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Filed under: Enterprise, Wireless, Odds and ends, Surveys and Polls, Apple, iPhone

J.D. Power smartphone study ranks iPhone #1 in customer satisfaction

I don't know about you, but when I hear the name "J.D. Power and Associates," I think of customer satisfaction for automobile manufacturers.

The company also does customer satisfaction surveys in a number of other industries, and yesterday they released the 2009 Wireless Consumer Smartphone Satisfaction Survey and the 2009 Wireless Business Smartphone Satisfaction Survey. As you might not expect after all of the commenter griping we see about the iPhone, Apple nabbed the number one spot in customer satisfaction in both the consumer and business surveys.

As you can see in the regretfully fuzzy screenshot above, the iPhone took first-place honors in the consumer smartphone index with a score of 811 out of a possible 1,000. More importantly, the iPhone was the only smartphone to get a five-circle ("Among the best") Power Circle rating. LG was the surprising second-place contestant, with only three circles ("About average") and a 775 overall score.

The iPhone is no slouch in the business world, grabbing the lead in the business smartphone satisfaction ratings (see below) with an 803 index ranking. Businesses surveyed agreed with consumers and gave the iPhone an "Among the best" Power Circle Rating, significantly better than RIM's BlackBerry devices. The J.D. Power and Associates ratings tend to have the respect of many enterprise CIOs, so this should be good news for Apple in terms of increasing enterprise iPhone sales.

Filed under: Apple, Developer

Apple Design Award winners announced

It's a point of pride for the developers and a highlight of WWDC week -- tonight, courtesy of Jim Dalrymple at The Loop, we congratulate the winners of the Apple Design Awards for 2009. The list includes several TUAW favorites (Things, BoinxTV, Tweetie, Billings and MLB.com) along with some fantastic efforts from students.

The full winner list thanks to The Loop and Apple's ADA listings:

iPhone Developer Showcase
Tweetie from atebits
Topple from ng:moco
MLB.com At Bat from MLB.com
Postage from Rogue Sheep

Mac OS Leopard Developer Showcase
Billings from Marketcircle
Things from Cultured Code
BoinxTV from Boinx

Best Mac OS X Student Product
Fontcase by Pieter Omvlee

Best iPhone Student App
Wooden Labyrinth 3D by Elias Pietil
Best iPhone OS 3.0 Beta App
Accuterra by Intermap Technologies

Congratulations to all the winners!

Filed under: Apple Corporate, Retail

Apple Store window displays receive awards

When I was a young lad in Scranton, Pa, pierogi in one pocket and anthracite coal in the other, my mother and I would wait for the Colts bus in front of the Globe Department Store. Now, before you assume that this post will be nothing more than endless, irrelevant Andy Rooney-style sentimentality from Dave, I'll tell you that it's only in the first two paragraphs.

The Globe staff created ornate window displays with those animatronic figures that seemed festive at the time but would later scare the daylights out of me. I was reminded of Scranton and The Globe last winter during a visit to Boston's Boylston Street Apple Store, where I photographed the elf at right. The adjacent window had a similarly-stylized Santa holding an iPhone, and both were very cute with a 1960's claymation appeal.

The Association for Retail Environments must have liked them as well, as they awarded Apple's "Holiday Santa iPhone" window display "Best Visual Presentation," along with the "Back to School" and "Cherry Blossom Nano" displays. You can read more details on the awards here or download a PDF with additional details. Well done, Apple!

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Gaming, Software, Developer, iPhone, App Store, SDK, iPod touch

iPhone is dominating independent gaming

Our friends at Joystiq make a very insightful and very telling discovery: the iPhone more or less owns the finalist list for the 2009 Independent Games Festival Mobile category. 11 of the 14 contestants aren't on the Nintendo DS or PSP -- they're built and played on the iPhone and the iPod touch. The popular Fieldrunners and Igloo Games' Dizzy Bee are standouts, but even innovative games like Galcon and the pseudogame experience Ruben and Lullaby are being honored with nods.

Very, very telling -- the relatively low cost of entry into the App Store and the versatility of Apple's SDK makes the iPhone/iPod touch a dream platform for independent game developers, and clearly, even with less than a year of development time, Apple's handheld is making a big splash in the industry. Sure, there's still a few pricing hiccups that need to be worked out to get bigger developers on board in a big way, but for smaller and single person independent game developers, there's never been a better platform on which to make and market your games.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, Freeware, iTunes, iPhone, iPod touch

2008 Best iPhone App Ever winners announced

The voting only went underway a while ago, but they've just announced the winners for the 2008 Best App Ever awards, celebrating (according to 148apps.com and the people they got to nominate and vote in their contest) the best iPhone apps of last year. As I said for the voting, you can probably take most of this with a grain of salt, but there's no question that there are some awesome apps in here, and probably at least one or two you'll be interested in checking out if you haven't yet.

Shazam won big in the "Best Overall", "Most Innovative," and "Best WOW" categories, and that is well worth it: Shazam is super reliable and works great as a "music recognizer." Rolando picked up "Best Game Graphics," and "Best Game Controls." Fieldrunners also picked up two awards for "Best Strategy Game" and "Best Long-play Game."

Unfortunately, the much-despised (by me) Ocarina won three total awards, including "Best 99 cent app" (I would have chosen Koi Pond over that one easily and that's one where Weightbot was made to win), but feel free to ignore me and my iPhone app crankiness. There are lots of great iPhone apps here (especially when you dive into the nominations), and overall, we're looking at the best of a terrific first year of iPhone development. Onward to 2009!

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Apple, Developer, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch

2008 Best App Ever awards voting is underway

The nominations are out and voting has begun for the "Best App Ever" awards for 2008, recognizing the best iPhone and iPod touch apps of the year. Nominations have already happened -- the public submitted almost 18,000 nominations, and a panel of developers and experts was assembled to finalize the choices. You can vote right now over on the website for the winners in categories like "Best App Ever," "Best Musical App," and "Most Creative Use of IPhone Hardware" all the way down to "Best Word Game."

Quite a list of choices. Voting ends on January 6th (so get started testing those apps if there are some in here you've never heard of), and the winners will be announced next week at Macworld Expo.

Unfortunately, the App Store changes so fast and is so varied that some of the most useful apps (SnapTell Explorer is in for the hardware award, but it's missing on the "Most Useful" list) are not on the list in favor of more popular or well-known apps (Weightbot is a great app and very well done, but "Most Innovative"? And you know how I feel about Ocarina). Still, as a popularity contest, it'll be fun to see what comes out as the winners, and I can guarantee that in all of the many categories presented, there are a few really great apps that will come to your attention for the first time.

Filed under: WWDC, Developer

Apple posts ADA winners page, screenshots of iPhone apps

Today, Apple posted a page showing off the 2008 Apple Design Award winners. Most notably, they show off the iPhone software winners. So if you want to get a "sneak peek" at what some of the software will look like when it is released, head on over to the ADA page.

Enigmo, MIM, Twitterrific, AOL Radio, and OmniFocus are the iPhone apps that can be found on the ADA page along with screenshots of each application.

Filed under: WWDC, Developer

Apple Design Awards 2008

Apple held their 2008 Apple Design Awards at WWDC last night. We love developers. What makes the Mac platform so awesome is the cool applications that these creative developers make. It is with great pleasure that we tell you who won the Apple Design Awards for 2008.

Best Student Runner Up: Flow
Best Student Winner: Squirrel

Graphics and Media Runner Up: Fotomagico
Graphics and Media Winner: ScreenFlow

Leopard User Experience Runner Up: CheckOut
Leopard User Experience Winner: Macnification

Leopard Game Runner Up: Command and Conquer 3
Leopard Game Winner: Guitar Hero 3

Best Leopard Application Runner Up: TimeLine 3D
Best Leopard Application Winner: ScreenFlow

Best iPhone Web App Runner Up: Associated Press
Best iPhone Web App Winner: Remember the Milk

Best iPhone Game: Enigmo
Best iPhone Entertainment App: AOL Radio
Best iPhone Social Networking: Twitterrific
Best iPhone Productivity App: OmniFocus
Best iPhone Health App: MIM

[via wisequark on Twitter]

Updates: Yes, we added links!

Filed under: Apple, Graphic Design

Apple wins two D&AD 'Black Pencil' awards

As reported elsewhere, Apple today won two Black Pencil awards from D&AD, a British organization (or "organisation," I suppose) that promotes the very best of design around the world.

This year, the iPhone and aluminum iMac both took home the top award. The iPod touch received second prize (a Yellow Pencil), and the iPod nano and aluminum keyboard were each nominated. Apple has won six Black Pencils since 1999.

This year, six Black Pencils were awarded, though some years D&AD hand out zero (Graphic designers, for example, were a little miffed this year that none of their work was good enough). Sixty-four Yellow Pencils were handed out, among 143 total nominations.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Cool tools, Apple, iPhone

iPhone wins awards, will win a lot more before 2008

We're getting closer and closer to the end of the year, and that means it's almost time for everyone to announce their "best tech product of the year" awards. Gadget website T3 has gotten an early start, and not surprisingly, Apple walked all over everyone else, with the iPhone grabbing tons of awards, and iTunes and the MacBook Pro picking up a few more.

Which means: get ready, because the iPhone is going to pretty much win every award imaginable for 2007. What else came out this year that came even close to moving gadget technology ahead? As predicted, it sold tons of units, captured the nation's imagination at launch, singlehandedly pushed cell phones ahead light years (even while bringing some harsh light to Apple's closed architecture policy), and just generally changed the world of gadgets. Is there any other product released in 2007 that could really be called "Gadget of the Year"?

I'd think not. The Wii is awesome and all, but my guess is as these end of the year awards come out, even Nintendo's little marvel of an input device demo won't hold a candle to Apple's communications device.

Thanks, Charles B!

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Hardware, Software, Odds and ends, Leopard

Macworld Editors' and Readers' Choice awards voting begins

Macworld has announced that they're looking for nominations and votes for their fourth annual Reader's Choice awards-- they're asking interested parties to drop a note over on this forum thread in the categories of Apple Product of the Year, Third Party Hardware and Software of the Year, and Mac Gem of the Year (an under-$50 software out there that deserves more recognition than it usually gets).

As I suspected, there's no question about Apple Product of the Year: it's definitely the Hi-Fi. Wait, no, I mean it's definitely the iPhone. Duh. And the rest of the votes are literally all over the place, from Parallels, Adobe's suites, and even Leopard (despite not actually being from a third party, but maybe it's just that good) to smaller stuff like Panic's Coda and Gus Mueller's Acorn. I gotta say good luck to Macworld's editors-- they're going to need it to come up with some good award winners from that mess.

But they've got time-- the awards probably won't drop until mid-December. And by then, we'll all have used Leopard enough to know that it is the software product of the year, third-party or otherwise.

Filed under: WWDC, Developer

Apple Design Awards 2007

Apple has announced the winners of the 2007 Apple Design Awards, and as always, the winners are a selection of the very best of OS X applications. While a good deal of the winning developers tonight received their second or even third award, it's nice to see a bunch of smaller and lesser known first time winners mixed in.

Results after the jump.

Continue readingApple Design Awards 2007

Filed under: WWDC, Apple

Apple Design Awards 2007 now accepting entries



It's that time of year again kids - the time when Mac OS X developers can submit their application to Apple for a chance to win a coveted Apple Design Award. The categories up for judging this year have actually lowered from eight to seven since 2006, shaving off Best Automator Workflow to leave us with:
  • Best Mac OS X Leopard Application
  • Best Mac OS X User Experience
  • Best Mac OS X Developer Tool
  • Best Mac OS X Game
  • Best Mac OS X Scientific Computing Solution
  • Best Mac OS X Dashboard Widget
  • Best Student Application
We know what you're saying: "Best Leopard app? But it isn't even out yet!" Don't worry, we're scratching our heads too. Even though more and more developers are already announcing Leopard-only apps, we're itching just as bad as you are to see all the wiz-bang new stuff developers' apps can do with the fancy new technologies - some of them still a secret - of Mac OS X Leopard. Fortunately, since the awards are announced at WWDC, which is where everyone thinks Leopard is going to debut anyway, we'll already have a list of rockin' apps that were chosen by the dev community themselves to hit the ground running with.

Filed under: Hardware, iPod Family, Multimedia, OS, WWDC, Apple, Macbook Pro

Apple Design Awards 2006 now accepting entries

"Show off your latest feat of programming genius," says the Apple Developer Connection email announcing the call for entries to their 11th annual Design Awards. Recognizing "technical excellence and outstanding achievement in developing Mac OS X software," there are eight award categories into which developers can submit their apps: Best Mac OS X Developer Tool, Best Use of Mac OS X Graphics, Best Widget, Automator Workflow, User Experience, Game, Scientific Computing Solution and Student Product.

As far as what winning developers receive for all their hard work, Apple's going all out this year. Each category winner receives two 15-inch MacBook Pros, two 23-inch Cinema Displays, an ADC Premiere Membership, a WWDC 2006 E-ticket, and an exhibitor space at Macworld 2007. The Student category winner will receive one 15-inch MacBook Pro, one 23-inch Cinema Display, one 60GB iPod, an ADC Student Membership, and a WWDC 2006 Student E-ticket. Does anyone else find it odd the non-student members don't receive an iPod? And how about the lack of PowerMac prizes?

The entry deadline is June 16th, and the winners will be honored at WWDC in August.

Filed under: Hardware, Software, Odds and ends

TiVoToGo for Mac named in Wired's 2005 Vaporware Awards

Remember those TiVoToGo OS X screenshots we came across in early January? Wired's readers do, and they nominated it as the #10 vaporware (a much-hyped product that never appears) of 2005 in Wired's annual Vaporware Awards. TiVo has apparently been promising the software for months, amidst Apple TiVo partnership rumors and rampant speculation about a Mac mini TiVo (or TiVo-like) media center.

Another mentionable 2005 vaporware item, though not necessarily Apple-related, is the perpetually forthcoming Windows Vista, clocking in at number 4. I just have to tip my hat to one reader's comment that Wired printed: "It's been put off so many times, it's been called 'Hasta la Vista.'"


My favorite Apple-related piece of vaporware? The Apple Pippin.

Tip of the Day

Holding the Command key (aka the Apple key) and pressing Tab will cycle through your open applications. It's easier to Cmd-Tab if you are Copy (Cmd-C) and Pasting (Cmd-V) to and from various applications.


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