Apple's latest acquisition, WiFiSLAM, was an Android-centric indoor location positioning tool for developers that has now been taken off the market.Apple has a history of shutting down the public facing services of companies it acquires, a strategy that has unsurprisingly continued with its latest purchase of indoor GPS company WiFiSLAM. The company's Android software development kit allowed applications for Google's mobile platform to receive precise indoor location with their own third-party applications.
The company had an SDK for Apple's iOS in the works, but those plans were discontinued after Apple disabled Wi-Fi scanning in iOS 5.Nav Patel, who is the creative director and product engineer at WiFiSLAM, explained in a forum post atHacker News last year that his company's service could still operate on jailbroken iOS devices, which are hacked to run unauthorized code. But Patel admitted that WiFiSLAM was not interested in supporting jailbreak developers, as it is "not a big target audience."At the time, WiFiSLAM reportedly had a "workaround" in development that would incorporate iOS devices with its service. But by the time Apple's purchase of WiFiSLAM was made public this week, there was no indication that a public release of the workaround was imminent.WiFiSLAM's connections to Google go beyond Android, and extend into both personnel and funding. One of the company's founding members, Darin Tay, joined the company after a two-year stint with Google, while current Google employee Don Dodge is an angel investor in WiFiSLAM.Google already offers its own indoor mobile maps through the company's Google Maps service. They include maps of locations such as shopping malls and airports.Google has even taken its famous "Street View" to new locations such as businesses, monuments, stadiums, and even underwater.
Apple's purchase of WiFiSLAM is a sign that the company is continuing to bolster its own proprietary mapping software for iPhone and iPad, which launched last year with the debut of iOS 6. Apple Maps were instantly met with derision from a vocal group of users who felt Apple's solution was inferior to Google Maps.Before it was taken offline completely, WiFiSLAM's website claimed it could calculate a user's precise indoor location in as little as 90 seconds. The service allows mobile applications to detect a user's locations by analyzing Wi-Fi signals in a building.Apple already uses a similar method to pinpoint a user's location more quickly than GPS satellites can accomplish. While a GPS signal can take several minutes to attain, crowd-sourcing known Wi-Fi hotspots can dramatically reduce the time needed."These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple," the company explained in 2011.
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Canadian manufacturer BlackBerry appears to be readying another go at the tablet sector, as an image purporting to be a leaked product roadmap shows a potential iPad competitor slated for a late 2013 release
The supposed product roadmap appeared Friday in a tweet from @BB10Leaks (via TechnoBuffalo) and appears to show BlackBerry's forthcoming products through the second quarter of 2014. In addition to the already released Z10 and its hardware QWERTY keyboard sporting counterpart, the Q10, the roadmap shows a tablet, a phablet, and a phablet-esque device with a hardware QWERTY keyboard of its own. The iPad competitor appears to be named the B10. The roadmap gives no details on its dimensions or specifications, but it looks to be a large tablet in the vein of Google's Nexus 10 and Apple's full-size iPads. Should the device materialize, it would represent BlackBerry's second attempt at breaking into the tablet segment.The Canadian manufacturer previously released a 7-inch PlayBook tablet, meant to provide enterprise-minded customers with a more portable alternative to Apple's iPad, which dominated the tablet segment then as it does now. Poor software implementation and developer support, though, doomed the PlayBook to sluggish sales even as Apple's tablet moved to greater heights. Eventually, then-RIM's inventory of unsold PlayBook units caused the company to take a $485 million charge.With the launch of BlackBerry 10, though, the manufacturer has seen encouraging signs. BlackBerry's most recent financial figures revealed one million Z10's shipped since the device's launch in February. That, in combination with drastic cost reductions, led to BlackBerry's first profitable quarter in some time. A new tablet would help flesh out the range of devices BlackBerry offers, making it a more capable alternative for customers looking outside of Apple's iOS and Google's Android. Speaking earlier in March, BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins said that the company would have to do something "really substantial and meaningful... [and] profitable as well," if it were to enter the tablet space again."I think the profit pool is very, very thin," Heins told the Australian Financial Review. "Kudos to Apple, I think they really managed to own that space, so it doesn't make sense for me to just take this head on. I need to figure out, for my enterprise customers, for my consumers, for my BB10 audience, what can I do that provides them a mobile computing experience in the form factor of a tablet, which goes beyond just the puristic tablet experience."Should the leaked roadmap prove accurate, BlackBerry's tablet will see release some time in either the third or fourth quarter of 2013. It would be followed shortly thereafter by a large-screened BlackBerry 10 device, apparently dubbed the U10. That device — likely a "phablet" in the vein of Samsung's Galaxy Note II — may be the rumored Aristo device that surfaced late last year. Following the phablet's release, another large-screened model would follow quickly thereafter, this one sporting a hardware QWERTY keyboard much like BlackBerry's forthcoming Q10.
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