How the iPad is killing the iPad

Sales of Apple’s iPad 2 in the UAE have fallen drastically following the global the launch of the New iPad (or iPad 3).

The New iPad is not yet officially available in the UAE, though many Apple fans and traders have already shipped in stocks from markets where the New iPad has been launched.

“Sales of iPad 2 have dropped by 50 per cent since the launch of the new tablet,” said Bittu Jethani of Sheeba General Trading, one of the first to bring the New iPad into the UAE market.

“With hardly any price difference, there is no reason why anyone should opt for the older version of the iPad,” he said.

While officially the older iPad versions are still priced at Dh1500 and above, online, those models are available at throwaway prices.

The first generation iPad 1 in perfect condition is selling for as low as Dh1200 for 16GB while iPad 2 models are being priced at Dh1400 and upwards.

Some owners are even selling their iPads with additional new accessories to find quick buyers. “I recently purchased a three-month old 32Gb iPad 2 from Abu Dhabi for Dh1800,”said Sudesh Manjunath a sales executive from Dubai.

The New iPad is selling for Dh2,450 for a 16GB wifi only model, and 4G is priced at Dh2,450.

Meanwhile, according to latest figures by mobile advertising firm Jumptap, while the first week of the launch saw sales of the new iPad hit record levels (3 million in a week) traffic levels thereafter continued to slow.

The network that measured iPad traffic on over 107 million monthly mobile users said “iPad3 traffic represented .52 per cent of total iPad network traffic on the day of launch, peaked at 2.28 per cent by day three, and closed out the week at 1.92 per cent.

“iPad and iPad2, on the other hand, each maintained 45 per cent or more of the total iPad traffic throughout the week.”

Meanwhile, according to another prediction from technology research firm Gartner, tablets made by Apple will continue to retain the number one spot for the next four years with annual unit shipments expected to increase by four fold to 169.7 million by 2016.

According to it 118.9 million tablets will be sold next year compared to 60 million sold last year.

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Invisible Mercedes Brings James Bond's Technology To Life

In a promotion for its first production fuel-cell vehicle in Germany, Mercedes-Benz turned a B-Class hatchback invisible (at least, from a distance), using the same idea behind the invisible car in the James Bond's film, "Die Another Day."

The invisibility cloak had its tryout this week on the streets of Stuttgart, Germany. To make Q's idea of an invisible car real, Mercedes employed dozens of technicians and some $263,000 worth of flexible LED mats covering one side of the car.

Using a camera mounted on the opposite side of the vehicle, the LEDs were programmed to reproduce the image from the camera at the right scale, blending the vehicle into the background from a few feet away. Doing so required power sources, computers and other gear totaling 1,100 lbs of equipment inside the B-Class.

Mercedes' point was to show how the F-Cell hydrogen fuel-cell powered car would be invisible to the environment, producing only water vapor and heat for emissions. For an invisible car, it's getting a lot of stares.

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The New jean with laptop have built-in keyboard, mouse and speakers (PHOTOS)

If you struggle to spend more than a few moments away from your computer then a new invention could be for you.

That's because a pair of Dutch inventors have developed a set of jeans that give a whole new meaning to the phrase 'laptop'.

The jeans, known as Beauty and the Geek, come with a fully functional keyboard, mouse and speakers integrated into the upper leg of the fabric and are the idea of design company Nieuwe Heren, run by Erik de Nijs and Tim Smit.

The duo handmade the trousers themselves and they are designed to give a user ease of movement while still being in control of the computer.

'They’re not that heavy,' de Nijs told WebProNews. 'With the flexible keyboard, small speakers, and small mouse, they are only a little bit heavier than your regular jeans.'

He added: 'The idea was that you could log in to your computer and control it without sitting in a closed environment behind your desk.'

The jeans are of a modern style and have a back pocket that has been specially designed to cover the mouse, which uses an elastic wire to stay attached.

They stay connected to the laptop via wireless technology in a USB device and are expected to retail at around £250 - if they ever make it onto the market.

De Nijs added: 'The whole project is too complex and we don’t have enough money right now to get it ready for the market.'

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One-man flying space hopper could become the 'air car' of the future

Thomas Senkel, who built the machine with two friends in south-west Germany, piloted the extraordinary aircraft on its maiden 1min 30sec journey.

The remarkable contraption looks like a helicopter (pictured) but has 16 rotors and an open top - and its creators say it is cheap and eco-friendly too.

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WikiLeaks Now Victim Of Its Own Leak

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, once said his mission was not simply to divulge secrets, but to make sure the release of that information actually made a difference.

He shared his trove of diplomatic cables with The New York Times, the Guardian in London, and other news organizations so they could draw the world's attention to the most important parts.

But that approach has now collapsed. The entire WikiLeaks collection, consisting of a quarter-million diplomatic files, is now out in raw form on the Internet. They are unfiltered, unanalyzed and unedited. No names of diplomats or secret sources have been removed.

The release was apparently inadvertent, but the backlash has been swift and harsh. WikiLeaks, which gained worldwide fame for publicizing U.S. government secrets, is once again the target of intense criticism. But this time, it's not just the U.S. government and others who wanted to keep those documents private. Even former WikiLeaks supporters are criticizing the organization for sloppy security.

This is not what WikiLeaks or its partners wanted.

"Our relationship with WikiLeaks was based on the agreement that we would be allowed to redact these things and nothing would be published that hadn't been carefully redacted for reasons of personal safety," says David Leigh of the Guardian newspaper, one of the editors who negotiated with Assange. "We're extremely upset that Assange, on his own responsibility, has now published everything."

But Assange and WikiLeaks blame the Guardian, and Leigh in particular. They say Leigh, in a book about WikiLeaks, divulged a password needed to unlock all the documents.

Leigh says that's nonsense, and other WikiLeaks news partners issued a joint statement with the Guardian, highlighting WikiLeaks' own failure to safeguard its files.

Even the alleged leaker of the diplomatic cables, U.S. Pfc. Bradley Manning, is now down on WikiLeaks, it seems. Bradley is in a military prison, but his support network said Friday that any source who provides secret information has the right to expect that that information will be "handled with care."

Journalism professor C.W. Anderson of the City University of New York says the WikiLeaks model involved collaboration among three groups: people with inside information, like Manning; computer activists with the skills to manage big dumps of data; and news organizations eager to make use of the leaks. But those relationships have now fractured.

"Former WikiLeaks people are fighting all the time, so that relationship is deeply damaged. The relationship with the traditional media organization is certainly damaged beyond repair," he says. "The whole thing is just such a mess."

Nor, says Anderson, are potential leakers likely to want to work with WikiLeaks in the future.

"If I had a very nervous person, who had secret documents I wanted to share, and I looked at what was going on, I would not come near them with a 10-foot pole," he says.

Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, notes that the leaking of government secrets is not an everyday phenomenon.

"It depends on the existence and the willingness of an individual with access to significant information to break ranks and disclose that information," he says. "If Bradley Manning was the source of these cables, it seems there's only one source of that caliber, and Bradley Manning is not going to be disclosing any more in the near future."

Yet WikiLeaks has already made its mark, and Anderson says the entire episode reflects the way information is now gathered, stored and shared.

"I think the idea that leaks are going to occur in gigabytes of data, piped through anonymous servers — the horse is out of the barn — I don't think we'll ever go back to the old way," he says.

Source:BBC

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Blogger Finally Releases an iPhone App

Google has finally launched an iOS app for Blogger, giving the blog network's millions of users a simple way to write, manage and publish posts from their iPhones.

The app, available for iOS users 3.2 and up, is rather straightforward. It allows users to compose and publish blog posts complete with photos and geotagging. It also lets users view and edit their published and draft blog posts. It mimics the simplicity of the Blogger for Android interface, though. Users can also manage multiple blogs from the interface.

While the app works for the iPad, it only works in compatibility mode. Hopefully an iPad app is in the near future.

This is the first official Blogger app for the iPhone. BlogPress created an unofficial app that Blogger endorsed, but an official app has been long overdue. The blogging service, once the world's largest blogging service, has been overshadowed by WordPress, Tumblr and more lightweight competition. Google recently started investing in an overhaul of the service in an attempt to make Blogger relevant once again.

What do you think of Blogger and its new iOS app?

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Apple-Led Group to Buy Nortel Patents for $4.5B

Apple Inc. and five bidding partners agreed to buy Nortel Networks Corp.’s remaining patents for $4.5 billion, giving them access to a portfolio of technologies used in mobile phones and tablet computers. The bidding group included Microsoft Corp., Sony Corp, Research In Motion Ltd., Ericsson AB and EMC Corp., Ontario-based Nortel said in a statement. The bid trumped the $900 million Google Inc. had offered before the auction for Nortel’s remaining intellectual property.  

Apple Inc. (AAPL) joined with rivals Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Research in Motion Ltd. (RIM) to outbid Google Inc. (GOOG) for a patent portfolio from Nortel Networks Corp. and gain rights to technologies for mobile phones and tablet computers.

Bloomberg reports that the group, which also includes Sony Corp. (6758), Ericsson AB and EMC Corp., agreed to pay $4.5 billion in cash for the assets, Ontario-based Nortel said in a statement. The companies aim to complete the sale this quarter pending approval from U.S. and Canadian courts, it said.

The purchase will give Apple, RIM and their bidding partners control over more than 6,000 patents and applications that cover wireless and Internet technologies. The winning offer came after several rounds of bidding and was five times the $900 million Google had offered before the auction for Nortel’s remaining intellectual property.

“This is by far the biggest patent auction in history, both in terms of number of patents sold and in terms of the price tag,” said Alex Poltorak, chairman and chief executive officer of Suffern, New York-based General Patent Corp. “Nobody expected the price to get this high.”

The deal brings together Apple, RIM and Microsoft, which compete against each other in mobile computing, and leaves out Google, which makes the Android software for handset makers such as Samsung Electronics Co. and LG Electronics Inc. The Android alliance has become the leading platform for smartphones.

“Everybody is vying for market dominance,” said Poltorak. “My speculation is that everybody else pretty much got together bidding against Google and Intel.”

The bidding process had multiple rounds with about 150 people in the auction room, according to David Descoteaux, managing director of Lazard Ltd., Nortel’s investment banker.

“It was around-the-clock negotiations,” Descoteaux said in an interview. “We went well into the night.”

The price and the bidding show that companies considered the patents vital to their strategic goals, including the need to defend themselves from patent lawsuits and to roll out future products, Descoteaux said.

“This has woken up the world to what IP means and how companies think about ways of monetizing intellectual property,” he said.

Nortel, which filed for bankruptcy in 2009, fetched more for the patents than the $3 billion it had previously raised by selling almost all its businesses. RIM, maker of the BlackBerry smartphone, will pay about $770 million for its share of the patents, the Waterloo, Ontario-based company said in a statement. Ericsson will pay $340 million, the Stockholm-based networking-equipment maker said. Steve Dowling, a spokesman for Apple, declined to comment beyond the Nortel statement.

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