which is taller and slightly heavier than an iPad, will go on sale on October 26 as the company launches the new touch-friendly Windows 8 operating system. A limited number will be available for pre-order from a Microsoft website from Tuesday morning.

The company is hoping the Surface - along with Windows tablets from other hardware makers - will challenge the dominance of Apple's iPad, which has 70 percent of the tablet market after essentially inventing the category in 2010.

The iPad's popularity demolished the market for mini-laptops called netbooks, and crimped the sales of full-scale PCs, eating away at Microsoft's Windows market.
Based on a Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O) chip designed by ARM Holdings (ARM.L), the Surface will run a simplified version of Windows 8 that is not compatible with old Microsoft applications.

However, the tablet will feature new app-style versions of Office mainstays such as Word, PowerPoint and Excel, and will include Xbox games, video and music apps.
The Surface, with two cameras and a USB port, will be Wi-Fi only. Microsoft has made no mention of a wireless-enabled version.

On top of the basic model, Microsoft will also offer a 32GB model bundled with a black 'Touch Cover' - that doubles as a keyboard - for $599, and a 64GB version with a black Touch Cover for $699.

That compares to $699 for a 64GB Wi-Fi only version of the new iPad.
Since announcing the Surface in June, Microsoft had been silent on the price range, saying only that it would be "competitive" with similar products.

Some market watchers had speculated that Microsoft might price its first tablet even lower to compete with Apple's less-powerful iPad 2, which costs $399, or smaller rivals such as Amazon.com's (AMZN.O) Kindle Fire HD and Google Inc's (GOOG.O) Nexus 7, which start at $199.

Alongside Microsoft's physical stores in the United States and Canada, the Surface will be generally available online from October 26 for consumers in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Britain and the United States.