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Apple’s second quarter 2008 earnings proved to be a huge blowout, though Wall Street reacted negatively to company’s conservative outlook. Well, they are almost always wrong on Apple - which is clearly a sentiment driven company.

Nevertheless, the highlight of the quarterly earnings was the supercharged Mac sales. The numbers match-up with recent reports that Apple was leaping up the US PC-sales charts. Revenues for the quarter were up 38%, highest since 2005 despite slowing iPod sales and scant iPhone sales.

Peter Oppenheimer, Apple CFO was conservative in his outlook for the September 2008 quarter giving many reasons, including “a future product transition.” Analysts from Technology Business Research think that “Product transition” is Apple-speak for cool new stuff. I concur. So what could be on menu?

TBR believes Apple will refresh its notebooks with the latest Intel Centrino 2 processors, which will improve performance and increase battery life. We think the company will do more than update internals, however. In addition to a redesign, TBR believes Apple will add TV tuners and may introduce a larger screen MacBook. To maintain the necessary product differentiation, Apple will probably use quad-core processors for the new MacBook Pros. iMac desktop PCs are not likely to get a dramatic overhaul, but Apple will probably beef them up.

What that means: Apple is going to do more than fine this coming quarter. Not only iPhone sales will goose up their revenues, the new products could add ore oomph to the company bottom line. The big cloud on Apple: Steve Jobs health.

Yesterday evening, at a beachside dinner organized by our investors, True Ventures, I sat at a table full of relatively young entrepreneurs (I’m pretty sure I raised the average age by a few years.) Most of us had iPhones — both old and new — and most were Twitter users.

So it should come as no surprise that we all had an opinion about Twitterrfic, an iPhone client for Twitter. To sum up everyone’s thoughts in one word: horrific. Scrolling through messages should come naturally; it doesn’t. And the UI manages to leave you feeling about as satisfied as a cup of noodles warmed with hot tap water.

But we won’t have to use it anymore, for Twinkle by Gogo Apps, previously a jailbreak app, has just hit the iTunes Apps Store. Its UI is remarkably intuitive and easy to use. As John Gruber writes, “It’s an interesting contrast with Twitterrific — even ignoring cosmetic differences, the two apps take significantly different UI approaches.” I think that’s an understatement.

The best aspect of the service is the ability to find a person using Twinkler near you using the LBS feature of the iPhone — though currently it doesn’t seems to be working. This could turn Twinkle-Twitter into a social experience, a simpler and easier version of other complicated LBS-based, friend finder applications.

I like how one can quickly look at all direct messages in a separate window. In fact, there are numerous little things that I find appealing about this app. For instance, it takes just two clicks to start following someone on the feed. Sending private messages is easy and looking up profiles is even easier. What I don’t like: Not having the ability to quickly see replies.

My Rating on this iPhone app: 4 out of 5.

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Mobilize — Mobile Web Today and Tomorrow

The iPhones have been unboxed and torn down, so now it’s the Wall Street watchers’ turn to tally up who won and who lost among the companies that provide chips for the envy-inducing device. The big winner is Infineon with four chips, including GPS and 3G radio. Little-known chip firm TriQuint also won, with three power amplifiers inside the phone. Wi-Fi was once again provided by Marvell, but Broadcom scored low, with only a touchscreen controller and no GPS (which we had been expecting).

Most impressive was that the phone contains 19 high-value chips. For silicon vendors the iPhone represents an opportunity to push high-margin chips reserved for high-end smartphones into the average cell phone. Readers of this blog may take a BlackBerry or Nokia N95 for granted, but middle America or even Europe doesn’t always see the point. But if housewives and teens clamor for iPhones, chip makers will cheer.

That’s because the iPhone, in addition to making wireless broadband consumption more accessible to people, will drive smartphone adoption. And smartphones can contain up to six times the amount of silicon found in an entry-level phone. Despite TI not having a large presence in the iPhone, Bill Krenik, CTO of Texas Instruments’ wireless division (the second-largest wireless chip company behind Qualcomm), says the adoption of the iPhone is a good thing for chip makers everywhere.

“It’s a lot more fun to build iPhones and other high-end products than a simple voice-only handset because there’s a lot more design sophistication and exciting features like high-end graphics, but from a business angle there’s more semiconductor content for us to go after,” Krenik said. “There has been a lot of negative sentiment about what more can you really do on a phone, but we’ve ignored that.”

David Carey, president of the firm that conducted an iPhone teardown, Portelligent, said part of the risk point for the wireless industry was that everyone was satisfied — that nothing that would lull consumers into a more feature-rich phone. “If the iPhone does sort of capture the public’s imagination, it’ll have a direct impact on whether the cell-phone industry is a growth market for the chip business, or it stagnates,” he said.

Carey has seen the total space devoted to silicon inside a cell phone shrink as the radios and applications processors became more integrated. Qualcomm and Freescale offer such integrated platforms, while many handset makers still offer an integrated brain and radio for cell phones, even on their higher-end phones like the Samsung Instinct (although phones like the Instinct still offer plenty of other opportunities for chip vendors). Carey points to HTC, Motorola, LG and Samsung as handset companies who tend to consolidate silicon, and offers Nokia and Apple as examples of firms that separate the brains of the phone from the communications chips.

The move toward better integration is the norm in the industry, but despite the rise in the number of cell phones sold and an increase in the sales of wireless chips, it has led to lowered prices per unit. In 2004 when iSuppli started gathering data on the topic, about $23.77 was spent on silicon inside each handset on average. That number dropped to $18.65 in 2007. The wireless chip players are relying on handset growth to keep their sales on the rise — and hoping for next-generation features they can convince consumers and handset makers to buy.

GPS is one such technology gaining in popularity on high-end phones. The iPhone has it, and many software companies are actively trying to make programs and offer services that take advantage of it. Other technologies waiting in the wings are mobile television, which would require chips from Qualcomm in the U.S. or those from Dibcom or Samsung in other countries, and HD video that would require higher-end applications processing such as that offered by Nvidia’s APX 2500 or Texas Instrument’s OMAP 3. Regardless, the iPhone might do more than make semiconductors fun. It may keep chip vendors happy.

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The best thing that’s happened to Facebook: Apple’s MobileMe outage, the iPhone launch and iPhone activation problems across the board. Why? Because no one seems to be reporting on them being out for most of the morning. I just tried to get in; no luck. There is no update on their blog, either. I got a few responses to my question about Facebook’s status on Twitter, so this is not just a problem for me. Are you having Facebook problems as well?

Update: A Facebook spokeswoman emailed us back. “We did experience some issues with the site for a short time this morning, but it was never completely down. It was stabilized as of 10:10 a.m.” They are still investigating the root cause.

At $99 a year, I expect my online service to function all the time. So perhaps that is why I am a little upset that Apple hasn’t been able to launch their MobileMe service properly and are experiencing outages. The fact that the service was supposed to launch at a time of Apple’s choosing, leaves no room for excuses on today’s problems.

It is doubly disappointing because this is a for-pay and not some free service, where you get what you pay for. Many free services occassionaly suffer downtime. Apple’s DotMac service, predecessor to MobileMe was as temperamental as John McEnroe in his heyday. (Related Story: dotMac, time for a makeover.) The only saving grace is that my dot.mac email via the desktop client is working properly. Whew!

But I want to see a letter of apology and a refund for time lost to outage. Infact all paying services should be forced to refund the money for the time the services are down. That way the high cost of returning a couple of dollars is going to eat into their profits, making them work harder.

So in a couple of days the iPhone 3G is going to go on sale. Like many of you I am going to get this device as part of my duties as an intrepid reporter (and a shameless Apple-holic.) However, if you are rational, then you might want to read these reviews by the big three tech writers and their take on the iPhone 3G before you decide to hand over your credit card to the sales people.

• Walt Mossberg/WSJ: “I found it to be a more capable version of an already excellent device. And now that it’s open to third-party programs, the iPhone has a chance to become a true computing platform with wide versatility…if you can live with the higher service costs and the weaker battery life.”

• Edward Baig/USA Today: “With GPS newly added to the mix, this handheld marvel has no equal among consumer-oriented smart phones. While not everything on my wish list made it onto the new device, Apple has raised the bar with iPhone 3G. To which I offer an enthusiastic thumbs up.”

• David Pogue/NYTimes: “It’s not so much better that it turns all those original iPhones into has-beens. Indeed, the really big deal is the iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store, neither of which requires buying a new iPhone.”

I am sensing some hesitation on the part of the these reviewers. And now that you have read their reviews, are you still interested in buying the iPhone 3G.

For a while there, covering the chip industry was like covering a race run by a rabbit and a cheetah. AMD was the rabbit, while Intel — with its much larger market cap and greater profits — was the cheetah. Evey now and then the rabbit would fool you into thinking he was going to pull ahead, but we all knew who was going to win. In the past few years, however, two things have brought more runners and more diversity to the course: a challenge to the x86 architecture, and the iPhone.

I could probably find a way to credit the iPhone for changing the furniture industry if I tried hard enough (it could be the new Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game for tech journalists.) But in this case the iPhone pushed the real Internet — as opposed to a carrier-defined portal — out to mobile consumers and showed them how compelling such access could be. That made clear to carriers that data usage, which was already on the rise, could become a huge revenue booster if consumers were given the right type of devices. Which prompted chip makers to see gold in the form of the 33.2 million high-end handsets sold around the world.

That pushed the chip world into viewing these devices as mini computers requiring their very own processors. Obviously these processors need to be small, use very little energy and still cycle fast enough to load and display web pages, pictures and other mobile computing tasks. Chip firms had been thinking about those functions for years, but the success of the iPhone showed how important the mobile computing experience could be. So Intel begat Atom, a chip designed not for a mobile phone but for a smaller laptop that Intel calls a mobile Internet device.

Other chips firms aren’t standing still, either. Via Technologies, which for a long time had the handheld computer market to itself, is refreshing its line of chips. Qualcomm now has Snapdragon, and Texas Instruments is offering OMAP chips. The dark horse in all of this frenzy comes from Nvidia’s Tegra offering, which is really compelling in demos. But Nvidia has an uneven record of supporting its products, so it remains to be seen if the real-life experience can meet the high expectations set by the demos.

Nvidia is also making my chip coverage fun with its efforts to knock out the x86 architecture. Intel and AMD dual-, triple- and quad-core chips will never go away, but both Nvidia and IBM are pushing credible alternatives for high-end processing. Nvidia’s dressing up its graphics processing chips (GPUs) to run scientific queries, visually intensive tasks and repetitive problems than can be done in parallel, such as video decoding and encoding. The influx of digital media is creating a need for such capabilities in an increasing number of data centers.

IBM, meanwhile, is pushing its Cell processor — which was designed with Sony and Toshiba eight years ago for the PlayStation 3 — for enterprise servers and high-performance computing. In many ways it’s attacking the same problems Nvidia’s GPUs are, with encoding and Monte Carlo simulations showing off the Cell’s specially designed, nine-core architecture. IBM may have an advantage over Nvidia because of its enterprise focus. It offers an enterprise-ready Cell-based blade server, while Nvidia sells its chips to firms such as Atrato and Rackable for corporate consumption.

So the two-company race that was never all that competitive has turned into several races with multiple players. Ironically AMD doesn’t have a mobile processor yet, and isn’t really pushing its GPUs into jobs other than running graphics. Perhaps it believes that if it stays the PC course it can pass the cheetah while Intel focuses on Atom and smaller devices.

I played with the demo version of Samsung’s consumer-oriented iPhone killer in April and found it fun, but maybe a bit too much gadget crammed into too small of a space for me. It’ll be out on June 20 with a $200 price tag on the Sprint network, and today reviews appeared in a variety of places. David Pogue points out that the Instinct is long on features and short on polish when compared with the iPhone; Walt Mossberg agrees, saying the hardware is nice, but Apple’s software beats the Instinct’s hands down.

The lack of zing in the Instinct is a shame, and it shows how hardware and software can combine to create a novel design or a novelty design. The touch experience on the Instinct is a novelty design. It’s what Samsung calls a haptic touch screen, which means it vibrates when a user touches in a command. Pogue calls it gimmicky and he’s right, but I liked it anyhow. However, it’s hard to think of ways to integrate that vibration into features that push the Instinct to go beyond the constraints of a modern cell phone.

In contrast, the iPhone’s novel use of accelerometers and software give it the ability to orient itself (something the Instinct can’t do). That’s a feature that provides a similar Wow factor as haptic touch, but also can be used to change that way games are designed, turning the movement of the device into a type of joystick. That’s novel. Regardless of its novelty screen, people will buy the Instinct and it will certainly follow the iPhone in bringing touch as a user interface to the masses.

OK guys, instead of liveblogging the event, we are standing in line to buy the new iPhone, which went totally “real” a little while ago, according to a blog post by our buddies at Engadget and Gizmodo. But the company says no new iPhones till July 11, which is kind of a bummer. Here are some features:

* It is 3G
* Has a plastic back and thinner edges.
* The speed improvement over other 3G phones is 36 percent.
* 300 hours of standby, 5 hours of 3G Talk, 8 hours of 2G talk time. Seven hours of video and a day of audio. (I will believe it when I see it, for Apple makes some wild-ass claims about battery life that are just flat-out wrong. P-o-s Macbook Air is a case in point.)
* Geolocation’s Cadillac. I love this feature and can’t wait for the location-based revolution it will unleash, extending the good work of the folks at Nokia.
* It seems they’re still using the same processor, and the same kind of video-processing unit as they did with the original device. I wonder why that is?

Bonus link: Slim Pickings For Web Workers: WebWorkerDaily. They are rightfully underwhelmed, and after all the hype, so am I. What’s the point of not having the phone available on the day you announce it? All iPhone related news is not worth it, unless you can test it. Of course you can do press release rewrites…

NewTeeVee: Latest iPhone Wins One & Sucks Some On Video

Jobs photo courtesy of Engadget and their live blog coverage and extensive array of photos.

The New York Times, earlier this week pointed out that browser wars had erupted again with Mozilla Corp’s Firefox, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari looking to one-up each other. While that certainly is true, the browser wars on the desktop are not as interesting as the sudden explosion of interest in the browsers on mobile devices. With billions of devices sold every year there is a big demand for mobile browsers. The market is an emergent one, with no real winners.

WebKit-based browsers on S60 and Apple’s iPhone are strong contenders. In addition, Mozilla is looking to develop mobile browser for phones that are based on Linux OS, as CEO John Lilly said in a chat with us earlier this month. They are all fighting it out with Opera of Norway. I have Opera Mini on my Blackberry Curve and I love it.

However, all these players should watch out for Skyfire, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that went into private beta earlier this year. The company is about to announce that it has raised $13 million in Series B funding from Lightspeed Ventures previously investors, Trinity Ventures and Matrix Partners. The company has raised $17.8 million thus far.

What makes Skyfire so special? It has a mobile browser that can render regular web pages almost perfectly like the way you expect to see them on your desktop. Only Apple’s iPhone version of Safari has that kind of ability. However, Skyfire’s server centric approach allows it to render Flash-based content such as YouTube videos on mobile devices. That makes this browser really useful. While Skyfire works only on Windows Mobile platform, the company is hard at work on a Symbian version. I have seen an early stage demo and it works very well. When I saw this browser for the first time, my initial reaction was: Microsoft should buy this company and replace their lousy Mobile IE with this much nicer product. It would instantly make HTC devices usable.

On a more macro level, everyone in the mobile ecosystem - from handset makers to mobile carriers - is interested in a mobile browser, that can render web pages for view on the handset without writing special versions of the web content. Apple’s iPhone showed that a good browser (married to easy to use experience) can raise demand for data services. With Voice-related revenues peaking, mobile carriers are increasingly banking on demand for mobile data services to make money, as we have noted previously. According to UBS Research analysis, wireless data services “now account for 21% of total service revenues for the major carriers, up from 16% a year ago.”

In a recent report, mobile market research firm, M:Metrics pointed out that among smartphone users in the United States, mobile browsing has increased 89% year over year, and pageviews have increased 127 percent. More importantly, the time people are spending on non iPhone mobile phones based web browsers is increasing as well. Mobile advertising start-up, AdMob had come to similar conclusions when it analyzed the data it collected from its ad-network.

Against such a backdrop, it is not difficult to see why VCs want to take a flyer on a company like Skyfire. Sure it has its risks including fighting with deep pocketed incumbents, but the upside is big as well. As I said, it is early days in the mobile browser wars.

Love it or hate it, one has to admit that Apple’s iPhone has been quite a game changer forcing the wireless industry to get off its duff and start innovating. I think a lot of people forget that iPhone is not just a pretty face and sleek curves. Instead it is a device that is changing our behavior and the expectations we have of mobile devices. Most observations about iPhone have been personal and anecdotal.

Today, however, I got a chance to skim through a report put together by San Mateo, Calif.-based mobile advertising startup AdMob, about iPhone user behavior — both in the United States and worldwide — that provides metrics to match some of the theories around iPhone. Clearly, these numbers are not an absolute reflection of iPhone usage, but they do seem to indicative of broader iPhone trends. (Full report embedded below the fold.)