Hasta La Gadget!

After less than three years of existence, Apple’s App Store has accumulated half-a-million mobile apps.

The iTunes App Store, which launched in the summer of 2008, surpassed the 500,000 milestone Tuesday morning, according to 148Apps, an iPhone app reviews blog that has been tracking the store closely.

To be clear, that’s 500,000 apps that Apple has approved — they’re not necessarily live yet. In the United States, the App Store is just shy of reaching 400,000 apps available for download.

“The fact that it has taken less than three years to reach this number is remarkable,” said Jeff Scott, editor of 148Apps. “With the improved tools for developers and steady adoption of smartphone technology, I anticipate there is still a lot of runway.”

Since its birth, Apple’s App Store has expanded rapidly, from 500 apps on day one to 100,000 about one year later. On the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, the App Store is the only official channel for customers to download and purchase third-party software with the tap of a button.

The App Store’s seamless, friction-free purchasing process provided an efficient business model for the software industry. Prior to the App Store, independent software coders had a difficult time competing against larger software companies with big budgets. Many tried marketing and selling their apps with methods such as the shareware model, or on their personal websites, but few found success through these ad-hoc channels.

By tying the App Store to iTunes and including the store on every iPhone, Apple created a captive audience and an effective marketing platform for distributing software, where programmers both big and small had an equal chance to make serious money. A handful of lucky developers struck it rich with hot app sales.

After the App Store exploded, other competitors launched their own app stores. Google’s Android app market, which launched eight months after the App Store, is the closest rival, with about 300,000 apps to date.

To celebrate the App Store’s half-a-million milestone, Scott of 148Apps collaborated with Chomp, a company that makes an app search tool, to create a large infographic (see full graphic below the jump) summarizing statistics about the app landscape.

Some tidbits from the App Store infographic:

• It would cost $891,982.24 and over 7 terabytes to download all available applications.
• Approximately 36 percent of all apps are free, and paid apps have an average price of $3.64
• Angry Birds has held the number 1 paid spot more than any other app at 275 days total.

At one point does quantity no longer matter? Nobody needs 500,000 apps, but I’ve argued in the past that the more apps an app store accrues, the more likely it can fill every need for various professions, hobbies and special interests.

See Also:

• The 19 Most Wired iPhone and iPad Apps of 2010
• iPhone App Store Approaches 1 Billion Downloads
• Apple Pre-Celebrates App Store’s First Birthday
• App Sales Sluggish, Despite Android’s Popularity

Apple’s legal battle with Samsung has taken a new twist, as a federal court forces Samsung to hand over samples of new phones for Apple to poke and pore over.

Intel's Atom series of processors debuted in May of last year. We may see the latest generation — code-named "Oak Trail" — in tablets this summer. Photo courtesy Intel

Long absent from the mobile-device arena, Intel processors may arrive in tablets as soon as this summer.

Acer will launch a tablet powered by Intel’s “Oak Trail” processor, which could start selling as early as July, according to sources cited by DigiTimes. Asus and Lenovo will follow Acer’s lead shortly thereafter, say the sources.

While none of the hardware manufacturers that Wired.com contacted were willing to confirm any specific dates or deals, some were eager to drop hints of what was to come.

“While we cannot pre-announce our customers’ product plans,” Intel spokesperson Suzy Ramirez told Wired.com, “we are seeing success today with the Intel Atom processor Z670, formerly code-named ‘Oak Trail,’ in a variety of designs from leading OEMs.”

Ramirez said we’ll see a number of those designs debut next week at Computex, Taipei’s annual computer expo.

“We are certainly intrigued by the concept,” Asus spokesperson Gary Key told Wired.com, “and are fully supportive of Intel’s upcoming Oak Trail platform but at this time cannot confirm a tablet design based on Intel’s new architecture.”

Acer and Lenovo did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Intel’s presence has been conspicuously missing in the tablet and smartphone arena to date. Thus far, the rival ARM-licensed processor architecture has been the dominant force in the market.

“The big issue is power consumption,” Richard Fichera, an analyst at Forrester research told Wired.com. “ARM was designed from the get-go to be low-power consumption.”

Because mobile devices like smartphones are notorious for sucking down battery power faster than so-called “dumbphones,” ARM’s architecture has thus far been a good fit. Intel’s processors, while powerful, have not been as power-efficient as ARM’s.

The Oak Trail line is Intel’s step toward changing that power-efficiency gap. As one of Intel’s low-voltage Atom processors, the company claims its Oak Trail processors will improve mobile battery life “without sacrificing performance.”

Intel recently announced its first mass-produced 3-D transistor, which will be featured on another new line of chips, dubbed “Ivy Bridge.” The new transistors include a thin silicon fin jutting out from the top, differing from traditional planar transistors and allowing for more surface area to squeeze more transistors closer together.

Ivy Bridge chips will use less than half the power of Intel’s current 2-D transistors, while increasing performance by 37 percent. Although these chips won’t be readily mass-produced until the beginning of 2012, the drastic decrease in power consumption makes these chips look ready-made for mobile devices.

In the company’s annual shareholders meeting this month, CEO Paul Otellini commented on Intel’s forthcoming push into mobile, saying embedded devices are the “fastest growing sector” of Intel’s business. “The tablet race is nowhere near finished,” Otellini said.

Back in 2010, when we caught a glimpse of Cydle’s M7 Android tablet at CES 2010, the company was also touting the i30, an iPhone cradle capable of delivering real-time digital TV to the smartphone. That cradle caught a little bit of air time at CES the following year, but still wasn’t ready for market. Well, it looks like that’s about to change — now, just a few months shy of two years since the Mobile DTV standard was minted, the i30 is finally rearing it’s antenna-sporting head over at the FCC. According to the User Manual, outed in the filing, the iPhone case uses its antenna to catch local mobile channel signals and shoots them to the iPhone via WiFi. The case is also packing a rechargeable battery, and when connected to the supplied AC adapter, pumps juice to both the dock and your iPhone. Of course, you’ll need the Cydle ATSC M/H Mobile TV app (we know, it’s a mouthful) to get the whole thing going, but getting your digital TV on is apparently relatively simple from there. For more photos of the Cydle i30 cradle, including shots of its exposed guts, follow the source link below.

Cydle i30 cradle delivers digital TV to your iPhone, finally lands at FCC originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 24 May 2011 16:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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From cool hybrid computers to digital flower vases, entrants to the Fujitsu Design Awards 2011 contest come up with all sorts of intriguing ideas to tickle our futuristic fantasies.