In a highly anticipated debut yesterday, Steve Jobs and crew announced the iPad, a revolutionary device that is essentially a Nook or Kindle on steroids. If I were Jeff Bezos over at Amazon I would be ticked, and rightly so. Apple, for the umpteenth time in their history, has made every other product in world look like it was made in the stone age.

The iPad, despite the name, looks incredibly fun. It’s got a 9.7 inch screen, .5 inches thick and supposedly lightning fast thanks to the custom Apple-built processor. It does a host of things, including (obviously) e-book functionality and the ability to browse and buy e-books through the iBookStore. But, most interestingly enough, Apple has found a way to make all 140,000 applications in the App Store work on it. I’m excited to see my application on it, and I’m very interested in seeing how they scale to such a large screen.

The iPad does have some drawbacks, namely the lack of a camera and the fact that Apple refuses to partner with Adobe to let Flash into their mobile Safari browser, but all said, I can’t wait to get my hands on it. The web experience on it is something I’ve looked forward to for a long time. Being able to surf the New York Times, or ESPN, click on an embedded video and watch it, is exactly what I’ve been waiting for.

http://www.apple.com
http://www.engadget.com
http://www.pcworld.com

U.S. ARMY

The U.S. Army released an iPhone app that is surprisingly robust. You can get news from around the Army world, pictures and video. It even has a fun little game.

Download from the App Store

USAA, a fairly small bank which services mostly military personnel around the world, has added to its iPhone app the ability to take a picture of your check and submit it for deposit. USAA doesn’t have branches, and customers have had to scan both sides of their check and upload it to USAA for deposit. With this change, the iPhone is essentially acting as a mobile bank.

According to Tech Crunch, via the Washington Post, Facebook is working on a new iPhone app to hit the store, well, sometime soon. Facebook developer Joe Hewitt wrote on Twitter that the app is “”Pretty Much Done”. What’s left is translating and submitting it for approval to the app store, which from my perspective, barring any easter egg related boobie slip, should be a relatively quick process.

The new Facebook app’s improvements include the ability to manage events as well as video support.

It is well established that Apple takes a 30% cut of revenue generating from the sale of an App. But what happens if the App is free, requiring a website subscription to access it? Does Apple take a cut of that instead?

On one hand, it’s not acceptable for Apple to facilitate the business growth of a website for free. Though on another, a company could easily use the App Store as a marketplace for advertising its subscription based service.

Does anyone have an example of an App that requires a subscription to access it? Even Netflix doesn’t have an App at this point, why is that?