Gizmodo has an interesting post up on Apple’s iPhone App Store, and how it might be headed straight down the road to oblivion. Their basic take is that downward price pressure, users conditioned by iTunes to expect $1 songs and $2 TV shows, Apple recommending (and wanting) cheaper prices, high development costs with low chances for visibility, all combine to put iPhone (and iPod touch) development on the endangered species list. Further, yesterday’s announcement of in-app purchase for free apps, they argue, makes things like the Top Lists nebulous going forward.

And it doesn’t just apply to the iPhone:

don’t forget, Palm and Android fans, this App Store Effect sends ripples well beyond the App Store. Customers expect to see functionally identical apps priced the same way across platforms, because to us, that’s what makes sense. Can devs really afford to port an app to the webOS to sell to the tens of thousands of Pre owners, when they’re expected to tag it with iPhone prices, calculated for a base of millions? Whether by Apple’s design or totally by accident, everyone who doesn’t own an iPhone will suffer for it.

See their chart, above, showing the pricing differences between platforms. Some would argue the market can correct for anything. If premium developers leave in frustration, users will tire of CrApps, a premium developer will sense the voice, fill it, make a killing, and other premium developers will flock back. Others believe Apple controls the market and so it’s their job to make it as good a market for developers — and ultimately users — as possible through proper policies and procedures (BlackBerry, for example, won’t allow paid apps under $2.99 into the App World).

We’ve all discussed this a lot in the past, and no doubt will continue to discuss it moving forward, but give Giz’s article a read and let us know what you think.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Gizmodo: App Store Economy a Road to Oblivion?

Apple might be preparing a 10.7″ multi-touch iTablet with 720p resolution, running the iPhone OS, for announcement in January and release in May/June 2010. That’s just one of the rumors dropped by iLounge this morning, from a source they say was accurate about the most recent iPod nano, iPhone, and Chinese iPhone stories.

Like the iPhone and the iPod touch, iLounge’s source claims both a 3G and non-3G version will be available, so users can weigh always-on connectivity vs. another monthly telco bill.

Apple is no stranger to big product announcements in January, but since exiting Macworld, they’re also now free to set their own schedule. Possible delays? Odds of it receiving the official “b’okay” from Steve Jobs in its current form are said to be 80% (after it already being nixed at 7″ for being “too small”). That’s good, but far from certain.

Also far from certain, but certainly interesting is Microsoft’s equal and opposite tablet concept — the Courier, which focuses not on media but on journaling. Gizmodo has another video up. It reminds us of those awesome, future-filled Bill Gates keynotes from CES. Most of what Gates demoed hasn’t made it to market, however. Hopefully the Courier will fare better.

People are used to phones, they’re used to MP3 players, laptops, desktops, even set top boxes. A decade later, there’s no indication of tablets breaking through into the mainstream, so Apple, Microsoft, and everyone else has their work cut out for them.

We’ll see if the iTablet can tell a compelling enough story, and offer a feature set that sells.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iTablet to be Announced in January, Launch in Early Summer, Run iPhone OS?

Gizmodo honcho Brian Lam claims to have received a cryptic call with nebulous details on the much-rumored Apple iTablet, shedding light and casting in shadow at the same time. Highlights:

• Lam believes the source is in a position to know about the iTablet
• The source implies he or she has sat in meetings about the device
• 10 inch screen
• Looks just like a big iPhone (though that may change)
• 2 versions: with webcam and without (for education?)
• $700 – $900 price tag
• May function as secondary touchpad/screen for Macs
• OS is still big question mark
• Super-secret Lam-Googled product code name that “made sense”

So, do we know more now… or less?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Gizmodo: More (and Less) on the Apple iTablet

AT&T and other carriers subsidize the upfront cost of the iPhone and other smartphones and make up the difference via guaranteed long term contracts/commitments. That’s their business model, but it means they can’t and won’t give repeated subsidies until you’ve finished the associated contract terms. With many iPhone 3G owners — still under contract — eyeing the iPhone 3G S, and the non-subsidized price it brings with it, a fair amount of anger has been plasma-cannoned in AT&T’s monstrous direction.

Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz, however, gives a nasty spoonful of reality medicine to those of us who bought heavily subsidized iPhones last year, and are upset we can’t get the same subsidy again this year:

The fact is that the $199/$299 price tag for the iPhone is the result of AT&T’s—or any other carrier, since the situation is the same all around the world—subsidy. Without subsidy—and tying you to a new two year contract—the iPhone is not different from something like the Nokia N97, which is $700 unlocked. Or the contract-free, unsubsidized iPhone 3G itself: The iPhone 3G costs $770 and $877 unlocked for the 8 and 16GB versions.

He goes on to kick the telcos heartily in their nether-regions as well, pointing out their exorbitant monthly charges, but takes issue with the sense of “entitlement” in modern consumer culture.

If you don’t like it? His advice is to not buy the new iPhone 3G S and wait until next year when you can get a subsidy.

(I’m locked into a 3 year contract which currently has an early termination fee of ~$500, so I feel that pain…)

And in the mean time?

do the rest of the world a favor and stop whining about what you are entitled to. We don’t live in your pretty me me me ME world.

NB: Delayed MMS deployment and lack of anything approaching information on tethering, however — totally AT&T hate worthy…

[Via Daring Fireball]

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Gizmodo to AT&T Upgrade “Whiners”: You Got Your Subsidy Last Year

We can’t use the picture Gizmodo used to headline their post, so we’re retreating beneath the wholesome banner of Megan Fox for this one (blink blink). Suffice it to say, mixing and matching from their Gawker Media heritage, Gizmodo asks the adult-content question:

Can the new OS make the iPhone the best sexual toy ever?

Exploring the new iPhone SDK’s rumble API, along with peer-to-peer, voice, proximity sensor, and other freshly unveiled functionality, they get as close to porny with it as possible before retreating to the scholarly comfort of Dr. Debby Herbenick, who inspired by one of their previous posts, offers them her iPhone sex guide (also NSFW) in return.

It’s doubtful what exactly would make it through the App Store approval process, but hey, we’re sure iBackMassagerWeSwear is already in the pipeline, right?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone After Dark: Gizmodo Goes Wild (NSFW-AC)

Gizmodo is running a series of posts highlighting the evolution of various technologies in honor of the birthday of Charles Darwin, who many years ago realized one thing killing another thing wasn’t mean, but was the reason we all now have fast cars and hot tubs (or something like that, I texted my way through bio).

Coming as no surprise to any regular reader of this book, the chart Gizmodo chose clearly shows the original mega-cell phones giving way to Moto’s StarTac, the PalmOS Treo, the blue BlackBerry, and finally the new king of jungle, the iPhone 3G.

How utterly appropriate.

Happy birthday Darwin, and sorry frenemies, but like dinosaurs and Jurassic Park movies, and mullets, nature gave you your shot, and is now selecting you for extinction.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Thursday Fun: Gizmodo Wishes Darwin a Happy Birthday Via iPhone Natural Selection

We should start a new “Gizmodo iPhone Concept Art” category, because it seems like Jesus Diaz is throwing up one of these a week, each equal parts smart and silly in their own way. This week’s version doesn’t light my design regions on fire, but the idea of built in video iChat, compatible with desktops — even with the Google Maps/CoreLocation chrome tossed in — is very much “me want”.

What do you think? I love the MacBook Air look, but in an iPhone? And is Mobile iChat definitely a must-drool feature?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Gizmodo: Another Next Gen iPhone Concept — MacBook Air Inspired

Last time Gizmodo gave us their version of an iPhone iSlider form factor. We. Didn’t. Want. It. Now they’re back with a compromise: a modular iPhone that could accept, among other things, a snap-on keyboard iClamshell.

Eh. Still doesn’t strike us as something elegant enough for Apple to consider releasing, though as a 3rd party accessory (if they can get both SDK and dock licensing in order), it would likely make many people happy. (Still not us, though, we loves the multi-touch and truly, deeply, strongly believe the era of on-device hardware keyboards is over).

It’s your opinions that matter most, however, so let us know if this is something you’d like to see, first party or third, and what form you’d most like to see it in.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Forget the iSlider Keyboard, Howsabout the iPhone iClamshell?!

Form-factor-palooza continues! During the iPhone Round Robin, our best frenemy CrackBerry Kevin spoke extensively about his desire for an iPhone Pro:

know a big part of the iPhone philosophy is to keep it simple, but sometimes it doesn’t hurt to be a little more complicated, and luckily, tagging a product with “Pro” at the end covers the reduced intuitiveness of a professional device. At the bottom of the iPhone is a single home button. How about we toss a little Apple key to the left of it? Maybe when you hit that button you could get a few basic functions to pop up on the display… maybe like copy and paste? While we’re at it, let’s add a little back button to the right of that home key. The lack of a back key on the iPhone is one of my BIGGEST irks of all – you have to learn within each app the correct way to tap “back” to a previous menu (time waster). The most unified/simplistic means of getting back is via a back button. I know this is something that even iPhone fans (Rene, I’m looking at you) would like to see. Maybe add the ability to edit office docs natively – it’s not something one typically does on a smartphone all that often (more likely to view than to edit), but sometimes “Pro” users do have to make changes on the go. And last but not least, give it a flashing red light. In other words, make it more like a BlackBerry!

Seems he’s not alone, though Gizmodo certainly takes it to another level entirely: enter the slider! (Or re-enter, as we heard rumors of the iSlider back in July…) It’s not TiPb’s cup of tea. We’re still predicting an iPhone HD, but sans-slider. We highly doubt it’s something Apple would ever consider either, but we’re sure it would appeal to at least some of the HTC Pro/G1 crowd.

What do you think? Does the iPhone need it a big @$$ keyboard for 2009?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Who Wants an iPhone “Pro” Slider for New Year?

UPDATED AGAIN: Pastebud founder, Jed Schmidt, via the comments, directs us back to Technologizer (see link below) for his update on what was happening:

I’ve updated this issue over at Get Satisfaction[1], but let me just summarize what exactly was going wrong: you were inadvertently forwarding your emails not to your secret pastebud address, but to the address set as the from address for these emails, which was noreply@pastebud.com.

This happened to other folks too; instead of sending email to secret-random-string@pastebud.com, they were sending to noreply@pastebud.com. And everyone who was doing this ended up sharing the same clipboard.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that we’ve fixed it, and the changed will be live by the morning.

PREVIOUS UPDATE/PRIVACY WARNING: Technologizer is showing that they’re getting other people’s clipboard data in their paste results, including complete emails:

Pastebud’s site addresses security, and says it’s “safe enough” for general use. Based on my experience so far, I think not! But I don’t know if I’m running into some bizarre quirk or doing something wrong, or if this is happening to everyone who’s trying Pastebud as I speak. I just know that I’ve come to the conclusion that using a Web service as a substitute for a feature that should be in a device’s OS may not be such a great idea after all.

This might be a temporary glitch on the server side, but it’s a very disturbing glitch and one that might just be a deal-breaker for the security and privacy concerned.

Original post after the break…

We mentioned Pastebud yesterday, the bookmarklet based cut/copy paste “solution” that’s trying to plug one of the longest and most glaring omission in the iPhone feature set. Well, Gizmodo and fellow Gawker-site Lifehacker has given it the hands on look see, and what did they find? Giz says:

Pasting text back into another web form via the PASTE bookmarklet is easy—after tapping it, a green box labeled PASTE HERE is overlaid onto any open form field. Tapping that drops in your clipboard’s contents, preserving any HTML that was there if the form supports it. But, of course, there are some drawbacks. While pasting to and from different Safari windows and emails covers a lot of one’s copying and pasting needs, it’s not anywhere close to the convenience a system-wide solution would bring.

Lifehacker weighs in with:

One small issue, though, at least for those who don’t pay $5 to Pastebud—it inserts a little “Pasted from my iPhone!” and promotion link in every paste. You can delete it, of course, but it’s there every time… And once your text arrives, you get a little pop-up box, asking you to upgrade for $5 to “make it even more convenient”

Need more incentive to cough up the $5? LH says SSL, destroy-on-paste, and other security concerns will be soon addressed in the paid version.

Enough for now? Still not good enough? Waiting on a built-in solution from Apple? Or forget Apple, gimme whatcha got?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

UPDATED AGAIN: Gizmodo and Lifehacker Go Hands On with Pastebud Copy/Paste for iPhone