Timing is everything, they say in comedy. Amazon probably isn’t laughing after reading a financial analyst’s prediction the online bookseller will see its share of the e-book market nosedive to 35 percent by 2015 at a time when revenue for electronic reading is expected to nearly triple. Why? Two words: Apple iPad.

Credit Suisse analyst Spencer Wang expects Amazon’s share of the e-book market to be more than halved by the iPad, falling to 35 percent by 2015, down from 90 percent in 2009. Just as Amazon’s market share for e-books shrinks, revenue from e-books is expected to explode; hitting $775 million by 2015, up from $248 million last year. The skyrocketing demand could also be helped by a number of big-named publishers – Macmillion, HarperCollins and Hachette – using the iPad to force Amazon to drop its $9.99 flat-price on e-books.

I’ve been a long-time user of messenger bags, ever since I was a bike courier here in San Francisco in the mid-1990s. I’ve been though a few of them, including an original Zo bag, but one of the best I’ve used is the Large Messenger Bag from Incase.

Note: It’s Bag Week on CultofMac.com. We’re checking out some of the latest and greatest bags on the market. Read all the bag reviews here.

I took the LA Besace bag with me to Macworld and boy am I glad I did!

This bag is an absolute pleasure to use. Its semicircular front opening is a superb design that makes everything highly visable and accessible. No more wasted time digging around for stuff in bags!

Note: It’s Bag Week on CultofMac.com. We’re checking out some of the latest and greatest bags on the market. Read all the bag reviews here.

Here’s some video of Wired‘s digital version of the magazine in action.

Check out the amazing 360 of the car ad at the 1.33 point. A glossy magazine ad comes to life and you’re able rotate it with your finger. It’s totally sci-fi — and very, very cool.

Wired’s EIC  Chris Anderson says the iPad and other tablets are a big opportunity for the publishing industry, and Wired is betting big on them.

“Much is still to be answered about magazines and other media on this emerging class of devices, from the business and distribution models to the consumer response. But what is already clear is that they offer the opportunity to be beautiful, highly engaging and immersive, going beyond what’s available on the web. I think tablets are going to sell like hotcakes, in part because they offer such an intimate, rich media experience. We’re betting big on them, as you can see, but this is just a taste. Stay tuned for a full release this summer.”

The app is designed to run using Adobe’s Air, but can be easily repurposed for the iPad and other devices, Anderson says. He showed it off for the first time last week at the TED conference.

Via Wired’s Epicenter blog.

Cell phone cameras are unmitigated garbage. By nature, the CMOS chips have to be small, which means less surface area to suck in light. That’s fine in an emergency, or to snap a lip-pursed Snooki shot of some girls you met at the bar, but right now, you’ll simply never take a snap with a cameraphone that equals the picture quality of even that five-year old digicam lurking in your obsolete gadget drawer.

Worse: all too often, cameraphone makers try to compensate for the terrible image quality of their chips by cramming more megapixels into the chip, which fools buyers into thinking they are getting a better camera, but counter-intuitively just makes image quality even poorer. What’s needed is better chips, not more megapixels.

So it’s exciting to see OmniVision come out with a new, RAW-capable CMOS sensor for cellphones. Shooting in RAW means that no data is lost when your phone converts the image data from the CMOS into a JPEG, so it should improve image quality… especially given the OmniVision sensor maxes out at 5 megapixels.

Big shocker: Microsoft isn’t supporting Adobe’s Flash in its brand new Windows Phone 7 operating system.

Windows Phone 7 joins Apple’s iPhone and iPad in snubbing the widely-used plug-in.

The news was delivered to Information Week, which received a surprise email from Adobe saying:

“While the newest version of Windows Phone won’t support Flash at initial availability, both companies are working to include a browser plug-in for the full Flash player in future versions of Windows Phone. More details will be shared at Microsoft MIX next month.”

Information Week is skeptical. It says it’s not clear if Flash is coming to WinMo 7 at all.

Microsoft launched WinMo 7 on Monday to great acclaim. Blogs like Gizmodo and Wired’s Gadget Lab, which got to play with the new system at the Mobile World Congress, say it looks better and is easier to use than the iPhone. (Giz: Windows Phone 7 Interface: Microsoft Has Out-Appled Apple; Gadget Lab: Hands-On With Windows Phone 7 Series

Of course, Microsoft makes its own Silverlight platform, a rich-media platform which competes with Flash on the web.

Although Apple has remained officially mum on the issue of Flash, it’s widely understood that the company views the plug-in as buggy and power-hungry.

Not all smartphone makes are snubbing Flash, however.  Adobe just announced Flash for Google’s Android platform, it’s first step into mobile.

Information Week: Windows Mobile 7 Won’t Get Flash

Via Gadget Lab.

We start today with a deal on MacBooks, including $849 for a 2.26GHz Core 2 13.3″-inch white model. Also on tap: a new round of App Store price drops, including an iPhone, iPod touch adaptation of the classic PAC-MAN video game. Finally, Adobe Photoshop Elements image manipulation software is available for $50.

Along the way, we’ll look at many other Apple-related bargains, including the Air Mouse Pro for the iPhone, Altec Lansing speakers for the iPod and a Philips Transdock II FM transmitter and car charger for the iPod.

As always, details on these and many more items can be found on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

Although I’m still an Adium man on my primary Mac, I’ve been using the excellent online IM client Meebo for years to keep in contact with a decade’s worth of collected buddies scattered across ever instant messaging protocol under the sun across multiple machines.

Unfortunately, using the Meebo site on the iPhone was never quite as good as an experience. I’m really excited to see, then, that they’ve just released a native Meebo app to the iTunes App Store.

All the best features of Meebo are here, including searchable chat history across all of your Meebo sessions, regardless of machine, and support for just about every IM protocol under the sun. The Meebo app will also push IM notifications to you when the app is closed, and early reports suggest that it keeps you logged in far longer than just about any other IM app out there. It’ll even automatically reconnect when you lose coverage.

The best news, though, is the price: Meebo is completely free. I’ve been a huge fan of the Meebo web service for years: if you do any instant messaging on your iPhone at all, this is worth a download.

The first step in Apple taking on netbooks without releasing a netbook was the iPad with cheap 3G support from AT&T. Now comes word the carrier may start selling iPads in its stores – and pushing out netbooks to make room. The rumor comes on the heels of reports European carriers will subsidize the iPad’s price for a two-year contract.

“We’re told the general plan is to convert one or two existing netbook display sections in each corporate AT&T location into a pretty substantial iPad display area,” according to Boy Genius Reports, citing a carrier source “down South” indicating the company will sell the 3G iPad.

Swede and Apple enthusiast Anders Norman saw his every possession melted and charred in a cataclysmic home conflagration that gutted his entire apartment.

The only item left standing? His aluminum iMac: dirty, singed, partly melted, but still cheerily humming along.

Aperture 3 was a much needed update to Apple’s professional photography suite, which had lagged badly behind the competition not just in feature-set, but in performance, since its predecessor did not take advantage of 64-bit processors.

Unfortunately, though, the upgrade has not resulted in measurable performance gains for most users. Far from it: a bug in Aperture 3 causes a serious memory leak on the machines of many users, filling up even terrabyte sized hard drives with bloated caches of unused virtual memory.

Apple has already patched Aperture 3 once, with a 65 meg software update meant to address “an issue affecting the playback of video clips used in Aperture 3 slideshows on Snow Leopard.” Unfortunately, that’s the most minor of bugs compared to the memory leaks now being widely reported.

On their part, Cupertino is staying mum, per usual. That hopefully means they are aware of the issue and have the Aperture team working overtime on a fix.

Anyone using Aperture 3 out there who has experienced the memory leaks? Let us know in the comments. This isn’t a universal problem, so clearly it has something to do with the end user’s machine configuration. Maybe we can figure out the common factor.

If Apple CEO Steve Jobs is to realize his vision for the iPad as an information-sharing device, he may have to win-over newspapers to that idea, a new report suggests. Although talks between Apple and newspapers are described as “friendly,” the head of one major daily calls Cupertino’s demands a potential “dealbreaker.”

The key sticking points in the discussions are two-fold: Apple’s desire to share subscriber information and other data viewed as valuable by publishers, as well as how revenue-sharing applies to newspaper and magazine publishers. Publishers have amassed subscriber names, addresses and credit cards often used to develop marketing campaigns, even newspaper content.

First Apple used higher prices to get book publishers to consider the company’s iPad. Now comes word the Cupertino, Calif. electronics firm will offer FairPlay DRM to make them feel safe from e-book pirates. The move seems to extend Apple’s use of DRM for movies and television episodes to its latest consumer tablet device.

However, unlike movies and TV show sold through iTunes, Apple plans to give book publishers the option to lock-down their titles with DRM. “No doubt some publishers, including O’Reilly Media — which has vociferously argued that digital locks are harmful to sales — will opt not to deploy FairPlay,” according to Monday’s Los Angeles Times.

I love the latest Horseman laptop bag from Crumpler.

The best thing about Crumpler’s Horseman Bag is its size, which I think is optimum for a messenger/laptop bag. I have owned messenger bags that are too big, really just a huge cavernous void for your stuff to rattle and roll around in.

The other end of the spectrum are bags that are too small, which I personally think look a little on the feminine side on a fully-grown man. Not The Horseman though.

Note: It’s Bag Week on CultofMac.com. We’re checking out some of the latest and greatest bags on the market. Read all the bag reviews here.

For the ultimate wow factor, bring the Knomo Bristol laptop bag to your next meeting or job interview. This well-made leather laptop bag is the ultimate accessory for white-collar workers.

The Bristol looks professional and so will you. Sold at Apple’s retail stores, this $150.00 bag is from Knomo, a posh new company from the West End of London.

Founded in 2004,  Knomo’s mission is to make accesories that are as stylish as they are functional. With the Bristol bag they’ve outdone themselves.

Note: It’s Bag Week on CultofMac.com. We’re checking out some of the latest and greatest bags on the market. Read all the bag reviews here.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k0V4Zk4Nqs

We told you a few weeks ago that Square|Enix was bringing classic titles from its long-running RPG series Final Fantasy to the iPhone. Today, we bring you the first footage of the game in action (and a screenshot showing the interface).

Looks tasty, though I admit I’ll be more excited when Final Fantasy IV comes to the iPhone. That’s a must-download. And don’t even get me started on Chrono Trigger…

Via TouchArcade

The AR.Drone feels like the future of video games. A combination of a flying, hovering, and downright smart helicopter with four rotors and lots of sensors, and an iPhone augmented reality app, the Drone allows gamers to see the world through cameras on the chopper, to augmentedly dogfight with friends, and even to attack robots that only they can see. Basically, it was the hit of CES, and it shows an entire class of games that the iPhone makes possible.

On Friday, the AR.Drone from Parrot took the stage at the venerable TED Conference in Long Beach alongside everyone from Bill Gates and complexity theory genius Benoit Mandelbrot to Andrew Bird and Sarah Silverman. But before then, the little helicopter from the future hit northern California, making a cameo at MacWorld and, in a stroke of luck, briefly landing in my control on Thursday. And I came away more impressed by the actual device than I had been by video and demos of it.

Steve Jobs is finally cooperating with an official biography, the New York Times reports.

Jobs will collaborate with Walter Isaacson, author of two well-regarded biographies of Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger.

The book, which is in the early planning stages, would cover the entire life of Mr. Jobs, from his youth in the area now known as Silicon Valley through his years at Apple, these people said.

Mr. Jobs, who will turn 55 on Feb. 24, has invited Mr. Isaacson to tour his childhood home, one person with knowledge of the discussion said.

… Cooperation with Mr. Isaacson could be a sign that Mr. Jobs has emerged from his recent health battles with more of an interest in shaping his legacy.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RNpMAtqIZ8&feature=player_embedded

In the wake of last week’s report that sausage-mania was gripping South Korea when Maxbong brand sausages were found to be usable as capacitive styluses, there were some small few who doubted the report.

Our retort? This video, showing a South Korean playing Taiko Drummaster with a pair of Maxbong Sausages. As you can see, it works well, but those Maxbongs look a little too thick to be truly decent styluses. I still think a Slim Jim would work better.

Well, that certainly took long enough: Apple has finally allowed a version of SlingPlayer Mobile app to creep through the App Store with 3G support.

And it’s about time. SlingPlayer Mobile is a great little app that allows you to stream video from your television, cable, satellite or DVR to your iPhone. The previous version was WiFi only, due to pressure from AT&T, but Ma Bell claims that they worked with SlingPlayer to optimize their 3G compression scheme, and they are now happy that the app won’t be too much of a bandwidth hog.

That’s good news for home theater enthusiasts: it means you never really need to load your iPhone up with movies at all, but can just stream your library from home. Of course, that functionality has a price premium: it costs $30.

Children — those sticky, mucous-leaking, disaster-prone calamity goblins! — tend to have an unhealthy fixation with their parents’ gadgets. By ‘unhealthy,’ I mean for us, and not for them: no matter how many times your pudge-kneed toddler drops your iPhone into the toilet, common decency prevents us from clobbering the little monster for the affront. The only thing to do is buy yourself a new iPhone, then try to distract your feral, post-fetal doppelganger from indulging his or her innate impetus to destroy it with a plastic toy simulacrum.

Toy makers have been banking on just this for years. Consider all of the plastic laptops and cell phones and MP3 players on the shelves of your local Toys ‘R’ Us. Every gadget under the sun has a bright plastic analogue, ready to be sacrificed to your child’s agency of destruction and save your most cherished gadgets.

Apple’s new iPad, when it is released, is going to be a particulaly tempting object for the average kid to mindlessly throw, smash, bend, smear bodily fluids upon, or all of the above. But Fisher-Price — old saws at this game — have you covered. They’ve just announced their own iPad-inspired device for children, called the iXL.

It looks pretty good. It allows kids to look at photos, read e-books, play music and games, and even dink around with remedial art and note taking programs. Of course, since your kid’s probably just going to smash the dog in the head with it, then use it to blow up the microwave when you’re not looking, the $79.99 price tag might seem a bit much… but it’s better to be out $80 than $499, don’t you think?

We start the week off with a passel of puzzles for your iPhone, plus a speaker for your iPod from Logitech. Alchemize is a puzzle game for your iPhone or iPod touch being offered free for a limited time. Next up is a number of App Store titles marked down to the low, low price of free. Lastly, Logitech has their rechargeable speaker system for the iPod or iPhone. The $60 system gives you 20 hours of tune between charges.

As always, details on these and many other items (such as the Western Digital 1TB USB 2.0 external hard drive) are available after the jump.

A report by a UK insurance company says phony claims for iPhones soar every time a new model launches.

Since the November 2007 launch of the first gen iPhone in the UK to the iPhone 3gs, claims on iPhones increase by 50% during the month after a new model is launched, Supercover Insurance director Carmi Korine said in a statement. Her company estimates that four out of 10 of those increased claims are abruptly-mangled iPhones that owners hope to have replaced with the latest model.

“While most customers take out insurance because they value their iPhone, we started to notice increases in claims as new and upgraded iPhones were launched.

“For short periods around new model or upgrade launches, claims for lost, stolen or damaged iPhones go through the roof.

“The issue appears to be that most iPhone owners can only go for so long realising that they’re a generation behind the latest must-have spec before they resort to extreme measures.”

It might be worth faking the break: Korine notes that although 40% of the claims received after a new iPhone model launch were suspicious the company  rejected about 25%.

Just don’t be too obvious: the insurer requires that you send in the phone. One over-zealous early adopter claimed the phone had been “dropped” when he or she had evidently driven a car over it.

Via Press Association

Don’t search for Horticulture vs. Necromancy or Vegetables vs. Decomposition, but if you go to the App Store now, Plants vs. Zombies is now available for the iPhone and iPod Touch for only $2.99.

Trust me, that’s an absolute steal. Pop Cap Games’ wonderfully goofy tower-defense game — in which rows of flowers and funguses must cheerily hold off wave after wave — was the most addictive game of last year, and not only does Plants vs. Zombies feel more intuitive to play on a touchscreen, but the iPhone app costs 85% less than the desktop port.

For iPhone gamers, this is news that should be met with nothing less than hysterical shrieking and full-on bladder evacuation. Buy Plants vs. Zombies here, then join me in the comments where I’ll explain my patented, never-fail Gloomshroom defense.

Chip-making giant Intel and mobile phone giant Nokia Monday announced a partnership of sorts, melding their two mobile operating systems into one platform: MeeGo. “Simply put, MeeGo heralds a new era of mobile computing,” claimed Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo.

The Linux-based Meego targets a range of mobile companies, including Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android handsets and even Microsoft. In a slam against Android, Intel vice president Renee James told the New York Times the Google-made platform is too “specific” to be used on a wide range of devices.