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Steve Jobs said he wanted to destroy Google’s Android and would spend all of Apple’s money and his dying breath if that is what it took to do so.The full extent of his animosity towards Google’s mobile operating system is revealed in an authorised biography which is released today.

Mr Jobs told author Walter Isaacson that he viewed Android’s similarity to iOS as “grand theft”.

Apple is suing several smartphone makers which use the Android software.

According to extracts of Mr Isaacson’s book, Mr Jobs said: “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

He is also quoted as saying: “I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong.”

Apple enjoyed a close relationship with Google prior to the launch of the Android system. Google products, including maps and search formed a key part of the iPhone’s ecosystem.

At that time, Google’s chief executive, now chairman, Eric Schmidt also sat on the board of Apple.

However, relations began to sour when Google unveiled Android in November 2007, 10 months after the iPhone first appeared.

In subsequent years Apple rejected a number of Google programs from its App store, forcing the company to create less integrated web app versions.

Android has subsequently enjoyed rapid adoption and now accounts for around 48% of global smartphone shipments, compared to 19% for Apple.

But its growth has not gone uncontested. Apple has waged an aggressive proxy-war against Android, suing a number of the hardware manufacturers which have adopted it for their tablets and smartphones.

Motorola was one of the first to be targeted, although it is Samsung that has recently borne the brunt of Mr Jobs’ law suits.

The South Korean firm is currently banned from selling its Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia and Germany because of a combination of patent infringements and “look and feel” similarities. A smartphone ban is also pending in the Netherlands.

Samsung is counter-suing Apple for infringing, it claims, several wireless technology patents which it holds the rights to.

The world’s most valuable technology company Apple Inc has reported an 85% rise in its full year results.Net profit for the year ending 24 September was £16.5 billion.

However, its shares fell more than 5% in after-hours trading after fourth quarter iPhone sales were weaker than experts predicted.

Overall revenues totalled £17.66 billion for the three months- which was nearly £660 million less than Wall Street forecasts.

It is the first time that Apple has missed analysts’ sales forecasts since 2008.

During a conference call, chief executive Tim Cook suggested demand for the iPhone 4 had been dampened by rumours that a new model was about to be released.

“The reduction happened largely in the back half of the quarter as the speculation hit extreme highs,” said Mr Cook.

“However, we’re thrilled to be shipping the new iPhone 4S… and we’re very confident that we will set an all-time record in the December quarter for iPhone sales.”

Apple sold 17.1 million iPhones in the last quarter. That was a 21% increase on the same period last year, but analysts had expected sales of 20 million.

The firm said handset orders had also been affected by a decision to delay new partnerships.

“We opted to defer adding new carriers or countries during the September quarter knowing that we would launch the iPhone 4S very early in the October month, and we wanted to launch our new carriers with our latest products so we waited,” said chief financial officer, Peter Oppenheimer.

The earnings are the first to be released by Apple since the death of its co-founder Steve Jobs.

Mr Cook marked the occasion by paying tribute to his predecessor.

“Steve was a great leader and mentor and inspired everyone at Apple to do extraordinary things,” he said.

“I’d like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude for all of the condolences and expressions of support that we have received following Steve’s passing.”

Despite the iPhone figures Apple said it was “thrilled” by the results.

It sold 11.12 million iPads over the latest quarter, which was a 166% rise on the same period last year.

Sales of the Mac computers totalled 4.89 million, a 26% rise and an all-time record.

Mr Cook said he was particularly excited by China, where sales are growing at a “feverish” pace.

Greater China revenue accounted for 16% of Apple’s revenue in the fourth quarter, up from 2% in 2009.

“Certainly in my lifetime, I’ve never seen a country with as many people rising into the middle class that aspire to buy products that Apple makes,” Mr Cook said.

He said the company was also focussing on Brazil where sales had increased 118% over the past year, topping £562 million.

Apple warned that the recent flooding in Thailand might cause it problems sourcing hard discs and components for its Macs.

“I’m virtually certain there will be an overall industry shortage of disc drives as a result of the disaster,” said Mr Cook.

Apple has released on sale it’s new iPhone 4S smart phone.As thousands of people have queued for hours around the world waiting for the release, hundreds of people queued up for hours outside London’s Covent Garden Apple Store to be the first to get their hands on the new Apple iPhone 4S which went on sale for the first time on Friday morning.

Apple fans and staff from the store counted down the seconds until the store officially opened at 9am. Moments later customers emerged from the shop excitedly clutching the new piece of technology.

However, staff at the Covent Garden store were coy about the availability of the new phone.

“It’s very hard to judge how easy it will be as we don’t know how many people are going to come. The volume of phones we have in replicate the high demand and if you come early, say 8am, you will have a good chance of getting one,” one shop assistant said.

The smartphone’s UK launch repeated scenes similar in Australia and Japan, which were among the first countries to release of Apple’s new iPhone 4S.

The iPhone is the world’s biggest selling smartphone and some analysts expect fourth-quarter iPhone shipments to be as high as 30 million units, almost double last year’s figure.

It might look the same but the iPhone 4S is significantly faster than its predecessor, with a new camera and – this year’s most attention-grabbing feature – a clever voice control service called Siri. In hindsight, this year’s upgrade makes sense: it mirrors the 2009 upgrade from iPhone 3G to iPhone 3GS.

Overall, the iPhone 4S is a good upgrade to a very good phone.

It retains the stylish design of the iPhone 4 and gives it a substantial boost. It’s certainly not cheap when you consider some of the alternatives but it feels like a luxury product and it’s an absolute joy to use.

If you own the iPhone 4, then whether you upgrade or not depends on how tempted you are by Siri and the new camera. The upgrades in iOS 5 might be enough for iPhone 4 owners. 3GS owners should be in the queue already.

Bolt on iOS 5 – the new version of the operating system – and iCloud, Apple’s cloud storage service, and you have a pretty compelling package. It’s especially compelling for those iPhone 3GS owners whose two-year contracts are just coming to an end.

Apple co-founder and former chief executive Steve Jobs, died on Wednesday at the age of 56, after a  multi year long battle with pancreatic cancer.Jobs’ death was announced by Apple in a statement late yesterday. The Apple.com homepage features a black and white picture (above) of him with the words “Steve Jobs, 1955-2011″.

A message on the site read: “Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor.

“Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.”

The Silicon Valley icon who gave the world the MAC, the iPod, the iPad and the iPhone had resigned as chief executive of the world’s largest technology corporation in August, handing the reins to current chief executive Tim Cook.

A survivor of a rare form of pancreatic cancer, he was deemed the heart and soul of a company that rivals Exxon Mobil as the most valuable in America.

“Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve,” Apple said in a statement announcing Jobs’ passing.

“His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts.”

Job’s health had been a controversial topic for years. His battle with cancer had been a deep concern to Apple fans, investors and the company’s board alike.

In past years, even board members have confided to friends their concern that Jobs, in his quest for privacy, wasn’t being forthcoming enough with directors about the true condition of his health.

Now, despite investor confidence in Cook, who has stood in for his boss during three leaves of absence, there remain concerns about whether the company would stay a creative force to be reckoned with beyond the next year or so without its founder and visionary at the helm.

The news triggered an immediate outpouring of sympathy. Among others, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said he will miss Jobs “immensely”.

A college dropout, Buddhist and son of adoptive parents, Jobs started Apple Computer with friend Steve Wozniak in the late 1970s. The company soon introduced the Apple 1 computer.

But it was the Apple II that became a huge success and gave Apple its position as a critical player in the then-nascent PC industry, culminating in a 1980 IPO that made Jobs a multimillionaire.

Despite the subsequent success of the Mac, Jobs’ relationship with top management and the board soured. The company removed most of his powers and then in 1985 he was fired.

Apple’s fortunes waned after that. However, its purchase of NeXT – the computer company Jobs founded after leaving Apple – in 1997 brought him back into the fold. Later that year, he became interim CEO and in 2000, the company dropped “interim” from his title.

Along the way Jobs also had managed to revolutionize computer animation with his other company, Pixar, but it was the iPhone in 2007 that capped his legacy in the annals of modern technology history.

Two years before the gadget that forever transformed the way people around the world access and use the Internet, Jobs talked about how a sense of his mortality was a major driver behind that vision.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life,” Jobs said during a Stanford commencement ceremony in 2005.

“Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Apple has unveiled the latest iteration in its iPhone range, but there was no sign of the widely rumoured iPhone 5.The iPhone 4S, as the model will be known, boasts an improved camera, an extra antenna for faster loading, voice recognition software and a significantly extended battery life.

It will run the latest iOS5 operating system, which is set for release on 12 October.

The event was the first major announcement for new boss Tim Cook who took over from Steve Jobs in August.

The iPhone 4S, which will go on sale on 14 October, will be available in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB models – in both black and white.

It has the same look and feel as the existing iPhone 4 which was launched 15 months ago.

However, Apple said that updates to iOS meant the phone would boast some “200 new features”.

Shares in Apple fell by almost 5% within minutes of the eagerly anticipated launch, with analysts saying that investors and Apple fans had expected the latest version to be a more radical improvement over its predecessor.

However, the company’s shares later regained most of their losses to close down just 0.6%, albeit underperforming the NASDAQ index as a whole.

Among the additions is  a voice recognition software or a “intelligent assistant” that allows users to ask questions aloud and receive detailed answers back.

Siri, which began life as a third-party app, was purchased by Apple in 2010 but has yet to appear within its software.

Details of the new phone were unveiled by Apple’s Philip Schiller

For Apple’s new chief executive, the event was as much about making a statement about his leadership as it was new products.

Tim Cook had previously acted as interim boss, looking after the company while Steve Jobs was on sick leave.

Unlike his charismatic predecessor, Mr Cook left the biggest announcement of Tuesday’s event to a colleague – marketing boss Phil Schiller.

The new web browser designed by Amazon for its Kindle Fire tablet has sparked security concerns that the firm will be able to track users’ every online webpage.The new browser, Amazon Silk, uses the firm’s network of giant data centres to pre-load web pages before they are delivered to the device.

According to Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, this “split browser” approach will offer “ultra-fast” mobile web access. It will reduce the computation required from the Kindle Fire’s processor, which is lower performance than that of Apple’s iPad 2.

But it also means that Amazon’s systems will keep a record of every single web page that Kindle Fire users visit, which could be used to profile their interests for advertising and other commercial purposes. The records will also be subject to data requests from police and intelligence agencies, as the relatively limited data held by broadband providers.

The browser will even aim to predict your next move in its effort to shave milliseconds off loading times, by learning how users tend to browse individual websites.

“All of your web surfing habits will transit to Amazon’s cloud,” said Chester Wisniewski, of the British computer security firm Sophos.

“If you think that Google AdWords and Facebook may be watching you, this Amazon service is guaranteed to have a record of everything you do on the web.”

Amazon’s approach is similar to that of Opera Mini, a mobile browser available on Android, iOS, Symbian and Windows Mobile smartphones. Its Norwegian developer, Opera, also pre-loads and compresses web pages to speed up browsing and cut the amount of 3G bandwidth that smartphones consume.

Unlike Amazon, however, Opera has undertaken not to keep records of the web pages Opera Mini users access or profile their individual browsing habits.

“The system brings with it a need to reassure people that their privacy is being protected,” said Pål Unanue-Zahl, Opera’s communication manager.

The terms and conditions announced for Amazon Silk provide no such reassurance.

“Amazon Silk also temporarily logs web addresses for the web pages it serves and certain identifiers, such as IP or MAC addresses, to troubleshoot and diagnose Amazon Silk technical issues,” they say, adding that users are also subject to Amazon’s broad privacy policy. It allows users’ personal information to be exploited for a host of commercial purposes.

“We generally do not keep this information for longer than 30 days,” the Amazon Silk terms and conditions say.

The new browser will also pose a challenge to website owners, including some of Amazon’s major rivals.

When a user directly accesses a website from a normal browser, the website typically logs their IP address. These unique numbers are used by firms to track where their visitors come from, and for other commercially-useful traffic analyses.

But when a Kindle Fire user accesses a website, all the website will be able to log is an IP address for one of Amazon’s network of giant data centres.

The users’ IP address will go no further than the dominant online retailer.

Given the rapid growth in mobile browsing, and Mr Bezos’ plan to sell “many millions” of Kindle Fires this year alone, rivals such as Google, whose advertising business relies heavily on being able to target individuals, will miss out on valuable data.

“If you buy a Fire device, think carefully as to whether your privacy is worth trading for a few milliseconds faster web surfing experience,” said Mr Wisniewski.

Apple’s iPad has captured 80% of the tablet computer market in the US in April to July new reserach has found.The iPad accounted for six million of all 7.5 million tablets shipped in North America during the second quarter of 2011, according to research group Strategy Analytics.

It described Apple as a “formidable market leader”.

Yet they added that Amazon – which has unveiled its own tablet yesterday – could become a big challenger.

Stategy Analytics senior analyst Alex Spektor said: “Apple remains a long way ahead of its main rivals such as Motorola, Samsung, RIM, Asus and HTC.

“A combination of cool branding, user-friendly hardware, entertaining services and savvy retail distribution has made Apple a formidable market leader.”

“Provided the pricing, screen size and hardware design are right, Amazon can be one of the main challengers to Apple’s dominance,” said Neil Mawston, director at Strategy Analytics.

“Like Apple, Amazon has a strong brand, compelling content, sophisticated billing systems and widespread distribution.

“In effect, Amazon’s new tablet product represents a good opportunity to place an Amazon shopping cart in the hands of American consumers, offering optimised access to purchasing digital content or physical goods from the Amazon online store.”

The continuing popularity of Apple’s iPad comes despite its incompatibility with Adobe Flash software, meaning that users cannot view a large number of online videos.

Rivals such as Samsung are quick to highlight in their advertising that their tablets are able to use Flash.

Apple and Samsung, which makes the Galaxy range of tablets, are also continuing a number of legal disputes over patents.

The iPad was first released in April 2010, with the second version, the iPad 2, following in March of this year.

Amazon has launched a new tablet computer called the Kindle Fire- which will undercut Apple’s iPad2.The £130 device will run a modified version of Google’s Android operating system.

As well as targeting Apple’s iPad, Amazon is likely to have its sights on rival bookseller US Barnes & Noble, which already has a colour tablet.

The Kindle Fire will enter a hugely competitive market, dominated by Apple’s iPad who currently have 80% of the tablet market.

Amazon will be hoping to leverage both the strength of the Kindle brand, built up over three generations of its popular e-book reader, and its ability to serve up content such as music and video.

In recent years, the company has begun offering downloadable music for sale, and also has a streaming video-on-demand service in the United States. Those, combined with its mobile application store, give it a more sophisticated content “ecosystem” than most of its rivals.

Amazon Kindle Fire Facts

7″ IPS (in-plane switching) display
1024 x 600 resolution
Customised Google Android operating system
$199 (£130)
Weighs 413 grammes
Dual core processor
8GB internal storage

Amazon sees the hardware almost as a loss leader who can make their money by selling content whereas Apple profit from hardware sales and software sales are a “nice to have”.

Digital content has already proved itself to be a money-spinner for Amazon.

Although the company has never released official sales figures for the Kindle, it did state – in December 2010 – that it was now selling more electronic copies of books than paper copies.

Its US rival, Barnes & Noble, has also enjoyed success with its Nook devices.

In October 2010, the company unveiled the Nook Color, which also runs a version of Android, albeit with lower hardware specs than many fully featured tablets.

While the Nook Color is largely focused on book and magazine reading, some users have managed to unlock its wider functionality and install third-party apps.
Kindle Touch Amazon has dropped the keyboard from some of its Kindles in favour of touch

The Kindle Fire’s £130 price tag undercuts the Nook Color by £30 and is significantly cheaper than more powerful tablets from Apple, Samsung, Motorola and others.

It is due to go on sale on 15 November in the US, although global release dates are currently unavailable.

“These are premium products at non premium prices,” said Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos. “We are going to sell millions of these.”

Google is marking its teenage years by turning its home page into a birthday party scene.Surrounded by multi-coloured balloons and streamers, its logo is adorned with party hats and sits behind a table heaped with wrapped presents and a large white birthday cake with 13 candles.

Although Google’s founders Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin built their first search engine in 1996, it was not until 1998 when the graduated with PhDs that they formalised their research and created Google.

The company filed for incorporation on September 4, 1998, and the Google.com domain was registered on September 15. The search engine officially celebrates its birthday on September 27.

The pair came up with the name as a play on the word “googol”, the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros.

“The name reflects the immense volume of information that exists and the scope of Google’s mission: To organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” claims Google.

The anniversary comes at a time when the company faces increasing legislative scrutiny and is locked in intense rivalries with the social networking site Facebook and smart phone operator Apple.

The search engine recently launched its Google+ social networking service to all users, in an effort to counter Facebook’s rising popularity.

However, other research shows that Google enjoys a 90 per cent share of the global internet search market and over 30% of the smart phone OS market.

Sony’s Tablet S is entering the markets in the US, UK and Japan.The tablets runs on Google’s operating system Android and has a new wedge shaped design.

Following the success of Apple’s iPad, other manufacturers such as Samsung and HTC have released their own tablets.

Analysts say while Tablet S may prove to be a popular Android tablet, it is not a serious threat to the iPad.

As it goes head-to-head with the iPad and others, analysts said the Sony Tablet S did have some unique features not available in other devices.

For one, the hardware design, a wedge shape, is different from most other flat, thin tablets.

“The unique form factor shifts the device’s weight closer to your palm, making it feel lighter and more comfortable while reading a book or magazine,” Sony said in a press release.

Other features include the ability to play PlayStation games on the device and stream music and video to your TV or home entertainment system from the tablet.

Even though Sony has come up with some distinctive features, analysts say Apple’s first mover advantage and its brand appeal has placed it squarely ahead of all others in the tablet market.

But it might still prove a threat to other tablets. Even though Sony entered the market later than many other competitors, the timing could work out in its favour.

The Tablet S is in stores in the UK on 15 September, the US on 16 September and in Japan on 17 September.