His company, Gogii, produces the TextPlus app for the iPhone, which lets folks send text messages free, bypassing the phone network. It has been downloaded more than 5 million times.

The iPad, a 9.7-inch touch-screen computer that Apple touts as a multimedia e-reader and mobile Web surfer, is set to launch April 3, starting at $499. It is an understatement to say that Lahman, and thousands of other developers who created programs for the iPhone, are excited about the possibilities. “If there ever was a space to do some land-grabbing in, this is it,” says Lahman, Gogii’s CEO.

Since Apple (AAPL) launched the iPhone in 2007, developers have created some 150,000 software applications, or apps, which have been downloaded 2 billion times. They range from free, ad-supported text-message workarounds like Gogii’s, to games, restaurant locators, music services and GPS location assistance. While most will work fine on the iPad, developers are racing to optimize existing apps to take advantage of the larger screen, or to dream up new ones.

The iPhone spawned a $1 billion-a-year industry for app developers, says analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray. He predicts first-year sales of 2.7 million iPads, compared with 4 million iPhones in the first year. The iPhone has grown to become a third of Apple’s business, says Munster. The iPad has the potential to represent 10% to 15% of Apple’s annual revenue by 2012, he says.

“The iPad isn’t a phone,” says Munster. “It’s a different animal.”

But for developers, even if the iPad sells only 1 million units in the first year, it still represents a huge market that’s either an add-on to the existing iPhone market or an all-new one.

“I’d rather be in early than sit back and wait and let my competitors get early traction,” says Ken Willner, CEO of Zumobi, a Seattle-based developer of ad-supported apps for big media brands including MSNBC and Today. “It’s a larger device, so it’s better for advertising.”

Sure, the iPad will have a smaller audience initially, he says, but so-called early adopters are “much more engaged.” Zumobi will have a revamped app for Motor Trend magazine ready at launch.

Consumers who have bought apps for their iPhones, or the iPod Touch, will not pay extra to access them on an iPad. But an app will appear in the smaller, 3-inch mode with a big black border unless the developer optimizes it for the larger screen. This presents developers with new opportunities.

“This is the iPhone moving into the living room,” says Bart Decrem, CEO of Tapulous. Its Tap Tap Revenge is one of the iPhone’s most popular games, with 25 million downloads. “In the short term, it’s an extension of the iPhone. In the long term, it’s a brand-new platform that will move eyeballs off gaming consoles and laptops.”

A simulating experience
Before the iPhone, creating software for mobile devices meant dealing with the Big 4 U.S. wireless companies — AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint and T-Mobile— and hoping to break in with an app that would give the wireless carrier 50% of the cut.

Apple made a more generous offer for the iPhone. Developers create the software and submit it to Apple for approval for sale in the iTunes Store. Apple keeps 30% and handles administration duties, while the developer gets 70%.

The challenge for developers for the iPad: creating something for a device they can’t yet hold in their hands.

Apple is notoriously secretive, and with a few exceptions, has not released advance copies of the iPad for developers. Instead, they have to download simulation software from Apple’s website.

Developer Ge Wang, whose start-up Smule has created two multimillion-selling hits for the iPhone, has pre-ordered seven iPads and hopes they’re delivered on April 3. But he’s going to stand in line at his local Apple Store as well, just to be sure.

“The emulator is pretty close, but there are some things we just can’t do with it,” he says. “Once we have the iPad in our hands, we can access the physical touch surface, and for us that will be huge.”

Alex Peters and her team at Melbourne, Australia-based Firemint are going to extreme lengths to get their hands on an iPad to try to adapt Flight Control for the iPad. The iPad won’t go on sale in Australia until May at the earliest. So Peters is working with a local Aussie who’s flying to New York to buy as many iPads as he can.

Gogii’s Lahman says he was watching online when Apple announced the iPad, after weeks of rumors, at an event in San Francisco on Jan. 27. His initial thought: “I just lost another 200 hours of sleep for the next two months.”

He and his team downloaded the emulation software and have spent the last two months writing software code to adapt TextPlus for the iPad, adding pictures and other graphics to take advantage of the bigger screen.

Still, he has several iPads on pre-order and, like Wang, will also brave the lines at the Apple Store on April 3, because “You just don’t know until you get your hands on it how it’s really going to work.”

Fuel for tablets?

Tablet computers, despite previous attempts by Apple and by Microsoft and its partners, including Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba, have never caught on. As independent analyst Rob Enderle says, a tablet’s “too big to carry around with you.”

Faster, cheaper processing power, better software and improved colorful touch-screens have convinced manufacturers that the tablet’s time may finally have come. Lenovo and HP both have new tablets in the works for later in the year, and start-up JooJoo has one, as well.

While Apple CEO Steve Jobs calls the iPad “magical” and “revolutionary,” it will lack some hardware and software features found on any Windows computer.

Like the iPhone, the iPad doesn’t support Adobe’s Flash software, which is used to watch most online video. That mean videos at popular sites such as Hulu and ComedyCentral.com can’t be viewed, and neither can videos at thousands of other websites that rely on Flash.

Additionally, the iPad doesn’t have slots for common computer add-ons, such as, say, a USB flash drive or external hard drive. If you want to import your own video clips, for instance, you’re out of luck, unless you first put them in Apple’s iTunes software and transfer them from the computer, or figure a way to move them via the Web.

No Flash, no available slots, too big to fit into a pocket: Those are huge drawbacks, Enderle says.

“Developers are spending a lot of time hoping the iPad is going to be huge,” he says. “If they’re wrong, and Apple has guessed wrong, then they’ve just wasted a ton of time and money on a platform that fell. I’d focus on the iPhone. It’s not going anywhere.”

Try telling that to Tim Westergren, chief strategy officer for online radio service Pandora.

The iPhone turned the struggling, unprofitable Pandora into a company with $50 million in revenue last year. The Pandora app has seen 15 million downloads, and 70% of Pandora’s off-PC listening now comes from the iPhone.

Westergren believes anyone who underestimates the iPad is betting wrong.

“My instinct says this is the kind of device you don’t understand until you’ve held it and used it,” he says. “I see it as way more than an e-reader that brings books to life. It’s a people’s computer.”

When Jobs unveiled the iPad in January, he showcased it by showing an optimized version of The New York Times, taking advantage of the big iPad screen. Columns could be merged and adjusted, and videos could come to life.

Magazine publisher Condé Nast recently introduced an iPhone app for its GQ magazine, offering monthly issues for $1.99 a pop, and is working on optimized iPad versions that take advantage of the larger screen for GQ, Wired, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Glamour.

Pending Apple’s approval, it hopes to have the April issue of GQ available for sale on the iPad, with pricing to be announced.

USA TODAY will have an iPad app available on April 3. It will be free for the first 90 days, sponsored by Courtyard by Marriott. After that, USA TODAY will announce subscription pricing.

National Public Radio, meanwhile, saw a “tenfold” increase in its mobile traffic with the iPhone, says Kinsey Wilson, senior vice president, so it’s a natural that it wants to be on board with a newly optimized app for the iPad. He sees the iPad as another opportunity “to extend the listening day.”

To make sure that listeners get to hear NPR on their iPads, NPR had to take extra steps. NPR uses Flash to stream audio on its website, and because Apple doesn’t work with Flash, NPR has optimized its website to recognize iPad users, switching to a different software platform to present audio.

“This is the biggest challenge we faced, but one worth undertaking,” says Wilson. “The experience Apple is creating with touch navigation is one we think is going to be important, and we want to be there at the opening bell.”

Wilson, and the thousands of other iPad developers, will find out in two weeks if it pays to be early.

Resource:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2010-03-24-ipadapps24_CV_N.htm

LAS VEGAS—Sprint Nextel CEO Dan Hesse announced a 4G-capable smartphone, the HTC Evo 4G, during a high-profile presentation at the CTIA Wireless 2010 conference on March 23. Boasting that it would take multimedia to “a whole new level,” Hesse demonstrated the device, which boasts a 4.3-inch capacitive touch-screen and the Google Android 2.1 operating system, for media and analysts.

The HTC Evo 4G will apparently make its debut during the summer. “It’s a fast device with a 1GHz Snapdragon processor,” Hesse told the audience. “It’s a terrific smartphone, even in 3G markets.” The device incorporates two cameras: an 8-megapixel module with auto-focus and an HD-capable camcorder, and a front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera.

Hesse then introduced Peter Chou, CEO of HTC, who explained that HTC and Sprint had been working on the project hand-in-hand with Google since May 2008 to deliver what he described as “the world’s first fully integrated 4G consumer handset.”

Chou continued: “I think the Evo 4G gives a clear indicator of how mobile broadband experience is starting to move beyond the fixed-line broadband experience by what it offers in terms of local and personal relevance.” The HTC Evo 4G plays into that as a “holistic video and multimedia experience. As you know, the mobile video experience hasn’t been really embraced yet due to network speed limitations.”

As with other smartphones making their debut at CTIA, including the Samsung Galaxy S, the HTC Evo 4G will include a substantial social-networking element, aggregating content from a variety of services such as Twitter, Facebook and Flickr into a continually updated “flow.” Unlike some smartphones being shown at the conference, including Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 Series devices, the HTC Evo 4G will apparently provide Adobe Flash support.

Sprint made a limited number of HTC Evo 4G devices available to analysts and members of the press following the executive presentations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the smartphones feel and operate very much like the Nexus One and HTC Droid Eris.

Sprint 4G capability is currently available in 27 markets, with plans to expand into Houston, Boston, Washington, D.C., New York City and San Francisco by the end of 2010.

Sprint has been working to ease its subscriber loss over the past few quarters, an effort helped by its recent acquisition of Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile USA. On Feb. 10, the company reported that it had lost a net 148,000 subscribers during the fourth quarter of 2009, better than the 545,000 who apparently left the network during the third quarter.

At the same time, the company has also been working to narrow its financial losses, which totaled $980 million for the fourth quarter—an improvement, nonetheless, over the $1.6 billion that had been lost during the same quarter a year earlier.

With that sort of financial pressure bearing down, Sprint has been gambling that users will be drawn to the prospect of a 4G network, with plans to invest an addition $1 billion into Clearwire’s WiMax 4G technology. Intel, Comcast, Time Warner and Bright House Networks have plans to contribute another $500 million to that effort.

Resource:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Sprint-Announces-HTC-Evo-4G-Emphasizing-Multimedia-735848/

LAS VEGAS—Samsung unveiled a Google Android smartphone, the Galaxy S, at the CTIA Wireless conference on March 23. In keeping with the trend of multimedia-capable smartphones, Samsung also revealed that it had partnered with companies such as Skiff and Paramount Pictures to bring content such as ebooks and movies to the Galaxy S at an unannounced later date, possibly when the device itself rolls out in summer 2010.

During a presentation at the Las Vegas Convention Center, images of the Galaxy S flashed on a massive screen as Samsung executives discussed the capabilities of the slim touch-screen device, which has a form factor reminiscent of the Apple iPhone or HTC Droid Eris. Social networking for consumers was emphasized, including Samsung’s Social Hub, which integrates the user’s various social networks into a single interface.

The Galaxy S has Super AMOLED technology, which the company says makes its 4-inch screen 20 percent brighter, with 80 percent less sunlight reflection and 20 percent more battery life. The smartphone runs Android 2.1 and is powered by a 1GHz processor.

During the presentation, a partnership was announced with Skiff, a company dedicated to optimizing e-reader content for smartphones. A project developed by Hearst, which also unveiled a Skiff Reader device at January’s Consumer Electronics Show, Skiff’s lineup of e-periodicals apparently includes Hearst publications such as Esquire along with outside properties such as The New York Times.

Paramount and Samsung are also apparently preparing movie-related content for the Galaxy S and other phones in the upcoming S Series.

Samsung’s global share of the mobile device market was 20.1 percent in 2009, up from 16.7 percent in 2008. In 2009, it shipped more than 200 million devices.

“Touchphone models were the key to Samsung’s high-end growth in 2009, but we expect the vendor to switch some of its focus to Bada/Android smartphones and the Samsung Apps initiative in 2010,” Neil Mawston, a Strategy Analytics analyst, wrote in a Jan. 29 report. That report placed Samsun behind worldwide market leader Nokia, but ahead of LG and other handset makers.

Samsung’s mobile-device lineup also includes its upcoming E60 e-reader, which will access Barnes & Noble’s ebook store and utilize the bookseller’s ebook lending feature. The 5-inch Samsung device will use either a PC connection or built-in WiFi for book downloading, as opposed to the 3G connection utilized by other popular e-readers such as Amazon.com’s Kindle or Barnes & Noble’s Nook. The E60 will sell for $299.

Resource:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Samsung-Reveals-Google-Android-Phone-The-Galaxy-S-380874/

When the 3.0 version of the iPhone operating system came out, it added background notification, but through a server-based push mechanism that only gives developers a few capabilities for sending notifications to phones. It’s not true background processing like you have on a computer or on other smartphones. An advantage to the Apple scheme, though, is that a rogue background app can’t keep the phone powered-up constantly, draining battery life, or opening security holes. Power can be a big problem with poorly written background apps on Android in particular, where apps that keep the GPS system powered up can reduce battery life on a phone to unacceptable levels.

But these three products at Demo show that it’s time for Apple to get off the stick and figure out the background problems like power management and security. Developers will continue to build cool apps on other platforms, and pull users to them, until it does.

Phone Halo is a service that keeps you from losing your keys or money clip by monitoring when its Bluetooth fobs go out of range. The only way it can work is for a background process on the phone to be monitoring the Bluetooth system. It works on the Blackberry and Android OS, but not on the iPhone.

Ambit Control is a monitoring system for smartphones (or spyware, if you wish) that parents install on their kids’ devices. It tells you what the kids are doing on the phone: who they’re calling and texting, what apps they’re installing and running, and so on. Again, it’s an Android app. You can’t do anything like this on an iPhone.

Motoriety is an automotive-monitoring product that collects data from a Bluetooth sensor in the car as well as usage and location data from the phone itself to keep you driving safely and keep you up-to-date on your car’s health. It could, theoretically, work fine as a foreground process, but the concept falls apart if you can’t use your phone for anything else (like making phone calls) when the app is running. So it needs a background process. It’s being released first for Windows phones. Android will follow. iPhone is off the map until it gets background capabilities.

I’m convinced that if the iPhone let developers create apps that run in the background, the above apps would be on that platform first instead of competitive platforms, which have fewer app-buying users (except possibly Motoriety, which is partly funded by Microsoft). And there would be more developers making more interesting and useful apps that work for us all the time, even when they’re not in our faces.

Resource:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-20001008-250.html

Apple has begun accepting iPad apps for review and approval before the device launches in the US on April 3, several weeks ahead of Australia, which gets the device “late April”.

Developers must submit their apps by March 27 if they want to be included among the first apps to be featured on the iPad app store. The device’s 9.7-inch touchscreen interface is seen as a game-changer for mobile apps and the earliest apps are likely to be the most successful.

Analytics firm Flurry, which provides real-time user data to thousands of app developers, crunched the numbers for AppleInsider and revealed that, like with the iPhone, games will be the most popular iPad app category, commanding 44 per cent of the apps being tested for the device. Entertainment follows with 14 per cent.

The iPhone’s 150,000 apps will work on the iPad, but developers are planning to do a lot more with the device than simply stretch their apps to fit the larger screen.

Media companies in Australia and abroad are hard at work on porting their publications to tablets such as the iPad. Already, Wired magazine has shown off a tablet version, while the ABC has confirmed it is actively looking into developing iPad apps.

Graham Clarke, through his new Glasshouse Apps company, is one of several Australian developers beavering away to create their apps in time for the launch.

“The iPad to me is just the start of something much bigger. April 3, 2010 isn’t just the date of another Apple event, it’s the first word of the next chapter in the history of computing,” he said.

Clarke developed the Cellar and Barista apps for the iPhone but would not give away much about his iPad plans.

“People are pretty tight-lipped about it, which is understandable because Apple haven’t really approved any apps yet – you can’t give too much away until you know for sure that everything’s going to work out,” Clarke said in a phone interview.

Another Australian app maker, Firemint, which made Flight Control – one of the iPhone’s most popular games – has said it is preparing to release an iPad version, Flight Control HD.

Most iPad developers bar a few major media companies such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have been unable to test their apps on the device before launch, instead relying on iPad emulation software.

Apple has told developers not to give away too much about their plans, while the few organisations that have received an iPad in advance of the launch are forced to abide by strict secrecy rules. These include, according to The New York Times, “keeping the iPad hidden from public view, chained to tables in windowless rooms”.

Some developers have complained that Apple’s immense secrecy measures are limiting their ability to create apps that are optimised for the new device.

One of the main selling points of the iPad, the ability to buy e-books from the iBooks store, will not be available to Australians at launch. But Amazon said this week it was developing an iPad Kindle app, which would provide access to more than 450,000 Kindle books and allow users to turn pages simply by swiping their fingers.

Anthony Agius, founder of the MacTalk community website, said he worried Apple would reject the Kindle app because it competed with iBooks, after similarly banning the Google Voice app on the iPhone.

Agius and Clarke are among several Australian Apple fanatics who will be travelling to New York for the US launch in an effort to obtain the iPad weeks before other Australians.

“For me, Apple is kind of like my favourite band. If your favourite band had a new album that was out and you can’t hear it for a month, it’s painful,” he said.

Agius will fly to New York on Friday and hopes to bring home about 10 iPads for friends. Apple has limited purchases to two per person but Agius hopes to get around this by pre-ordering with several credit cards and Apple IDs.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that hundreds of thousands of iPads had been pre-ordered ahead of the US launch. Some analyst firms, including the NPD Group, believe the iPad’s sales in the first few months after launch will exceed those of the iPhone.

One company, iPodMeister, is offering a free iPad Wi-Fi + 3G model to people who send it 1150 used CDs or DVDs, which will then be distributed at a discount in poor countries.

Clarke believes the iPad will spark a major shift in desktop computing towards the use of more touch-based interfaces.

“You’ll probably have to change the way that you use them [desktop PCs] because you obviously can’t sit down in a chair and hold your hands up to the screen all day, but I just think that it’s so much more intuitive to connect with the computer by touching it, rather than using a keyboard and mouse all the time,” he said.

Resource:
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life

Apple’s highly anticipated tablet computer would not, after all, require purchasing all new applications. Instead, everything in the App Store would automatically work on the iPad. As Jobs explained, tapping one button on the iPad screen transforms apps made for the 3.1-inch iPhone/iPod Touch screen to a snugger fit on the 9.7-inch iPad.

Simple, right? For the iPad owner, sure. But the iPad means bigger changes for the people who create these apps. Though the iPad has been dismissed by some as an oversized iPod Touch, it’s definitely not, as those who attempt to make iPad apps or re-create iPhone apps for it will find out fast.

That includes people like Michael Groves, who is half of a two-person development team at Wandering Pig Studios. He currently has two apps on the store, TapBox and a snow globe app. Groves, like most of his peers, is excited about the iPad. The extra screen real estate on the 9.7-inch device is a big deal, mostly because apps that were a no-go on the relatively small iPhone screen might actually work on the iPad.

“We’re starting to work on a game we originally positioned as an iPhone app, and it died because of the screen size issue. Now it will be our next project,” on the iPad, Groves said.

But bigger isn’t necessarily better in all cases. Cameron Daigle, a Web and interaction designer for Griffin, which makes all sorts of Apple accessories, says that like moving from a cramped apartment to a three-bedroom house in the suburbs, it will probably take app makers awhile to get used to all that space.

"What those (developers) are going to find is that the iPad has five times as much screen space, and your little app is going to look funny on there," Daigle said. "It’s going to be interesting to see how people grow their apps to fill that space. You’ll see a lot of awkwardly sparse and awkwardly cluttered apps as people figure out how to use that space."

Groves is also dealing with this problem. One of his apps is a game called Tap Box, in which players tap various colored blocks as they fly across the screen in changing patterns. Players advance by tapping all of the bad blocks as they try to make it off the screen.

"The interesting thing, on a much bigger screen size the game becomes a lot easier " Groves said. "If you have larger targets with larger screen, you’ll not have as much of an appeal as far as maintaining a (certain) challenge level "

For Groves, just having users click the 2x button Apple will put on the iPad screen will likely kill his app–if it’s not fun, who will buy it? So he has to basically rework his app from scratch to make it a decent experience on the iPad. So he will have to figure out a way to make his game more difficult.

Daigle, who has worked on Griffin’s iTalk voice-recording app, among others, says very simple apps like Griffin’s (the entire app consists of approximately seven elements) also won’t automatically benefit just from being larger. Making a button three times as big as the one on the iPhone app might look silly. It’s figuring out how to fill all that extra space that becomes the most important hurdle to overcome. That means rethinking what elements go on the screen, how big they are, and how users will interact with each element, all of which are things they’re working on as you read this.

Of course, many apps will translate to the large screen beautifully, like the ones we’ve already seen at the iPad introduction. Visually rich interactive games like Nova by GameLoft can only improve by being reworked and magnified. And MLB’s At Bat app benefits from being able to surface more info for stats-loving baseball geeks. It’s obviously not a coincidence as far as the apps chosen by Apple to demo the iPad–they make Apple’s new platform look good.

The iPad introduction event was not just a marketing strategy, it was also a subtle challenge to would-be iPad app makers. Apple set the bar really high with its own iPad apps. By demonstrating the likes of iBooks and iCal, applications which are very rich, distinct, and interactive, Apple is signaling to developers what they can and should do with this new platform.

"The iPad will require much more effort from a developer standpoint,” Groves said. “You have to put time into designing a workable interface that feels like it uses the screen size."

Instead of a few weeks to make a cookie-cutter iPhone app, standing out next to iBooks or iCal will probably take a few months, depending on the number of developers who can work on it. For Groves, it’s just him and another designer. At a large mobile developer shop like GameLoft, which has 60 games on the App Store, and 800 developers who work on the iPhone platform, it still means more work to upgrade to iPad-ready apps.

GameLoft Vice President of Publishing Baudouin Corman said his company intends to rework as many of its games for iPad as it can, though all of them is not really an option. "We can’t optimize all 60," he said. "Basically we have to make some choices…the ones that make sense best on the big screen."

Though it’s extra work, it’s worth it, says Daigle, because App Store shoppers will take notice. "There will be a big difference between a good, paid app and a free app," he said. "Free apps are going to look pretty free."

And that’s not meant to denigrate free apps at all, but to say that the gap between well-designed apps and poorly thought-out ones should be very obvious. Just allowing users to click the 2x button to scale up is an OK solution, but it’s not something designers and developers should rely on, according to Daigle.

"Scaling up never looks good–it doesn’t look good in Photoshop, much less something you’re interacting with," he said. "Apple is doing that to provide a little bit of a transitional period. But people are never going to be happy with scaling."

But there are other things developers need to think about too. Increased size also equals increased weight–the iPad weighs in at 1.5 pounds, the iPhone 3GS at just one third of a pound. Apps that require any sort of movement or shaking, like the Bump app for example, won’t be a natural way to use the iPad.

Groves says that worries him about his snow globe app, wpSnow. You shake an iPhone or iPod Touch with his app open and snowflakes float down onto the Christmas tree. "Not many people have held an iPad. My concern is that app (requires) the user to move the phone around a lot. With the heft of the iPad, will that cause an issue with user interaction? Will users drop the pad if they’re swinging it around a lot ? "

Clearly, this will be a learn-as-you-go process for iPad developers. While they have access to the software development kit (SDK), it only contains a simulator. Few people outside of Apple have yet to touch an iPad, and until April 3, when the device hits stores, app makers will likely have a learning process ahead of them. But for designers like Daigle who look forward to the direction the iPad is moving mobile computing in, it’s exciting, since it’s clear the iPad is just the beginning of a lot more changes in store.

"I think the iPhone/iPod Touch has been a training ground of sorts to get people used to this interface and concepts," said Daigle. "I think we’ll look back at when iPhone first came out, (when app design meant a) top bar, bottom bar, and space in the middle. Apple did that on purpose, releasing the smaller design (of the iPhone) first to get people used to it…If they had released iPad first people would have been overwhelmed"

Resource:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-20000393-260.html