iPhone Now Officially The World’s Most Popular Camera
As early as last summer, the iPhone laid claim to having become the world’s most popular camera, when it transpired that more of the photos on picture sharing site Flickr were taken on one of Apple’s devices than on any single “proper” camera.
Because the camera does not lie, we now have hard data to illustrate this trend. Sales of mass market, budget digital cameras are in freefall. In the UK, they were down 30% by value on the previous year from January to November 2011, according to the latest figures from research firm GfK.
That month, famed photographer Annie Liebovitz, whose images have graced countless Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair covers, was asked which camera she recommended to Friends. In an interview on America’s NBC News, Liebovitz declared the iPhone the “snapshot camera of today”.
Why did that moniker come to be applied to a machine designed for making calls and surfing the web? Convenience has played its part. With a smartphone in the back pocket, there is no longer any need to remember to charge the digital camera and then make room for it in a handbag.
Texting Profits at Risk as Users Look Elsewhere
IMAGE: DI
SMS — short message service — is no longer all the rage, but it still generates an estimated 12 percent of service revenue for U.S. operators.
Now, with many consumers turning to low-cost alternatives like iMessenger, BlackBerry Messenger and Facebook’s mobile messaging service, operators like Verizon Wireless, AT&T Inc and Sprint Nextel risk losing a steady, superbly profitable source of income.
Customers using the new crop of messaging services must still pay for mobile Internet access, but the cost per message is much smaller than a monthly SMS service plan or per text charges, particularly as U.S. carriers charge both the recipient and sender.
U.S. operators still carry a lot of text messages on their networks, but they are seeing warning signs ahead…
Craig Moffett, an analyst for Sanford Bernstein, said carriers have a huge cause for concern as he described text messaging as “the most profitable service known to man.”
At current rates SMS brings in $1,000 for every megabyte of data transmitted compared with the 2 cents to 13 cents per megabyte generated by a typical wireless Internet data plan, according to Moffett, who notes that this revenue is virtually “100 percent profit.”
Yes, Even iPhones Can Spy on You, Too
By ADAM CLARK ESTES for the Atlantic Wire
An Apple hacker has discovered that Carrier IQ, the shady smartphone software recently found to be logging keystrokes on Android and BlackBerry devices, is also installed on the iPhone. Don’t worry, fanboys. It’s off by default — probably. After
As on other smartphones, the presence of Carrier IQ in Apple’s iOS firmware is difficult to detect. Prominent iPhone jailbreaker “chpwn” discovered traces of the code on Thursday, after Android security researcher Trevor Eckhart dug into the code of his Google-made operating system to discover that Carrier IQ was recording tons of user data, even the contents of text messages. Hacker blogs are referring to Carrier IQ as a “rootkit,” a type of virtually undetectable software that provides privileged access to your data. In 2007, CNET reported that rootkits were “tops on the criminal hackers’ To Do lists,” though Carrier IQ markets its services to mobile carriers like AT&T and Sprint, as the name suggests. It’s also not a new service, as chpwn explains in a blog post (emphasis his):
