I think you need three things to really succeed as an app store, based on what we’ve seen from Apple and Google. And to be clear, success means that you as the app store make money and can drive enough distribution to developers that they too can build a big business on the back of your audience.

Payment-enabled customers + device footprint + well-merchandised store experience = Potential to Win as an App Store

1. Payment-Enabled Customers
One of the (many) things that makes the Apple iOS ecosystem so powerful is that Apple has 200 million hard-won credit cards on file. Having had iTunes prior to the app ecosystem meant that they were able to tap into a large audience of users for whom purchasing apps and in-game items is as simple as a single click.

Perhaps the only company more synonymous with one-click purchase experiences than Apple is Amazon – they did for the web what Apple has done for the iOS ecosystem when it comes to ease of transaction. And Amazon has tens of millions of payment-enabled customers by their own admission. I’m not sure why they haven’t gone through the process of making it easier for freemium game developers to integrate some variant of Amazon Flexible Payments Services as a way to charge for in-app purchases. That seems like a no-brainer way to enable freemium game developers to make real revenue through the Amazon Appstore.

2. Amazon’s Distribution Strategy for the Amazon Appstore
I think Amazon has a pretty clear strategy for how they will get their own Appstore deployed to tens of millions of consumers. This is all my speculation – but I think it makes sense:

Phase I: Give away top-tier games that are usually paid for free in order to get consumers to download and install the Amazon Appstore. This is just a simple quid pro quo. The goal is to give customers something of value (a free or greatly reduced install of a game they covet) in exchange for downloading and using the Amazon Appstore on their Android device. Provided Amazon can continue to find developers who want the exposure for their content, this strategy should help seed things.

Phase 2: Work with carriers to get preload deals so that the Amazon Appstore is on many more devices. Doing preload deals is nothing new. If you have relationships with carriers and can afford the economics required to make those deals interesting to them, that’s one way to get the Amazon Appstore in front of more consumers. This might prove to be trickier than it sounds, given that many carriers and handset makers themselves also have designs of building their own app stores. But this is still a strategy worth pursuing.

Phase 3: Launch an Amazon tablet, powered by Android, with the Amazon Appstore front and center as the primary application discovery method. The last thing Amazon can and should do (and is doing) is to build and sell its own Android tablets. This has less to do with games and more to do with the Kindle business. It’s a good hedge in the whole e-reader vs table debate and should allow Amazon to have a larger footprint for its cloud music and cloud video services. I would fully expect that Amazon will integrate its own Android market front-and-center on that product and will put its considerable marketing muscle behind promoting its table to both Kindle users and people who have yet to have settled on a tablet device.

3. Well-merchandised store
No need to belabor this one. Amazon is one of the world’s premier merchandisers when it comes to selling things online. I’d like to think they could bring some creative muscle to app discovery and recommendation.

It’s clear to me that Amazon is still in the early stages of building out their Amazon Appstore and that to count them out based on their current progress seems premature.

Follow me on Twitter – @chudson

If you’re short on time, the summary answer is that I the iPad cannot be a 100% laptop replacement for me during the workday. That being said, I did identify quite a few use cases or types of days where it was perfectly fine to go iPad only and leave the Macbook at home.

To give the iPad vs laptop comparison a fair shake, I thought it was only fair to compare an iPad without an extended / additional keyboard to a laptop. While having an external keyboard would have closed the gap between using an iPad and a laptop, the real goal was to see if I could get by with the iPad as is – if I’m going to carry the iPad plus a dock or keyboard, I might as well just carry a laptop. I should also say that I have been using an iPhone for about two years and am very comfortable with the iPhone operating system and user experience.

Broadly speaking, most of the workdays I have fall into one of three main buckets (or a combination of them):

* Heavy Meeting Days – These are days where I have 6-8 meetings during the day, with maybe 30-60 minutes in between each meeting.

* Heavy Transit Days – These are days where I might not have a lot of meetings, but I do have to make a major transit move or two, going from Mountain View to San Francisco, Berkeley, or somewhere else more than 30 minutes from home. The time spent commuting is a pretty meaty chunk of the day, at least 2 hours or more.

* Desk Days – These are days where I’m mostly sitting at a desk of some sort. It can be a coffee shop, hotel lobby, or some other reasonably comfortable place where I can work for blocks of 1-2 hours at least once per day.

The biggest thing I realized from going iPad only is that it’s a total waste of time to lug around the Macbook on days where I am doing a ton of commuting or have a lot of meetings. By and large, I was able to keep up with email, Facebook, the news, and deal with Google Docs and light spreadsheets / presentations on the iPad alone. When I was going iPad only, I basically just deferred any long emails until I got home (which was generally okay) and deferred playing Flash-based Facebook games until I had a Flash-capable device. Overall, I found that I was happy to use the iPad for about an hour straight to do work before I started wanting to have a full keyboard and larger form factor.

Oddly enough, I did not miss having a full keyboard. Unlike the iPhone or my Droid, where I am pretty fast holding the device with one hand and typing with both hands, the iPad does not allow for easy one-hand typing – it’s too heavy and too awkward. The simple workaround for me was to simply defer typing intensive tasks until I had a full keyboard.

There was one very unexpected surprise. The iPad is a much more capable all-day computer than my Macbook. I generally can’t get more than 2-3 hours of useful stuff done on my Macbook on a single charge. On the flipside, my iPad is able to last an entire day on a single charge with nearly constant use.

So, overall, I was pleasantly surprised with using the iPad as a laptop replacement. At least 2-3 days per week I have a combination of commute and meetings that basically make the laptop useless. When I’m on the go, I rarely get the opportunity to sit down, plug in, and get enough work done to justify lugging around the laptop. I’m happy to have found a new device to lighten the bag for days where I’m on the go.

As always, leave a comment if you like.

You know what strikes me as funny? I would never have felt the need or desire to even try an Android device at all if not for the spotty phone performance of my iPhone. It’s not a lack of compelling features that made me want to try Android – it was the inability to simply complete and maintain a phone call. With something approaching suitable phone performance, I would have remained a happy sole iPhone owner. Below are a few observations from my time using the Android platform:

Google Voice has allowed me to use the HTC Android device without having to go through the trouble of switching my number or blasting all of my contacts with my new number. That makes it a lot easier to test out the phone without the personal switching cost of getting the word out to my contacts.

About 60-70% of the applications I have become accustomed to using on my iPhone are now available on my HTC Incredible. There are usable versions of Foursquare, TripIt, Twitter, Pandora, Mint, Facebook (not quite as good as the FB version, but usable), and the New York Times. Gmail works great, as does the calendar. I’m missing ESPN Radio, XM Radio, and all of my favorite games. I suspect that will be remedied as Android grows.

Developers go where there is usage and volume – developers are unlikely abandon Apple regardless of what it does in terms of platform policies. However, as Android grows, developers will follow.

Getting media on my Android devices still feels broken, especially compared to the iTunes sync experience. But I’ve found that DoubleTwist is serviceable and up to the task. That makes my Android device more fun – I can actually take some of my music with me on the go.

Overall, I think Android has a pretty bright future. Despite all of the free vs closed debate, I think Android stands to be a strong competitor not because it’s open (whatever that means) but because it’s free. Having a very good, competitive free operating system that isn’t bound to one carrier or device should allow the platform to really reach scale. I wouldn’t have believed how much the gap had closed had I not played with devices myself.

Feel free to leave me thoughts or comments below.

If you’re going to work on a feature that ought to exist (filling a hole, so to speak), you might end up in a single or zero winner situation – It seems to me that the danger of building an application on someone else’s platform that you think ought to exist is that there’s likely only going to be one (or possibly no) winners in the end. If it is in fact a hole, there’s probably one company that the platform owner could anoint as the winner and either give that company preferential treatment or acquire the company itself. Even worse, if it’s an obvious hole, the platform might build it on their own, leaving everyone out in the cold.

If you’re really just filling a hole that the chosen platform just hasn’t gotten around to filling, that might be okay if you’re in a build-to-flip type of opportunity. If you’re trying to build something sustainable, it seems like this is a tough way to go.

It’s very dangerous to build on platforms where the platform itself hasn’t figured out it’s own monetization strategy – I’m surprised nobody talks about this more often. If the underlying platform on which you’re building hasn’t figured out its own monetization strategy, you’re taking a lot of risk with your own business. Until you know the strategy and business model for the platform you’re on, there’s always the risk that your product and strategy could become obsolete once they do figure out a business model. Even worse, your chosen model could end up being at odds with their own strategy.

Make sure you understand the cultural orientation of the platform on which you’re building – Some platforms are really about letting a thousand flowers bloom (Facebook) while others are more tightly controlled (Apple). With that cultural orientation in mind, it’s hard to be surprised when Apple does something with the iPhone / iPod / iPad platform that feels like a land grab – they have a history of exercising tight control.

This is what makes the Twitter situation so interesting to me. They have historically (as in the last few years) been all about letting innovation flourish. It appears that they now might be changing their perspective. Living on someone else’s platform requires that you understand this stuff really well.

If you’re short on time, here’s the punchline – buying an unlocked Google Nexus One is horrible because neither Google nor T-Mobile can get you up and running quickly unless you know what to ask. If you want this phone, just get a contract and be done with it – the two companies haven’t figured out how to support users who come in with a device in hand. Here’s my saga in a few steps:

1. Ordered Google Nexus One unlocked from the online store.
2. Went into T-Mobile and got offered a FlexPay plan – no monthly contract and plenty of options for unlimited or metered voice, text, and Internet.
3. After a few clicks, I had everything up and running – Gmail, Google Calendar, and all of the other core services tied to my Google account. So far so good.

And then I got to Google Voice. Everything went fine until I went to set up my voicemail. All I wanted to do was to forward my voicemail from the Nexus One to my Google Voice number using conditional forwarding. The helper wizard on the device couldn’t make it work. The directions available on the Google Voice site didn’t work. So I picked up the phone and called T-Mobile. They were very pleasant, kind, and helpful, even though they regularly admitted they didn’t know much about the device.

I read the T-Mobile forums prior to the call and a lot of users suggested that you can’t actually do conditional voicemail forwarding if you’re on a FlexPay plan – they simply don’t allow you to do so. I broght this point up repeatedly during my roughly 1 hour call with their support folks. Finally, after some patient work by a Tier 3 unsupported deice rep, we both figured it out – it’s my plan, not the device. After about 30 minutes with the billing department, who kept trying to get me back to technical support, I finally just gave up and told them I wanted to cancel my account. It turns out there actually isn’t a way to convert from a FlexPay month-to-month plan to a postpaid account. And here’s the kicker – even if you bring your own device, signing up for a postpaid account obligates you to sign up for a contract. I don’t mind signing up for a contract if you’re subsidizing my device. But if I’m bringing my own phone, I find that to be a bit insulting.

So now I have this Nexus One and can’t use it seamlessly with Google Voice. It’s a phone, right? This should be a device that showcases how awesome Google Voice is, right? So what I’ve concluded is that buying an unlocked Nexus One is about the worst decision you could make for three reasons:

1. You pay more – the device costs almost $600
2. If you want to be able to use Google Voice to do everything, including voicemail, you need a contract as well.
3. Nobody seems to be able to support the unlocked version of the device and you’ll pull your hair out trying to get help.

Fixing this would be easy. Either Google or T-Mobile could simply direct people who want the unlocked device toward a plan that will actually allow someone to fully enjoy the device and provide a bit more support for those of us who want to get the device up and running quickly.

Overall, I can see the promise in this device. If you’re a power user of Google Apps, this phone is great. But I think I’ll sit this round out and wait until the support and setup issues get resolved before committing to this device.

My Setup
I have a fairly atypical setup. I have several thousand contacts, 8ish calendars, and a lot of other information that I like to have available across all of my computers and mobile devices. I have 4 Macs (1 Mac Mini, 1 Macbook Air, 1 Macbook, 1 Macbook Pro – yes, that’s ridiculous and I accept that), 1 iPhone 3G, and 1 iPod Touch. I have two core requirements:

1. Support for OTA sync for my 8 Google Calendars and 1 Gmail account
2. Ability to differentiate between what information I’d like on my PC and what information I’d like on my iPhone

Overall, I found the revised MobileMe to be very unsatisfying for me edge case needs. A few things that didn’t work well for me:

No support for contact group syncing – I try to keep up with a lot of people. One of the key ways I make sense of all of my contacts is by putting them into groups. I don’t necessarily want to sync all groups to all devices at all times. For example, there’s a relatively small set of contacts that I like to keep on my phone and a fairly large group I like to keep in my address book. As far as I can tell, MobileMe does not support this use case. It’s an important one for me, even if I am an edge case.

No support for my primary email address(es) – While I’m sure I could figure out a way to make forwarding work, I don’t want to jump through hoops to support my primary email addresses (my personal domain and my gmail account). An OTA push email system that doesn’t support my primary email addresses is a non-starter. I can’t believe I’m alone here.

No need for the Gallery or iDisk products – I don’t have much of a need for the Gallery product and I already have a preferred web-based storage product (Dropbox). Neither of those features are of particular value to me and I don’t see a need to pay for them.

No substantive value above and beyond existing OTA calendar sync products – I’ve used Nuevasync and Google Sync to keep my Google Calendar in sync with my various computers and devices. Both products work well – I prefer Nuevasync over GCS because it allows me to sync more calendars and that’s the one I used first. MobileMe’s calendar product works well, but not meaningfully better than the Google or Nuevasync product. I don’t see any reason to pay when the free alternative is solid.

I have been pretty happy with NuevaSync but am tempted to try out the Google product when and if they release OTA mail sync and support for more than 5 calendars.

Photo Phone Book – It’s caller ID + photos for your iPhone. It integrates with your Facebook friends and other photos you have on your phone. They have a clever part of the app that allows / suggests that you ask your friends to provide updated photos of themselves.

Loopt – The latest version of Loopt encourages you to check out other people you might know who are already on Loopt. I’m not entirely sure how they generate the list of people, but they were able to serve up about 30-40 people with whom I might want to connect.

I’m really curious to see how virality plays out on the iPhone. Looking back at many of the platforms that have launched in the last few years (Facebook, MySpace, etc), there is usually some first-mover advantage to taking advantage of new viral distribution channels before they get saturated. I’m interested in seeing how well iPhone app developers implement virality and whether it ends up working.

The other missing piece in this puzzle is some kind of newsfeed. I’m perplexed by the fact that there isn’t a simple way (that I know of, at least) to see what applications my friends have installed. With 15,000+ applications available in the App Store, there’s no way I’m going to filter through them all to find a few gems. But I would check out apps that my friends install.

Without a common social graph for iPhone users (Facebook Connect, anyone), I’m not sure how this could be done quickly and easily. But I do think it’s worth doing and I believe someone will do it sooner rather than later.

It’s hard to argue that the iPod has not become an iconic device. What’s interesting to me, though, is how two other formerly iconic devices, the RAZR and the Treo, have just fallen on hard times. As someone who owns several iPods, there are a few things that I’ve noticed about how Apple manage the iPod line:
Apple has conditioned me to expect a constant array of truly new (as opposed to retread) products. Each new iPod generation generally does two things. First, it usually makes the price/storage quotient for the new device seem like a bargain compared to what I paid 12-18 months ago. Second, each successive generation of the iPod generally introduces improvements along at least one dimension – size, user interface, navigation paradigm, etc. As an iPod owner, I know that the next generation of product will be better than what I have today – that doesn’t make me any less willing to buy new iPods at lower price points.

Apple actually takes chances and introduces features and functionality that push the envelope. I remember when the first iPod Shuffle came out and a lot of people thought you couldn’t sell an iPod with no LCD. Well, that’s not the case. Then the touch screen on the iPhone. The ultra-thin nano. The list goes on. I’m sure Steve Jobs and company have some other delights up their sleeves.

Look at the RAZR and the Treo. In my opinion, neither of those products has changed in any meaningful way since launch. The RAZR is still thin and has a slightly better camera now than it used to, but what else is better? The UI is still awful and its primary selling point is that its thin. And don’t even get me started on the Treo. It looks virtually unchanged over the past few years, unless you count the cosmetic removal of the antenna and the inclusion of alternative operating systems.

Successful products can be a real challenge and in the RAZR and Treo I see a real reticence to tinker with the golden goose long after the initial wow factor of the product has paled.

Arguments I Don’t Buy

Lack of Corporate IT Support – I don’t think the lack of IT support for the iPhone will inhibit adoption. Early versions of the Blackberry only worked on the desktop. And if enough executives pick up the iPhone, I guarantee you that IT departments around the country will find themselves trying to hack together ways to support the device. IT adoption for devices like this can happen from the top, not just from the bottom.

High Price Tag – I don’t buy this one either. People are paying more and more for consume electronics devices. Also, Apple customers are used to paying full retail price for new products — you rarely find Apple products on sale or at discount unless it’s an end of life issue. Given the pent-up demand, I doubt Apple will be under any pressure to lower prices on this iteration of the device anytime soon. If anything, I think the high price will only increase the aspirational appeal of this device.
Arguments I Do Buy

Battery Life – I have certainly had my “everything” device bonk out due to battery usage and it is not cool. If you have one device that does everything, losing battery support for that device essentially cuts you off from the world. Reading the stats on battery usage, it appears that users who really push the device to do everything it can do (web browsing, audio, video, photos, and voice) could experience battery life issues.

Touch Screen – I do think this could be an issue. I have damaged every touch screen device I’ve ever owned. And the lack of keyboard might be a real issue – the only way to know is actually use the device and see how well text input without tactile response works. I do a lot of texting, email, and IM – I can’t imagine how I’d be efficient without a “real” keyboard.
My Complaints with the Curve

Better support for instant messaging – I’ve owned a lot of phones in my day and I would say one of the more life-changing experiences I had was owning a Sidekick 3 for a brief period of time. As someone who makes heavy use of IM, having a device with great IM and a full keyboard really makes mobile IM useful.

Better web browsing -The Blackberry has a serviceable web browser on Cingular. I can get to most pages I want to see, but not all pages render correctly and the browser tends to break tables and other formatting elements. Given that the iPhone will be using the same EDGE network as the Curve, I doubt I’ll see any improvement in browser speed. That doesn’t mean that the iPhone browser won’t provide a better experience (transcoding, page presentation, etc), but I don’t think it will be any faster.

So, as far as I can tell, the iPhone has the possibility of solving only one (at most) of these two issues right out of the box. That isn’t to say that third parties won’t develop the apps I want in the IM realm, but we won’t have that functionality on Friday. The Curve does everything I need it to do and I just don’t feel compelled to buy an iPhone. What am I missing? Help me out.