Here is your daily Apple stock news and rumors for Friday.
Apple Admits to Using Carrier IQ User Info Gathering Tech in iPhone: Earlier this year Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) came under fire for logging information about its iPhone users, including GPS-based location and personal information. Apple claimed at the time that this data was recorded accidentally. It turns out that up until just recently, Apple was using technology that recorded users’ personal information intentionally.
According to a Wednesday report at Tech Crunch, developer Trevor Eckhart discovered that Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android phones used on Sprint‘s (NYSE:S) network were using Carrier IQ, a type of data-collecting software used mostly by telecoms for tracking just the sort of user information Apple was blasted for collecting. On Thursday though, Apple released a statement to All Things Digital that it too used Carrier IQ in its iPhone operating system iOS. Apple said that though it used Carrier IQ, it never used the software to record users’ personal information like text messages or keystrokes, but just for diagnosing potential technical problems with phones.
Apple also said that it has stopped “supporting” Carrier IQ with the most recent version of iOS and that the technology will be removed from iPhones completely in an upcoming update.
Nokia Loses More Than Half Its Home Country Mobile Support in 2011: Giga OM reported on Friday that though Nokia (NYSE:NOK) has received some decent press in recent weeks, thanks to its new Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) phones, times are grimmer than they’ve ever been for the Finnish phone maker. It’s actually Finland that shows just how rough things have gotten for Nokia. New data from research firm IDC shows that Nokia’s share of the mobile market in its home country of Finland was just 31% in the third quarter of 2011. That’s down from 76% during the same period in 2010. Where has the company’s market share gone? To Samsung and Apple.
RIM Takes $485 Million Charge on Unsold PlayBooks: Research In Motion (NASDAQ:RIMM) didn’t make much of a dent against Apple’s iPad business when it released its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet earlier this year. Whereas Apple sold 11 million tablets during the third quarter, RIM has sold just 900,000 PlayBooks in the three quarters since it released. Those low sales have led to a massive stock of unsold PlayBooks among retailers. That inventory is now, according to a Friday report at Apple Insider, costing RIM $485 million. At the same time that the company revealed its inventory charge woes to investors, it also lowered guidance for its fiscal 2012 earnings. RIM no longer believes that it will deliver EPS between $5.25 and $6.
As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here. Follow him on Twitter at @ajohnagnello and become a fan of InvestorPlace on Facebook.
