By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
It has been a week of big smartphone releases and as I watched most of the keynote speakers go on stage and reveal the hot new models and technologies that Apple's competitors have wisely started to differentiate themselves from the iPhone and now the iPhone 4S. Larger screens, high-speed LTE data capabilities and increasingly slimmer bodies are the areas where they are focusing on.
It seems LTE data speeds are this year's Adobe Flash or the feature most demoed to differentiate new products from the iPhone. Last year, the competition was talking about,"experiencing the real web with Flash," and not it all about how much faster the new LTE-enabled handsets are than the iPhone 4S at accessing high speed Internet.
Apple has chosen to stay away from LTE for now because of the toll it takes on battery life.
We've had some time with the iPhone 4S and will have a comprehensive review up soon. So far we're very impressed with the new phone's improved performance, exceptional camera and the new Siri personal assistant.
Siri is one of those transformative technologies that may seem novel and gimmicky at first but when you realize how well it works, then you just keep on using it. Still in beta, Siri's potential is staggering.
The system can be used on Macs and even in Apple TVs which could be a game changer for Apple in the home entertainment area. The Apple TV is already perpetually hooked up to the Internet so getting Siri to work on it should be easy.
User: "Siri, play Goodfellas,"
Siri: "Found one Goodfellas in your video library. Would you like to start from the beginning or resume from last chapter?"
While, arguably not for everyone, hands-free voice navigation of our TV, video collection and home entertainment beats having to navigate through a pile of remote controls, thumbing through the TV guide or even just flipping channels.
User: "Siri, flip channels starting from channel 1,"
Siri:"Flipping through 870 channels, now."
User: "Avoid infomercial channels,"
Siri: "Avoiding infomercial channels, flipping though 680 channels, now."
New Highs
We sat in on yesterday's Apple Earnings Call where it was revealed that the company had earned a quarterly revenue of $28.27 billion and quarterly net profit of $6.62 billion, or $7.05 per diluted share.
These results compare to last year's quarter revenue of $20.34 billion and net quarterly profit of $4.31 billion, or $4.64 per diluted share. Gross margin was 40.3 percent compared to 36.9 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 63 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
Apple sold 17.07 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 21 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 11.12 million iPads during the quarter, a 166 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter.
The Company sold 4.89 million Macs during the quarter, a 26 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 6.62 million iPods, a 27 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter.
More importantly, Apple CEO Tim Cook, who handled the call, was optimistic about Apple's pipeline of upcoming products.
“We are thrilled with the very strong finish of an outstanding fiscal 2011, growing annual revenue to $108 billion and growing earnings to $26 billion,” Cook said. “Customer response to iPhone 4S has been fantastic, we have strong momentum going into the holiday season, and we remain really enthusiastic about our product pipeline.”
Apple's shares fell more than 5% in after-hours trading after fourth quarter iPhone sales were weaker than experts predicted. This is mostly because of much unfounded speclation on what the iPhone 5 was going to be and unrealistic expectations that it was going to be another new and revolutionary product.
The new 4S model was launched after the period so the early success of that product, which sold 4 million units over the weekend, did not factor into the sales. Apple still enjoyed all time record Mac and iPad sales for the period.