Apple iPhone 5 'to be cased in Liquidmetal'

Apple’s next iPhone will be cased in ‘Liquidmetal’, according to reports. 

Apple's chief executive: Tim Cook. Photo: AP

 

The iPhone 5, likely to be released later this year, is expected to be cased in a ‘metallic glass’, otherwise known as Liquidmetal, says a Korean news outlet citing ‘industry sources’.

The case is expected to be 20 times stronger than the current encasement. According to The Register, ‘metallic glass is a metal alloy, but one with the disordered structure of glass’. The material has been around since the 1990s, but since a new breakthrough in ‘superspeed pulse mould technology’, this type of glass, which is as tough as metal, can now be used for phone casings.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment on rumours and speculation.

The technology giant has signed an exclusive deal with Liquidmetal Techologies Ltd, the inventors of the material. Apple is believed to have paid $11m for the exclusive arrangement.

The part of the new iPhone expected to be made out of metallic glass is the back casing – as opposed to the glass display.

The same Korean news outlet has also predicted that the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S3, due to launch on May 3 in London, will be made out of high-tech ceramics.

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Apple iPhone 'outselling rivals as Christmas approaches'

Apple's iPhone 4S was Britain's biggest selling mobile phone in the month before December 9, according to analysts.

The iPhone 4S outsold rivals in November and December, according to analysts.

 

The iPhone 4S, which was released in October, made up a quarter of all handset sales in the four weeks before December 9, according to market research firm GfK.

Samsung's Galaxy SII was the second-best selling phone in the week up to December 9, the Financial Times reported.

However, Nokia's new Lumia handset was off to an underwhelming start, failing to make the top 10 handsets in the four weeks of the survey period. The Lumia, which runs Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 operating system, was released in Britain on November 16.

GfK, which monitors sales through mobile network operators, said that Apple iPhone models made up five of the top 15 handsets sold in the first week of December.

The iPhone 4S is a more powerful version of its predecessor, with an improved camera and a new voice control system called Siri. Last week, there was speculation that Google was working on its own voice control software to be released as part of its Android mobile operating system.
RIM, the Canadian company that makes BlackBerry handsets, has had a bad year but there was at least some comfort in the GfK data. Sales of BlackBerry handsets increased during the period of the survey, with three variants of the BlackBerry Curve in the top 10. 

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Apple 'working on prototype television set'

Apple is creating a television set that could be released late next year or early in 2013, it has been claimed. 

The most recent Apple TV was smaller and had more streaming options than its predecessor. Photo: AFP/GETTY

 

Sources within the company said that Jeff Robbin, the Apple engineer who helped create the iPod and iTunes, is leading the effort. However, Apple declined to comment publicly.

According to Bloomberg, an Apple insider said that the company wants to let users seamlessly access television shows by integrating all the available sources, such as satellite TV, online film rental services and iTunes downloads.

Shortly before he died, Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, told his biographer that he had "finally cracked" the problem of building a television.

In Walter Isaacson's book, Steve Jobs, which was published yesterday, the Apple founder says: "I'd like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use. It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it."

Jeff Robbin joined Apple in 2000 to work on iTunes, which at the time was a music playing application. Since then it has expanded to incorporate film, TV shows, apps and more. Apple has also added the iTunes Store, which sells a variety of content.

Apple has been experimenting with television since 2007, when it launched the Apple TV - a box that connected to a television and offered access to content stored on the device's hard drive or downloaded from iTunes. A new version of Apple TV, which did away with the hard drive and added more streaming options, was released last year. 

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