Novelist Nicholson Baker loves books, but not Jeff Bezos’s device: “Amazon is very good at selling things. It isn’t so good, to date anyway, at making things…fortunately, if you want to read electronic books there’s another way to go. Here’s what you do. Buy an iPod Touch.”
Everyone knows that one of the iPhone’s best selling points is the amazing array of apps developers make for the handset. But if you still need convincing, check out this “Daily Show” clip, which highlights some of the phone’s most popular programs.
Here’s another set of customers for AT&T: People who buy e-book readers from Plastic Logic, the would-be Kindle killer due out next year.
Privately held Plastic Logic says it will rely on AT&T to supply its gadgets with a wireless connection, in the same way that Sprint is the network provider for Amazon’s Kindle.
This is now an Apple earnings-call tradition: Analysts try their hardest to convince Apple executives to express interest in the booming market for cheap netbooks and Apple executives make it perfectly clear how much disdain they have for netbooks. But an $800 iTablet? That’s something else altogether…
Last week, Amazon acknowledged that it deleted some copies of “1984″ and “Animal Farm” from customers’ Kindles. So what book will be next?
Because while Amazon has said it won’t repeat what it did last week, it hasn’t actually sworn off remote book-removal–or remote-anything removal, for that matter–altogether. Does that worry you? It should.
The more time iPhone users spend fondling their apps, the less they have for everything else. Obvious, but important, for media folks trying to figure out what the mobile movement means to them.
When the economy cratered last fall, even mighty Google was forced to pull back on spending: The company stopped growing its workforce and put several big expensive projects on hold. But that’s likely to change, predicts Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay. He says that while Google is on track to shell out $1.4 billion on capital expenditures this year, that number will shoot up up more than 40 percent next year, to $2 billion. And if Google doesn’t get a grip on YouTube, that number could keep growing.
Still waiting to get your hands on the new iPhone 3G S? Here’s something that should occupy you for a few minutes while you wait: A side-by-side-by-side-by-side comparison of four iterations of iPhones going through various speed tests, performed by Pali Research analyst Walt Piecyk. And as a bonus, a clip of the new iPhone vs. the Palm Pre, featuring a surprise twist.
Did you wait in line this morning to buy a new iPhone 3G S? If you want to take advantage of its “tethering” feature and use it as a modem, you’re going to have to wait a while longer. And you’ll have to pay–though it’s unclear how much that’s going to cost.
I’m a Sprint customer, so the wireless company knows where I live, how to find me online, what kind of phone I have and what I spend each month. And it knows my contract expires at the end of the month. So why isn’t it trying hard to keep me from the clutches of AT&T and its iPhone?
The promise of “virtual goods”–pretend things you buy with real money in cyberspace–has lured entrepreneurs and venture capitalists for years. Same goes for mobile payments–using your iPhone instead of your Amex to buy stuff. But what if you combined the two? You’d have a market that barely exists yet is worth fighting over. At least that’s what Zong and Boku are doing.
We all know tomorrow’s newspapers won’t be printed on paper, but delivered via the Internet. The question for today’s publishers is whether consumers are going read them on iPhones or Kindles. But it shouldn’t be a question–smart phones like Apple’s are winning this one hands down.
The Palm Pre debuts this week. Next week, we should hear about a big update for Apple’s iPhone. And by the end of the summer we’ll have new phones running Android platform. So who’s going to emerge as the winner? Easy, says Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney: It’s Google. But Mahaney isn’t talking about Google’s smartphone platform. He’s talking about Google’s core search business, which he thinks is finally about to see significant lift from mobile users.
Publisher Condé Nast gets plenty of well-deserved criticism for its slow embrace of technology and the Web, but some of its individual titles do some interesting stuff. To wit: This video, which depicts how artist Jorge Columbo created this week’s cover art in an hour, using an iPhone and an app called Brushes.
I actually got to fondle Amazon’s newest Kindle DX at its unveiling earlier this month. So I can confirm that it really isn’t that big. But you can see where these guys are going with this.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
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