Hasta La Gadget!

Amazon seems ready to get into the app-store business with plans to launch a new Android app store.

The company has reportedly sent welcome kits to some developers to entice them to start signing on to the store, according to reports in The Wall Street Journal and Engadget.

With its plans to offer an Android app store, Amazon may be hoping to take on the Google Market, currently the app store of choice on most Android devices. Exploding sales of Android smartphones and the introduction of new Android-based tablets hungry for apps may have caught Amazon’s attention and had it clamoring for a piece of the action.

Amazon has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Smartphones running Android OS were more popular than iPhones among new U.S. buyers in August, according to a report from the Nielsen Company.

Currently, Google’s Android market has about 90,000 apps, compared to Apple’s App Store with 250,000 apps.

Upstart, independent challengers such as AndSpot and SlideMe are slready trying to create their own Android app stores. It’s all kosher because, unlike Apple, Google allows for multiple app stores to exist on the Android operating system. These independent app stores hope to lure users with the promise of better search and user interface, greater availability internationally and increased revenue.

Amazon may be betting on something similar, and it certainly has the clout and the brand to be more popular than the upstarts. But winning over developers may not be easy.

“From the developer perspective, its trial-and-error to see how effective they really are. A lot of these app stores — whether from Verizon now or Amazon in the future — are yet to prove themselves,” says Paul Chen, director of business development at Papaya Mobile, an Android games developer.

Still Chen says his company is open and willing to embrace any distribution channel that could increase the visibility of its apps.

Though Amazon has been extremely tight-lipped, here’s everything we know so far — based on the leaks — about Amazon’s plans:

Look and Feel

Amazon’s app store is likely to be a lot like Apple’s: carefully curated and targeted at consumers who are tired of the chaos in the Google Android Market. Spam, poor quality of apps, and the inability to easily find apps are major problems in the Android Market. But what Amazon’s app store will be called, look like, or the kind of features it will have are all still under wraps.

For consumers, it will be exciting if Amazon can bring features such as recommendations, wish lists and deals to its app store.

Cost, Control and Availability

Developers will reportedly have to pay $100 to sign up — just as they do with the Apple app store.

Unlike the current Google Android Market, where any developers can publish apps as long as it follows the company’s guidelines, Amazon will decide what will get into its store, according to a report in TechCrunch.

Apps can either be free or paid. Paid apps will have to be competitively priced. That means developers can’t charge more for the same app on the Amazon app store than in other markets.

Amazon’s app store will likely be available only in the United States, though it won’t be long before Amazon extends it to other countries. After all, Amazon has all the necessary payment systems in place to make this happen, even as Google Checkout remains limited.

Support and Distribution

This is where things get confusing. It is not clear which Android devices Amazon’s app store will support or how it will be distributed. Google’s Android Market comes preloaded on all Android smartphones. But Amazon will have to ink deals with device makers to get its app store in there.

We’ll also have to see if Amazon’s Android app store and Google Market will coexist on a device. If they do so, it could cause consumer confusion and give rise to app store fragmentation.

Also, with the availability of tablets and hardware boxes running Google TV, which is based on the Android platform, it will be interesting to see whether Amazon limits its app store to just smartphones or if it is willing to go where Google fears to tread.

See Also:

• Amazon Shows Off Kindle for iPad
• Amazon Sells More E-Books Than Hardcovers
• Social Networking Meets Apps in New Android App Store
• Independent App Stores Take On Google’s Android Market

Photo: (astanush/Flickr)

Good morning Gadget Lab readers. It’s time for today’s overzealous iPad speculation. In this episode we take a look at the “new” iPad case, which will apparently sport two dock-connectors, with a second port on the side to enable landscape docking.

The “evidence” comes from the Mission Repair blog, a somewhat suspect source as we shall see. Mission repair appears to have gotten its hands on spare parts for the next-gen iPad. The aluminum shell has a second slot on the long side.

I call bluff. Apple has indeed filed for a patent showing two ports of some kind, but duplication of function like this seems distinctly un-Apple. Take a second look at that slot, though, and you’ll see it is just the right size for an SD-card slot, something Apple already builds in to the iMac and MacBook Pro (I held my iPad up to the iMac for comparison and the size is just right).

Also, doesn’t it seem a little odd that a repair company would already have spares for an as-yet unreleased iPad? Apple has a history of making small revisions in the first year of a new product (a memory increase on the original iPhone, for example) but major revisions on mobile devices come one year apart, like clockwork.

We have seen Mission Repair’s work before. Back in February, before the iPad shipped, the company posted a picture of the internal frame of an iPad which turned out to be real. The site claimed that it had space for a front-facing camera, but this turned out to be the gap for the ambient light sensor. Sure, they got ahold of the parts before launch, but weeks, not months before.

Double dock iPad? Nah. I don’t see it. An SD card slot? Along with a FaceTime camera in a new, February/April iPad release, I’d put money on it.

[UPDATE: Engadget boss Joshua Topolsky has it from a “trusted source” that the “image actually shows is a rejected concept from the current generation iPad.”

iPad Landscape docking? You decide! [Mission Repair]

Photos: Mission Repair

See Also:

• Apple iPad May Ship With Webcam

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Contrary to popular belief, the iPad isn’t gobbling up huge chunks of PC sales, according to a market research company.

According to an NPD research report, only 13 percent of iPad owners surveyed chose to buy an iPad instead of a PC. That’s a small number, considering that 24 percent of iPad owners replaced a planned e-reader purchase with Apple’s tablet.

The report also noted that iPad owners, especially early adopters, are a particularly tech-savvy bunch, as they’re significantly more likely to own Apple gadgets, e-readers or smartphones.

NPD’s findings clash with earlier reports that suggested the iPad was stealing away a significant number of sales from traditional personal computers. Last month, Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn said the iPad had replaced as much as 50 percent of all laptop sales at the retail chain. That’s a significant number, but it’s also just an internal estimate for just one brick-and-mortar outlet.

That doesn’t go to say that the iPad isn’t selling extremely well. Bernstein Research recently issued a report claiming that iPad adoption rates are the fastest in electronics product history, with sales of approximately 4.5 million units sold per quarter. By way of comparison, the original iPhone sold 1 million per quarter at launch, and DVD players sold about 350,000 per quarter when they first launched.

See Also:

• Best Buy Chief: iPad Cuts Laptop Sales in Half
• iPads on Track to Outsell the Mac
• Amazon: Kindle Books Outsold Real Books This Christmas

Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

Briss is a cross-platform open-source Java application that does one thing and does it well: cropping PDFs. Usually, that’s exactly what you need to format cumbersome documents for a tablet or e-reader’s small screen.

It turns out that to format PDFs for e-reading, cropping is the richest tool you usually need, so long as your cropping tool is as easy, fast and powerful as Briss. It can convert two-page spreads into single vertical pages, slice off extra-wide margins and get rid of ugly metadata like page numbers and chapter headings.

Trimming this information is essential if you’re converting your PDF to an e-book format like EPUB or MOBI; because e-book conversion doesn’t keep the same pagination, you’ll wind up with numbers and text in random spots, usually in the middle of a page. Now that even dedicated e-readers like the Kindle, Nook and Sony Reader support PDF out-of-the-box, it’s optional.

The UI is dead simple, if a touch unforgiving. When loading a PDF file, Briss analyzes it to check for repetitive structures — for instance, that all of the pages are the same size and have roughly the same margins. It usually offers different options for even and odd pages. If the PDF is a two-page spread (i.e., two pages of a book or magazine copied onto a single page in the PDF), it detects that as well.

Then outline the parts of the document you want to keep into different crop areas. If you’re splitting spreads into one-page vertical columns, you might have as many as four. If you have a uniform PDF that just needs its margins trimmed, there might only be one. Briss then applies that crop to every page in the document, outputting a file into the same folder with “_trimmed” appended to it. The original file remains intact.

This is usually as easy as cropping an image in any application, but in some cases with spreads I’ve had to perform crops blind. I usually select half the page to be column one and the other half to be column two, then fine-tune it later. Adobe Photoshop’s can perform the same task with a more sophisticated and reliable interface, but it’s nowhere near as lightweight (or free) as Briss.

The romance-novel/e-book blog Dear Author has more detailed instructions on how to use Calibre to further convert PDFs to e-book-native formats, but in my experience, the new generation of e-readers handles PDFs just fine. In most cases, your PDFs may have been simple photocopy-and-scan jobs without OCR text; converting to a text format without also performing an OCR scan won’t help them anyways.

I also leave the page numbers on books I crop, so I can reference them as easily as I could a print edition. For scholar and student users, e-books’ lack of stable page references makes working from them a huge headache; paginated PDFs don’t have that problem.

See Also:

• How to Do (Almost) Everything With a Kindle 3
• How to Do Everything on Your Kindle, Pt. 2: Jailbreak Edition …
• The iPad Will Violate the Kindle's Space, And Other First …
• Students Skeptical Kindle DX Can Replace Paper Chase
• How Will the Apple Tablet iPad Change Our Kids' Lives?
• Kno Creates 14-inch Tablet for Students

Updated at 5:30 p.m. Eastern to add comment from K-NFB.

This week, K-NFB, an e-reading company founded by Ray Kurzweil and the National Federation for the Blind, launched its much-anticipated Blio reading app and e-book store. Blio was immediately and widely panned by publishers, developers and readers.

“Many of the failures are fundamentally at odds with the one thing that Kurzweil was touting above all else: accessibility,” wrote Laura Dawson, a digital reading industry consultant, formerly of BarnesAndNoble.com. K-NFB initially promised to make e-books more accessible to blind readers; yet Windows, currently its only enhanced books platform, has known text-to-speech conversion issues.

K-NFB and Kurzweil responded by saying the software had been released before a fully-accessible version was ready, and that they plan to release an improved version next week.

“People understandably have very high expectations,” Kurzweil said in an interview with Wired.com Thursday. “We believe Blio is very usable and has many features other book formats don’t. And there are many features that we want to add.”

In addition to bug fixes and other tweaks, an accessibility release scheduled for October 25 will work with Freedom Scientific’s JAWS, screen reader software for Windows specifically tailored for blind users. The 1.0 version released Tuesday relied on Windows’ built-in text-to-speech capabilities.

K-NFB spokesperson Peter Chapman acknowledged the problems with Blio’s text-to-speech in an interview with Publishers Weekly, but blamed the platform, not the books: “the TTS software on most Windows machines isn’t very good.” Yet many Windows XP users were unable to even install Blio’s software. (This has since been resolved.)

K-NFB also confirmed that an iOS 4 version for iPhone and iPod Touch is currently in private beta, and that an iPad version will shortly follow the iPhone, probably sometime after November’s release of iOS 4.2. Android and Mac OS X versions are also in development.

Users weren’t the only ones frustrated with Blio. Hadrien Gardeur, founder and CEO of free e-books site FeedBooks, complained on Twitter that Blio was offering downloads from FeedBooks’ catalog without permission: “Hey Blio, next time that you add our OPDS [Open Publishing Distribution System] catalog to a commercial product, send us an e-mail first.”

In a follow-up e-mail, Gardeur noted that FeedBooks only allows other systems to include their catalog under the following conditions:

• full support for the EPUB standard (Blio converts EPUB into its own format and can’t support EPUB with other companies’ DRM)
• support the entire OPDS catalog (Blio only includes some of FeedBooks’ feeds)
• Add other OPDS catalogs to its library (Blio can’t do that)
• allow payment for commercial content through open standards (Blio doesn’t)

For these reasons, Gardeur asked Blio not to include FeedBooks’ content in its initial launch; according to Gardeur, K-NFB went ahead and included part of Feedbooks’ OPDS catalog anyways. Since FeedBooks has a planned system update forthcoming, it will most likely break Blio’s access to the catalog.

Kurzweil stated Thursday that K-NFB was continuing to work with Feedbooks and other free book providers; he credited the dispute over Blio’s use of their feeds to a miscommunication.

Finally, as we noted earlier this week, Toshiba launched its own branded version of the Blio application, store and e-book catalog called Toshiba Book Place. Toshiba is offering 6,000 titles at launch; Blio 11,000. This puts Blio at a distinct disadvantage against the 700,000 e-books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers for sale from Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s library of over 1,000,000 e-books.

It’s not precisely clear why there’s a gap in the number of books offered by Toshiba and Blio. But the brand and store fragmentation is another confusing component of a deeply confusing product launch. It’s especially troubling for those who have been hoping for serious innovation in making e-readers accessible to users of all abilities.

Image via Blio.com

See Also:

• UPDATE: Toshiba, Blio Jump In With Enhanced E-Books For Laptops …
• Singularity Proponent Ray Kurzweil Reinvents the Book, Again …
• 5 Things That Will Make E-Readers Better in 2010
• Apple's Tablet E-Book App Rips off Indie Dev's Creation
• Amazon's Kindle 2 Pits Authors Versus the Blind
• Apple's iPad Will Read Books Out Loud, Support Free E-Books …
• Copyright Owners Fight Plan to Release E-Books for the Blind …