This post was published 2 months 24 days ago.
It\'s is possible that the information within this article is now out of date or updated.

Lots and lots of Apple News coming down the information super highway today.

Let’s start with the no-brainer, shall we? Apple has finally sent out the invitations to the long rumored event on Sept 9th in San Francisco and have confirmed it will be iPod related. The invites feature a typical “dancing hipster with iPod” silhouette and the caption “It’s Only Rock and Roll, but We Like It…”. Conventional wisdom states that the new social elements of iTunes will be demoed, a new iPod Touch will appear featuring a camera, a new 64G iPod Touch will be announced, and anyone who even mentions an Apple Tablet will be dragged to the Presidio and thrashed till Christmas. Beyond that, I personally have a hunch there will be some other iPod related announcement that hasn’t been tipped yet, possibly larger capacity Nanos or Shuffles, there will be more Microsoft-baiting then we have seen recently at these events, there will be much back-patting and focus on Apple’s dominant position in digital music, and Steve Jobs will make an appearance, likely right at the end and he will have some kind of surprise with him. If he walks out at the final moment with an Apple Tablet in his hands, that would be his biggest BOOM yet. I keep getting this feeling that that is what is going to happen. Crazy, I know…but can’t you just picture the bedlam?

Next, as our favorite Apple enthusiast Doogald mentioned in a comment to another post today, the net is alive with analysis (originating with Gene Munster, a senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray) that says that Apple will drop it’s exclusive iPhone deal with AT&T within the year. This would make sense since many people have been blaming the iPhone’s relatively low US penetration with having a single carrier, and more and more users are complaining bitterly about AT&T’s network performance. Plus, if they do dump the AT&T deal and then fix the AppStore, they can blame the weird app acceptance process on AT&T…BAD AT&T. The fact that the Apple has been opening up the iPhone to multiple carriers in more markets is also suggestive that a change is coming. The carrier rumored to be in the lead to pick up the iPhone along side AT&T is Verizon. This makes sense since the Verizon network gets high satisfaction ratings from customers, but could be a problem as it is CDMA only. The iPhone is a GSM device, so either Verizon makes some major infrastructure changes or they’ll get their own personal iPhone model….both could be tricky and time consuming. Of course, AT&T is in there plugging to get their exclusive deal continued and say they are in negotiation on that point with Apple. Perhaps they sacrificed a few Android handsets on the alter to sweeten the deal?

Lastly, a strange little bit of news found in a recent report from mobile media company JiWire. According to their study of cafe hotspots, cafe mobile device usage is overwhelmingly Apple flavored. The iPhone and iPod Touch make up an insane 98 percent of mobile gadgets used in cafes with Wi-Fi (that doesn;t include notebooks or netbooks). The iPhone accounts for 54.2 percent of cafe WiFi connections and the iPod Touch for 43.4 percent. The closest competitor is the PSP of all things, with 1.2 percent. I think these numbers mainly make clear that the demographic that uses WiFi in cafes is perfectly in sync with the demographic of Apple mobile device internet surfers (read “predominantly College age”. I mean, come on, what is the PSP doing in there?)…but the sheer size of those percentages is still staggering.

Zealot (469 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).