Foxconn denies report of strike at iPhone plant

BEIJING (AP) — Foxconn Technology Group said Saturday that production at its central Chinese factory that makes Apple's iPhones was continuing without interruption, denying a labor watch group's report that thousands of workers at the plant had gone on strike.

New York-based China Labor Watch had reported that 3,000 to 4,000 workers at the factory in Zhengzhou city went on strike Friday over increased quality control demands and having to work during an extended national holiday.

Foxconn, a Taiwan-based electronic manufacturer, confirmed there were two isolated, small-scale disputes between production line workers and quality assurance personnel on Monday and Tuesday at the factory, but denied there was any strike or work stoppage. Foxconn did not specify what issues had caused the dispute, but said immediate measures were taken to resolve the problems, including adding production line workers.

China Labor Watch had said several iPhone 5 production lines at the factory were paralyzed after the workers found the new quality control demands difficult to meet and went on strike. The group said the workers also were angry about being forced to work through China's National Day Golden Week holiday, which ends Sunday.

The iPhone 5, the latest in the line of the smartphones, debuted in September.

Foxconn said its employees in China who worked during the holiday did so voluntarily and were being paid three times their normal pay, in accordance with Chinese labor law.

China Labor Watch said workers also beat quality control inspectors, who carried out their own work stoppage after management ignored their complaints.

Apple could not be reached immediately for comment.

According to China Labor Watch, Apple and Foxconn had imposed stricter quality standards regarding indentations and scratches on the frames and back covers of the iPhones but did not provide workers with proper training to meet the new demands.

In late September, a brawl involving 2,000 workers broke out at Foxconn's factory in the northern Chinese city of Taiyuan, highlighting chronic labor tensions in a country that prohibits independent unions.

Labor activists have said the rollout of the iPhone 5 has led to longer working hours and more pressure on workers.

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Steve Jobs' high school girlfriend 'to tell all' in new memoir

Steve Jobs' high school girlfriend and the mother of his daughter Lisa is planning to write a book telling the story of her relationship with the late Apple co-founder, who died last year in October.

Chrisann Brennan, in her book, will describe 'Jobs' enormous appeal, energy and drive as well as his developing ambition and ruthlessness in business and personal dealings.

The book, which is to be published next year, will also detail the nascent years of Apple, to which Brennan was privy, the New York Times reports.

Brennan, who is now a painter based in the San Francisco Bay Area, met Jobs at Homestead High School in Cupertino, California.

She 'later lived with Jobs in a cabin, meditated with him and attended lectures,' according to the report by the Times.

While in her early 20s, she became pregnant and gave birth to their daughter, who is known as Lisa Brennan-Jobs.

Jobs initially denied paternity of his daughter, but later developed a closer relationship with her.

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Apple's map app could raise antitrust concerns

Bundling its maps with the iPhone 5 may yet prove to be a strategic 

 blunder for Apple, but it may nonetheless skirt the boundaries of 

the antitrust laws that tripped up Microsoft

Steven P. Jobs could hardly have hoped for a better legacy than the performance since his death of Apple, the company he co-founded and dominated. Its revenue, profit and share price have hit records. It's the world's largest company by market capitalization. 

These milestones were reached with the steady hand of Timothy D. Cook at Apple's helm, but they seem inseparable from Jobs. They are the result of initiatives begun during his tenure and, in many ways, reflect his personality - one that was perfectionist, competitive, driven and controlling. 

Those qualities have remained on display at Apple in the year since his death, most recently in the decision to substitute Apple mapping software for rival Google's in the iPhone 5 and the new iOS 6 operating system, as well as allegations that Apple and book producers conspired to control the price of e-books. 

Apple hasn't fully explained its decision to replace Google's maps, but it probably reflects the evolution of the Apple-Google relationship from close allies to fierce competitors, a process that began well before Jobs' death. Apple also hasn't indicated whether it was carrying out Jobs' wishes, but the decision seems consistent with his "compulsion for Apple to have end-to-end control of every product that it made," as Walter Isaacson put it in his book " Steve Jobs." 

Apple's use of its own mapping technology in the iPhone appears to be a textbook case of what's known as a tying arrangement, sometimes referred to as "bundling." In a tying arrangement, the purchase of one good or service (in this case the iPhone) is conditioned on the purchase or use of a second (Apple maps). 

To the degree that tying arrangements extend the control of a dominant producer, they may violate antitrust laws. Probably the best-known example was Microsoft's attempt to bundle its Internet Explorer browser on Windows software, to the disadvantage of Netscape, a rival browser, despite complaints that Explorer was initially an inferior product. This was the linchpin of the government's 1998 antitrust case against Microsoft. Emails were introduced as evidence in which Microsoft executives indiscreetly stated their intentions to "smother," "extinguish" and "cut off Netscape's air supply" by bundling Explorer with Windows. 

Among other findings, the judge ruled that Microsoft had engaged in an illegal tying arrangement. The outcome of the case kept the door open to competition in the browser market. Today, the once-dominant Internet Explorer faces stiff competition from rivals like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Microsoft's settlement came too late for Netscape's browser, which was no longer being developed or supported after 2007. But Firefox traces its lineage to Netscape's source code. 

Could Apple's map application suffer a similar fate? 

Early users searched for locations and got nonsensical results. Mad magazine ran a parody of the famous Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover of the world seen from Ninth Avenue "now using Apple Maps," in which the Hudson was the Sea of Galilee and other landmarks were ludicrously misidentified. 

Cook swiftly tried to contain the damage. 

"Everything we do at Apple is aimed at making our products the best in the world. We know that you expect that from us, and we will keep working nonstop until Maps lives up to the same incredibly high standard," he said a week ago. 

Would Jobs have been so quick to apologize? Perhaps not. He was famously resistant to the idea after complaints about the iPhone 4's antenna, and the Apple "genius" manual instructs employees never to apologize for the quality of Apple technology. 

Bundling its maps with the iPhone 5 may yet prove to be a strategic blunder for Apple, but it may nonetheless skirt the boundaries of the antitrust laws that tripped up Microsoft. 

"There's no antitrust theory under which vertically integrating into an inferior component is considered anti-competitive," Herbert Hovenkamp, an antitrust professor at the University of Iowa College of Law, told me. 

That's because the problem is considered self-correcting by market forces.

"There have been lots of complaints about tying arrangements involving inferior products. But ordinarily, incorporating an inferior product doesn't increase your market share, because consumers leave for a better product. It's not a promising strategy," Hovenkamp said. 

The danger for Apple is that customers will choose anAndroid phone with a superior Google Maps application rather than an iPhone 5. 

An exception is when a monopolist does it, which is what happened with Microsoft. If a consumer used Microsoft Windows, the dominant software, Explorer was installed by default. 

"This arose with Microsoft because back then Explorer was considered inferior and quirky," Hovenkamp said. "But that wasn't why it was a violation. It's because consumers had no choice." 

By contrast, Apple's iOS isn't the dominant smartphone operating system. Apple's software has captured 17 percent of the global smartphone market, compared with 68 percent for Google's Android. Apple users who want Google maps can readily switch to an Android phone. 

"Most tying arrangement cases have involved firms with close to 100 percent market shares," Hovenkamp noted. 

The real test will be whether Apple makes rival mapping apps readily available for downloading on its iPhones. In his apology, Cook suggested that iPhone users try alternatives and even suggested using Google maps by going to Google's website. Google said it was working on a map application for the iPhone 5. 

From an antitrust perspective, the e-books controversy is more serious. U.S. antitrust authorities have accused Apple of conspiring with major book publishers to raise e-book prices, and Apple offered to settle a European investigation into the same practices. The Justice Department cited a passage in Isaacson's book in which Jobs called the strategy an "aikido move," referring to the Japanese martial art, and said, "We'll go to the agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30 percent, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that's what you want anyway." 

The charges describe a classic price-fixing arrangement, "which is presumptively illegal," Hovenkamp said. "Everybody wants market dominance, not just Apple. But it's how you go about it. You can't go out and fix prices." 

Apple has denied the charges, and a trial has been set for next year. 

Cook's challenge has always been to guide Apple out of the shadow of its visionary and charismatic founder. Can he encourage Jobs' competitive zeal and drive for perfection while distancing Apple from Jobs' potentially damaging - even unlawful - need to dominate and control? 

"Historically, Apple hasn't been very sensitive to antitrust issues," Hovenkamp said. 

There's no quarreling with Apple's extraordinary success, and Jobs' obsession with controlling all aspects of Apple's products clearly paid off for its customers and shareholders. It proved to be the right strategy for the time. But competition in smartphones and Apple's other efforts has intensified in the year since Jobs died, and Apple may not be able to continue blindly down that path. With his swift apology for the imperfections of Apple maps, Cook seems to have taken a step in the right direction. If he also settles the e-books case and makes Google's and other map applications readily available to iPhone users, he'd be signaling a clear break from the past and encouraging Apple to embrace, rather than stifle, competition.

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Review: English Vinglish is a winner all the way

Great come back of Sridevi

In India,our post-Colonial hangover includes a peculiar English-language elitism, where those even halfway in control of the language thumb their nose at those unable to speak it. 

Where folk routinely, and with unforgivable curtness, cut folk off mid-sentence to snappily correct pronunciation. Which is why a scene in Gauri Shinde's new film -- where a simple Maharashtrian woman is castigated by her family for calling jazz "jhaaz" (even as they proudly call it "jhazz" themselves) -- rings so true. 

They don't intentionally mean to humiliate the woman with their constant use of English, but appear befuddled by her lack of what they imagine to be the most basic of linguistic skills.

Shashi, the devastatingly unassuming heroine of English Vinglish, is a homemaker and crafter of much-adoredladdoos, a fledgling entrepreneur doing what she does because its the only thing she's applauded for. Not knowing English, however, cripples her at nearly every turn, till the fact that she can't speak the language becomes her not-so-secret shame, not unlike Kate Winslet's illiteracy in The Reader. And here's the thing: Sridevi does far better.

It helps, of course, that the script services her at every turn. Shinde, making her directorial debut, concentrates not on the overarching drama or the narrative arc, but instead labours hard on creating a heroine so flawless, so grounded, so perfectly lovely that we can't help but be swayed by her. She is a heroine so exaggeratedly Good that she, contrasted against her cartoonishly callous family, appears a superwoman. 

This could very well have been another case of script servicing star except, as said, the star really did deserve a script this slavish. 

Sridevi's been away nearly fifteen years, and Hindi cinema has changed significantly, a fact perhaps most amusingly encapsulated by the way the actress gasps in this film on seeing a couple kiss in a coffee shop, something unimaginable (on-screen, anyway) in her time. 

Yet here she is, better than ever. Yes, ever. English Vinglish sees the veteran heroine trade in glamour for primness and chiffon for cotton, and reining in her wondrously exaggerated acting instincts: even her inimitably shaky-shrill voice works here as a facet of her character's fragility, her constant insecurity. 

Sri excels in fleshing out her character -- a character too simple to be, say, charismatic -- and also, more importantly, in winning the audience over so completely that her little triumphs, like navigating a turnstile at a subway station, seem like major highs. We root for her at every step, and that is no small feat.

And while all of Shashi's triumphs may, in fact, be minor ones, the very fact that we gladly cheer on a woman's struggle to learn how to order coffee correctly in the same way that we'd egg on, say, a loveable hockey team on its last legs, is testimony to how well the Shinde-Sridevi tag team builds the character. 

The film is staggeringly basic, with a fiendishly unclever plot -- woman feels bad, learns English, feels great -- and a narrative completely bereft of surprise. However, in a film cluttered with lesser victories, Shinde's greatest one might be the deftness with which she steers clear of melodrama. 

The result is simple, effective and undeniably striking: rather like the sarees Shashi constantly wears (and even, inexplicably, sleeps in.)

It is this deft assuredness which characterises English Vinglish throughout, with Shashi's obnoxious husband (played by the terrific Adil Hussain in a vintage Kay Kay Menon  kinda way) casually but firmly distancing himself from her by throwing somewhat accented English phrases into their conversation, and then retiring to bed with a John Grisham paperback. 

Shashi can still manage begrudgingly to get by in Pune, but when a wedding takes her to New York City, she's hopelessly out of her depth. And yet, as evidenced by a smashing superstar cameo on her flight, there's much to be found in the kindness of strangers.

New York, naturally, overwhelms. There are English mishaps, leading to a Mind Your Language-like classroom, complete with a French chef who has the eyes for, well, Sha-she's eyes. And it is here Shinde shows us how, while every global citizen in the classroom is tut-tutted for incorrect pronoun usage, that European gets away with "she is a very beautiful" and "my English not clean", while a South Indian techie seems to have enrolled for much lesser language quibbles. 

The sad truth is that we Indians refuse to recognise the exotic in our accidents, the beauty in sloppy, dialectic pronunciation differences, the joy of an over-hardened R or a too-soft T, and prefer instead the rulebook. We're losing out on such lovely, lovely slipups, all because of this need to colour within the lines.

But I digress. Go watch English Vinglish, and take your mothers along. As shown by one great scene which has Shashi speaking furiously in Hindi to her chef friend Laurent, who replies back in thoughtful-sounding French, it isn't about language. 

It's about one of the biggest stars of her era transformed into the plainest Jane, a delightful heroine who saves all her grace for hoisting her son onto her pillow. It's about how vital the smallest-seeming dreams can prove to be. Ah, spell it English Win-glish, I say. 

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Australia unveils powerful radio telescope

Antennas of the powerful telescope that aims to discover more about outer pace

Australia has launched one of the world's fastest telescopes tasked with surveying outer space and probing the origins of stars and galaxies.

The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (Askap) in Western Australia's outback has 36 antennas with a diameter of 12m (40ft) each.

The A$152m ($155m, £96m) telescope is expected to capture radio images, starting from Friday.

Askap forms part of the world's biggest radio telescope project.

The telescope is located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, 315km (196 miles) north-east of Geraldton in the Western Australian desert.

Dr John O'Sullivan, from Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, says that while the telescope is not very big, "it is still a very, very powerful survey instrument to start to get a look [at] the origins of galaxies".

"It is the beginning of a great new period, I think," he said.

It will be able to scan the sky much faster than existing telescopes. The location, in a remote area, means there is limited interference from man-made radio signals.

Scientists say that the telescope will generate a huge amount of information. One of the research projects it will be used for is to look for black holes.

The Askap is part of the bigger Square Kilometre Array (SKA) that is set to begin construction in 2016.

SKA, set to become the world's biggest radio telescope project based in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, aims to answer key questions about the Universe.

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Mercedes sales hit new September record

BERLIN (AP) — Daimler AG says its main Mercedes-Benz brand saw global sales grow 2 percent in year-on-year terms in September as growth in the U.S. and Asia offset a decline in western Europe.

The company said Thursday Mercedes-Benz delivered 123,358 vehicles, a record for the month. Sales in the Asia-Pacific region were up 7.8 percent to 30,992, led by growth of 18 percent in Japan and 10 percent in China.

Sales in the U.S. rose 7 percent at 23,156. But deliveries in western Europe sank 2.5 percent to 55,495, a sign of the problems afflicting those countries that use the euro.

Daimler says the brand's overall sales in the third quarter were up 1.1 percent compared with a year earlier at 312,001. It says that is a record for the quarter.

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'I don't think I have plenty of cricket left in me'

Sachin Tendulkar: "I am looking at it series by series.

 As long as I feel that I can deliver, I will continue playing." 

Sachin Tendulkar has said that he will reassess his cricketing future in November, when he plays the home Tests against England. Tendulkar, who has previously been non-committal on questions about his retirement, also said any decision about ending a 23-year career will depend on both his form and his motivation levels.

"I need not take a call right now. When I play in November, I will re-assess things," Tendulkar was quoted as saying in Times of India.

"I am 39 and I don't think I have plenty of cricket left in me. But it depends on my frame of mind and my physical ability to deliver. When I feel that I am not delivering what is needed, and then I will re-look at the scheme of things. I am already 39 and no one expects me to go on playing forever."

In his latest series, the home Tests against New Zealand, he was bowled in each of his three innings for low scores. Sunil Gavaskar was among those concerned by Tendulkar's poor form. "The gap between the pad and the bat is a worrying sign," Gavaskar had said. "This is never a good sign for a great batsman."

Tendulkar, however, felt that it was natural for the questions to be asked. "There are two different things - scoring runs and what I feel. For instance, if this three-wicket ordeal had happened when I was 25, no one would have questioned it. Incidentally, it happened when I am 39, so questions were raised. This is natural."

Tendulkar has played 190 Tests and he said he is not chasing any particular mark. India play England in a four-Test series starting November followed by another four-Test series against Australia early next year.

"I am looking at it series by series. As long as I feel that I can deliver, I will continue playing. It also depends on what the team feels and whether I am motivated enough to continue being on top of the game."

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Facebook's 'Next Billion': A Q&A With Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg, chairman and CEO of Facebook

In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook (FB) from his Harvard University dorm room, hoping to see what his classmates were up to on campus. The following eight years brought international fame, unimaginable wealth, a hit Hollywood movie, a disastrous initial public offering, a sagging stock price—and one unprecedented achievement. On Sept. 14, the company reached 1 billion active users. In an exclusive interview with Bloomberg Businessweek’s Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance, Zuckerberg reflected on the milestone and what’s next for his company as it resurfaces from a wave of negativity.

Bloomberg Businessweek: Congratulations on your first billion users. What does this mean for Facebook?

Mark Zuckerberg: The No. 1 value here is focus on impact. We’ve always been small in terms of number of employees. We have this stat that we throw out all the time here: There is on the order of 1,000 engineers and now on the order of a billion users, so each engineer is responsible for a million users. You just don’t get that anywhere else. I was talking to [Facebook board member] Marc Andreessen about this and he said the only two companies that he thought of that had a billion customers are Coca-Cola (KO) and McDonald’s (MCD).

Microsoft (MSFT)?

That wouldn’t surprise me. It’s really humbling to get a billion people to do anything.

Did you guys think about doing anything with the billionth user, grocery store-style?

I wanted to, but we didn’t want to leak that we got to a billion people. Doing data analytics at this scale is a big challenge, and one of the things you have to do is sample. So it’s funny, we were all sitting around watching us get to a billion users but it was actually just a sample of the users. It’s like you’re not going to try to pull a billion rows from a database, so you’ll pull a sample and project out. I don’t even know if we knew who the billionth person was.

How did you celebrate the moment?

Well, just everyone came together and counted down. Then we all went back to work. We have this ethos where we want to be a culture of builders, right?

We don’t want to overly celebrate any particular milestone, so what we do is we have hackathons. We have themed hackathons for different things. We’re having a hackathon to celebrate this when we announce it publicly, and the theme is going to be the next billion. So people will be thinking of ideas and working on prototypes and things that we’ll need to do to help connect the next billion people, which I think is pretty cool.

What’s possible at a billion-plus users that wasn’t possible at, say, 500 million?

There are two ways that I look at this. There’s what we can build internally and then there’s what can be built externally using Facebook. I’ll start with the external stuff. The big thing we’ve focused on is getting everyone connected and assembling this map of who people know. That way we can start to build interesting products like News Feed, or show who’s online for chat, or rank your friends so they’re in the right order for a search. But even when we were at half a billion people, you got these large-scale services like Skype or Netflix (NFLX) that also had big user bases. And we weren’t yet at the point where the majority of their users were Facebook users, so they couldn’t really rely on us as a piece of critical infrastructure for registration. A lot of startups did, but the bigger companies couldn’t. Now really everyone can start to rely on us as infrastructure. That’s a pretty big shift.

So for the next five or 10 years the question isn’t going to be, does Facebook get to 2 billion or 3 billion? I mean, that’s obviously one question. But the bigger question is, what services can get built now that every company can assume they can get access to knowing who everyone’s friends are. I think that’s going to be really transformative. We’ve already seen some of that in games and media, music, TV, video, that type of stuff. But I think there’s about to be a big push in commerce.

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Watermelon helpful to prevent heart attack and weight gain

A recent study in US has found that consuming a slice of watermelon on daily basis could help to prevent you from heart disease by checking the formation of harmful cholesterol and also be help in weight control.

Scientists from Purdue University, US, who carried out studies on mice fed a high-fat diet found the fruit halved the rate at which 'bad' low-density lipoprotein(LDL), accumulated, Daily Mail reported.

LDL is a form of cholesterol that leads to clogged arteries and heart disease.

In addition to that, the researchers also also observed that eating watermelon on regular basis helped to control excess weight gain and resulted in less amount of fatty deposits inside blood vessels.

According to the researchers, the presence of chemical citrulline, found in the juice of watermelon could be the reason for watermelon's health-boosting properties.

However, the latest investigation did not show any significant effects on blood pressure, it did reveal watermelons had a powerful impact on other heart risk factors.

In Britain around 270,000 people a year suffer heart attack and nearly one in three die before they could reach hospital.

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Samsung boosted by smartphone sales

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Strong smartphone sales helped Samsung Electronics beat market expectations in the third quarter, as the world’s biggest technology company by sales achieved an operating profit increase of more than 85 per cent.

The strong performance came despite the fact that during the third quarter Samsung was embroiled in a fierce US court battle with Apple, its main smartphone rival, which left it facing a damages bill of more than $1bn for patent infringement.

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But strong global sales of its Galaxy smartphones – the main subject of Apple’s intellectual property infringement claims – enabled Samsung to record strong increases in both revenue and profit, revealed in earnings guidance issued on Friday.

Revenue for the quarter was between $46bn and $47.7bn, up from $37.2bn a year before. Operating profit was between $7.1bn and $7.5bn, up from $3.8bn. A Bloomberg poll of analysts had produced a consensus forecast of $6.8bn for operating profit.

Samsung will publish a more precise report for the third quarter in the final week of this month.

Despite the outperformance of the consensus forecast, Samsung’s shares were trading only 0.15 per cent higher at Won1.37m in mid-morning trading in Seoul.

Marcello Ahn, an analyst at Nomura, said investors were taking profits amid concerns that Samsung would not repeat the positive surprise in the fourth quarter. Shares in the company have risen 62 per cent in the past 12 months.

Mr Ahn said strong smartphone sales contrasted with weaker performance at the semiconductor division. This was due to muted demand for memory chips from the PC market, and a later than expected launch for Apple’s iPhone 5, for which Samsung is the biggest supplier of components.

But Mr Ahn forecast another strong quarter in the final three months of the year, citing the recent launch of the Galaxy Note 2 tablet and an improved contribution from European sales as a result of a stronger euro.

Samsung and Apple are continuing to tussle over the fallout from August’s California court decision. Last month, Apple asked the judge to increase the damages award by $707m. Samsung responded this week by adding the iPhone 5 to a list of products that it said infringe its patents on data transfer technology. On Wednesday, Samsung also called for a new trial in the high-profile US patent case, citing concerns about one of the jurors.

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Steve Jobs: nurturing the legacy of Silicon Valley's Leonardo

Steve Jobs, who died a year ago today, laid the foundations for Apple's stellar year but the real test is yet to come.

When Steve Jobs died, exactly a year ago today, there was a public outpouring of grief.

Apple acolytes queued around the block to lay flowers and light candles outside the company’s store on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Meanwhile Twitter struggled to keep up with the deluge of comments from fans as they paid homage to the Apple co-founder.

Mr Jobs’ relentless perfectionism had helped him create the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad and in so doing, the so-called “Leonardo of Silicon Valley” had not only built one of the world’s most successful companies, he had changed the way we lived.

But alongside the tears and tributes, there were concerns about the future. Some Wall Street analysts feared that, without its inspirational leader at the helm, Apple’s pipeline of game-changing new products would slow. The Cupertino technology giant could run out of ideas.

Commentators were also quick to note what a long way there was to fall. At the back of their minds was Mr Jobs’ first period of absence from the company – then, in 1985, Apple nearly went to the wall after a power-struggle saw him squeezed out. He returned just over a decade later to not only nurse the group back to health, but to preside over a period of extraordinary growth that turned Apple into the biggest company in the world.

But Apple has gone a long way to silencing those critics over the last year. Since Mr Jobs’ death, the company’s share price has nearly doubled from $372.50 to $671.73 by afternoon trading on Thursday. Apple is not just the biggest company in the world. With a market capitalisation of $630bn (£389bn), it is the biggest company there has ever been. Even Google, another technology giant, has not been able to match that trajectory with a value increase of around 50pc over the same period.

Apple’s financial performance has also been on a steady incline. Its profits rose 21pc to $8.8bn in the three months to the end of June, while sales rose 23pc to $35bn. Both were new records, although they did not quite meet analyst expectations, briefly rattling investor confidence. But the figures did not take account of the newly released iPhone 5, which is expected to push Apple’s numbers even higher.

“The business has powered ahead. From an operational point of view it’s doing astoundingly well,” said Shaun Collins, managing director of technology analysis firm CCS Insight.

A lot of the credit goes to Mr Jobs. He launched the first iPhone, and laid the foundations for future iterations that would each be better looking than the one before. He is said to have given the iPhone 5 his blessing before he died. But Tim Cook, Apple’s former chief operating officer who took the helm of Apple a few months before Mr Jobs’s death, has also done a creditable job, winning investor confidence and stamping his own imprint on the business.

In the 12 months since Mr Jobs’ death, Apple has behaved in ways it never would have countenanced before. The notoriously secretive company has become more communicative with shareholders, going beyond the compulsory quarterly updates to tell investors what it plans to do with its cash reserves, for example. It has also started returning some of that money to shareholders, paying its first dividend for nearly two decades.

Insiders claim that Apple has also become more corporate, and that the power has shifted away from its creatives in favour of more traditional management types.

But perhaps the biggest departures from the Jobs era came last month. First Apple put out a product that was clearly sub par, jestissoning Google’s mapping service in favour of its own, home-grown version which was littered with geographical errors and spelling mistakes. It is questionable whether Mr Jobs – who famously telephoned staff in the middle of the night to quibble over the exact colour of logos when they appeared on the iPhone screen – would have let that slip through.

But even more surprisingly, Apple said sorry.

In an act of humility that, from Apple, was as worrying as it was unfamiliar,Mr Cook acknowledged the company had fallen “short” of its promise to deliver world class products. He even suggested that customers revert back to Google Maps while Apple fixed its own bugs.

Users claimed that Apple had sacrificed user experience just to get one over on Google, and that Mr Jobs would never have allowed such a thing to happen. But Mr Collins is not so sure: “Apple is at the stage in its journey where things have to change because of its scale. It’s too easy to say this wouldn’t have happened if Steve was still alive.”

What is clear is that the real test of Apple in the post-Jobs era lies in the year ahead, not the one that has just passed.

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Sony pulls Xperia Tablet S from shelves due to water resistance issue

Sony has reportedly stopped the sales on Xperia Tablet S in Japan and other markets following concerns about its water resistance feature.

The problem with the tablet, which is supposed to be splash-proof, is the result of a manufacturing flaw at the Chinese plant where it is fabricated, Sony spokeswoman Noriko Shoji told Reuters.

Sony is not clear on when it will be able to resume sales of the tablet, Sony spokeswoman added.

Company has said that it will repair all the defected tablets free of charge, and does not think that the recall and repairs will have any significant impact on its earnings.

The Sony Xperia Tablet S went on sale September 7 in the US, followed by Japan, Europe and other markets. Company has shipped around 100,000 tablets till now.

The tablet features NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor, 9.4-inch display, 1GB RAM, Android 4.0 and 16GB/32GB of internal storage.

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