TechnoCloud

You might be surprised to hear that the second biggest app store after Apple’s App Store is in fact, Getjar, a cross-platform aggregator of apps. It has over 50k apps on offer across 97% of phones and has had close to 1bn downloads of free and paid apps. It benefits from confusion over app availability and discovery and makes its money through referral fees from the app publisher.

Over 70% of its downloads are Java apps, with Nokia’s Symbian second with 12%.

According to Gartner’s latest set of predictions, by 2013 more people will be able to access the web from mobile phones than from PCs. The company reckons that there will be 1.78 billion PCs in use that year, outstripped by the 1.82 billion install base of Smartphones and browser-equipped feature phones.

With the user experience challenges of a small screen and with other phones yet to catch the iPhone in terms of web usage, it could still be a while until the majority of the web is consumed on mobile devices, but it’s nonetheless an eye-catching statistic.

The future of the web is looking mobile.

As Apple passed another milestone in mobile with 3 billion app downloads, Google stepped up its competition in the Smartphone market with the launch of its Nexus One phone. Obviously, this uses Google’s Android operating system, also in use on an increasing number of handsets, including the much hyped Droid phone from Motorola.

The phone is initially sold directly from a Google website, with consumers able to choose their preferred operator for the $529 device (a $179 2 year T-Mobile USA deal is also available, more coming soon including Vodafone in Europe).

But is it an ‘iPhone killer’? It’s certainly close in size and shape to the iPhone and boasts finer screen resolution and a removable battery, plus a number of innovations including free GPS navigation. However, with a still limited Android app store and no bundled ‘iTunes’ equivalent, the iPhone may well still have more of its nine lives to use up…

A couple of weeks ago, a terrible thing happened to my favourite gadget. Yes, I dropped my iPhone in a sink full of water.

Initially all looked fine and it worked as normal. However, the next morning the water that had penetrated the phone started to corrode its components and the Home button stopped working.

The rest of the iPhone worked as normal, quite an achievement after a full immersion in water.

An iPhone app developer suggested putting the phone in a bowl of brown rice to draw out the moisture. Worth a try if you can do it straight away, but unfortunately the Home button was too far gone in my case.

The beauty of the iPhone is the simplicity of its user interface, with the touchscreen requiring only two addition buttons. Of course the drawback is when one of these buttons stops working you are in trouble.

My iPhone had passed its one year warranty date, so Apple were unable to replace it for free. My phone contract only had a few weeks to run, so it seemed too expensive to buy a replacement for a few weeks only when a lower priced subsidised device was on its way, particularly as I was looking to upgrade to a 3GS.

Over time, I’ve learned how to use an iPhone without the Home button:

- Move from app to app, as most apps allow you to open at least the browser (especially ‘terms and conditions’ usually contain hyperlinks). Email contains hyperlinks which open the browser. Contacts and Calendar allow you to put in a URL which opens the browser. Open a ‘purchase app’ link within the browser and then download a free app and you are back to the starting point (or incorrectly enter your password to avoid downloading lots of unwanted apps).

- Of course, some apps are dead ends. In this case, you have to restart your phone.

- If the phone gets stuck on the Apple loading screen (about 1 in 5 times for me), then you have a problem. As you need the Home button to force a restart you have to wait for the power to run down. Fortunately, the loading screen uses up lots of power, so it normally powers down within a day. The trick is not to fully charge the phone, so you don’t wait all day if this happens.

- And most importantly of all… Don’t drop your iPhone in water!

Time’s gadget of the year may well have been the Droid Android phone, but the iPhone still retains its place as my gadget of the year.

However, for all the iPhone’s improvements in graphics, the PSP Go gets special mention for delivering high end gaming experience on a handheld. The iPhone has been great for snacking, but the PSP remains my leading device for mobile game feasting!

Small fry to The Sun, which reckons it’s been the UK’s best handheld for the last 40 years with this wonderful parody of Apple’s iPhone advertising.

Spotify’s premium music service, which includes its offline playlists, is coming to the Symbian operating system (owned by Nokia).

The new version mainly supports Nokia phones, including popular models like the 5800 XpressMusic and E72, but also supports Samsung’s Omnia HD and Sony Ericsson’s new Satio.

The premium service, £9.99 a month, is already available on iPhone and Android phones.

What would be very interesting to see would be the take-up to date on their iPhone and Android offers, as I’ve yet to see any figures. With tendency to pay on mobile higher than on desktop internet, and the offline playlists a valuable feature to those accessing the service on a mobile, can mobile be the tipping point to monetising their service?

Google has announced an agreement to acquire AdMob, the mobile ad network and technology provider, for $750 million in stock.

The move increases further Google’s share of the advertising market after 2007’s key acquisition of DoubleClick and the mobile market after the launch of its rapidly growing operating system, Android. With mobile advertising still in its infancy and lagging behind the growth in media consumption on mobile devices (as we saw with the desktop internet), this gives Google a significant early share of the market both in terms of ad volumes and ad technologies.

Condé Nast are repurposing the entire December issue of GQ, with the same ads and articles, into an iPhone app. The app will be launched the same day the print issue will appear and will be priced at $2.99, two dollars less than the print version.

The app will also include e-commerce, audio and video functions. Turned sideways, the iPhone displays the magazine in its traditional print layout. Users can flip through pages sequentially and zoom in and out of each page. As the app is a full replica of the magazine, it will count towards its ABC paid circulation figures.

iPhone users generally view ads in paid apps unfavourably, so it will be interesting to see the consumer reaction to largely a print business model and content (newsstand, plus ads) on the iPhone.

Another week, another Spotify business model, this time a bundled subscription to Spotify’s premium service on HTC’s Hero Android Smartphone which is available on the UK’s 3 network. For a £35 a month tariff, plus a £99 fee (similar to iPhone pricing), users get two years of Spotify’s premium service included in the deal.

They may have their work cut out after leaked figures emerged for Nokia’s similar ‘Comes with Music’ service indicating they had only signed up 107,000 customers since their January launch, albeit on a less impressive handset.

Just when you thought app stores could not appear on anything else, it seems ‘The Ultimate Driving Machine’ wouldn’t be complete without its own app store. The BMW app store is just a concept for now, but the apps on offer covered the likes of multimedia travel guides, games and inevitably social networks.

So, if your gadget-obsessed friend updates their status with ‘crashing into a hedge’ you know why…