Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod touch are huge in the Middle East and North Africa, where they account for 55 percent of mobile Internet traffic, according to a new survey by Dubai-based Effective Measure. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, 64.5 percent of mobile Internet traffic occurred on Apple devices, with the iPhone accounting for 34.3 percent. Effective Measure’s measured audience for the Middle East-North ...

The new MacBook Air notebooks with ThunderBolt are available in the United Arab Emirates since August 11th. Unfortunately they are not available in Saudi Arabia from Arab Computers until the 27th of the month. The 2011 MacBook Air models' features include faster processors, ThunderBolt port and a backlit keyboard. Base models ship with an Intel Core i5 processor but you can upgrade to a 1.8GHz Dual-Core Int ...

Egypt's Mobinil, Jordan's Orange and Vodafone Qatar all followed Vodafone Egypt's lead and enabled FaceTime on their iPhone 4 units via Carrier Update. Here is a screen shot of the Carrier Settings files for these carriers taken by Mohammed Lubbad: As you can see, all these files have the AllowsVoIP key and it's on, enabling FaceTime on iPhone 4 units sold by these carriers and have the model numbers MC605A ...

FaceTime is still disabled in iOS 4.3 beta on iPhone 4 units sold by Mobily, Etisalat, Du, Vodafone Qatar, Vodafone Eqypt and Mobinil. Three months ago we talked about a RegionFeatures file found iOS devices including the iPad. The file includes restrictions on the device based on the country. For Japan it's a loud shutter sound (SHUTTER), China iPhones apparently have no wifi (NOWIFI) and in the Middle Eas ...

Both VIVA Kuwait and VIVA Bahrain announced the official availability of Samsung's Galaxy Tab tablet in the Middle East. However VIVS's partner in Saudi Arabia, Saudi Telecom Company - STC, did not announce anything. The Arabic VIVA Kuwait's press release included comments on how the Galaxy Tab is designed to support Arabic while the English press release had no mention of Arabic language support. Arabic is ...

AlJazeera channel aired an inaccurate report about the iPhone unauthorized user patent. The report was completely wrong and it spread fear, uncertainty and doubt between consumers in the Middle East. Here is the AlJazeera report (it's in Arabic, we talked about the report on the Arabic edition of SaudiMac in September, but if anyone wants to provide English translation then please do). httpv://www.youtube.c ...

We still don't know the real reason for blocking FaceTime in the Middle East but we do know that FaceTime works in Tunisia. Vodafone Qatar announced that they will reactivate it and Government policies in Qatar prevented initial FaceTime availability. Vodafone Egypt confirmed that saying that Egypt's NTRA decided to block FaceTime. So no conspiracy theories there. For the time being there is a hack to enabl ...

Vodafone Qatar has announced via a Twitter message that FaceTime will return to the iPhone 4. The feature will return via an update through iTunes. It did not specify whether it will be a Carrier Setting file or as part of the next iOS update. We will soon find out if this fix will be exclusive to Qatar or the Middle East. And if it was for Qatar only then what is Mobily doing it? So far we didn't hear of a ...

According to a previous post, iPod touch units sold by Arab Computers and carry the model numbers MC547AB, MC540AB and MC544AB has FaceTime disabled. And now the Apple Saudi Arabia iPod touch page confirmed that. The same goes to the other Middle East countries: UAE, Egypt, Jordan and Qatar. On these countries only Retina display, HD Video Recoding and Game Center are featured. The exception once again is T ...

Yesterday Apple updated their Locating iPhone wireless carriers support page to include a small note regarding FaceTime for Middle Eastern countries. Note number 4 says that FaceTime is not available on this carrier. The countries listed without FaceTime are: Saudi Arabia (mobily) - affected model numbers are MC603AE and MC605AE United Arab Emirates (Du and Etisalat) - affected model numbers are MC603AE and ...