PocketGear acquires Handango, new cross platform app store to feature 140,000+ paid and free titles

Ahhhh…. Memories of my Palm OS days… (sniff sniff ) ….

4 billion consumers in 175 countries? Something tells me that number is way off.

Not only is the 4 billion consumers in 175 countries wrong. Those number altogether are very confusing.

4 Billion if everyone of those people actually had a chance to own or use a cell phone sure, but they don’t.

$400 million in revenue to date? TO DATE!? They have what 10+ years combined in the business and they have only sold $400 million? That makes Apple’s 1.5 years to 3 billion Apps downloaded that much more impressive.

As a dedicated service to phones that have little other choice this is good news indeed. You can either keep using devices that are yesterdays technology, or you can move on.

Forget about Apple’s complete dominance over the last 2 1/2 years. Atleast go out and try something new. Get yourself a BlackBerry or an Android phone (for those of you refusing to get an iPhone for whatever your reasons).

Anyone still needing to use either of these two companies (one company) services is really trying to hold on to yesterday. (Que Boyz To Men)

Agree. Their WM apps are way too expensive compare to iPhone and Android. And who’s going to download via PC when the market place/app store is right on your phone.

Ok, 140,000 apps for WinMo, Blackberry, Palm, Symbian, Android, Linux, and Java AND only $400 million in the 10 years they have been in business are some pretty depressing numbers. That only shows how slow those markets are compared to what Apple has started less than 2 years ago. Why even list those numbers like it is a good thing? *shakes head*

I’m glad I stuck with iPhone because this is where the developers are. Granted, I don’t have a physical keyboard … But my productivity apps are better on here.

“Given a choice would you prefer to buy from the potentially smaller platform-specific application store or the larger, cross platform conglomerate?”

From the safe & reliable Apple store. Thanks anyway.

4 billion people. Yeah, sure. Some flack is really congratulating himself on that number.

To those wondering about revenue, Handango is a repository of, for the most part, expensive apps. It’s also one of about 27,000 different places where a smartphone user can get an app. I myself prefer to buy from developers themselves to cut out the middle man.

To compare it to Apple’s App Store is a bit disingenuous since no other smartphone platform has locked their customers into one market before. The rest of us just use google.

Using Handango at this point is a bit like signing up for AOL. Seriously.

Reading over some of these posts made me think about the subject a little bit. Being that the entire industry was changed by an outside the industry company, I see no reason to not give credit where it is due.

You really can not compare anything to what has been done in just a year and a half. The reason you can not compare to two is because there was no other company that was aware of what was possible. To be fair, even if another company had figured it out no one could have made it happen.

Microsoft would have been the only company that could have done just as much as Apple has. The problem with MSFT doing this would be that MSFT doesn’t design their own hardware.

Google understands that for them to be as successful, they need to build hardware and have a desktop OS. End to end solutions work when you have end to end products and services. Google’ Chrome OS will be the deciding factor in how adopted the Android platform becomes. Well, that and when Google finally decides to reel-in their fragmented MobileOS. (They still haven’t shipped the 10 millionth Android device)

Microsoft has lost any chance that they had at dominating for another decade or two. Had Linux not become “easily” useable and Apple had not bought NeXT Microsft would still have 98% OS share and 95% browser share. People opened their eyes and minds to technology.

Now, certain types on here will say, “Jarrett, that isn’t true because people are using closed systems and are not experiencing all that computing could do for them.” In turn I would agree with these claims. People are using technology for what their needs are. 10% of the population needs avenues all over the city so they can go any which way they choose. 90% of the population need to have a trust in a technology supplier to give us products and services that we don’t need to circumvent to address our directional needs. Our streets may be one way, but they tend to always lead us where we are going.

“If we worried about giving our customers what they wanted we would all be riding faster horses.”
Henry Ford.

Sour grapes.

Cheers