Apple Finally Lets A Google Voice Application Into The App Store (Again)

Google Voice applications have had a pretty tumultuous history in the App Store. At first, Apple approved them, and the people rejoiced. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, they were pulled, with “duplicating features that the iPhone comes with (Dialer, SMS, etc).” cited as the reasoning. The people were, understandably, pretty friggin’ mad.

Over the past few days, the developers of at least two such applications have been indicating that they’d been hearing good news from Apple, suggesting that the Apps would be making an Apple-approved, no-jailbreak-required return. Sure enough, they’ve just started popping up in the App Store.

The first app to get approval, as far as I can tell, is Andreas Amann’s GV Connect, which just hit the App Store moments ago. Going for $2.99, the app provides Google Voice-powered support for calls, SMS, and voicemail — in other words, everything these apps were originally banned for.

We reached out to Sean Kovacz, developer of GV Mobile, which was pretty much the premiere Google Voice app when such things were initially allowed. His app, unfortunately, is still pending approval — a bit disheartening, given that he was one of the first off the bat in the original round.

Here’s to hoping that Apple keeps approving these things — and more importantly, that they stick around this time.

Google's Android leapfrogging over iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows

By the end of this year, Google's Android smartphone operating system will in a single year have leapfrogged competitors like Apple's iPhone, Research in Motion's Blackberry and Microsoft Windows phones in global popularity, and will challenge Nokia to become the world's most popular mobile OS by 2014, research firm Gartner said Friday.

In its annual global smartphone forecast, Gartner said the explosive growth of Google's mobile operating system will give it 17.7 percent of worldwide sales by the end of 2010 -- up from 3.9 percent at the end of 2009. Google says it is currently seeing more than 200,000 Android phones activated every day.

With manufacturers like Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG and Motorola planning to offer budget Android phones this fall, Android will become a mass market technology that by 2014 will have double the global market share of iOS, Apple's mobile operating system that powers the iPhone and the iPad, Gartner said.

Android's rise to the No. 2 smartphone operating system in terms of global sales by the end 2010 is two years sooner than Gartner predicted a year ago.

"It's a matter of Android really going more into the hands of the mainstream user," Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner, said in a telephone interview from London. "The iPhone will remain focused toward the higher end of the market, while through the end of this year and into 2011, all that growth you see in Android will come from the fact that most of the vendors who are backing it will release cheaper smartphones."

By the end of 2014, Gartner says Android and Nokia's Symbian operating system will each account for about 30 percent of global smartphone sales, while Apple's iOS will be third with about 15 percent of the global market, and RIM will be fourth with about 12 percent. The projections account for Gartner's expectation that Verizon, the largest U.S. wireless carrier, will begin to sell the iPhone in coming months, Cozza said.

The research firm IDC is also forecasting strong growth for Android relative to Nokia's Symbian operating system, although not quite as strong as Gartner's prediction, saying that Android smartphones will comprise 24.9 percent of global smartphone in 2014, compared to 32.9 percent for Symbian.

Both Gartner and IDC agree, however, that Android is rapidly eating into the market share of Nokia and RIM.

"That flood of Samsung handsets, HTC handsets, LG handsets, Motorola -- it's just this sort of irresistible wave," said Will Stofega, a mobile analyst for IDC said of the growth of Android smartphones. "It's difficult to say that they are not going to become more and more dominant as time goes on."

Google declined to comment on the reports.

Analysts say there are always a number of issues that could derail Android's growth. Those include Oracle's recent federal copyright lawsuit against Google charging that the Android operating system was built on Oracle's Java software without permission, "fragmentation" concerns about the different versions of Android being sold, and questions about whether Google will be able to maintain amicable relationships with the variety of manufacturers and wireless carriers that support Android phones.

But Stofega said there is little doubt that Android's rapid growth and its popularity with software developers who build smartphone apps contributed to Apple's uncharacteristic decision this week to loosen its grip on control over software development for iPhone and iPad. Google said there are now more than 80,000 apps available to download in the Android Market, still much less than the Apple App Store, but more than double the number available this spring.

"The developers tell us they love Android. It's easier to learn; it takes less time, and one of the complaints we hear quite a bit about is (Apple's) app certification process as a real thing that costs them time and money," Stofega said. Developers figure "why not go to Android and make a bet there? Get on the wave and see what happens."

Why all smartphones are $199

A hot new smartphone can be Incredible,Vibrant, Epic or just "eh," but no matter how it stacks up, it's a safe bet that it will start selling at $199.

On the four major wireless networks -- Verizon Wireless (VZ, Fortune 500), AT&T, Sprint (S, Fortune 500) and T-Mobile -- there are 13 smartphones priced at $199 with a two-year contract. There are no phone models with a higher starting price (add-ons like more memory can increase the price tag), and there are more smartphones selling at $199 than at any other single price point.

But spending $199 doesn't guarantee you a top-of-the-line phone. On AT&T's (T, Fortune 500) network, $199 will buy an iPhone 4, the best-selling smartphone of all time. But you'll need to fork over the same amount for a BlackBerry Bold 9700, a nine-month-old phone that lacks a touch screen.

It will also cost you $199 to get an HTC Tilt 2, which runs Windows Mobile 6.5 -- an operating system so out of date that Microsoft (MSFT,Fortune 500) is set to completely abandon it in the next few months.

So what's so special about $199?

"The obvious answer is that $199 is a magic price point for smartphone volume," said George Appling, partner at consulting firm Booz & Co. "The not-so-obvious reason is that carriers are not charging customers what they pay."

In other words, wireless carriers pay significantly more for smartphones than you do. In exchange for your signature on an expensive two-year contract, they'll offer you the smartphone for less than it costs them but as much as they think you'll pay for it -- and right now, that's $199 across the board. Buy an unsubsidized iPhone 4 straight from Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) and you'll pay $599 for the 16 GB phone that AT&T sells for $199 with a two-year contract.

Smartphones generally cost carriers around $500 per unit. Volume deals and other negotiations with manufacturers can shave down that price tag, but the hotter the phone, the more a carrier will pay to buy it.

But that's just the start of their calculations of what a phone "costs."

Phones that tend to eat up more bandwidth -- hello iPhone! -- add to the carrier's overhead. Put together the upfront cost of the phone and the back-end cost to service it, and you're left with the phone's profit margin. For a model with really tight margins, the carrier might find itself essentially forced to charge more upfront than it otherwise would -- it can't discount the purchase price and still scrape out a profit. That sometimes leads to inferior phones, like the BlackBerry Bold, carrying the same price tag as more advanced rivals, like BlackBerry's Torch.

It wasn't always that way. Before the age of tricked-out smartphones with expensive touch screens and processors, cell phones were much cheaper to manufacture. That gave wireless companies more leeway to compete on cost, and prior to the iPhone's mid-2007 release, phones had a wide variety of price tags.

But as phones got more expensive, a tiering of prices developed. Even the iPhone couldn't hold the high ground: Initially priced at $599 -- yes, even with a two-year contract -- the phone plunged to $399 just two months after its debut. By 2008, it had settled into the $199 groove.

If you don't need the latest and greatest, you can certainly score a gadget for less. Older, less exciting smartphones like the LG Ally, Palm Pre and Motorola (MOT, Fortune 500) Devour go for $149, or even $99.

But you won't find many phones priced outside those $50 tier increments.

"There's no $189 price point any more because operators don't want to suggest that one phone is a little better or a little worse than another at the same tier," said Charles Golvin, analyst at Forrester Research. "Carriers are looking for simplicity, even if that doesn't reflect their margins."

So will any carrier try to shake up the market and sell a cutting-edge phone for less? Don't hold your breath.

"No price war is going to happen," Appling said. "If Verizon got the iPhone tomorrow, it would probably sell for $199. They're already in a $300 hole when they add a customer, so they'll be extraordinarily hesitant to make that worse."

That's not to say the wireless carriers are getting a bad deal. They're happy to take the initial hit in exchange for a data plan that costs subscribers an extra $30 or so a month on their bill. And smartphone users tend to stick with their networks longer than low-end phone users, according to Soumen Ganguly, principal at Altman Vilandrie & Co. That makes them dream customers: They pay more and churn less.

The $199 price point has another perk for carriers. We're in the midst of a smartphone innovation boom, with companies pumping out new top-of-the-line phones every few months with better screens, memory and features. When those new phones are offered at the same price point older models once were, they seem like a steal in comparison. That draws new customers into the market -- and inspires those with aging phones to trade up and lock themselves into a fresh contract.

"There will always be a next big phone coming out in two months that will justify the $199 price," Ganguly said. "Manufacturers are innovating faster than the willingness of carriers to compete on price." 

Motorola Pulls Out Another Full Page NYT Ad Aimed At Apple’s Head

Oh my, how I love some good ol’ fashion mudslinging.

“Flash Websites? There’s A Phone For That.”

To any ne’er-do-blog-read layman, the full page ad that Motorola just put in the New York Times might just seem oddly worded. To anyone who has even considered considering themselves a gadget geek — or has, at least, turned on their TV anytime in the past year and a half and seen Apple’s “There’s An App For That” campaign — there’s no question who this one’s aimed at.

This isn’t the first time Moto has done this. Heck, it’s not even the second. Moto pulled out two separate full page ads (here’s one, and the other) during the iPhone 4 Antennagate madness, lambasting Apple with tongue planted firmly in cheek.

This one isn’t quite as clever as either of the first two; the whole matter of Flash on the iPhone is neither original nor fresh, by any means, and “There’s an App for that!” jokes are up there with “Yo Momma” jokes and Borat quotes on this list of “Jokes that one guy just won’t stop using”. But Flash is something that nearly all consumers would recognize (Thanks, Youtube and/or Farmville!), so juxtaposing your handset’s support for it against the competitions lack thereof probably isn’t a bad idea. Even if Flash on Android doesn’t really work that well.

Pinger’s Textfree Is Massive, Now Over 3.5 Billion Messages Sent

It’s a promise sounds too good to be true: free, unlimited texting to and from your iPhone. And even if a service did manage to offer it, it certainly couldn’t be sustainable, could it? Pinger, a startup that launchedback in 2006 as a voicemail service but has since pivoted in a big way, would beg to differ: the company has managed to become immensely popular on the iPhone by offering free text messages to users through an application called Textfree. And it’s just blown past another major milestone: users have sent 3.5 billion text messages using Textfree since it launched in March 2009.

So how do the do it? The key, unsurprisingly, is ads. Textfree has gotten such massive distribution that it can now turn a profit by placing ads in the application (the company has been profitable since December). Textfree doesn’t insert ads into your conversations — rather, it shows basic display ads which get 1.4 billion ad impressions a month. The application has been downloaded 7 million times which gives you an idea of its reach, but it’s also extremely engaging: users open it an average of ten times a day.

Using Textfree isn’t quite as straightforward as ‘normal’ text messaging, but users don’t seem to mind. The service assigns each user a new telephone number, free of charge. From then on you can text as much as you’d like, and can receive inbound texts that are sent to this special Textfree number. This can obviously be slightly irritating if you already have a phone number (i.e. on an iPhone), but remember, there are millions of devices running iOS that don’t have phone service, namely the iPod Touch. And Textfree gives all of those users the ability to text as much as they’d like, provided they have a Wifi connection.

The iPod Touch has proven to be Textfree’s bread-and-butter — 70% of its users are on the device. And Pinger says that carriers actually like their service, because it turns all of these iPod Touch users into extra nodes — they may be sending free text messages, but they’re certainly going to be sending and receiving messages from users who are on traditional carriers.

Textfree originally launched last year as a premium application that would charge users $6 per year for unlimited texting. That proved to be quite popular, but Pinger found that it could do even better by shifting the app to a free model and relying exclusively on advertising to generate revenue.

Apple Announces The New iPod Touch: Dual Cameras, Retina Screen

Apple unveiled the new iPod touch today at their special event, along with several other music- and media-related devices. Of course, we’ve been hearing murmurs and leaks about it for some time now, and the new device pretty much tallies with our expectations.

The two big improvements are the Retina screen and the dual cameras. The screen is the same found in the iPhone 4: 960×640, 3.5″, all as expected. The cameras are also the same as the iPhone; I’m thinking they got a bulk deal on the 5-megapixel sensors The rear camera does 720p, but only takes pictures at 960×720 (?!); the front-facing VGA camera is the same. Steve went so far as calling the iPod touch the “iPhone without a contract.”

It’s running an A4 processor, and is available with up to 64GB of space. It seems to have all the same internals, including gyro, accelerometer, and microphone, though of course it lacks the 3G radio and GPS (it’ll still do limited location). Historically the iPod touch has had a different PCB layout and that sort of thing; we’ll find out when we see the first teardown. FaceTime will work between the iPod touch and iPhone, by the way.

Here are the price points:

• 8GB:$229
• 32GB:$299
• 64GB:$399

The styling is a bit of a cross between the old iPod touch and the new iPhone 4. It’s very thin and chromey, but without the flat sides. It’s a tenth of an inch thinner, and has an ever-so-slightly smaller footprint.

Steve mentioned that they’re outselling both Nintendo and Sony in gaming. Believable, but I’d like to see the actual numbers. Most of the games sold on the iPhone and such are less than $5; it is of course a highly complicated thing to compare devices as unlike one another as iOS devices and game consoles, handheld or not.

The new 4.1 update should ship with these, including the new Game Center and other goodies.The new iPod touches will be shipping next week, but you can pre-order them now.

Update: the specs on Apple’s page note that the new iPod touch only takes still pictures at 960×720. That’s some nonsense. If the sensor can capture 1280×720 video at 30FPS, surely it’s capable of better stills. If the sensor is only capable of 960×720 images and they’re just stretching it to 1280×720, I’m going to have an image quality hissy fit.