iPhone 4S selling out while RIM kissing up

Perusing the technology headlines this morning a few things popped out.
First, a plethora of media outlets picked up on Apple Inc.’s early morning prepared statement (press release) whereby the folks in Cupertino announced they had sold over four million of their new iPhone 4S models in the last three days since the official rollout on the 14th.

I myself spotted long lines out the doors at two of Manhattan’s Apple stores over the weekend — at the one in Chelsea there were even those annoying types coming up to ask the security guy keeping things quiet in the line: “So how long do you think?…”

Second, there have been more than 25 million download/upgrades of iOS 5, the latest version of the Apple mobile operating system since it became available for download five days ago.

A quick aside.

My headline/alert scanning also led me off on a tangent re: why the iPhone 4 (my own phone, owned by millions and among them thousands of you financial advisers) cannot take advantage of/run Siri, the new virtual digital assistant that is supported on the iPhone4S.

The folks over at the 9to5Mac blog have been working with a developer specializing in Apple to port that application over such that it would run on an iPhone 4.

What they have found so far is that hardware on the iPhone 4 (the A4 CPU) should be capable of running Siri but Apple’s servers, which are needed for processing and deciphering the requests, are filtering out traffic originating from the iPhone 4. There is logical conjecture on 9to5Mac (and several other places) as to why. I had not received any official word back from Apple’s PR machine by the time I posted this (it is still early out West).

Oh — and another quick Siri aside, a bit’o humor pulled off the Google+ social media network this morning. I have not verified the truth of it, probably just artistic fun and license but thought it funny nonetheless. Guy posts a screenshot of his Siri interface: “Please call me an ambulance,” he asks his Siri assistant. It responds: “From now on I will call you Ambulance.”

Getting back to Apple’s announcement today; there have also been what I think is an amazing 20 million people that have signed up for iCloud, a set of “free cloud services that automatically and wirelessly store your content in iCloud and push it to all your devices.”

I point a lot of this out in case there is any doubt that Apple remains a potent technology investment for now.

Addressing your recent RIM/Blackberry woes aka how they’re saying they’re sorry for the outage

Many advisers carry Blackberry smart phones (though I heard from some of them last week that they were getting serious about shopping for a new phone) in addition to the millions of other folks inconvenienced by last week’s outage.

The cause was a core switch that failed and its backup failed to pick up the slack in the way the firm had hoped or planned.

With its systems back up and running, Research in Motion is trying an application giveaway for those affected as a form of recompense.

My former colleague over at PCMag.com, Chloe Albanesius, jumped right on top of the
RIM announcement this morning. Here are the most pertinent deets from her story:

…The apps will be available for download from October 19 to December 31. RIM is starting with a dozen apps worth approximately $100, though more will be added.

The apps include: SIMS 3, Bejeweled, N.O.V.A., Texas Hold’em Poker 2, Bubble Bash 2, Photo Editor Ultimate, DriveSafe.ly Pro, iSpeech Translator Pro, Drive Safe.ly Enterprise, Nobex Radio Premium, Shazam Encore, and Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant.

Enterprise customers, meanwhile, will get one free month of technical support. Those who already subscribe to the service will get an additional month added to their contracts at no charge…

More details will be available at at RIM’s Blackberry enterprise site but be forewarned, the site was loading pretty slowly earlier today.