Apple is in for another huge iPhone 4S launch, if early lineups are any indication. Penn Olson reports that lines outside of Apple’s five official retail stores in China already extend into the hundreds ahead of Friday’s launch.

Photos from Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo clearly show huge crowds at the two Beijing and three Shanghai locations, despite temperatures between 32 and 40° F. The lineups are likely for people who want to try to get an iPhone off-contract and unlocked, starting at 4988 yuan, or around 0 U.S. Shoppers can also buy directly from China Unicom, which even has some pricing plans that allow users to pick up the hardware free, but monthly contract requirements for those subsidies are quite steep. Plus, buying unlocked makes it easier for scalpers to resell devices through unofficial channels.

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When it launched in the U.S., the iPhone 4S was also greeted with long lines, and in Hong Kong attendance at Apple’s retail flagship store numbered in the thousands. The Chinese launch of the 4S should be the biggest since it debuted in October, since China is now Apple’s second-most important market, and according to at least one estimate, it’s conceivable that Apple sold more iPhones in China during its fiscal fourth quarter of 2011 than it did in the U.S.

The staggered launch means that sales resulting from the Chinese launch of the iPhone 4S will appear as part of Apple’s second fiscal quarter results, and not those that’ll be reported Jan. 24. That could help Apple post even higher iPhone shipments next quarter even without the holiday bump, especially if its regulatory progress with getting a China Telecom-compatible  version of the 4S to market bears fruit within the next couple of months.

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Solar rooftops only work in specific environments: an area with enough sun, a roof with the right tilt, a state or city with strong subsidies. But a company called Geostellar is using big data tools to help its solar installer customers deliver more solar panels to more rooftops in places where it actually makes economic sense. Later this year, the company plans to release an open API — so developers can build applications on top of it — and eventually, the company plans to launch a consumer-facing site.

Year-old Geostellar pulls together at least 25 different types of data into its platform, including information about weather, shadows, roof slope, closest transmission lines, property values, land use, electricity rates, solar subsidies, and solar hazards. In addition, the company is constantly adding in more data sets like information about brownfields — a sudden hot area for solar installers — and data from pertinent recent legislation explained Geostellar CEO David Levine in an interview with me this week.

All that data goes into a system solar installers and utilities can use to search for useful data to target solar customers. For example, a solar installer could search Geostellar’s system for the locations of rooftops of a certain size in New Jersey or California and hone a mailing list down to the best potential candidates. The system can also estimate the amount of solar power, in kilowatt-hours/per year, that any rooftop would be able to produce if it had panels on it.

The solar rooftop companies are all fighting over a few select markets right now — California, New Jersey and Massachusetts — noted Levine, and Geostellar’s platform can help increase their sales. The company sells access to the software via a monthly license and then also charges the users for the data, depending on how extensive it is. So far pilot customers include CleanPath Renewables, Community Energy and AES Solar in Northern Virginia.

Eventually Geostellar will offer a consumer facing site, so interested solar buyers can search their own home — or their neighbors — to see how solar-friendly it is. RoofRay is offering a similar idea. Levine said Geostellar wanted to launch the industry section first to grow its revenues, before it launched a consumer site, which would likely be free to access.

Geostellar, based in West Virginia, has raised million from a group of angel investors including Flash Forward Ventures, and the company plans to start raising a Series B round after it has closed a couple more customer deals.

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High technology aside, the two great things about old-fashioned books are that they are cheap, and you can take notes in them. Can Apple’s tablet offer both?

The Nokia Booklet 3G is one of the nicest netbooks you can buy, with a build that aspires to be a 10-inch MacBook Pro. But it’s still just a netbook, and therein lies the problem.

Price

$300 with 2-year AT&T contract, $600 à la carte

Verdict

Nokia has built a great netbook, but they’ve done nothing to redefine the genre. Their 10-inch Booklet 3G has your typical 1.6GHz Atom, 120GB hard drive and 1GB of RAM. Running Windows 7, that means the performance is just passable. I’d be this close to pounding my head against the wall when a program would begin installing or a video would load.

That’s typical.

What’s ever so less typical is the sharp, sub-3lb unibody-esque construction (complete with sweet MacBook-like under-hatch battery and a hinge that bends nearly 180-degrees), HDMI output (not that you can really playback HD videos smoothly on an Atom) and, of course, solid integrated 3G and integrated GPS (though Nokia’s bundled Ovi software apparently requires a phone or PC to activate, and after 30 minutes of fiddling, I honestly gave up on mapping.)
The battery life is impressive, too. In nonstop 3G browsing and app running with the screen at 80% brightness, the machine’s svelte 16-cell battery ran for a bit over 6 hours and 30 minutes. That was a strenuous test, and dimming the screen and/or browsing through Wi-Fi should truly be enough to get you through the workday sans-recharge. (For instance, CrunchGear’s John Biggs reported a pretty remarkable 10 hours of movie playback.)

But alas, even for a nice netbook, the Booklet’s price is a bit too opulent for what you’re really getting: an ever-so gussied up version of the same machine you could buy from Acer, Asus, HP, etc, for half the price (before subsidies). Meanwhile, there are plenty of ULV systems in the $700 range with bigger screens, better performance and portable-minded design (of course, they’ll mostly require 3G dongles).

Give me some rhinestones and a bit more power, and we’ll talk. Or just hand me back my iPhone.

Quality build


Long battery life


Plastic monitor back makes whole thing feel cheaper


It’s still a $600 netbook

With its large subsidies to Apple, AT&T doesn’t break even on iPhone accounts with high data-usage until the 17th month of a 24-month contract, according to a new report from Yankee Group.

The report, titled “The Golden Subsidy Egg’s Goose is Cooked: Welcome to the Brave New Subsidy-Free World,” …

Originally posted at News – Apple

Japan has all kinds of solar-powered stuff: cell phones, cars, ships, and even carports and satellites. And now Tokyo-based Sekisui House plans to sell apartments fitted with sophisticated solar energy generation and control systems, which will not only power rooms but also allow residents to sell surplus electricity directly to utilities.

The electricity will be generated via solar panels on the buildings’ roofs, with each apartment having a meter to measure how much energy has been used and sold. Sekisui House claims the sun will provide enough energy for the solar buildings as a whole, but utilities will deliver conventional power in case of emergencies.

One solar power generation system installed in a four-apartment building costs a whopping $60,000 (but there are generous subsidies provided by the Japanese government for solar equipment). Sekisui House expects to sell around 300 of these systems by the end of January 2010 and sees about 30% of all apartments that it builds equipped with them in the future.

Via Nikkei [registration required, paid subscription]