Apple App Store service offered to iOS devices touched 10 billion downloads. The App Store, which allows users to browse and download applications from the iTunes Store developed three years back, reached the milestone on Saturday.

And to commemorate the event Apple has given out the promised $10,000 App Store gift card to Gail Davis of Orpington from England, the man who bought the 10 billionth download. Some reports show that the median revenue per developed application is estimated to be $700, while the average costs range from $15,000 to $50,000.

Apple’s senior vice president of marketing, in a statement said, “With more than 10 billion apps downloaded in just two and a half years - a staggering 7 billion apps in the last year alone - the App Store has surpassed our wildest dreams.”

The App Store presently houses more than 4, 00,000 applications and recently several Google Voice applications have been approved. Among the most popular free apps include the Facebook and Google Earth. In paid app category the Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D by Activision Publishing tops the list.

iPhone, the brand that has sold in millions from Apple is upping for their next big plans to introduce the next iPhone in the form of iPhone 5.

But the plan seemed to have slowed down as Apple is finding Japan too expensive. Hence the company is searching for a new house for its iPhone 5 in Taiwan in hopes of fining “more cost-effective sources.”

The Economic Daily News (EDN) report showed, “Foxconn will become the iPhone 5's new earphone supplier. Japan's Foster was the previous supplier, but a strengthening yen has spurred Apple to look for more cost-effective sources, the report said, noting that related orders are estimated at NT$5 billion (US$171.7 million). Foxlink will produce earphone jack sockets for the iPhone 5.”

The new smartphone is expected to have the components suppliers such as Foxconn Electronics, Foxlink, Gold Circuit Electronics (GCE) and Epistar. Apple iPhone which used to have Japanese Foster supplying earphone contract will have new suppliers such as Foxconn, Foxlink to produce earphone jack sockets. The LED chips is expected to be from Epistar.

The report added, “LED chipmaker Epistar could break into Apple's supply chain after forming a strategic alliance with Japan's Toyoda Gosei, which also provides Epistar access to Toyoda technologies. Apple could only source from Japan-based suppliers in the past due to patent issues, the report said, citing industry sources.”

Previously, a Chinese language Apple Daily reported about the Kinsus Interconnect Technology being the new smartphone processor manufacturer as the iPhone 5 is expected to adopt Qualcomm’s baseband chipsets which uses Kinsus IC substrates. And a new ARM’s A8 processor (or A5 CPU processor) will feature the memory and graphics chips embedded in a single chip into the 1GHz processor. Apple iPhone 5 is also expected to feature more memory compared to the previous 512 MB RAM offered by iPhone 4. Meanwhile there are chances of Apple moving to a multi-core chip in the form of A9 processor in the coming year.

Apple iPhone although is designed in California, but is assembled in China and most of the inner parts are created in Japan. And now moving to Taiwan, it would be interesting to see how the Apple iPhone 5 will turn out to be. Most probably the new cost effective shift should bring out a cheaper iPhone or iPhone 5 may cost same as iPhone 4 with better specifications.

Generally, Apple comes out with the iPhone announcements at Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which usually takes place in June. The new smartphone from Apple is expected to be announced in Q2 of 2011 and could be shipped in Q3.

Apple‘s iPad 2 development is also moving to a brighter side. The next generation iPad 2 is rumored by various tech Websites to have a resolution of 2048x1536 pixels compared to the present one which has 1024x768 pixels. And the new iBook 1.1, application is being readied to support the large resolution.

Apple iPad 2 is going to be lighter, faster and is expected to feature a USB port, front facing camera and 3-axis gyroscopes along with a SD card slot. But multi-tasking is not expected in this year’s release but multitasking gestures are still in planning stage where Apple plans to refine it further.

Also a recent report from 9to5mac website showed that Apple is readying their new iOS 4.3 featuring the “Photo Streaming” file system with which users can set up Photo Streams and invite others to view the pictures as one takes them and upload them to a service. Moreover, the MobileMe, an online service offered by Apple is expected to connect to a feature within it known as “Find my Friends”, where users can view their friends on the same map. This seems like an act from Apple to introduce their own social networking feature to compete with Facebook.

And with Apple connecting to AT&T and Verizon along with other retailers to bring the iPad to larger audience, the margin for iPad to ship more than 40 million units in 2011, according to certain sources, is a clear booster for the technology giant. iPad 2 is set to start mass producing its next-generation iPad 2 at the end of February.

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