Free Republic

To the average consumer, the war between iPhone and Android is probably very confusing. Most people don’t know there’s a difference between a “Droid” and an “Android” phone or why these new phones are so different from what came before.

Earlier today, Apple officially launched its application store for Macintosh, with about 1,000 free and paid applications available. Snow Leopard users download the Mac OS X 10.6.6 update, and the store is included. But people using the software are in for a change. Consumers typically buy software by machine. Those people buying from the Mac App Store purchase by person. The software is attached to an identity. This is a dramatic departure from how consumer software is typically licensed. Licensing agreements typically restrict installation on one PC, sometimes two or even three...The Mac App Store changes the paradigm and usage...

Google isn’t a web application company—they’re an advertising company. That’s what they do best, and that’s what drives their company. Of Google’s $23.6 billion of revenue in 2009, all but $760 million of it was derived from advertising, and nearly 70 percent of it was from Google’s own websites. Everything Google does must be understood within this context. Google builds services like Google Maps, Gmail and Docs and gives them away for free not because they have a philosophical belief that web applications should be free, but rather because giving them away for free gives them a competitive advantage. Free...

The iPad is changing how folks read stuff online--no surprise if you think how different a gizmo it is to a PC. But a new study shows it's moving online reading into primetime TV hours, which is big news. Is evening reading coming back, just in a digital style? The study comes from internal data acquired by ReadItLater, a web service that lets users bookmark web content for perusal at a different time. Though you may think this slightly colors the dataset, the way this service works gives the company unique access to time-coded data on how iPad users (and...

The Mac App Store has arrived and with it comes access to more than 1,000 different free and paid apps. While nearly identical in design to the iTunes App Store for iOS apps, the Mac App Store represents a big shift in Mac application discovery and development. We’ve already done a walkthrough of the new store. What follows is our analysis of the overall store experience after spending the last few hours exploring the store, downloading applications, comparing the release to initial expectations and ruminating on how it will change the developer ecosystem. If you’ve yet to experience the Mac...