“At the end of the day, Apple has a brand to maintain,” said Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray who keeps a close eye on the company. “And the bottom line is they want that image to be squeaky clean.”

The iPad will run the same applications that work on the iPhone and iPod Touch, which demonstrated that consumers were willing to pay for software that turned their devices into gaming machines, e-readers and navigation systems.

“The reality is that the iPad is going to be a big platform for apps,” said Mr. Munster. “It raises the bar for Apple in terms of policing what goes into the App Store.”

» via The New York Times

soupsoup:

Twelve of the world’s biggest phone networks – including AT&T, Orange and Telefonica – will announce their rival technology tomorrow to Apple’s App Store. The combined audience for the app platform will be 2 billion customers. Phone manufacturers Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson are also on board for the launch.

The announcement is expected to take place at tomorrow’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, writes the Times, and will be good news for consumers. With the fragmentation of app stores from Apple, Android (Android) and others, many handsets and operators will now support a single standard of apps that work across multiple devices.

Google may open as early as March an online store to sell third-party software that complements its Google Apps collaboration and communication hosted suite, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

Google would let customers purchase the software from its store and charge the third-party developers a commission, according to the Journal, whose article was based on anonymous sources.

» via Macworld UK

In its announcement Thursday, Amazon will say that it is letting programmers create what it calls active content — similar to applications — for the Kindle and keep 70 percent of the revenue from each sale after paying for wireless delivery costs.

Amazon will release a set of programming guidelines that other companies — including publishers of books and periodicals — can use to create and sell applications for the Kindle.

» via The New York Times

Leaping way, way ahead of competitors, Apple has approved more than 100,000 apps for the App Store, according to App Shopper, an app tracking site.

By contrast, there’s 246 apps for Windows Mobile, which has been around for six years, and about 96 apps for the Palm Pre (see Palm’s list of WebOS applications). Google’s Android,which is probably the iPhone’s strongest competitor, has about 10,000 apps, according to recent estimates. Google has yet to release official figures.

Seen at Cult of Mac

There’s nothing geeks love more than to argue mobile phone platforms. Here’s Matt Blaisdell saying that apps weren’t key to iPhone’s success. That’s true, but now that Apple has apps the world has changed and challengers to the iPhone will find it very tough.

Here’s why: everyone is using a different set of 20 apps. Trillions of combinations. You can see this on Appsfire’s VIP list (my iPhone apps are listed there, along with a number of others). None of us have the same set of apps.

So, to get me off of the iPhone you are going to have to duplicate all my apps (and I’ve gotten several more since doing this list a couple of weeks ago).

Seen at Scobleizer

Google Wave will almost certainly have an application marketplace, where people will be able to buy third party plug ins for the forthcoming collaboration and communication tool.

Speaking to TechRadar about the Preview trial of Wave, Google Senior Staff Engineer and Wave co-developer Lars Rasmussen admitted that he would be surprised if an application store model was not followed.

“So we haven’t 100 per cent locked this in, but all the developers are asking [about paid-for apps],” said Rasmussen.

Seen at TechRadar