News

First quarter mobile phone sales may be off almost nine percent from last year, however the smartphone market continues to heat up. Gartner reports that Apple has doubled its market share from last year, with sales of 3.9 million iPhones in Q1 2009, representing 10.8 percent of global smartphone sales.

Nokia still leads the pack with 41.2 percent, although this is a decrease from last year's 45.1 percent market share. Research In Motion sales also jumped from 13.3 percent market share in Q1 2008 to 19.9 percent during the same period this year, partly due to the popularity of the BlackBerry Storm.

Apple has posted two job opportunities that could give further insight into the hardware and advanced capabilities coming our way on the next generation iPhone. Video recording and an improved 3.2 megapixel camera have been confirmed.

It seems Apple is ready to develop some exciting ways to take advantage of the new hardware. The following is an excerpt from a job description from Apple:

Only one month after the initial release of push notification, Apple has invited iPhone OS 3.0 developers to participate in high-volume tests of the system. If all goes well, push notification is expected to be operative for general users with the release of iPhone 3.0.

Push notification saves the iPhone battery by allowing apps to receive information without actually running in the background. Recent reports have indicated that Apple is considering allowing a limited number of apps to run in the background, however this taxes iPhone resources.

New information has leaked regarding iPhone 3.0, allegedly from a member of Apple's hardware development team. Along with a list of features and specs, the source indicated that July 17th will be the release date for the new iPhone.

The list of features below, should it be correct, would be impressive. We've heard rumors of an OLED screen before, however this doesn't make the prospect any less interesting. This design upgrade alone would dramatically improve battery life.

Wouldn't it be great if every time you jumped to the iPhone home screen Pandora kept streaming music? The only application that Apple currently allows to run in the background is the iPod, however if recent reports are correct, this could all change.

Pandora is just one example of how useful allowing apps to run in the background could be. Another likely use would be keeping an instant messaging chat connected. Rumors have been swirling about just how Apple would implement background processing considering the limited resources of iPhone hardware.