Hasta La Gadget!

Wowsers, that little App Store side project Apple has going on sure doesn’t seem to be settling down. After launching in July of ’08 and hitting 100 million downloads in September, the App Store has just crossed the 500 million download mark — a mere six months after opening. Compare that to the iTunes Music Store, which took two whole years to cross the 500 million mark, though to be fair we have little idea of the paid to free ratio of app downloads. There are over 15,000 apps in the App Store currently, and sure, 14,500 of them are crap, with the rest being tip calculators, but we gotta hand it to Apple for pretty much unprecedented success in the mobile download space — now let us download SNES emulators!

[Thanks, Richard]

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

App Store hits 500 million downloads: thanks, iFart originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Jan 2009 10:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In case you missed the keynote, Palm took some special moments to let everyone know that they’re not trying to compete with Apple — which is of course exactly what they’re doing with the Pre and webOS. Sure, there’s plenty of room in the market for multiple operating systems and manufacturers, as both companies have pointed out, but we can’t help but think that Palm took a long hard look at where Apple was at with its ultra-successful mobile OS and what they could improve upon, and we would like to assume that Apple is looking very carefully at webOS right now (and hopefully the Pre’s physical keyboard, but we’re dreamers) and comparing it with its current iPhone OS. So, if you’ll indulge us, let’s look at a few of the iPhone’s existing shortcomings that Apple might try and shore up — or perhaps already has fixes in the works for — now that there’s some very serious competition on the scene. Plus, with Steve on the sidelines, we can imagine there’s some extra pressure on the company to prove that innovation at Apple is not just about one man.

These are by no means the only two phones that matter right now, but there are enough parallels and common ancestry (a certain John Rubinstein) to make this a natural first round of comparison. All the magic happens after the break.

Continue reading What Apple could learn from Palm’s webOS

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

What Apple could learn from Palm’s webOS originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Jan 2009 14:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple this week began offering iPhone owners alternatives to its Safari mobile browser.

A
number of third-party web browsers appeared in the iPhone App Store on
Monday and Tuesday. Applications include Shaking Web ($2)– a browser
that stabilizes the view of a web page when your hand is shaking — and
Incognito ($2), which surfs the internet without leaving behind browsing history.

The
move suggests a change of heart in Apple’s App Store policies.
Previously, the company rejected some iPhone applications on the
grounds that they "duplicated iTunes functionality."

Some might
think approving third-party browsers will open doors to an
open-platform browser such as Firefox, which could finally allow
plug-ins such as Adobe Flash to run on the iPhone. However, it’s not
that simple. Apple’s terms of service for its software development kit
reads the following:

"An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code
by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in
architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise," reads clause 3.3.2 of the iPhone SDK agreement, which was recently published on WikiLeaks. "No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except
for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and
built-in interpreter(s)." 

So
unless Apple revises its terms of service for its SDK, we won’t see any
browsers mind-blowingly different from Safari. Nonetheless, less
restriction is generally more than welcome when it comes to Apple. 

Apple Allows 3rd Party Web Browsers into App Store [MacRumors]

Anyone heard of Smashwords? Me either, until today, and it looks like a lot more people will be learning about the e-book publisher soon.

Smashwords is a "digital self publishing platform" — what used to be called vanity press, only online. And the reason its here is because the Smashwords catalog has just been added to the free iPhone e-book reader Stanza, a much-loved app here at Gadget Lab.

The catalog will just show up when you select the Online Catalog section in Stanza, and from there you can browse in the usual ways — by author, subject, most recent, most popular and so on.

The gimmick (there has to be a gimmick) is that you can grab a section free before you buy, and sometimes the whole book is free of charge. This addresses the major problem with e-book buying in general (no browsing) and buying books from unknown authors in particular (who will pay without first sampling?)

To purchase a book, you are redirected to the Smashwords site, although you stay within Stanza, and once you have an account set up things are straightforward.

I have a strong feeling that e-books will soon be sold through the iTunes Store, in which case small publishers like this may lose out. One thing is clear, though — e-books are finally going mainstream, and smart phones look to be the trojan horse carrying them in.

Press release [Smashwords. Thanks, Bryan!]

See Also:

• Free Software Turns the iPhone Into an E-Book Reader
• Interview: Stanza Brings Online Bookstore to the iPhone
• iPhone Beats Kindle in E-Reader Popularity Contest

One glaring omission from the CES showroom floor this year: anything Google Android-related. While a number of handset manufacturers are expected to release followups to T-Mobile’s popular G1 handset. not many seemed to notice, as most phone news was overshadowed by the reemergence of ailing Palm with the release of its iPhone competitor, the Palm Pre.

Among companies rumored to be releasing an Android phone next year is Taiwanese manufacturer HTC. Australian telecom Telstra, who has met with both Palm and HTC, spoke with the Australian blog Smarthouse, telling it that HTC’s forthcoming Android offering is “better and more functional” than the Palm Pre.

Telstra went on to say:

We have seen both and we believe that the new HTC phone will be a real competitor to the iPhone and the Pre which at this stage looks nice but is still not delivered to market.

HTC has yet to confirm the existence of the phone.