www.itunes.com download

Like many companies, Sharper Image has a dock for iPod and iPhone. But Apple has the integration a step further.

The Bedside App Dock (which is still a working title) takes the accessory integration of the iPhone 3.0 operating system and builds a docking station that can use the iPhone or iPod Touch extract data from the Web.

Traditional iPod docking devices just pull music off the iPod or iPhone. The talking between devices is more or less one way.

But this device will be able to talk backwards and forwards using a downloadable app. Once you have the app, the dock communicates with the app and can pull weather, news, gossip and other evidence which appears on the screen of the digital platform. If you want a deeper dive, you can click on an individual headline and the app will take you to the story on your iPod Touch or iPhone.

When I talked to Apple executives after the launch of iPhone 3.0 this past summer, they said the quiet revolution could be the ability for all types of peripherals and accessories to talk backwards and forwards with the iPhone or iPod Touch. This means that the iPhone could combine with a number of gadgets to become all sorts of useful tools.

This is a clear example of it, but gives a good overview of what can be done with the right initiative.

The Bedside App Dock will sell for a price target of $ 99 for the fourth quarter.

A Brief History of the iPhone App Store
When the original iPhone was announced in early 2007,Apple said it would not allow other companies to distribute native software for this smartphone. Instead, they could make Web applications that ran in the browser.

For the first full year of this device has been on the market were blocked native applications of third parties. This led to a significant percentage of products “Jail-broken” – changed to eliminate this restriction.

Only tremendous demand from users forced Apple to change course, and the App Store debuted with the launch of the second-generation iPhone.

In the last three months, roughly a billion apps were downloaded from Apple’s software store for its smartphones and handhelds, bringing the total to over three billion since this store launched last year.

“Three billion applications downloaded in less than 18 months — this is like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.

In November the company announced that more than 100,000 software applications available in the store.

Much of the competition
When Apple introduced its software store, the idea of an on-device application store was hardly a new one — companies like Handango have offered them for years –but the early ones met with limited success.  The popularity of the iPhone version has breathed new life into this concept, and virtually all of Apple’s competitors are seeking to imitate this accomplishment.

Both Google’s Android OS and Palm’s webOS debuted with a software store part of their basic feature set, RIM has launched the BlackBerry App World,while the store Ovi by Nokia. In addition, Microsoft has introduced an application store for Windows Mobile devices this fall.

However, none of them managed to match the App Store. Second is the Android Market, which closed more than 20,000 applications.