AAPL Rumors

Mobile providers in Japan have indicated a dramatic shift in the numbers of subscribers switching companies. The impact of the iPhone is also answering critics who insisted there would find only limited interest.

According to a report by Japanese tech business journal, Tech-On, SoftBank Mobile, Apple’s exclusive provider of the iPhone, led all other providers in new mobile phone subscriptions. Estimated at 215,400 of the 391,500 new activations during the month of July. 

KDDI noted that new cancelations related to customers’ transferring their numbers to another provider surpassed incoming transfers for the first time ever in July, crediting the iPhone with the unusual shift. “We accept the fact that our handsets need to be more attractive” a KDDI representative said.

Many analysts predicted that Apple’s phone would flop in Japan, a market where phone hardware and mobile networks have long offered greater sophistication than other markets. Other critics pointed out that the iPhone lacked a variety of culturally significant elements unique to the Japanese mobile market, including the ability to scan the QC barcodes that appear everywhere, and the inclusion of Sony’s RFID-based “FeliCA” swipe chip for purchases such at travel on the train system. Apple may go some way to address this, but to properly address the needs of the Japanese market may require a custom design. Many now believe that some of the required technologies for Japan will be integrated into the iPhone as standard, keeping with the one phone worldwide design, though the stored value card may only be solved by creating a custom version for Japan.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the iTunes App Store has delivered over 60 million applications to customers in the first month of operations. Jobs commented that while most of those applications were free Apple has sold an average of $1 million a day for a total of $30 million in sales in the first month. Jobs said “I have never seen anything like this in my career for software.” 

Some of the big winners include Sega’s Super Monkey Ball which had over 300,000 downloads. This represents over $2 million in revenue for this $9.99 game. Meanwhile, the popular medical reference Epocrates has seen over 125,000 downloads. This compares to the previously installed base of 500,000 on other mobile devices.

Jobs also addressed is the recent discussions regarding application removals confirming the ability for Apple to remotely disable an application. This may be of concern to some but is an important feature in the corporate market.

The IEEE has approved an updated version of the standard IEEE 1394 known to Apple users as Firewire. The standard has been named 1394-2008 and is backwards compatible with all prior Firewire technology. The new standard includes complete specifications for speeds of 1.6 Gigabits/second and 3.2 Gigabits/second. It utilizes the existing Firewire 800 connector.

Firewire 400 devices have become widely adopted,  though the faster Firewire 800 has seen slower to see wide spread use outside the Mac community. It will be interesting to see how quickly this technology will be adopted. We talked to several hard disk vendors and they say it is on their road map, so we may see some products using the spec early next year. When we contacted Apple about including it on future Macs they said they do not comment of future product releases. But I guess we expected that.

IEEE says the new standard is expected to be available in October.

Apple resellers have received notice that MacBook, MacBook Pro and iPod supplies will become constrained in the coming weeks. Historically this precedes the introduction of new or refreshed models. Given the timing this would point to a product launch in September.

On the iPod update, Apple has refreshed their iPod lineup in September for the past 2 years and independently to this report it was widely expected to do the same again this year. Is it a coincidence that the ‘Back to School” promotion ends on September 15th.?

iPod announcements to look out for are, a new iPod Touch, a tall iPod Nano, new touchpad of the MacBook, redesigned MacBook Pro, and the Mac Tablet.

ARM announced today a major new OEM licensing deal, but did not name the customer; could this be Apple. Peter Clarke believes so. Apple recently acquired PA Semiconductor which brought its founder and CEO Dan Dobberpuhl to Apple. Dobberpuhl led the Digital Equipment team that developed the StrongARM processor using a similar license from ARM.

If true this could mean a major advance in the performance of the iPhone, also a great fit for the next generation iPod Touch, and possibly a new Tablet form of Mac, often dubbed “Newton 2″. Though I doubt Steve would use that name. Some hints on the product side were revealed at the Quarterly conference call.

This blog/website is for rumors about all things Apple. If you have a rumor you can let me know and I will add it to the blog.

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