iPhone News Updated

Apple now shipping iPad within 24 hours

Apple is now shipping the iPad within 24 hours after an order is placed.

The new, speedier processing contrasts with the shipping times that followed the tablet’s April launch in which orders typically took at least a week to fill.

Swamped by a huge number of preorders and initial sales, Apple had trouble keeping up with customer demand. On the first day, the company sold 300,000 of the tablets. That initial surge depleted the stock of iPads, forcing Apple to push back the 3G version by a week and the international debut by a month.

The lack of supply also naturally affected shipping times. By mid-May, buyers typically had to wait 7 to 10 business days for their tablets to ship, according to data compiled by Fortune. Those times remained consistent throughout June and July and only started to improve around mid-August.

But now as displayed on Apple’s online store, all six versions of the iPad ship within 24 hours.

[Thanks: http://news.cnet.com]

Verizon-only Bing app shows proprietary side of Android

iPhone is closed. Android is open.

That’s the conventional wisdom about the dueling mobile operating systems. Apple’s iPhone operating system runs only on Apple’s iPhone (plus the iPad and iPod), and every app must be approved by the company before it appears on the App Store.

Android, which Google gives away for free, runs on dozens of phones from many different carriers, and anyone can freely upload new apps to the Android Market without approval.

But that conventional wisdom is showing a few cracks, at least on the Android side. Take the flashy new Bing app for Android, announced today by Microsoft: It’s not available to all Android phone users — only the ones that use Verizon.

If you’ve got a T-Mobile, Sprint or AT&T Android device, you’ll have to wait a while to Bing.

That’s because Verizon and Microsoft are treating the Bing app as an exclusive service for Verizon customers — a way to differentiate Verizon from its competitors.

That deal grew out of the established relationship between Microsoft and Verizon, specifically in the area of mobile search: A number of Verizon BlackBerrys run Bing as their default search engine and have for some time.

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