<IT WORLD> Apple harvest - for
free By Martin J
Young
HUA HIN, Thailand - As Apple, the
world's most valuable company, launched its latest
smartphone model, the iPhone 5, this week, its
manufacturing partner in China, essential to the
generation of profits, has come under renewed
criticism over labor practices.
Taiwan-based Foxconn Technology has
confirmed that it has been using students and
school interns on manufacturing lines but it did
claim that they were free to leave at any time.
Worker advocacy groups claim to have
spoken to students in Zhengzhou, in north-central
Henan province, who maintain that they had been
forced by teachers to assemble iPhones at a
Foxconn factory. State-run media reported that
several vocational schools in the city of Huai'an,
eastern Jiangsu province, forced
hundreds of students to
work on production lines manufacturing cables for
the iPhone 5, which was unveiled on Thursday.
Founder of China Labor Watch, Li Quiang,
claimed that 10 out of 87 workers on Apple's
production lines were students. "They don't want
to work there - they want to learn. But if they
don't work, they are told they will not graduate,
because it is a very busy time with the new iPhone
coming, and Foxconn does not have enough workers
without the students."
Foxconn has denied
the allegations and stated that students made up
just 2.7% - or 32,000 - of its 1.2 million-person
workforce in China, and that schools "recruit the
students under the supervision of the local
government, and the schools also assign teachers
to accompany and monitor the students throughout
their internship."
Apple has declined to
comment on this matter. It is now focused on
developing hype over its latest smart-phone, which
goes on sale globally on September 21.
Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan will be the
first Asian countries to sell the gadget. Pricing
has yet to be disclosed, although it is highly
likely that the handset will cost more in Asia
than in the United States, where it retails with a
two-year lock-in contract for US$199 for the 16
gigabyte model to $399 for 64Gb.
In its
press release on Thursday, Apple said the device
will be rolled out to 22 more countries on
September 28, but no other Asian countries were
listed. Aside from a little weight loss, improved
connectivity technology, and a software upgrade,
the handset is largely the same as its
predecessor. That did not prevent Apple's share
price surging almost 10% after the iPhone launch.
Tablets The world's largest
online retail store, Amazon, has launched a
successor to its popular Kindle Fire
tablet/e-reader that was released last year. The
new model, Kindle Fire HD, comes in two screen
sizes, 7- and 8.9-inch, and costs $199 and $299
respectively - the latest entry level iPad starts
at $499. It also boasts more storage than the
previous model, 16 or 32Gb, improved battery life,
faster processor, dual speakers, and a high
definition screen.
The company touts the
Kindle Fire HD as "the best tablet at any price" -
not strictly true. Google's Nexus 7 for the same
price offers stiff competition and a more open and
flexible platform. The Amazon device is
essentially a digital shop-front window into its
own ecosystem, you can use it to buy products from
Amazon and Amazon alone.
The new Kindle
runs a customized version of Android, which is
virtually unrecognizable from the standard Android
4, dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich, as it has been
heavily tailored to the company's own products. It
uses Amazon's own Silk browser for the Internet,
integrates with Amazon's cloud services and has a
few basic applications. Users are also bombarded
with advertising for Amazon offers and promotions,
so the tablet really is only suitable for heavy
users of the online retailer. Google's Nexus 7
tablet makes for a far better choice if only for
its flexibility.
Internet Google
stepped up its clandestine search censorship
practices this week when it blacklisted web links
and search terms from torrent tracking site The
Pirate Bay. For users searching for torrents on
the website it means that the auto-complete and
"instant" functions will no longer work and they
will have to type it all in manually. The move is
designed to prevent people using the function to
guide them to copyright infringing material.
Google has also disabled auto-complete
searches for other torrent-related websites such
as BitTorrent, RapidShare, MegaUpload and
uTorrent. According to the TorrentFreak news
website, The Pirate Bay has not noticed a decrease
in referrers from Google, and even if that was the
case it wouldn't be a problem as only a tiny
percentage of The Pirate Bay's traffic comes from
search engines.
Last month, Google
announced in a blog post that it was changing its
search features to ensure legal-download websites
appeared higher than pirate sites, a move that has
been welcomed by record companies in the UK, The
Motion Picture Association of America, the
Recording Industry Association of America, and
Hollywood film studios.
Martin J
Young is an Asia Times Online correspondent
based in Thailand.
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Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights
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