The iPad Killer

From Inc.com:

The CEO of Verizon, Lowell McAdam, is making no secret of it. They are officially in cahoots with Google developing what they hope will be the iPad killer.

Interesting, but I am always loathe to bet against Apple.  Here is the one mitigating factor that gives me pause:

4. For all the same reasons the Droid is shaking up the iPhone; touch screen tablets will wage the same war just on another battlefield. Google’s Android is making headway because its available on multiple brands of devices and with multiple carriers. Apple let’s you use AT&T, AT&T or AT&T on their hardware. Period.

That is one important point.

It’s an iPhone-Blackberry World

Some of these sales numbers are staggering when you consider the shape of the economy:

To be precise, RIM reported it had shipped 10.5 million BlackBerrys in the three months ending in February 2010, representing a personal best for RIM. Among these 10 million phones, around half–actually 4.9 million–were new subscribers, demonstrating what a powerful ally RIM is to its cell-phone network partners. Over roughly the same period, Apple, with its super-hot-ticket iPhone still riding high in the public and media’s eyes, sold 8.7 million units…meaning RIM is firming up its position as forgotten king of smartphoneland.

I’m a Samsung Instinct user so I am really on the outside looking in.

IT in the Cloud

Get used to it – the term “cloud” is becoming ubiquitous in the IT world.  ZDNet offers up a futuristic look at a clash between two titans – Google and Apple (and somehow Wal-Mart is forgotten in the opening, but not in the story).  First, a primer on cloud computing:

…the holy grail of digital media – a cloud-based shelf where collections of music and movies and probably photos, too, will be housed for streaming playback anywhere there’s a Web connection, including a mobile phone or a fancy new tablet.

And in this corner, Apple:

Apple certainly has the lead here with its popular line of iPod and iPhone – and soon the iPad – devices to keep people engaged with and entertained by their digital media libraries. But they want to make sure you have plenty of storage to buy buy buy even more digital content – so they’re taking a play out of the Google playback to push the cloud. First, it was music. Now, it’s movies.

And in the other corner, Google:

Google, which is also making some moves toward content in the cloud, is big on multi-platform and open source these days and the idea of being able to stream content to all devices – instead of just those behind the proprietary iWall – is something that the content providers, as well as consumers, could prefer.

For me, I see the open source option of Google having better legs at this point.  Apple gets customer because of their astute marketing department.  It is cool to own Apple anything.  They have excellent products and are consumer savvy, but they are still a proprietary platform for lack of a better phrase.

My guess is that Google plows a new path for open source options that eventually win the market share war.