Chinese Suicide Might Have Been iPhone Counterfeiter
Filed under: 4th Generation iPhone, Apple Corporate, China
When 25 year-old Sun Danyong jumped to his death from his 12th-floor apartment on July 16, there was speculation that his suicide was that of a worker wracked by guilt at innocently misplacing a prototype of the next-generation iPhone and thereby betraying the tight secrecy that surrounds Apple’s products in development.
Reuters is now reporting that Sun, who worked for Foxconn International, the iPhone’s manufacturer in Dongguan, just north of Hong Kong, may have sold access to the prototype — or the prototype itself — to people in the area’s thriving counterfeit market.
“The copying of prototypes certainly happens a lot in the electronics and IT industries,” Dane Chamorro, a regional general manager with Control Risks, a corporate investigations consulting firm, told Reuters. “You don’t have to steal them, you just have to borrow one for a day.”
The news service noted that in an earlier interview with the New York Times, Foxconn’s general manager for China said that Sun had previously lost products “several times” before getting them back again.
The Reuters article paints a picture of a culture of permissiveness in China in which government turns a blind eye to counterfeiting, which has assumed an important place in the Chinese economy.
Reuters said that according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 81% of all counterfeit goods seized at the U.S. border were from China. The value of those goods rose 40% in 2008, to $221.7 million.
According to the Nanfang Daily, Sun, who joined Foxconn in 2008, had sent text messages to his girlfriend and a former classmate expressing his frustration at mislaying one of 16 prototypes of the next-generation “N90″ iPhone and his anger at being mistreated by Foxconn security personnel.
“Not only was I beaten, but those bastards inspected my mobile phone, searched my home and detained me,” read one of Sun’s text messages an hour and a half before his suicide, according to the Southern Metropolis Daily as reported by the Los Angeles Times.
The Sun suicide comes as Apple is reportedly close to sealing a deal with China Unicom to bring the iPhone to China, perhaps as early as September.
Review: Tiger Woods PGA Tour — Hole in One
Wow. That’s really all you need to know about Tiger Woods PGA Tour for the iPhone. It’s that good. It’s that challenging. And it’s every bit as frustrating as the real thing.
If you need a break from the sweat and toil of business, or if you’re wondering why your employees are unusually active on their iPhone’s of late, this is the answer.
Featuring over 120 holes from seven of the more famous PGA courses in the world, including Pebble Beach, St. Andrews, TPC Sawgrass and Doral, Tiger Woods PGA Tour let’s you play against Tiger or as Tiger. You can also play as or against Annika Sorenstam, Vijay Singh, Natalie Gulbis, and Retief Goosen.
You can pick your club, preview shots, and assess wind speed and direction, but the heart of all the action is the game’s Swing Meter. You control it with your finger by dragging a golf ball down a distance guage and then taking it back up to apply draw or fade as conditions demand.
Just as on a real golf course, practice is needed to master the Swing Meter. And that’s my only serious criticism of this otherwise stellar game — the practice tutorials are limited to a single hole and a single wind direction and you really need to be able to practice under a variety of conditions to gain mastery of this vital control.
Another nifty control that makes great use of the iPhone’s accelerometer is the ability to swipe your screen to manipulate the direction of your ball spin. Meanwhile on the greens, a system of grids and colored lines help you negotiate contours and determine ball speed and direction.
Tiger Woods PGA Tour $9.99 although at the time of this review a $6.99 special was taking place. As far as recreational apps go, it’s a hole in one.
Tiger Woods PGA Tour
- Released: April 4, 2009
- Version: 1.0.0
- Price: $6.99
- Seller: Electronic Arts
- App Store Link
iPhone Leads the Way as Apple Earnings Wow Wall Street; Jobs a No-Show at Conference Call
As Apple posted the best non-holiday revenue and earnings in the company’s history, the iPhone led the way with a stunning performance in the June quarter. The numbers said it all:
- 5.2 million iPhones sold
- 626% unit growth over the year-ago quarter
- 45 million installed base of iPhone and iPod Touch
The only thing that would have made the impressive numbers even more impressive would have been an appearance by CEO Steve Jobs, recently back from medical leave. Although absent from the conference call, Apple’s company-wide performance last fiscal quarter ended June 27 is surely just what the doctor ordered:
- 13% increase in net profit (net profit of $1.23 billion, or $1.35 a share, up from $1.07 billion, or $1.19 a share, in the year-ago period)
- Revenue rose 12% to $8.3 billion
- Gross margin of 36.3% compared with 36.4% in the last quarter and 34.8 percent a year ago (Apple saw margins at 34% in the September quarter)
- $31 billion in cash and marketable securities
“The overall takeaway is that Apple continues to execute in this tough environment,” Kaufman Bros analyst Shaw Wu told Reuters. “They do the hardware, software and service, and that really allows them to have a leg up against competitors.”
While Mac sales were up 4% for the quater, the 10.2 million iPods sold were down 7% from fiscal 08.
The company said demand for the new 3GS iPhone was outstripping supply but it was working to address the shortfall. Partly because of these constraints, the 3GS is shipping in only 18 of 80 countires.
Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook said during the conference call that iPhone development and innovatiion is “years ahead of other people.”
Review: High Paying Jobs — A Good Place to Find that New Position
High Paying Jobs, a free app, lists jobs from leading job sites such as Monster, CareerBuilder, Dice, TheLadders, and Personforce.
The app publisher says you can search over two million jobs. This may well be possible because you can enter any location in the US as well as have the app find jobs according to your current location.
You can also browse jobs according to 15 categories that probably pay the best wages, such as Technology; Science, Pharm & Biotech; and Legal.
Most, if not all, of the search resuts come from Indeed.com, a jobs search engine. But jobs that pay over $100,000 a year — there a special button in the app for these high-earners — come via TheLadders.com
High Paying Jobs also lists some not-so-high-paying jobs as well.
A bookmarking feature makes it easy for you to make a list of likely candidates as you browse the available jobs.
A more full-featured app might also provide you with the ability to keep track of positions you’ve applied for, access a calendar for interview dates and track other pertinent job-hunting information.
Whether or not you’ll actually perform serious searches for a job — particuarly a high-playing job — on an iPhone, or any phone, is questionable. But it’s possible you might begin a search on such an app before more moving your enquiries to a computer.
If you do, High Paying Jobs has all you need to begin your job-hunting journey.
High Paying Jobs
- Released: Jul 7, 2009
- Version: 1.0.2246
- Price: Free
- Seller: Moov Corporation
- App Store Link
Review: Dexigner — Who, What, Where in the World of Design
Dexigner is an elegant app that delivers the latest news and information about events, exhibitions, conferences and competitions from the world of design — products, graphic design, fashion, architecture, digitial design and the arts.
Dexigner isn’t the product of a brainstorming session to come up with some great ideas for an iPhone app, but rather it’s the logical outgrowth of a network of websites serving the design world since 2001.
Through a combination of directories and maps, the app lets you find places and people around the world: designers, studios, galleries, museums.
Using the iPhone’s GPS features, Dexigner can, with your permission, tell you about news and events in your particular geographic location.
The screens of the app, with their white text on a black background, are finely designed, as you would hope from app concerned with design.
For most information you retrieve, phone numbers are included for one-touch calling but, disappointingly, no web addresses are provided. This is a surprise as web addresses are included on the Dexigner website.
The lack of web addresses compounds another shortcoming in the app: the paucity of visual samples — of a designers work, of a exhibition’s exhibits and so on.
Even without this, however, Dexigner is still an immensely useful and well-crafted app. But it could be better. Hopefully it’ll be addressed in a future, or paid, version.
Dexigner
- Released: Jul 04, 2009
- Version: 1.0
- Price: Free
- Seller: Levent Ozler
- App Store Link
Review: Al Jazeera English Live — Global News with an Arab Perspective
Al Jazeera English Live is a live feed of Al Jazeera’s English channel.
Based in Doha, Qatar, the 24-hour TV news network gained global attention following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks when it broadcast video statements from Osama bin Laden.
As a result of this and other actions, Al Jazeera has been accused of pro-Arab, anti-Western and anti-Israeli biases. The network has acknowledged some errors in coverage but says it is committed to providing fair and balanced coverage of world events while maintaining its right to do so from an Arab perspective.
One story I saw while reviewing the app concerned Israel’s 436-mile, 26-foot high “wall of seperation” it’s constructing in the West Bank, it says, to protect itself from Palestinian incursions and attacks. The Al Jazeera story showed the plight of Palestinian farmers and others living in the shadow of the wall and discussed rulings passed by the United Nations and the International Court of Justice that the wall is illegal and should be removed. It was a perspective you might not see on Western TV but not one that I thought wasn’t biased.
With Al Jazeera English Live you can judge for yourself.
Reception over Wi-Fi was crisp and clear but over 3G, while the audio was strong, the video quality was mixed.
Overall, the app is simplicity itself: it does one thing and it has a single button to control its operation. In a preferences area you can select your network connection and keep track of bandwith usage, if that’s an issue for you (the app uses about 44MB of throughput an hour at Standard quality (3G) and about 135MB at High quality (Wi-Fi)).
A notice in the App Store says the app doesn’t work on the 3GS but a fix is in the works and should be available “in the next couple of days.” At the time of writing, that notice was about seven days old.
Al Jazeera English Live would be better if, like France 24, it offered sections beyond the live feed, such as business, sports and weather. But even as it is this app is well worth the $2.99 to gain a perspective on world events that no other news network is likely, or perhaps able, to provide.
Al Jazeera English Live
- Released: Jul 2, 2009
- Version: 1.0
- Price: $2.99
- Seller: Livestation Limited
- App Store Link
WSJ: Justice Dept May Examine AT&T’s Exclusive iPhone Deal with Apple
The Wall Street Journal reports that as part of an informal review of the power wielded by large telelcommunications companies, the Justice Department may examine AT&T’s exclusive deal with Apple regarding the iPhone.
“Lawmakers and regulators have raised questions about deals such as AT&T’s exclusive right to provide service for Apple Inc.’s iPhone in the U.S,” says the Journal. “Big carriers say limiting exclusive deals would hurt innovation.”
The paper notes that AT&T, with its iPhone deal, isn’t alone in striking exclusive arrangements. Verizon is the exclusive provider of Research In Motion Ltd.’s touch-screen BlackBerry Storm in the U.S. Sprint Nextel Corp. will be the only carrier with the Palm Inc. Pre until early next year.
AT&T and Verizon control 60% of the 274 million U.S. wireless subscribers and they operate large portions of the Internet backbone, said the Journal.
No one quoted in the Journal story expects anti-trust suits to be filed as a result of the investigation. Instead, the Justice Deptartment action is seen as a signal from the Obama administration that this White House won’t be turning a blind eye to the dealings of big business.
