MacRumors

In what should not be a surprise given Siri's beta status and its use of new technology for voice interaction with mobile devices, a study from Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster finds that Siri's abilities are still eclipsed by the traditional text-entry Google searches that have been in place for years.

The study included presenting Siri with 800 queries in each of two environments, a quiet room and a busy urban street, and then assessing Siri's ability to correctly interpret the queries and provide correct responses. Specifically addressing the outdoor testing, Munster notes:

While Google comprehends 100% of searches, Siri was only able to comprehend 83% of the prompted questions on a busy Minneapolis street. In terms of answer accuracy, Siri correctly answered 62% of queries on the street compared to Google's estimated 86% answer accuracy. Based on these results, we give Google an A+ for comprehension and a B+ for accuracy while we give Siri a B for comprehension and a D for accuracy.

But while Siri has some room for improvement, Munster acknowledges that the technology is only in its infancy and he remains "optimistic about its future" with an eye toward iOS 6 as bringing substantial improvements.

Piper Jaffray's testing was conducted using the iPhone's built-in microphone in the quiet setting and Skullcandy microphone headphones for the outdoor setting, with Siri's ability to correctly comprehend queries falling from 89% to 83% when moving outdoors to the noisy urban setting. On the accuracy side, Google's 86% rating is derived from comScore data showing that Google generates 1.14 search result pages per search, suggesting that roughly 86% of time Google presents the data the user is looking for within the first few results.

Piper Jaffray also analyzed the sources for Siri's results, finding that Google provided 60% of the answers, with Yelp and other sources filling in the remainder.

Of queries excluding commands (i.e. call Jay, send text) Google would provide 60% of the answers, Yelp 20%, WolframAlpha 14%, Yahoo 4%, and Wikipedia 2%. Breaking down Siri's reliance further, Google provides 100% of navigation results, 61% of information results, 48% of commerce results and 42% of local results. Among other result aggregators, Yelp provided the most local results (51%) and commerce results (51%), while WolframAlpha provided 34% of information results.

Munster estimates that Google's share of Siri results will drop to 48% with the launch of iOS 6 as navigation, sports, and movie queries shift over to Apple and its new partners.

Last November, Adobe announced that it was ending development of Flash Player for mobile platforms, opting not to optimize the plug-in for new browser, operating system, and device configurations. Adobe's announcement came roughly a year and a half after Steve Jobs penned his "Thoughts on Flash" open letter outlining why Apple had decided not to allow Flash to run on its iOS devices.

Now nearly eight months after Adobe's announcement, the company is officially pulling Flash from the Google Play marketplace for Android for new users. Those users who already have Flash installed on their Android devices will, however, be able to continue receiving updates.

Beginning August 15th we will use the configuration settings in the Google Play Store to limit continued access to Flash Player updates to only those devices that have Flash Player already installed. Devices that do not have Flash Player already installed are increasingly likely to be incompatible with Flash Player and will no longer be able to install it from the Google Play Store after August 15th.

Adobe also notes that Flash is officially not certified for use with the upcoming Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean" previewed earlier this week, and users are encouraged to uninstall Flash if and when they update their Android devices to Jelly Bean.

Over the past several days, Gizmodo has been highlighting freezing and crashing issues on several of its staff's new MacBook Air models, linking the problems to Google Chrome. Switching to Apple's Safari browser eliminated all of the issues, and thus the site recommended that owners of the new machines avoid Chrome for the time being.

Google has now issued a statement to Gizmodo acknowledging that Chrome is the culprit and discussing the steps it is taking to address the issue. While Google has disabled some of Chrome's GPU acceleration on an emergency basis as it seeks to deploy a permanent solution, the company has also filed a bug report with Apple as such issues should not be able to cause an entire system to freeze or crash.

"We have identified a leak of graphics resources in the Chrome browser related to the drawing of plugins on Mac OS X. Work is proceeding to find and fix the root cause of the leak.

The resource leak is causing a kernel panic on Mac hardware containing the Intel HD 4000 graphics chip (e.g. the new Macbook Airs). Radar bug number 11762608 has been filed with Apple regarding the kernel panics, since it should not be possible for an application to trigger such behavior.

While the root cause of the leak is being fixed, we are temporarily disabling some of Chrome's GPU acceleration features on the affected hardware via an auto-updated release that went out this afternoon (Thursday June 28). We anticipate further fixes in the coming days which will re-enable many or all of these features on this hardware."

With the issue affecting all systems using Intel HD 4000 graphics, all of Apple's notebook models released earlier this month are susceptible and owners of the new MacBook Pro models are indeed also reporting the issue.

First launched in September 2008, Chrome has steadily gained in overall popularity among desktop Internet browsers and is currently running neck-and-neck with Firefox for the second position behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Apple Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering Bob Mansfield is retiring, according to an Apple press release. He joined Apple in 1999. He has led Mac hardware engineering since 2005, along with iPhone, iPod, and iPad engineering since 2010.

Apple® today announced that Bob Mansfield, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, will retire and the role will be transitioned to Dan Riccio, Apple’s vice president of iPad Hardware Engineering, over several months. The entire hardware engineering team will continue to report to Mansfield until his departure.

“Bob has been an instrumental part of our executive team, leading the hardware engineering organization and overseeing the team that has delivered dozens of breakthrough products over the years,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We are very sad to have him leave and hope he enjoys every day of his retirement.”

Mansfield has been instrumental in Apple's success in recent years, overseeing the development of the very successful MacBook Air notebooks, as well as recent iPhone and iPad designs. With rumors of an iPhone redesign coming this fall, it's possible that Mansfield wanted to stay with Apple through the introduction of that product.

He has sold off more than $70 million in Apple stock and options in the past few years.

Dan Riccio, the executive taking over Mansfield's responsibilities, has been with Apple since 1998. He was vice president of product design for 12 years before taking over the iPad division in 2010. Apple's press release says Riccio "has been a key contributor to most of Apple’s hardware over his career."

In a separate announcement made today in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Apple reported that Corporate Controller and Principal Accounting Office Betsy Rafael will also be retiring, effective October 19.

As announced earlier this month, Sprint prepaid subsidiary Virgin Mobile USA is launching the iPhone tomorrow, and the carrier has begun taking orders ahead of the official launch.

As noted by Bloomberg Businessweek, Virgin Mobile is seeking to capitalize on the publicity generated by the iPhone to remake itself as a major player in the market, in part by opening its first ten retail stores in Chicago to coincide with the iPhone launch. Should the stores prove successful, the carrier would seek to expand the initiative nationwide.

The new stores also mark a strategy shift for Virgin, which has previously relied on retailers such as RadioShack Corp. and Best Buy Co. to market its service, said Jeff Auman, a vice president at the carrier.

Pay-as-you-go companies, which let customers get mobile- phone service without credit checks and long-term contracts, are trying to reinvigorate the market by offering the iPhone and other popular smartphones. The industry has seen its growth slow in recent years, hurt by major carriers rolling out better phones and more flexible payment plans.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse indicates that he expects "the iPhone will do very well on Virgin" based on pre-orders of the device so far, and giving customers dedicated retail stores for purchase and support could help extend the brand that has already found a loyal following among prepaid phone users.

Virgin is the second U.S. prepaid carrier to launch the iPhone, following Leap Wireless, which launched the device through its Cricket brand last weekend. Leap has declined to disclose iPhone sales so far, but its move to add the iPhone has certainly brought the carrier significant publicity.

According to today's report, MetroPCS may also add the iPhone to its lineup once Apple launches an LTE-compatible model, which is expected later this year. MetroPCS carrier Tom Keys acknowledge that the carrier has had talks with Apple about the iPhone and would "certainly be interested" once LTE is included.

Earlier this month, we noted that Microsoft was making a major push into the living room, seeking to use its Xbox hardware as the hub for new streaming video content and a "SmartGlass" app for various platforms that will allow two-way Airplay-like wireless streaming between devices and an Xbox connected to a television.

Bloomberg now reports that Microsoft is also making a substantial push on the music side, talking to labels about launching a hybrid music service that would offer both iTunes-like downloads and Spotify-like streaming content.

The Redmond, Washington-based software maker is in talks with major record companies for the needed rights, and plans to begin service later this year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions aren’t complete.

By combining the best features of competing services, Microsoft seeks to build a digital product that lets customers consume music any way they like. The maker of the Xbox console is building the new music business after its unsuccessful effort with the Zune service, which will close and move customers to Xbox Music, the company said on its website.

Microsoft's music service will reportedly also include a digital locker similar in some respects to iTunes Match, allowing users to host their entire music collections in the cloud for access from multiple devices. Talks with labels are still underway, and Microsoft may yet find itself unable to obtain all of the rights it is seeking, but it is clear that the company is once again working hard to compete with Apple in the digital media arena.

Google announced today that it is releasing a version of its Google Chrome for the iPhone and iPad. The company says it will go live on the App Store later today. Macquarie analyst Ben Schacter predicted last month that Google Chrome was coming to iOS.

While Chrome for iOS will include a number of key features, including incognito mode and tab syncing across devices, the browser will still use Apple's WebKit-based engine required by the App Store developer guidelines. It also will lack the Nitro JavaScript engine that Apple uses to speed Safari's performance. But, there is one main obstacle to Chrome on iOS, as noted by The Next Web:

The biggest hurdle that Chrome features, of course, is that it cannot be set to be the default browser on iOS devices, a capability that Apple also reserves for Safari. So, while you can use the browser to your heart’s content, it will not be the default handler for any URLs clicked. That’s a huge hurdle to overcome.

Google Drive -- the DropBox competitor released earlier this year -- also gained an iOS client. [App Store]

Update: Chrome for iOS is now live on the App Store. [Direct Link]

Five and a half years ago, a company by the name of Axiotron unveiled the Modbook, a MacBook that had been converted into a pen-based tablet by repackaging the internals into a new casing to yield the one-piece tablet form factor. Two years later, Axiotron introduced the Modbook Pro based on a similar concept, but delays in delivering its products ultimately led Axiotron to fade away.

Earlier this year, one of Axiotron's founders returned with a new company carrying the Modbook name, and today the company is announcing the new generation of Modbook Pro products.

Built from a unique enclosure conversion kit, the Modbook Pro incorporates and completely encases the original hardware of a new Apple MacBook Pro 13.3-inch base system. Its Wacom digitizer delivers 512 levels of pen pressure sensitivity — more than any other tablet computer on the market. And its ForceGlass screen provides an etched, paper-emulating drawing surface.

The result is a sleek tablet computer run by a powerful Mac base system, with a highly sensitive pen interface and a natural drawing surface, all fused into one device you can take with you and use anywhere.

The Modbook Pro components connect to the original MacBook Pro through one of its two USB 3.0 ports, with the entire assembly being enclosed in a new casing for an integrated OS X-based tablet solution that also supports Windows 7.

The Modbook Pro is scheduled to launch in "early fall 2012", with pricing and retail partners yet to be announced.

A new website at FinallyOnTheMac.com has just gone live, teasing a major announcement from an undisclosed company. The site currently consists of a single YouTube video entitled "Countdown to a revolution", with the site containing an additional eight blank slots where other videos will presumably be posted in the coming days.

We believe that Sony is behind the teaser campaign, and the video's focus on music and audio recording hints that the company's Sound Forge audio recording and editing tools may be coming to the Mac.

The video offers the following tag lines suggesting that it is indeed an existing software product that is being rebuilt from the ground up for the Mac:

- The wait is over
- Rethought. Reshaped. Recreated.
- Reinvented for the Mac

No timeframe for an official announcement or launch has been given, with the website and video description simply mentioning that the product will be "coming soon".

BlueStacks announced a public alpha version of their Android App Player for the Mac today at Google I/O.

The company had originally released a beta version of their App Player for Windows back in March. The software allows users to run Android apps directly on their Windows PCs, and the newest version begins to extend that functionality to the Mac.

While the Windows version allows you to run any Android app without modification, the early Mac version seems to be limited to 15 initial apps that comes bundled with the download. The bundled apps include Air Control Lite, Alchemy, Basketball Shot, Drag Racing, Elastic World, Facebook, Glow Hockey, Guns'n'Glory, Paper Toss, Pulse, Robo Defense, Seesmic, Twitter, Whatsapp, and Zebra Paint.

Their support page claims that "in the very near future", they plan on opening the Mac version up to over 400,000 Android apps:

The BlueStacks App Player for Mac OSX (alpha) supports both Lion and Snow Leopard. You can test drive a fixed set of curated apps for the first release (alpha-1). In the very near future, BlueStacks will let you select from over 400,000 Android apps to play on your Mac.

The alpha version is available as a free download from the BlueStacks website.

Bloomberg reports that Apple is preparing a major overhaul of its iTunes software to more closely integrate its iCloud services and add new features for sharing music.

With an increasing amount of content available on the store, the overhaul is intended to improve how people manage all their files, one person said. That includes changes to how users find new material and how they access what they already own on different Apple devices, said one person.

One of the main ways Apple will attempt to improve discovery is by making it easier for people to share songs, a popular feature of Spotify Ltd.’s music-subscription service. Apple has been negotiating with major record labels for rights that would let a user listen to a song sent to them from a friend for free, one person said.

Apple's iCloud efforts will improve organization of users' own content while also the company is also considering splitting out some functions of iTunes as it did yesterday on iOS with its new Podcasts app.

Apple is also looking to include more multimedia content in the iTunes Store, requesting more photos and music videos from artists to help broaden its offerings.

The revamped iTunes application is set to launch before the end of the year and is said to be one of the largest sets of changes since the iTunes Store's debut in 2003. As announced at its Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month, Apple is also working to improve the iTunes experience on iOS, revamping its digital store apps in iOS 6 to aid users in discovering new content.

Earlier this week, The Next Web noted that some early purchasers of the Retina MacBook Pro have been experiencing "ghosting" on their machines' displays, with remnants of previously-displayed screen contents remaining visible for some time afterward.

Some readers on the ASC forum have reported the image retention issue with as little as 20 minutes worth of use. However it’s well worth noting that the problem isn’t happening to everyone, and image retention isn’t uncommon on IPS panels such as the one used in the new Pro.

Apple has reportedly been replacing machines affected by the issue, but tight supplies of the Retina MacBook Pro could result in waits for the replacement units.

DisplayMate's Ray Soneira notes on his news page that such behavior is not restricted to IPS panels such as those used in the new Retina MacBook Pro, suggesting that the issue is likely an early production problem that Apple has perhaps already ironed out.

It used to be much more common, but now it's unusual to see it in a display. The cause varies: an electrostatic build up, a chemical impurity build up, a thermal imbalance, or an electronic levels issue within the panel. Depending on the cause it can be better to leave the display on with a dark uniform image, on with a bright uniform image, or turn the display off all together.

Apple continues to cite shipping estimates of 3-4 weeks for new Retina MacBook Pro orders amid high demand, and the company is apparently delaying some early custom-configured orders from business customers by up to a month from their original estimates.