Sunday, April 12, 2009

Kindle 3 Versus One Billion iphone Apps

The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon is developing Kindle 3 and this will be a larger screen version designed to be attractive and compete in the newspaper and magazine markets. The article speculates that the K3 could be out in time for the 2009 Christmas shopping season.

They are obviously aware that Plastic Logic is coming over the hill and both the Hearst and Murdoch empires are looking to do their own thing and also if Barnes and Noble make a move its likely to be around the same time.

The big question is will eink be the technology that prevails and despite the media attention given to these ebook readers today will they merely become the single dimensional dinosaurs of tomorrow? Larger screens add significant cost to the eink technology. Today and for the foreseeable future eink remains grayscale and may be ok for text but is seriously unsexy for graphics, illustrations, photos and can’t play video. No matter how big they make the screen we would rather use the smaller, compact and more portable iPhone or even iTouch.

So it was very interesting to see that Apple have started to countdown not to Christmas but to their one billionth app downloaded milestone on the App Store. iPhone sales hit 17 million last month and in less than a year of their launch the apps have proved a huge market success and huge competitive differentiator with all the competitors now scrambling to catch up.

As we write the counter is at 938,718,000 and counting very fast! Apple are giving away prizes for the lucky billion app person.

The top ten free book apps are:

Kindle for iPhone
Stanza
eReader
Wattpad
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Beamitdown software)
Shakespeare (Readdle Playshakespeare.com)
Love Poems (Beamitdown software)
Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen (Beamitdown software)
King James Bible Audio (iToursoftware.com)
Alice in Wonderland (Beamitdown software)

The top ten free book apps are:

Classics (the only one in either list to feature in the top ten of all application)
Star Trek Countdown 1 (iVerse Media)
Star Trek Countdown 4 (iVerse Media)
Star Trek Countdown 2 (iVerse Media)
Star Trek Countdown 3 (iVerse Media)
Star Trek Countdown 1 (iVerse Media)
King James Bible (DMBC)
Twilight by Stephanie Meyer (iceberg reader)
A Twilight Trivia (twilight Movie and Book)
New Moon: The Twilight Saga, Book 2 by Stephanie Meyer (iceberg reader)
Mohandas Gandhi Quotes (Brighthouse labs)

No comments: