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Android picking up steam? Great! More pressure on Apple not to harass e-book app devs?
December 22, 2009 | 12:18 pm
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By David Rothman
I own an iPod Touch and benefit from iPhone e-book software, but I’m still ticked to see an eWeek headline reading Android possibly stealing attention from iPhone. Great. People are more aware than ever of Android, which means Apple can’t be its normal controlling self as easily when it comes to e-book apps and others. Already, promising e-book apps exist in Android like Aldiko and WordPlayer.
Summarizing a ComScore survey, eWeek reports: “Users were asked which phone they planned to buy in the next three months, 7 percent said the T-Mobile G1 or T-Mobile MyTouch—the only two Android-running devices available at the time—while 21 percent named the iPhone. When the question was asked again in November, 17 percent of respondents said they planned to buy an Android-supported device and 20 percent said they planned to shop for an iPhone.”
And speaking of Aldiko: It gota nice writeup in PW, which reports 30,000 titles available through the app and mentions the focus on the nonproprietary ePub standard. Tiffany Wong, an Aldiko founder, is a TeleRead contributor. WordPlayer is also ePub-capable. And notice the Register’s disgust with Amazon for not doing ePub on the Kindle? Glad tidings for us standards boosters.
Update, Dec. 23: Aldiko spelling corrected (thanks, Spider).
Technorati Tags: Adiko,WordPlayer
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Comments:
As I’ve said numerous times in the past year, “This year’s iPhone is next year’s Razr.” Now I can start saying “This year’s Android is next year’s iPhone.”
Putting all of your eggs into any one hardware basket is always a mistake, especially with leading-edge hardware… it never stays leading-edge for long. But if you concentrate on creating (or obtaining) content that can be migrated from one platform to another, you’ll usually be okay.
I have a Droid and an iPod Touch. I find the ebook apps on Anroid make for a really poor reading experience. Aldikio and WordPlayer are both pretty simple compared with the apps on the iTouch. I’ve used Stanza, Kindle for iPhone, ereader for iPhone, and the B&N app. I think they were all better than Aldikio and WordPlayer although I’m not a fan of B&N’s app.
Thanks for the first-hand impressions, Spider. Guess it depends on the hardware. Roger Sperberg is rather excited about the e-book potential of Android phones–his own phone is very high res, Thanks. David
Correction: the app is called Aldiko.
My phone is very high res, as well. The Droid was made gadget of the year so it’s definitely not bad hardware. In retrospect, I may have been a little harsh on Aldiko. Certainly WordPlayer and FBReader are not that good on Android but Aldiko is decent. I was just frustrated with the menu at first. I missed the “back” button at first, thinking it didn’t have one. It still shouldn’t take me three “clicks” to get to it. A simple menu is critical on small screens. I do like that you can adjust the brightness of the display by sliding your finger along the left side, though. A neat, useful feature. So it may have a little catch-up to do to win me over the way the iTouch apps did but I shouldn’t say Aldiko makes for a bad reading experience. It is, however, the only ebook reader worth using on Android right now.
It also looks to me like Aldiko has the best support. It comes out with more updates.