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Cyberspace: Finally an iOS Browser That Stands Out
Making a truly good third-party browser for the iPhone or iPad is difficult because of Apple’s iOS development restrictions. You basically have to create a Safari clone, with some extras thrown in. Cyberspace is a new contender that manages to set itself apart from the crowd.

Surprisingly, it does so not by adding very much, but by taking quite a bit away. Cyberspace is designed to simplify the web browsing experience in much the same way that Safari’s new reader view does: It reduces web pages to their most basic elements for easier consumption. And while I find Safari’s reader feature useful, it’s even more of a boon to mobile browsing.

Cyberspace does the bulk of its amazing work thanks to the Instapaper Mobilizer-powered Text mode and Readability bookmarklet, both of which help to reduce the clutter on text-focused websites, providing you with two options for getting rid of things like graphics and sidebars to read the actual content you came to the site to find in the first place. Both can be used with regular mobile Safari, but they require far more steps. With Cyberspace, Text mode is always one click away, and Readability is only three, and neither requires any additional setup.

The browser does its work very quickly, and without any annoying customized chrome elements that some other third-party solutions have chosen to go with. And even though the UI is minimal and plain, it’s still quite powerful. As mentioned, you can switch between Full and Text views with one tap, establish and access a queue if you’re planning on reading a number of things in succession, add bookmarks with a single click, and access both local and social bookmarks all from the main screen.

Other perks that Cyberspace offers include an amazing recommendation engine for the search/URL bar, which draws from different sources including Google and responds nearly instantly. The app also provides a “Switch Keyboard” button that lets you change between iOS’ URL and search field contextual keyboards with a single click. It’s much more elegant that providing two separate text entry fields for search and URLs, like mobile Safari does.

Finally, Cyberspace lets you share to Instapaper, Read It Later, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Delicious, Pinboard and Google Reader quickly and easily, and provides a scratchpad within the app so you can keep notes for yourself while browsing. Those notes can be sent to Pastebot, and shared to Twitter and Facebook, or via email.

Cyberspace will cost you $1.99, but it’s a universal app optimized for both iPhone and iPad, and it packs so many features that $2 is worth the time you’d save trying to set up mobile Safari to emulate even half of its functionality. If you do a lot of reading on the web, or even just a lot of mobile browsing and sharing via social networks, then Cyberspace is an absolute must-buy.

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Apps That Bring Apple and Android Together
Maybe you, like me, crossed over to the dark side this holiday season and picked up an Android device. I got a Samsung Galaxy Tab to help satisfy my persistent curiosity about Google’s iOS competitor, and I found that one of the first things I wanted to do was get the Tab set up so that it could communicate as much as possible with Apple’s devices, and vice versa.

Here are the apps I found essential for maintaining the link with my iPhone and iPad-toting friends, and to my Mac, when I’m in the mood for some Android moonlighting.

WhatsApp Messenger

This was one of the first BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) substitutes available for the iPhone, back before Kik came on the scene. And unlike Kik, it remains available for BlackBerry devices. Plus it just feels like a better-made product, from the UI to its actual performance. But both WhatsApp Messenger and Kik are available for Android devices, so feel free to grab whichever you prefer.

Fring

FaceTime is a great product with a lot of potential, but it has some disappointing limitations. For one, it only works over Wi-Fi. And it also only works between Macs, iPhones and iPod touches for the time being. Fring video calling doesn’t have any of those restrictions, and lets me video call from my iPhone 4 or Galaxy Tab to both Android and iOS devices on either 3G or Wi-Fi. Tango is another service that offers the same thing, but my call quality was better with Fring, so that’s the one I recommend.

doubleTwist

It’s hard to understate how essential doubleTwist is for Mac-based Android users. Josh wrote about it in November, and James created a video on the subject before that (embedded below). Combined with Air Sync, which is available to users who pay to upgrade doubleTwist to the premium version, this Mac software and its companion Android app will make you wonder why you ever felt so married to iTunes to begin with. You can sync iTunes playlists and music, but its real value comes in being able to drag and drop movie files to your Android device and have them converted and transferred — wirelessly and automatically.

Remote for iTunes

iOS device users will smirk at this one, since Remote for iTunes for Android (which is not developed by Apple, by the way) costs $4.99. The official Remote app, of course, is free. The Android clone works just as well, though, requires no additional software installation, pairs the exact same way as the iOS version, and has pretty much all the same features. As an added bonus, the Android app lets you control the volume of iTunes with your device’s hardware volume buttons, something Apple would never allow.

Any others you think belong on this list?

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How Much Did You Spend on Apps This Year?
With apps being sold at an average price of less than $2.50 each, what could possibly be driving speculation that app sales could be a $35 billion industry by 2014? If you have an iOS device, then the answer is you. On average, early in 2010, iOS users were spending a little over $4 each month on apps. With over 120 million iOS devices sold as of September, and 6.5 billion combined app downloads, it’s easy to see where ambitious sales estimates are coming from.

Sales numbers are all well and good, but instead of looking at the industry numbers to see who is correct, and what report is on track, look instead at your own personal buying habits and draw your own conclusions. I pulled together my own numbers and here’s what I found. Since purchasing my iPhone 3G back in September 2008, I’ve spent $825 on 676 apps (274 or 40 percent were paid apps, and 402 or 60 percent were free apps). I’m obviously helping bring that $4 average up by spending approximately $30 per month on apps. If every iOS user out there were buying apps on a monthly basis like I do, then Apple would already have its own $35 billion dollar industry today.

To find out this information, I used an OS X application called App Store Expense Monitor from WetFish Software. It’s simple enough to use, just download and launch. It gathers information about your app purchases by reading the file names of your iPhone applications from your iTunes folder on your computer. It then retrieves prices and presents the total amount of money you’ve spent. The results are exportable for further review and analysis. So what are your numbers like?

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More Proof Apple TV Is Actually a Netflix Box
Apple has indeed crossed the 1 million Apple TVs sold mark, as it predicted it would shortly before Christmas. I argued that its relative success was mostly due to Neftlix being available on the streaming media device, and a new report from an industry analyst (via AppleInsider) supports that view.

Gleacher & Company’s Brian Marshall said Dec. 29 that according to his estimates, sourced from company reports and additional research, Apple rents around 475,000 movies and TV shows per day through the iTunes store. Netflix, by comparison, rents over 10 times as much, with about 5.1 million rentals per day.

But Apple and Netflix have very different models. Netflix offers a “pay once, watch as much as you can” model, while Apple embraces a fee-per-download way of doing things. Maybe Apple is more successful from a revenue perspective, despite the large discrepancy in daily rentals? Not so, according to Marshall.

According to his estimates, iTunes rentals bring in around $60 million per quarter, while purchases through the media distribution service account for around $50 million, making for a total of approximately $110 million per quarter. Netflix’s reported revenue for just a single month (Sept. 2010) is about $550 million, or five times as much.

It’s by no means bad news for Apple, which is still growing its iTunes rental business. Marshall believes iTunes rental revenue could exceed $1 billion per year within five years, giving it another fairly healthy revenue stream, even after giving movie studios their cut.

The bottom line remains that Netflix has far more traction than iTunes as a means for renting and viewing streamed content, so it’s hard to underestimate its effect on Apple TV sales. Anecdotally, it’s the only thing anyone I know who has one uses it for, and almost none of those I know who bought this model owned a previous generation device.

So is Apple TV just a great Netflix box, or is something else driving sales? The impending potential of apps, maybe?

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