News from 'The Apple Blog'

Amazon has announced a new Kindle that most bloggers are calling Kindle 3. The new device seems pretty awesome, both in features and price. It’s important that we declare both devices as winners in their own right and set some things straight for anyone calling iPad a Kindle killer or the other way around.

Kindle as a service

Kindle is a service that allows consumers to buy books from anywhere in the world as long as there is an Internet connection. Books can be purchased via any device with a modern web browser and you can read those books on any device that supports Kindle software like your Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, Android and Amazon’s own Kindle hardware.

Amazon’s strategy is different from Apple’s. Apple developed the iTunes Store as a service to drive the sales of its hardware. Kindle software and hardware was created to drive the sale of books and other downloadable content. Kindle is huge for Amazon because going digital isn’t just convenient to the consumer. It’s great for Amazon because it doesn’t have to keep a stock of books and worry about paying to ship those books and the consumer wins by having that book accessible across multiple devices instantly. All Amazon has to do is ensure its selection of books is higher and its price is lower than the competition.

Kindle and iPad finally coexisting

Until today’s announcement, Kindle as a device was scrutinized against the Apple iPad, because while you could read books on both, the iPad was only $150 more than the smaller Kindle and a few bucks more than the larger Kindle DX.

Amazon aggressively slashed prices on the device in a way that made everyone think they were just being defensive and fearful of iPad but today, that all changed.

Kindle 3 is priced at $139 (Wi-Fi only) and an International version with 3G is only $189 (3G via GSM). TechCrunch Reports:

In addition to the price and screen change, the redesigned body is 21% smaller and 15% lighter, down to about 8.5oz. If their press release is to be believed, it’s also got twice the storage (4GB) and significantly improved battery life over the old Kindle.

Kindle is priced so aggressively that true book lovers can buy the new Kindle at a price that’s simply a no brainer considering that Kindle books cost considerably less than real books and you’re saving on shipping and the pesky 3-7 days it takes for a book to arrive at your door. No longer is there a decision to make between buying a Kindle device or simply paying $150 more and having an iPad that does books and so much more.

Amazon is finally showing the industry that it doesn’t want to make millions selling Kindles. It’s about the sale of digital books.

Apple and Amazon are both winners

When you’re just talking hardware, Apple will continue to sell millions of iPads to people who want books, games, movies, apps and the web and the Kindle will continue to sell in the millions for book lovers. This is a huge win for consumers because our decision is made for us and bloggers can stop comparing both devices like they’re the same. I’ll be buying a Kindle for my sister who reads books every day and an Amazon gift card so she can buy a few books to get started. It’s a much easier gift than paying $499 for an iPad that she’ll mostly be using for books, anyway.

So who are the losers?

Basically, everyone that’s not Apple or Amazon. For now and the foreseeable future, Amazon has done a phenomenal job getting Kindle on millions of computers, phones and other handheld devices. Its goal of selling books by the truck load is working well as it just announced Kindle books are now outselling physical books after only three years. The losers are Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Sony’s E-Reader, and any other devices that don’t either work with Amazon or have their own book store. B&N has a fighting chance but Amazon’s user base of passionate book buyers will stay true to Amazon and Apple has over 100 million accounts with credit cards who will dive right in to iBooks. Sorry, but it’s clear who the winners are in the digital book sales space.

What about iBooks?

Amazon and Apple may not be competing when it comes to Kindle hardware versus iPad but they’re still competing in the book sales space. I’ve been meaning to write this for a while but I won’t buy a book via iBooks outside of the free section. The reason is that Apple hasn’t convinced me that my digital DRMed books are safe with them. In the same way that my iTunes movies and music (prior to iTunes Plus) are not playable on other hardware other than Apple’s. Amazon has displayed the right strategy that any device or platform that comes out in the future will eventually get Kindle software and those digital books I bought in 2007 will sync to that device without fail and Amazon is a large company that I trust. iBooks may win me over eventually but for price, selection and compatibility, Kindle (the service) has me hooked.

Kindle versus iPad is a dead argument. You’re both winners. No one is arguing the iPad isn’t better hardware for much more than books but that comes at a price and, even on the iPad, Kindle is just one tap away via its own app.

Related GigaOM Pro Content (subscription required): Evolution of the e-Book Market

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News from 'The Apple Blog'

When I was tasked to write a roundup of iPad blogging apps, I figured this would be the usual pros and cons of four or five apps. Instead, I found only two, one of which is specific to WordPress (see our disclosure below). Since neither of the two apps made me all that happy, the multi-app roundup I was hoping for instead became a case of “two apps enter, no app leaves.”

Blogging on the iPad is a sorry state of affairs — I’m also coming at this from the angle of a prose blog, not a photo blog. Both WordPress and BlogPress allow you to do the same basic features: type in your thoughts and press publish. Neither of the apps let you define links or format your text — you’re limited to plain style. Some of this, I am led to believe from researching other apps with the same problem (Evernote), is how restrictive Apple is on its rich text features. On the other hand, all of the Office-style apps out there let you format text, so I don’t know what’s up. What I do know is, neither of these two apps even come close to the feature set most bloggers need.

WordPress (Free)

As the official app for WordPress, it’s a sad commentary when the best I can say is, “Some of the time, it doesn’t crash. And it’s free.” A quick five minute double-check of some features yielded four crashes. It crashed inserting a picture. It crashed while canceling edits. I wouldn’t be surprised if it crashed while crashing. When I was able to successfully insert a picture, it didn’t show up in the local draft; I had to go out to the local view to see it, and even then it was just code, not a visual. You can, however, manage comments, pages, and assign categories within the WordPress App.

I was also impressed with its offline features. It cached previous posts which made it handy to reference what I’d  said about a topic.

BlogPress ($2.99)

In addition to the hearty, “It crashes less” feature, BlogPress also connects to Blogger, MSN Live Spaces, Movable Type, TypePad, Live Journal, Drupal and Joomla in addition to WordPress. If you’re not using WordPress, BlogPress is the only game in town for you. Unfortunately, it doesn’t connect to Tumblr. I had a lot more success with this app, even within my WordPress-hosted sites. For starters, the only time it crashed on me was when I connected it to Live Journal, and when I relaunched it everything was OK. Inserted pictures showed up inline where I wanted them to, and I could adjust their alignment, but not their size. I was also unable to manage comments or edit static Pages in BlogPress. Still, I found BlogPress to be worth the $2.99.

My recommendation for BlogPress is somewhat grudging. It’s not a bad app, but I’m hard pressed to find many blog posts I’ve ever written that I could do entirely in either of these apps. Almost every post has bolded or italic text, an image, and a link or two. Of those three things, both apps only let me embed the image. Unless I’m writing a rare text-only post, I’ll need the web front-end of each site to wrap up the post. Sure, the apps are good for throwing a post together on the iPad and tossing it in the online Drafts folder for later editing, but it’s pretty sad I can’t rely on either of them to start-to-finish an average blog post.

Hopefully, at some point we’ll see a better selection, as well as the ability to format text and insert links. Until then, BlogPress earns my enthusiastic “At least it sucks less than the WordPress app” seal of approval.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

News from 'The Apple Blog'

It’s been a little over a week since Apple started rolling out iAd, its new advertisement feature for iOS 4. The first ads started to appear on July 1, and come from a variety of big-name companies including Disney, Nissan and AT&T. However, for some, iAd brings up a privacy concern.

To make sure users only see ads which might interest them, Apple studies the data from their iPhones to see what the user does and doesn’t like. According to Rachel Pasqua, who is an agent working with Apple on iAds for her clients:

Apple knows what you’ve downloaded, how much time you spend interacting with applications and knows even what you’ve downloaded, don’t like and deleted.

While this is clever on Apple’s part, there are more than a few iPhone users who are bound to be worried about the safety of their information, especially after the hacking fiasco earlier this week. Luckily, Apple has provided a way to opt-out of this data collection.

As detailed in Apple’s Knowledge Base article, to opt-out, all you have to do is point your iPhone to http://oo.apple.com. You should see a “successful opt-out” message and a few bullet points giving you some information about the opt-out service. If not, Apple’s advice is to “wait a few hours and try again.”

This only works for devices running iOS 4 — you can’t opt-out on an iPad or on a desktop computer for example — and if you own more than one device, you have to opt-out on every device individually. Also note that opting-out doesn’t stop you from seeing any ads, it just stops Apple from collecting data about how you use your iPhone.

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