i Could Be a Contenda - Motorola's Droid Smartphone Predicted to Give iPhone Stiff Competition

Silicon Valley is perpetually hyping the smartphone du jour that is supposed to sweep the iPhone into the dustbin. After a while one's eyes glaze. But Good Morning Silicon Valley's John Murrell thinks the Motorola Droid may be the real deal. "This," he says, "may be one contender that's not all talk."

What makes Droid any better than the rest of the pack? Murrell says the television commercial cleverly distinguishes Motorola's device from Apple's. If you haven't caught it, it goes like this:

"iDon't have a real keyboard. iDon't run simultaneous apps. iDon't take night shots. iDon't allow open development. iDon't customize. iDon't run widgets. iDon't have interchangeable batteries." — and finishes with a hard right: "Everything iDon't, Droid does."

Droid's underlying operating system? Google Android.

For details and informed rumors, read Motorola gives Apple a poke in the i, and for some other reviews and comments, read another Good Morning Silicon Valley blogger, Susan Steade, here.

RC

E-Books on iPhone: From "People don't read anymore" to Most Popular App

About a year ago we posted a blog entitled: Will Steve Jobs Eat His Words with Ketchup, Mustard or Mayo? We wrote: "Perhaps Apple boss Steven Jobs' declaration that 'People don't read anymore' does not rank with Neville Chamberlain's 'Peace for our time' speech in 1938, just before Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. But it is not out of line to mention both in the same breath to exemplify how colossally wrong smart people can be."

On the strength of a report by an analytics firm called Flurry, we think Jobs should eat his words with ketchup, mustard and mayo. It seems that e-books have overtaken games as the most popular category of iPhone application.

Emma Barnett of Telegraph.co.uk writes that Flurry's report "shows that games were the number one category of apps downloaded on the iPhone every month from August 2008 until August 2009. However, in the last four months, book apps have exceeded the popularity of games apps – with one out of every five new apps launching in October having been a book. In September, games apps were overtaken by book apps for the first time."

Wrong though Jobs was, with news like that we in the e-book business will be happy to join him at the feast. Pass the condiments!

Here's Barnett's article:Book apps overtake games on iPhone

Richard Curtis

A Dedicated Kindlephile Flirts With Rival Device

Joe Wikert, who operates and blogs about all things Kindle on a website called - natch! - Kindleville, has reservations about the device, and he's expressed them in a posting headlined Why Isn't Amazon the 800-Pound Gorilla of eReaders? A great many observers have issues with Kindle, but this Kindlekind earns triple points for candor.

For one thing, asks Wikert, how many Kindles have you seen "in the wild?" meaning on a bus or subway or airplane. "I've been on at least 30 different flights since the original Kindle arrived in November of 2007 and I think I've seen one other person using one on a plane. It's an unfair comparison, but I couldn't even tally the number of iPhones I've seen on those same flights."

He also accuses Amazon of complacency. "It seems every time I turn around someone else is announcing plans for a new reader. Why do I get the impression Amazon isn't hungry and aggressive enough to dominate this space? They seem perfectly content to take the slow and steady path, focusing more on customers with the most disposable income and not the mass market."

So deep is his disillusionment that he openly speaks of transferring his affections to a more satisfying love object.

"I admit I'm down on Amazon right now. I feel like I spent $360 on a Kindle 1 and although I use it every day I don't see growth potential or an upgrade path for it. My iPhone, on the other hand, features a slew of new apps every week, making it even more appealing today than it was yesterday...and who knows about tomorrow? How long will it be before someone creates an e-reader with that sort of sex appeal? Or does it already exist and it's called 'the iPhone'?"

With just a little more kindling Wikert's love affair with the iPhone will burst fully into flame. Does that spell Splitsville for Kindleville? And if so, what will he call his new website? Not iPhoneville.com - the domain is already taken. But it looks like plasticlogicville.com is still available. Grab it, Joe!

RC

Welcome Sweet Springtime, We Greet Thee in... Lawsuits? Apple Latest Target

Spring has arrived and lawsuits are pushing their hardy green shoots through the soil everywhere we look. It started last week when we reported that Harlan Ellison is suing Paramount and the Writers Guild of America. Then we learned that Discovery Communications was suing Amazon for patent infringement over the Kindle ("Did Jeff Overlook U.S. Patent Number 7,298,851?"). Today it's a Swiss company called Monec Holding Ltd. and the target is Apple. Did Steve Jobs overlook patent No. 6,335,678? According to an Apple Insider report by Katie Marsal, he may have. She writes:

In a 7-page complaint filed with a Virginia district court Monday, Berne, Switzerland-based Monec Holding Ltd accuses the iPhone maker of patent infringement, unfair trade practices, monopolization, and tortious interference for allegedly treading on its January 2002 patent No. 6,335,678 titled "Electronic device, preferably an electronic book."

Monec claims Apple's distribution of e-book applications violates an early patent filed by the Swiss firm. "Although Monec does not identify the specific eBook reading applications that prompted its lawsuit," writes Marsal, "the complaint was filed just weeks after Apple began distributing Amazon.com's Kindle eBook reader software through the App Store."

Monec's website is unadorned, uninformative, unimaginative and uninteractive but if anyone reading this finds himself in the vicinity of Galgenfeldweg 18 in Berne, Switzerland we'll be most interested to know what their office looks like and how many people work in it.

It's easy to dismiss the actions against Amazon and Apple as nuisance lawsuits but they must be taken seriously. Pundits who brushed off the patent infringement suit brought by a firm called NTP Inc. against BlackBerry vendor Research In Motion Ltd. stopped laughing after the court awarded NTP more than $53 million in damages.

Actually, if anyone has grounds for a lawsuit it's science fiction novelist Ben Bova, author of a novel entitled Cyberbooks. He published it in 1989, long before e-books were a gleam in the eyes of Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs. Here's the summary: "A futuristic satire on the fate of the publishing industry after the invention of 'cyberbooks', electronic books which eliminate the need for paper, printers, salesmen, distributors and even booksellers." Unfortunately, Bova didn't patent the gadget but wouldn't you imagine that one of the parties in these lawsuits owes him a generous tip for his foresighted concept?

In any event we'll be at ringside watching Amazon and Apple wrestling with their tormentors.

RC

Why Kindle On The iPhone Matters More Than You May Have Thought

This week, Apple quietly released Amazon's new Kindle application in their iTunes Application Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch as a free download. There was some buzz, but not a lot of amazement from the iPhone community. In the Kindle community, there weren't any big parades, either. But while it might seem superficially like Kindle is just another ebook reader for the iPhone, and one that's not as full featured as Stanza, the Amazon Kindle app is probably more important than the new Kindle 2 for the future of E-Book sales at Amazon. This is a little application that represents the future of E-Books: wirelessly syncing your purchased library across multiple devices, letting you jump from device to device as easily as possible, picking up where you left off every time. And in one day, it opened up Kindle E-Book sales to almost 20 million Apple customers.

The Amazon Kindle iPhone application can read any Kindle E-Book that you've purchased from Amazon. It uses the phone's 3G or Wi-Fi connection to connect with Amazon's "WhisperSync" network services, by using your Amazon login identity and password to look up an inventory of all the Kindle E-Books you've purchased, and it allows you to re-download any or all of them for reading on the iPhone. If you have a Kindle 2, it can synchronize where you left off reading on the Kindle when you pick it up again on your iPhone (and vice versa). iPhone users can buy Kindle E-Books using the Safari browser on their phone, or going to Amazon.com with any other device, and once the book is added to your WhisperSync Amazon E-Book inventory, you can access it on any Kindle or iPhone. And that's the trick we've all been waiting for. Allowing more than one device to keep track of Kindle books and to do reading is an Amazon service that has been a long time coming, but one that's probably going to attract many more customers to Kindle E-Books.

Platforms and Device Multiplicity

This sort of device multiplicity is the heart and soul of many popular "platform" applications, like Twitter or Facebook. User activity takes place not only on a home computer's browser, but at work, in desktop widgets, cell phones, and their netbooks or laptops. People use all sorts of methods to participate in a service, even though the experience changes from device to device. What Amazon is finally acknowledging is that E-Books are a multi-device service and that Kindle is not just a device but an E-Book platform. E-Books may be commodities, but reading is a user habit that has always required a distribution service that anticipates the creative ways readers are looking to acquire new content. Bookstores, libraries, schools, the internet. Amazon used the first Kindle device generation to build their platform's first user base and gently ease them into an E-Book service that will continue to grow.

Restricting E-Book reading to just the Kindle device was important for Amazon initially to create a small niche market of evangelist users, but it was no way to sustain long term growth for E-Book sales when the majority of E-Book readers are experimenting more and more with different platforms. Fictionwise (now a part of Barnes & Noble), who were among the first to create an E-Book service for the iPhone with the eReader software, demonstrated that E-Book platforms are successful because users read their content across many devices, and now Amazon is taking the ball and running with it. In the near future, I expect to see Kindle applications for Google Android phones and maybe even your favorite flavor of operating system (Mac, PC, or Linux).

Is it going to hurt Kindle 2 sales? Probably not. The user experience is still quite different enough on the iPhone to make the Kindle 2 much more attractive for leisurely reading, because of the larger screen size and eye-comfort of Amazon's device. Hopefully, it's going to entice people to trade-up to a Kindle device and keep investing in Kindle formatted E-Books. It's adding value to the brand and every Kindle E-Book purchase.

Growing Pains or Limitations with the Kindle on iPhone

Right now, the Kindle application for iPhone is not as full-featured as the Kindle or Kindle 2, and for good reason. Amazon doesn't want the Kindle on the iPhone to cannibalize Kindle device sales - it's got to encourage Kindle 2 sales by hinting at what you're missing. There's no dictionary look-up, text-to-voice, note-taking, store browsing, and all the other bells and whistles. And the page location (instead of page numbering in the traditional sense) is still hard to decipher for newcomers. But at least there's a scroll bar to fast-forward (albeit imprecisely) around. Quite simply, all you can do is read the text, change font sizes, jump around with a scroll bar or interior bookmarks, and sync. Compared to other E-Book software for the iPhone, this is very anemic. But maybe the most important part of the Amazon platform strategy is that Kindle on iPhone is crippled from reading non-Kindle books, because Amazon does not allow WhisperSync to carry a bookshelf of user created content, or content purchased from other sources. You're only able to read and sync your Kindle E-Books.

In January, I wrote that MobiPocket (owned by Amazon) was missing from the iPhone, even though it could have been a breakthrough, and maybe now we know why it disappeared. It was too threatening to Kindle as a platform. MobiPocket is a format that allows E-Book content to be distributed from sources other than Amazon or MobiPocket, particularly without DRM encryption. With the release of the Kindle 2, Amazon now has too much invested in the Kindle format to risk losing any Kindle compatible E-Book sales to other distributor channels, and so it has to suppress MobiPocket as best it can, or at least not offer them any free rides, if it wants to nurture Kindle E-Books. And the Kindle platform on any device has to stay consistent to this rule. Kindle for iPhone is a lot of what I wanted in a MobiPocket application, particularly WhisperSync, but even though I respect Amazon's attempt to build Kindle E-Books sales, I'm not happy that it prohibits user generated content.

Competing iPhone E-Book apps, particularly Stanza, grow in popularity because they try to be agnostic to any given platform or format. Smart readers don't like to be forced to buy from only one sales channel or stick with just one format. And pirate E-Books are also another reason why "open" E-Book reader software will continue to thrive. Although the Kindle device can read non-DRM MobiPocket files or converted texts, users are responsible for putting these files on their Kindle themselves, using USB or email transfers (or an SD memory card, if you have a first-gen Kindle). Unfortunately, there may be a very good reason Amazon keeps the system relatively difficult for non-DRM books: Amazon would be opening itself to a world of copyright hurt if WhisperSync allowed anyone to upload and store pirated material with Amazon's servers. A policed WhisperSync is very important to build Kindle E-Book sales.

Will there be a Sony Reader on the iPhone?

The competing E-Book reader devices from Sony have a much more open approach to accepting content (ePub, PDF, RTF, etc.), but now Sony will have to be more adept at sharing Sony DRM E-Book content with other devices if it's going to stay competitive with the Kindle platform. What's just as problematic is that the Sony Reader must be physically tethered to computers or memory cards to move files, which make them harder for users to manage their purchased E-Book content, and this makes wireless synchronizing like WhisperSync seem almost magical in comparison. If Sony could build their own E-Book wireless sync service that also allowed non-DRM user content to be hosted in the cloud, they would be a formidable foe to Amazon, but it remains to be seen if they can put those resources together.

The fabled end-of-the-rainbow for any E-Book platform is the ubiquity of all the content (both user generated and publisher sales) to be accessible and synchronized to as many user devices as possible, while preserving a comfortable reading experience with generous perks like note-taking, review tools, some sharing, and bonuses like custom dictionaries and writing tools. Even though it's a slow climb, we're getting there. Now that Amazon is on the iPhone, it finally looks like the biggest distributor is admitting they have the same dream, too.

- Michael Gaudet

Has Mobipocket stood up its date with the iPhone?

Although it was only alluded to once by Mobipocket in public, the Mobipocket iPhone application is potentially Amazon's best weapon for indoctrinating more Kindle customers and pulling the Mobipocket format away from obscurity. So, where is it?

At the IDPF conference in May, 2008, I watched Martin Gorner of Mobipocket state to the audience that they had plans to release the Mobipocket reader for more platforms, including the iPhone, before the end of the year. Mobipocket is tightly leashed by their owners, Amazon, so this was great news for Mobi fans. Mobipocket has never really supported any Apple OS before, and my brain enumerated the possibilities of a Mobi iPhone app. My first thought was that this could be the start of some really wonderful synergy for Amazon's Kindle, because they'd be foolish not to join forces in a new application. And besides adding Apple support, maybe they planned to really update the Mobipocket Reader software and create a user experience on par with the Kindle's user-interface or Adobe's Digital Editions.

Just imagine that you could have a similar Kindle experience on your iPhone, shopping for books wirelessly, using a built-in dictionary, taking notes, etc, and at the end of the session all your book data would be sync'd with your Kindle account and back to your Kindle (through the Kindle's wireless connection), if you had one. Amazon would sell more books, people might upgrade to Kindle devices for the larger screen real estate, and the Mobi format would really come alive, too, if its DRM was supported. It would just require Mobi and Amazon to allow readers to keep both their Mobi and Kindle purchases in the same library and allow for note/bookmark data in the cloud (on Amazon's internet servers), so that customers' libraries could be re-downloaded and synchronized across devices. Add special location aware services (via the iPhone's GPS), special note export features (for bibliographies and personal footnotes), and then I'd be impressed.

Well, by the end of 2008 this never materialized. In December, Chris Meadows of the blog TeleRead surmised that Amazon put the whole project in the deep freeze so it wouldn't undermine Kindle sales ("The mysterious case of the missing iPhone Mobipocket reader" and "Is Amazon sitting on the Mobipocket iPhone client after all?"). An anonymous source apparently told Chris that "Mobipocket had its iPhone reader complete and ready to ship as of August—but Amazon.com did not permit them to release it." That isn't hard to believe, but I hope there's more to that story. I'd like to know why. Does Apple have secret ebook plans that Amazon is aware of?

In the meanwhile, other contenders have stepped up to the plate, offering E-Book software for the iPhone that comes close to the full potential, but not without limitations. For readers who take the time learn how to crack the DRM on their purchased E-Book files, BookShelf is an iPhone application that can read Palm .PDB and Mobi .PRC files, as well sync with "Shelf Servers," which are libraries of content on the internet or on your computer (there are E-Reads' books at Baen Webscriptions' Shelf Server). And, of course, there's the popular Stanza iPhone application, that is a wireless Fictionwise storefront (with access to your Fictionwise eReader library bookshelf), as well as a terrific E-Book reader for growing ePub format. Yet despite supporting over a dozen other formats, too, eReader's .PDB is the only DRM that works with Stanza, at the very least because of Fictionwise's support.

Has Mobipocket lost too much time? It's hard to tell. E-Book sales are still ramping up across all the major platforms (Sony, Kindle, eReader). Our expectations are that iPhone readers are adding to sales, not cannibalizing from other devices. The iPhone has something that the Kindle and Mobipocket should be envious of: popular mindshare with 18-35 year-olds. Every day Mobipocket or Amazon isn't a part of that zeitgeist, it sets them as outsiders and it counts as lost revenue in the current quarter. Maybe Amazon is gambling that when they do enter Apple's market, it will make up for all their time hemming and hawing. Maybe they just don't see the money there, yet (but I doubt this). However, no one has delivered the perfect E-Book reader application for the iPhone yet, either. Let alone for Google's Android or the new Palm Pre. It's still Amazon and Mobipocket's game to win or lose. At the very least, they can sell some ebooks. They just have to show up.

- Michael Gaudet

A Fortune Awaits Discoverer of Cure for App Addiction

Apps gone wild!

If you loaded one new application per day into your iPhone, it would take at least 27 years to try them all. According to Matt Richtel and Laura M. Holson of the New York Times, over 10,000 new apps have been posted to the Apple store, generating 300 million downloads. "The new status symbol is what your phone can do — count calories, teach Spanish, simulate a flute, or fling a monkey from a tree," they write. "The popularity of such applications for Apple’s iPhone, the leader of the transformation, is driving a fierce competition among the makers of the BlackBerry and Palm devices, and even Google and Microsoft." One venture capital company thinks it's such a goldmine that it has created a $100 million fund for iPhone developers.

Naturally, our favorite is the Stanza, the free e-book reader, and we've also written about the Android-powered barcode scanner. But it's not just the thousands of wonderful, stupid, crazy, and absorbing add-ons that make the phone-omenon notable, but their convergence into one device that brings us closer to the science fiction dream of a personal slave-device that carries out our every command at the graze of a fingertip.

But like any other convenience there is a danger of addiction and even abuse. In December Joe Wilcox, author of the Apple Watch blog, put a name on a syndrome whose symptoms are all too familiar to iPhone users: Apple App Addiction. "I've casually asked about two dozen other iPhone or iPod Touch users about their devices," writes Wilcox. "Nearly all confessed to being app addicts."

It looks like Apple App Addiction is the new obesity. What are the signs you're hooked? Says Wilcox,

Can you put the devices down? Do you use them frequently throughout the day—and more frequently than you would a vanilla cell phone or music player? Do you compulsively check your e-mail, Facebook or Twitter—or other app, perhaps? In a crowded room—maybe it's a party or business meeting—do you tap, tap, tap that touchscreen?

If 'yes' is the answer to any question, you're an Apple app addict.

Wilcox describes the technique for "hooking" users that sounds exactly like the way dope dealers hook victims:

Some of these app addict dealers are smart. Tapulous gave iPhone and iPod Touch users just a taste with Tap Tap Revenge. "C`mon, it's free. Try it." The game is highly addictive, and it's got a killer soundtrack. But successors like Nine Inch Nails Revenge and Weezer Christmas cost five bucks a piece. Damn, if they're not addictive, too. That taste leads to paid addiction.

There are organizations for treating alcohol, dope, gambling and even sex addiction. But I'm not aware of an Apps Anonymous (at least not one in my community) and because of the syndrome's potential impact on workplace and school performance, it may be the deadliest of all. Wilcox says, "People ask to be buried with their cell phones," and I can personally testify to that. Not long ago I attended a funeral in which the recently departed was laid out with his beloved cell phone hooked to his belt. "It was a part of him," his widow confessed to me. "No one ever saw him without it." When I viewed the corpse I noticed a blinking light indicating the phone was on. Someone else noticed it too, because, as a macabre practical joke or maybe just to see if the deceased would pick up, they called him and his unique ringtone warbled.

The thing is, nobody laughed. It seems like the most natural thing in the world.

RC

Will Steve Jobs Eat His Words with Ketchup, Mustard or Mayo?

Perhaps Apple boss Steven Jobs' declaration that "People don't read anymore" does not rank with Neville Chamberlain's "Peace for our time" speech in 1938, just before Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. But it is not out of line to mention both in the same breath to exemplify how colossally wrong smart people can be.

Jobs made his scornful comment in response to a question about the Kindle. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.” Aside from offending every literate person in the United States, including those who read one book or less every year, Jobs appalled everybody in the e-book business. They had looked to him to do for reading books what he had done for listening to music. By implying he was not entertaining a book-reading platform for the iPhone, he slapped the collective face of the e-book business. Thwarted by his hostility to an iPhone reader, customers turned to the Kindle to fill the e-book vacuum. Jobs could not have boosted the Kindle any more effectively if he had bought a controlling share of Amazon.com.

Fortunately, a number of determined and enterprising programmers took it upon themselves to spec - or hack - a reader application for the iPhone. And even more fortunately, Jobs did not discourage them. One hopes he realized he had spoken recklessly.

Which brings us to the Stanza, Lexcycle's free e-book reader now in use on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Charlie Sorrel writes in Wired, "Stanza has been downloaded almost 600,000 times, and users are in turn downloading 50-60,000 books a day." The key to this breakthrough is a partnership between Lexcycle and the online e-book seller Fictionwise.

Aside from the satisfaction of seeing Steve Jobs proven wrong, it's also inspiring to see Fictionwise taking this initiative. We at E-Reads are big fans of Fictionwise. It is our principal e-book distributor and a major reason why this industry is beginning to thrive.

To paraphrase Neville Chamberlain, "There will be e-books for our time." No thanks to Steve Jobs.

RC

Lining Up in the Cold to Buy the New Blackberry Storm

The first thing I thought when I saw people lined up in front of the Verizon store around the corner from my office was, They're hiring temps for Christmas sales jobs. Why else would people stand twenty deep in near-freezing temperature?

Then I remembered: today was release day for the Blackberry Storm, and Verizon is the designated exclusive retail sales outlet. (Okay, so the photo isn't a Verizon store, but it got your attention.)

So, what's to line up for? Well, the Storm comes with a touch screen like the iPhone's but there the resemblance ends. The screen feels, "clickable," says Jeff Rauschert, interactive media manager for the Flint Journal. Among the other things Rauschert likes are,

• Beautiful screen resolution
• Full-size headphone jack
• Addition of "To Go" software
• Speaker sound, clarity
• 3.2 megapixel camera with video
• Robust email and messaging
• Copy and paste out of the box

Al Sacco of CIO offers eight reasons to select the Storm over the iPhone:

•Stereo Bluetooth
•Removable battery
•Expandable memory
•Digital camera, video recording
•Storm works as a tethered modem
•Touch screen provides tactile feedback
•Cut-and-paste
•Multitasking champ

Is the Storm worth losing three fingers to frostbite? Read Sacco's analysis and decide for yourself. And check out this video.

RC

E-Book Reader App for Your iPhone, At Last

Mac Life reports a promising new e-book reader designed to interface with your iPhone. Check out Ryu's Classics Collection Application. For now the demo books are all public domain classics, but if the app flies it could lead to an iPhone store for copyrighted e-books as well.

This latest development brings us closer to the day when Apple CEO Steve Jobs eats his words knocking the future of reading.

RC