Digital Diary: Clash of the Techno-Titans

This week’s Digital Diary sees Sam comparing two new tech products from two of the industry’s biggest players, and musing over what they might mean for publishing.

With Christmas Day seeing Amazon sell more e-books than their printed counterparts for the first time ever – perhaps in part due to it being the present most teens were unwrapping that very morning – 2010 looks set to be a year of digital experimentation and creativity: one which will see a clash of the technological titans, as well as a raft of brilliant and not-so-brilliant ideas in the publishing industry.

Wasting no time in setting out their stall, Google launched their new smartphone this Tuesday, the fancifully named ‘Nexus One.’  A direct competitor to Apple’s iPhone – rather than a subtle attempt to undermine the latter’s dominance with the Android operating system as they have attempted thus far – the Nexus will have a 5 megapixel screen to the iPhone’s 3.  Despite outdoing the iPhone in terms of functionality, the Nexus owes much to Apple’s simple design: besides four small buttons along the bottom strip, the phone is black with a large screen.

Apple meanwhile, have been tinkering on their new tablet-like device – referred to in the interim as the iSlate –  which was rumoured yesterday to be a ten-inch slate with e-reader capabilities and has been described by some as a ‘Kindle Killer.’  The Venturebeat blog reported that the iSlate will be marketed mostly as an e-reader with iPhone functionality, a sort of smartphone/e-reader hybrid.  Either way, an announcement is slated for the end of January.

Whether this will smash Apple’s apparently inexorable rise to pre-eminence is debateable; what is indisputable however, is that these developments provide publishers with yet another potential platform on which to publish, with both helping to improve the e-reading experience and much for publishers to chew over.