Google acknowledged breaking the official rules of Apple's iPhone software development kit when it created the latest version of the Google Mobile application for the iPhone, but denied a more serious charge.
A Google spokesman confirmed Tuesday that Google Mobile uses undocumented APIs (application programming interfaces) in order to use the iPhone's proximity sensor to prompt a verbal search. iPhone developers were only supposed to use the APIs that Apple published in its SDK when they create their applications under the terms of that agreement.
Google has denied, however, a more serious charge that it was linking to private or dynamic frameworks in the Google Mobile application. That's considered a big no-no in the development community.
The problem with using undocumented APIs is that your application code could break in the future as Apple updates its software, but a lot of developers appear to have taken that risk in order to deliver a cool feature, such as Google's verbal search prompt.
Based on the tremendous efforts by members at Mac Observer's AFB to track IMEI iPhone numbers, we have determined that Apple has drastically surpassed analysts' Q4 iPhone sales estimates, and that Apple has reached its goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008. The consensus estimates for iPhone sales figures for Apple's Q4 (calendar Q3) were calling for approximately 4 million units. It now appears that Apple has sold at least 7 to 7.5 million iPhones in Q4—that's nearly 80% above consensus. Apple has far surpassed even Gene Munster's bullish estimates of 5 million iPhone sales in Q4 according to the data.
At MacWorld 2007, when Apple was trading at the same price it is today, Steve Jobs and Apple set a bold goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008. Despite Apple's consistent reassurances of meeting its goal, bearish analysts repeatedly raised irrational concerns about whether Apple could reach such lofty sales figures. In January, Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst who rarely comments on Apple, started the "missing iPhones controversy" which led a herd of naive analysts to reduce their iPhone sales estimates to numbers that fell well below Apple's 10 million iPhone goal for 2008. Sacconaghi forecasted that Apple would only sell 7.9 million iPhones in the period. This obviously put considerable pricing pressure on shares of Apple in February. date, model, and production week. By early September, Apple was on its 8th TAC, meaning that 8 million 3G iPhones had already been manufactured. The actual number of handsets sold versus manufactured depends on a variety of factors including the amount of inventory Apple carries in its retail chain, defects that were destroyed, defects that were sold and then exchanged, display models etc.
Based on the 