Top AppAdvice News & Apps Of The Past Week
April 3, 2011
Some giants in media began their fights, as Amazon revealed its cloud. Meanwhile, Angry Birds Rio sold ten million copies in just ten days, while the $41 million Color app joined the App Store and fell flat. Finally, AppAdvice introduced the world to the iPad 2i, but it was all just a joke. These stories and more made news during the last week.
Amazon vs. Apple
Amazon.com is officially going after Apple. First, the online juggernaut introduced its Android Appstore. Then it released its new Cloud service, where users can store music, videos, documents, and more.
Sure it doesn’t technically work with iOS devices, but that isn’t the point: it beat Apple to the cloud, which is a big deal.
Perhaps Apple will use the “software-only” WWDC on June 6 to finally announce plans to reboot its MobileMe service and begin allowing iTunes customers to store their files in a cloud too.
But, don't expect an iPhone 5 there.
Streaming Live Television To The iPad Causes An Explosion
In what could appropriately have been called ‘Cease And Desist’ week, television networks took a club to Time Warner last week after the cable giant released its new streaming app for iPad.
According to the suits at Discovery, Fox, Viacom and Nickelodeon, streaming of live programming is apparently as bad as Charlie Sheen’s tiger blood, and they want it stopped.
Meanwhile, the Zite news app angered some Old Media giants, including The Washington Post, AP, and Dow Jones. Apparently, it is okay for the amazing app to list their articles amongst the others, but only if they point readers to their sites. Doing so within the app is a big no-no.
Apps Good And Bad
While Time Warner and Zite began lawyering up, the folks behind Angry Birds Rio were rolling in the cash. In just ten days, the new game had already sold a staggering ten million copies. Now that’s a lot of birds!
One app not doing so well is the new Color photo-sharing app. While the app itself looks promising, it burst onto the scene backed by $41 million in venture funding, which turned a lot of heads and not in a good way.
App Rumors
Just after we heard Blackberry Messenger was coming to iOS devices on April 26, the rumor was debunked, although the popular service should arrive sometime in 2011.
One app that is coming is GameLoft’s N.O.V.A. Elite, which is probably going to ship using Epic Game’s Unreal Engine 3.
Meanwhile, Adobe demoed Photoshop for iPad, which may or may not appear on iOS devices in the next few months.
Finally, let’s give a warm cheer to Twitter, who finally killed off its unpopular QuickBar on its iPhone app. Let us raise a glass to the demise of the tool forever known as the DickBar.
Owned And Found
President Obama took time away from fighting three wars to announce to the world, that yes, he owns an iPad. Meanwhile, one Dell executive finally got a clue and admitted he actually knew what an iPad was, but not to worry: His company and Microsoft would kill the thing dead in no time.
One Guy Tells The Truth, While Another Is Just A Fool
Finally, the new month of April arrived with two big announcements.
First, the satirical newspaper The Onion arrived on the iPad.
Next, Apple announced to the world that we should forget about the iPad 2 and instead get ready for the iPad 2i featuring a Retina display.
Strangely, while The Onion’s arrival was, in fact, true, the iPad 2i was just an April Fools Day joke by AppAdvice.com.
And those were some of the stories from the past week.
