Lonnie Knows Everything

Amazon today announced the launch of embedded audio and video clips for its Kindle eBook application for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced a new update to Kindle for iPad and Kindle for iPhone and iPod touch, which allows readers to enjoy the benefits of embedded video and audio clips in Kindle books. The first books to take advantage of this new technology, including Rick Steves’ London by Rick Steves and Together We Cannot Fail by Terry Golway, are available in the Kindle Store at http://www.amazon.com/kindleaudiovideo.

As an example of the utility of the feature, the press release points to travel guides such as Rick Steves’ London, which contains an embedded audio walking tour of the city.

“In the new Kindle Edition with audio/video of Rick Steves’ London, the embedded walking tours allow customers to listen to Rick as they explore the sites of London,” said Bill Newlin, publisher, Avalon Travel. “Rick’s narration adds depth to the reader’s experience, while listeners can follow the routes more easily with the text.”

The update brings a new weapon to Amazon’s arsenal in the increasing arms race among eBook retailers looking to lure readers to their platforms. Apple’s iOS platform is serving as a major venue in which the competition is playing out, with all of the major participants including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Apple itself deploying dedicated applications for their services.

BusinessWeek reports on new teardown research from iSuppli estimating component costs for the entry-level 16 GB iPhone 4 at $187.51, up slightly from the $178.96 figure for the 16 GB iPhone 3GS at its launch last year.

“Over the years, the iPhone has generally tended to hover in the $170-to -$180 cost range because Apple seems to be trying to hit some kind of budget,” Kevin Keller, who helped conduct the iSuppli teardown, says in an interview.

According to iSuppli, the new iPhone’s most expensive component is its screen, with the so-called “Retina” display clocking in at $28.50.

As with all of iSuppli’s analyses, the component costs do not cover such expenses as software, research and development, distribution, and patent royalty costs that cut significantly into Apple’s apparent profit margin. Also unknown is exactly how much Apple is receiving in subsidies for each iPhone 4 sold, although various reports and guess have placed it somewhere between $300 and $450.

iSuppli’s report notes that the component costs for the iPhone 3GS, still available in an 8 GB form priced at $99, have dropped to $134 from the $179 figure at last year’s launch. While the decline is primarily due to component cost declines that are natural in the technology industry, it is unclear whether the figures are comparing today’s 8 GB model with last year’s 16 GB model, in which case some of the price difference would be due to the smaller about of NAND flash memory required.

Apple today announced sales of over 1.7 million iPhone 4s through Saturday, covering just the first three days of sales.

Apple today announced that it has sold over 1.7 million of its iPhone 4 through Saturday, June 26, just three days after its launch on June 24. The new iPhone 4 features FaceTime, which makes video calling as easy as one tap, and Apple’s new Retina display, the highest resolution display ever built into a phone, resulting in stunning text, images and video.

“This is the most successful product launch in Apple’s history,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Even so, we apologize to those customers who were turned away because we did not have enough supply.”

Saturday marked the end of Apple’s third fiscal quarter (and second calendar quarter), and thus sales from Sunday forward will be included in Apple’s next fiscal quarter, due to end in late September.

For both the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G, Apple announced sales of over one million for their respective launch weekends. It took 74 days for the original iPhone to move one million units.

Apple continues to note that iPhone 4 will move beyond the initial launch countries of the United States, UK, France, Germany, and Japan into an additional 18 countries by the end of July: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

Given the amount of criticism that Apple has received for their curated App Store, it should be interesting to see that Google’s unmoderated solution for Android is not without its own criticisms. CNet reported on the high potential for abuse in the Android marketplace:

About 20 percent of the 48,000 apps in the Android marketplace allow a third-party application access to sensitive or private information, according to a report released on Tuesday.

While most of these apps are not malicious, spyware is said to be a growing problem. Google denies it being a real issue, however, and points out that users must explicitly allow applications to get access to the data. While true, Jon Johansen disputes the practicality of these checks and also believes that Google’s lack of curation is hurting their marketplace:

Google does far too little curation of the Android Market, and it shows. Unlike Apple’s App Store, the Android Market has few high quality apps.

…

Below are just a few examples of what’s wrong with the Android Market. Those 144 spam ringtone apps (which are clearly infringing copyright) are currently cluttering the top ranks of the Multimedia category. I was not surprised to find that they were being monetized through Google Ads.

Meanwhile, this past week, Google remotely disabled two apps from all Android phones. This so-called “Kill Switch” received a lot of publicity when it was revealed that Apple had the same functionality for the App Store. So far, Apple has not been known to have triggered it. According to Google, the remotely disabled apps were not malicious, but misrepresented themselves in order to encourage downloads:

Recently, we became aware of two free applications built by a security researcher for research purposes. These applications intentionally misrepresented their purpose in order to encourage user downloads, but they were not designed to be used maliciously, and did not have permission to access private data — or system resources beyond permission.INTERNET. As the applications were practically useless, most users uninstalled the applications shortly after downloading them.

The removed apps were said to be a theoretical demonstration of how to create a “botnet” of hijacked phones.

By cloaking an application capable of “fetching” new exploit code at will in a fake application offering preview pictures of the upcoming “Twilight Eclipse” film, he tricked more than 300 users into downloading the software. The lesson: a less friendly developer could have used that bait and switch to plant malware on users’ devices.

One MacRumors reader emailed Steve Jobs in a followup about the widely publicized iPhone 4 signal issues that have been reported across the web. In particular, rfbandit was asking about Apple’s policy on giving free bumper cases to alleviate the issue. “I love everything about the phone except my signal issues”, he wrote.

Steve Jobs reportedly replied immediately with:

There are no reception issues. Stay Tuned.

The response is notable in that it is not simply a copy/paste of the official statement from Apple. Steve Jobs had previously been replying to all signal inquiries on Friday with the same generic statement published Thursday:

Gripping any phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone. If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.

That public statement from Apple essentially described the issue as a normal phenomenon. Today’s email provides users some hope that a fix might somehow be on the way. In fact, one report even claimed an iOS update as early as Monday might be able to relieve the issue due to a lag in the iPhone 4′s ability to switch between frequencies causing the loss in signal.