“‘There’s never been anything like this experience for mobile software,’ Freeverse’s Ian Lynch Smith says of the App Store boom. ‘This is the future of digital distribution for everything: software, games, entertainment, all kinds of content,’” Jenna Wortham reports for The New York Times.

“As the App Store evolves from a kitschy catalog of novelty applications into what analysts and aficionados describe as a platform that is rapidly transforming mobile computing and telephony, it is changing the goals and testing the patience of developers, bolstering sales of the Apple motherships the applications ride upon — the iPhone and iPod Touch — and causing Apple’s competitors to overhaul their product lines and business models,” Wortham reports. “It even threatens to open chinks in Apple’s own corporate armor.”

“Thanks in large part to the iPhone, introduced in 2007, and the App Store, which opened its doors last year,smartphones have become the Swiss Army knives of the digital age,” Wortham reports. “They provide a staggering arsenal of functions and tools at the swipe of a finger: e-mail and text messaging, video and photography, maps and turn-by-turn navigation, media and books, music and games, mobile shopping, and even wireless keys that remotely unlock cars.”

Wortham reports, “‘Apple changed the view of what you can do with that small phone in your back pocket,’ says Katy Huberty, a Morgan Stanley analyst. ‘Applications make the smartphone trend a revolutionary trend — one we haven’t seen in consumer technology for many years… The iPhone is changing our behavior. The game that Apple is playing is to become the Microsoft of the smartphone market.’”

Full article here.

Source: MacDailyNews

“Apple has rejected an app advertising the Motorola Droid, according to reports,” MacNN reports.

“Called iDroid, the app has only one function, which is to imitate the glowing red eye of the Droid while linking to promotional material,” MacNN reports. “Unlike some other more prominent rejections, the iDroid case is believed to be clear-cut, since the app promotes” Verizon’s latest pretend iPhone.

MacNN theorizes that the app is just “a simple attempt at gaining publicity, much in the way that groups like PETA rely on controversy from banned TV ads.”

Full article here.

Source: MacDailyNews

Apple opens its newest retail store on New York’s Upper West Side on Saturday, November 14 at 10:00 a.m. Set beneath a breathtaking all-glass arched roof, the street level of the Apple Store Upper West Side will offer more Macs, iPods and iPhones than any store in the world and feature the largest area ever created by Apple for personal training and technical support, including a 45-foot Genius Bar.

Apple opens its newest retail store on New York’s Upper West Side on Saturday, November 14 at 10:00 a.m. Set beneath a breathtaking all-glass arched roof, the street level of the Apple Store Upper West Side will offer more Macs, iPods and iPhones than any store in the world and feature the largest area ever created by Apple for personal training and technical support, including a 45-foot Genius Bar.

Apple today announced that developers have created over 100,000 apps for the App Store, the largest applications store in the world. iPhone and iPod touch customers in 77 countries can choose from an incredible range of apps in 20 categories, including games, business, news, sports, health, reference and travel. App Store users have downloaded well over two billion apps, continuing to make it the world’s most popular applications store.

Apple today announced that more than two billion apps have been downloaded from its revolutionary App Store, the largest applications store in the world. There are now more than 85,000 apps available to the more than 50 million iPhone and iPod touch customers worldwide and over 125,000 developers in Apple’s iPhone Developer Program. “The App Store has reinvented what you can do with a mobile handheld device, and our users are clearly loving it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.

People are hooked, and so are you. Even our grandparents are enjoying Facebook. And there’s new reason to get hooked even more with Facebook – its app 3.0 version can be accessed now through iphone.

Tech Crunch’s Jason Kincaid wrote that the new application brings a slew of new features, making it what may be the most useful app on the App Store (be sure to read this post) for our full review. Among the additions are Events, which have frustratingly been omitted from previous versions. Now you’ll be able to look up where your Events are, and you can also respond to them and see which of your friends are attending (for anyone who has ever had to boot up the web version of the site just to look up an Event address, this is a big deal). You can also post video directly to the site if you have an iPhone 3GS — a feature that will likely see the number of videos on Facebook increase dramatically.

Smaller changes include a News Feed that more closely reflects the feed you’ll find on the main Facebook site, as well as the ability to “Like” items your friends have created.

One feature that users will be missing is Push Notifications, which we suspect will be rolled out in version 3.1, which Hewitt is already working on. There will also be support for landscape mode in the upcoming release, and we may also see support for the ability to watch Facebook videos from the phone (right now you can only upload them).

It’s worth noting that the 11 day wait since Facebook originally submitted the application was enough to raise Hewitt’s ire (and justifiably so), leading him to condemn the App Store approval process and call for its removal entirely. I couldn’t agree with him more.

Continue reading “Update your Facebook 3.0 account conveniently wherever you go, thanks iPhone” »