TechnoCloud

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!

HarperCollins is the latest publisher to say that it will delay the eBook verions of some of its new titles. From next year the News Corp-owned publisher will delay the online release of five to 10 new books each month for between four weeks and six months.

This will give it a chance to sell hardback copies of new releases at far higher prices than the $9.99 that most new eBooks cost.

This raises several questions. Will readers wait for the eBook version leading to less critical mass in the sales charts and less visibility? And will having no eBook at the critical launch time hurt overall sales, given Amazon’s incredible stat now that according to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos:

“For every 100 copies of a physical book we sell, where we have the Kindle edition, we will sell 48 copies of the Kindle edition.”

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?

With an awful pun worthy of this blog, UMG are releasing an iPhone app, Mariah Carey-Oke.

Fans get to sing along to four of the her songs and are awarded points if they match her vocals - Singstar in an app, an interesting way to tie in the iPhone’s microphone functionality.

In addition, the app includes news and tour information, as well as integration with Twitter and Facebook, and links to buy songs from iTunes. It costs $3.99 in the US a premium on the cost of purchasing the songs through iTunes, but is as yet unavailable in the UK.

Low budget horror ‘Paranormal Activity’ from Paramount Pictures has been using events website Eventful’s ‘Demand It’ feature to market the film.

‘Demand It’ uses social networks to build local and national demand for the likes of films, musicians and plays. This has helped Paranormal Activity to increase its original release to just 200 cinemas to a nationwide US release after reaching 1 million ‘demands’ for the film.

Of course crowdsourcing demand for content is nothing new, with a number of innovations in the music industry to allow fans to make micropayments to invest in getting a new album produced. All the same, the 1m figure is notable for its scale and shows the power of social networks and the internet to find an audience.

See what’s in demand here.

Google has made concessions to publishers by scaling back some of its plans to digitise millions of out-of-print works from US libraries.

Google is nearing a book deal in the US with publishers and writers. The number of books it will digitise has come down by 60%, following the exclusion of most foreign language books, although books by UK, Australian and Canadian authors held in US libraries will be part of the programme unless the authors or publishers opt out. Furthermore, the service will only be available in the US.

According to Paul Aiken of the US Authors Guild: “Amazon (through its Kindle) has 90% of the e-book market in the United States, and 75% of the online print book market - Google has roughly 0%. Google entering the market for out-of-print books just isn’t going to change the equation.”

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.

YouTube’s latest experiment at live broadcasting, the decidedly A-list U2 concert from the Rose Bowl attracted a broadcast size audience of 10m. Given its premium content, it’s too early to say whether this is a tipping point for internet video or indeed YouTube’s live broadcasting ambitions, but nonetheless it’s an impressive figure.

The concert was made available to 187 countries, including China, North Korea and Iran, with a third of the 10m viewers based in the US.