By Cynthia Herbert :: 8:49 AM
Looks like all the rumors we’ve been hearing the past few weeks were right on target. Apple today has confirmed that it will be releasing a 128 GB iPad with the Retina display in early February.
The price for the base Wi-Fi model will be $799, and the Wi-Fi with LTE flavor comes in at $929 — a price that puts it very close to the base level MacBook Air model.
“With more than 120 million iPads sold, it’s clear that customers around the world love their iPads, and everyday they are finding more great reasons to work, learn and play on their iPads rather than their old PCs,†said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. Clearly the storgage capacity and price point of this latest Apple gadget put traditional desktop PCs squarely in the crosshairs.
As with the other models in the current iPad lineup, this one will also be available in black or white. Apple announced that it will be in stores on February 5th.
By Paul Thomson :: 3:09 AM
Nokia announced yesterday that users of its new Lumia smartphone in the U.K. will be able to upgrade their music service with a subscription to Nokia Music+.
The subscription music service, which will come with a £3.99 monthly pricetag, offers users the ability to download and organize their music playlists for listening online. In addition, the fee model will allow for limitless skipping of tracks, a lyric lookup service and high-quality audio delivery during Wi-Fi connections.
Users currently taking advantage of the free Lumia music service will not see any changes or interruptions to their service. Nokia has confirmed that the new paid tier will not cause a cascade of advertising or other fees for users choosing not to subscribe to the upgrade package.
The service has not rolled out to users yet, but Nokia hopes to have the capability in place to push it out to consumers by the end of March, 2013.
Pricing for U.S. customers has not been revealed yet. Because Nokia wants to come in at a price point lower than the popular mobile music subscription service Spotify (at $9.99), it is likely that the U.S. offering will be somewhere around $5.99.
By Paul Thomson :: 5:06 PM
The online and mobile payments startup Square has lost COO Keith Rabois today in the wake of a sexual harassment scandal at the company. Square was started by Twitter’s co-founder, Jack Dorsey.
Rabois began his tenure at Square as COO in 2010 and was instrumental in its recent grown from 30 employees to several hundred. The Internet entrepreneur and  angel investor was a former Paypal employee. He is claiming the accusations are false, and says he is being blackmailed.
“Last week, a New York-based attorney threatened Square and myself with a lawsuit. I am told this lawsuit would allege that the relationship was not consensual, and would go on to accuse me of some pretty horrible things. I was told that only a payment of millions of dollars will make this go away, and that my career, my reputation, and my livelihood will be threatened if Square and I don’t pay up,†Rabois wrote on his Tumblr blog.
He continued to explain the relationship in his post. “I realize that continuing any physical relationship after he began working at Square was poor judgment on my part. But let me be unequivocal with the facts: (1) The relationship was welcome. (2) Square did not know of the relationship before a lawsuit was threatened; it came as a complete surprise to the company. (3) He never received nor was denied any reward or benefits based on our relationship. And (4), I did not do the horrendous things I am told I may be accused of. While I have certainly made mistakes, this threat feels like a shakedown, and I will defend myself to the full extent of the law.”
Square released a statement saying that Rabois had “exercised poor judgment,†and that his ability to lead the company had been undermined.
The company was launched to assist small businesses in processing credit card payments through the use of a credit card reader attached to smartphones and tablets. Square entered the mainstream last fall when coffee giant Starbucks said it would shift all management of credit card payments to Square, and let customers pay by phone. Starbucks also participated in a funding round that valued Square at $3.25 billion, and sells Square card readers in some of its retail outlets.
By Gilbert Falso :: 4:31 PM
Earlier today, Apple released its first major update to iOS 6, the mobile operating system for iPhones and iPads since the initial availability of the new OS last fall. iOS 6.1 offers patches for 27 security vulnerabilities, adds support for additional LTE carriers, and introduces some new functionality for Siri and iTunes Match. Two minor releases occurred in November and December that addressed a smaller number of issues.
The security patches include 22 in WebKit, the engine that powers the Safari web browser in iOS. Half of those security issues were uncovered by a software engineer at Google, creator of rival smartphone operating system Android.
With this update, Apple now supports more carriers for LTE high speed broadband data connections, including new support in these countries:  Denmark, Finland, Greece, Italy, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Switzerland.
U.S. iPhone users can now use the Siri personal assistant to order movie tickets using the Fandango ticketing service.
Frequent users of iTunes Match, the cloud-based music matching service that helps store and organize music in your collection ripped from CDs or obtained through other means, will find that they can now download just a single song with the service, rather than needing to download the entire album a song resides on.
The update is available for the following Apple hardware models:Â iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5; iPad 2, iPad (3rd and 4th generation), iPad Mini; iPod Touch (fourth-generation and after).
By Cynthia Herbert :: 5:19 PM
A new video format was approved last week, paving the way for high quality video delivery over broadband networks, and streaming HD video over mobile networks.
The new video format, called H.265 or High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), is the successor to the H.264 encoding standard, which nearly every Internet video content producer has standardized on after the debut and growing popularity of the iPad and other tablet and mobile devices.
Dr. Hamadoun I. Touré, Secretary-General of the ITU, the governing body that helps set Internet standards said,  “H.264 underpinned rapid progression and expansion of the video ecosystem, with many adopting it to replace their own proprietary compression codecs. The industry continues to look to ITU and its partners as the global benchmark for video compression, and I have no doubt that this new standard will be as effective as its predecessor in enabling the next wave of innovation in this fast-paced industry.â€
The industry hopes that H.265 will be a flexible, reliable and robust solution, to support online and streaming video for the next ten years. The new standard is designed to plan for growing screen resolutions and is expected to be phased in as high-end displays and services outgrow the current limits of networking and screen technology.
Companies such as Broadcom, Cyberlink, Ericsson, Mitsubishi and NHK have already showcased technology that implements the new HEVC codec.  While there will likely be some encoders available this year, it won’t see true adoption until it is embedded into hardware. That could take a year to a year-and-a-half, before the first devices with H.265 hardware support show up on shelves.