In an open letter posted on Apple’s web site, Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, offers
his explanation and apology to iPhone owners who paid $200 more for their iPhone’s.

He goes on to say that Apple will offer “every iPhone customer who purchased an iPhone from either Apple or AT&T, and who is not receiving a rebate or any other consideration, a $100 store credit towards the purchase of any product at an Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store.”

Details should appear on Apple web site sometime next week.

From The Mercury News….

Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced a series of new iPods today and saved the most surprising news for the end of the launch event, announcing a dramatic price cut for the 8-gigabyte iPhone from $599 to $399 and saying the 4-gigabyte version would be discontinued.

Speaking at the Moscone West convention center in San Francisco, Jobs started off by announcing a new iPod that borrows features from the iPhone, and an iPod Nano with the ability to show videos.

He also said the company would let users buy a song for 99 cents and turn it into a ringtone.

Jobs also showed the latest version of the iPod Shuffle, the $79 music player with 1 gigabyte of storage. It will now come in five new colors.

The changes to the iPod Nano are more dramatic. The player is now square-shaped and much smaller than the rectangular version. It also has a larger color screen to display video and play video games. The screen is 320×240, for 204 pixels per inch, the same number of pixels on a bigger iPod.

It comes with three games, including a version of Sudoku by Electronic Arts. It can play on a battery charge up to 24 hours of audio or five hours of video. A 4-gigabyte version will cost $149 and a 8-gigabyte version is $199, and it’s available today.

The new iPod Classic, as the original iPods will be called, will now be thinner; the largest will have 160 gigabytes, or enough for 40,000 songs.

The 80-gigabyte iPod Classic will sell for $249 and the 160-gigabyte version will sell for $349. The new iPods are all available today.
“That’s an incredible iPod lineup for the fall season,” Jobs said.

And, in a trademark of these events, he added, “But, we’re not done yet.”

He went on to introduce the iPod Touch, which has the same touch-screen as the iPhone, only 8 millimeters, and the same multi-touch interface that the iPhone has. Most notably, this iPod Touch has built-in Wi-Fi with 802.11 b/g wireless networking. And it will come with the Safari web browser.

The battery life is 22 hours of audio and five hours of video playback. It has a 3.5-inch display, with Google and Yahoo! search.

An 8-gigabyte version is $299 and the 16-gigabyte version is $399. Lastly, there is a new icon for the iTunes Wi-Fi music store where you can download songs straight to your iPod over the network.

From a Sharp press release:

Sharp Corporation has successfully developed a new System LCD equipped with touch screen and scanner functions. An optical sensor is built into each pixel of the LCD panel, eliminating the need to bond a film to the panel for touch screen functions, and providing images without losing display image quality.

Today, touch screen functions are becoming indispensable on displays for mobile devices such as smartphones, digital cameras, PDAs, and UMPCs*. However, conventional methods to provide such functions mainly involve laminating or bonding a film on top of the LCD panel, leading to problems with reduced display image quality and increased thickness for the display section.

In this light, Sharp developed its proprietary System LCD technology to successfully embed an optical sensor used in devices like scanners in each pixel of the LCD panel. This technology eliminates the need for films, resulting in a thinner, beautifully clear screen display compared to conventional touch screens. In addition, tactile recognition based on simultaneously touching multiple points on the screen is now possible, a feature previously difficult to implement. For example, users can easily tap the screen with two fingers to enlarge or reduce a displayed map. Also, the scanner function can be used to scan in a business card placed on top of the screen, and further improvements to this function are expected to enable fingerprint authentication in the future.

Sample shipments will begin in September of this year, with volume production slated to start next spring.

(* - Ultra Mobile Personal Computers)

Excerpt from the New York Times….

The empire is preparing to strike back — again.

In 1995, Microsoft added a free Web browser to its operating system in an attempt to fend off new rivals, an effort ultimately blocked by the courts.

This week, it plans to turn that strategy upside down, making available free software that connects its Windows operating system to software services delivered on the Internet, a practice increasingly referred to as “cloud” computing. The initiative is part of an effort to connect Windows more seamlessly to a growing array of Internet services.

The strategy is a major departure for Microsoft, which primarily sells packaged software for personal computers. With this new approach, Microsoft hopes to shield its hundreds of millions of software customers from competitors like Google and Salesforce.com, which already offer software applications through the Internet.

Microsoft’s new Windows Live software suite includes an updated electronic mail program, a photo-sharing application and a writing tool designed for people who keep Web logs.

The new service is an indication that Microsoft plans to compete head-on against archrival Google and others, and not only in the search-engine business where it is at a significant disadvantage. Instead, Microsoft will try to outmaneuver its challengers by becoming the dominant digital curator of all a user’s information, whether it is stored on a PC, a mobile device or on the Internet, industry executives and analysts said.