A countersuit has been filed by Apple's iPhone man-in-waiting, Mark Papermaster, against his former employer, in a dispute over a non-compete agreement.

On late Thursday, the court documents were filed in federal court in New York, which claimed that since the two companies are not competitors in the arena where Papermaster will be employed, IBM's non-compete agreement with Papermaster shouldn't apply to his potential employment at Apple.

Apple’s iPhone failed to woo Indian users, but why, what’s the main reason behind it, is it its high cost or anything else?

There are shedloads of people in the Indian market but no one is interested in buying the gadget (iPhone).

Analysts estimated that just 11,000 iPhones have been sold in the whole sub-continent since its launch in September 2008.

According to LiveMint.com even technology giant Apple didn’t consider that the phone would do well in India. It only allocated 50,000 Iphones to that market in the first place.

Till now, Apple has been mostly absent from online and search engine markets. But according to TechCrunch, there is a strong possibility that the company may either build its own search engine, or will at least develop a search engine interface for its own applications.

A study conducted by a mobile-phone warranty firm revealed that Apple’s iPhone has substantially less failures as compared to the failure rate of handsets from BlackBerry and Palm.

The SquareTrade study covered cell phone failure rates from over 15,000 new phones within a period of 12 months.

The team found that iPhones had a malfunction rate of 5.6 percent, as against 11.9 percent for BlackBerry smartphones.

Palm’s Treos range suffered the worst, with a failure rate of 16.2 percent during the same period.

Apple’s retail operation increased two-fold during the existing year (2008).

According to Apple’s recent 10-k annual filing released Wednesday, the company presently has 32,000 people on a full-time basis. The figure was up from 21,600 as compared to the corresponding period of last year.

The report also said that around 16,000 of those people work in company’s retail group, which currently has 247 stores.

Apple, in last year's annual report, announced that it had around 8,000 people working in the retail unit, which comprised 197 stores.

Apple's MacBook Pro is built from a sinlge block of aluminum, called unibody. This 15in MacBook Pro is quite stylish and will definitely tempt the business executives. It is not that heavy too, so could be carried from one place to place easily.

However, the extra-glossy coating might create a problem while it is being used outdoors, since it would be really prone to reflections. But in office environments, it would be perfectly fine.

The company claims that LED-backlit will use less of battery and the users could use it continuously for four and a half hours.