Apple’s coffers are brimming over, and it’s buying both hardware and software technology with its excesses.
Intrinsity
On the hardware front, Apple has acquired another ARM chip maker (so soon after buying P.A. Semi), called Intrinisty, which is believed to have helped Apple design the A4 chip on the iPad. The rumoured buying price was $121 million. With both these chip-makers working in-house, Apple will now think twice before outsourcing any of its chip designing.
Siri – Personal Assistant
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On the software front, Apple just acquired Siri. Remember that great voice-activiated digital assistant we’d shown you earlier for the iPhone platform? Well, now it’s Apple’s. What will it do with the application’s “speech recognition with a brain” prowess? A free app at the Apple App store, Siri calls itself “Your Personal Assistant”, and is based on the Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organises (CALO) program that was developed with DARPA funding at the Stanford Research Institute. It helps users get answers to their queries (voice or text) by finding and collating various search results. It is not yet known what Apple will do with Siri exactly, it could charge for usage on Android and other smartphone platforms, integrate it into the iPhone or other Apple device natively, and a lot more…
iPhone 4G release rumour
Apple certainly ends up making a big deal about its products, both intentionally and unintentionally. The iPad received a great response, and now, the new iteration of the iPhone that’s touted to release in Q3-Q4 this year, might just be available by June 7th, if the rumours have some truth to them.
The phone will supposedly be available for purchase during the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), which kicks-off on June 7th. Though new iPhones have been unveiled during the WWDC before, this might be the first time that it will retail simultaneously, instead of the regular few weeks delay. Sources believe that the purported change in schedule is because of the recent iPhone 4G prototype leak, which may have forced its hand.