Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and Apple Inc. (AAPL) have been competing in the ereader and tablet market for over a year now, since the iPad was introduced. On Friday, a report from Bloomberg mentioned that Amazon is now looking to introduce its own smartphone to take on the iPhone and some of the leading Android devices in the market.

A smartphone would give Amazon a wider range of low-priced hardware devices that bolster its strategy of making money from digital books, songs and movies. It would help Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos — who made a foray into tablets with the Kindle Fire — carve out a slice of the market for advanced wireless handsets.

Amazon has one of the most popular ereaders out on the market, the Kindle and is also leading the industry with some of its other products, including its cloud services and tablet computer, the Kindle Fire. The report mentions that Amazon is set to acquire a portfolio of patents that would allow the company to take steps in competing directly with some of the top competitors.

The rumored smartphone would likely borrow certain aspects of the Kindle Fire, including features such as purchasing books, magazines, and newspapers from Amazon’s store as well as using Amazon’s Cloud Drive as external storage. Amazon currently operates services that control a considerable portion of the digital content available online. By introducing a smartphone alongside its tablet and pairing with its online content, Amazon could very well present the iPhone with a serious competitor in the smartphone market.

{Via MacRumors}

TORONTO, ON — October 27, 2010 — Kobo, a global eReading service, today announced that a selection of the most popular newspapers and magazines are now available for download with a two -week FREE trial from the Kobo store. Effective immediately, dozens of top U.S. and Canadian publications have been added to Kobo, which currently boasts over 2.2 million eBooks including the hottest new releases, New York Times bestsellers, timeless literary masterpieces and thousands of free titles.

The Kobo Store now offers the following digital publications across select Kobo devices and Apps: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Scientist, The Seattle Times, Wilson Quarterly, Foreign Affairs, American Scholar, China International Business, Columbus Dispatch , Guideposts, Harvard Business Review, National Review, New York Observer, PC Magazine, Publishers Weekly, Reason, The Christian Science Monitor Daily Briefing, The Nation, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Montreal Gazette, National Post, Ottawa Citizen, Regina Leader-Post, Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, Vancouver Province, Vancouver Sun, Victoria Times-Colonist, and The Globe & Mail. Kobo will be continuing to expand its newspaper and magazine offering to ensure that we have all the publications that people want to read worldwide.

Delivering on the Kobo promise of providing consumers with a best-in-class eReading experience, Kobo’s newspapers and magazines are formatted to bring publications’ same unique qualities to the digital format. Readers can customize their content by selecting from several text sizes – enabling an optimal and comfortable reading experience. Readers can also now organize select newspapers and magazines, along with their eBooks, on the Kobo Wireless eReader, the iPhone and on the iPad. Reading books and select newspapers and magazines is seamless across devices, as users can pick up where they last left off with Kobo Sync.

“Kobo continues to build on our commitment of making sure that consumers have the best reading experience on any device with the largest selection of content worldwide, ” said Michael Serbinis, CEO of Kobo. “We’ve had tremendous success with eBooks and we’re very excited to expand the Kobo offering to include newspapers and magazines with a two-week free trial, allowing consumers to try first without any obligation. We continue to bring on top publishers to ensure that Kobo’s newspaper and magazine offering meets our customers’ highest expectations.”

The addition of newspapers and magazines allows Kobo customers to purchase their favorite publications through a monthly subscription. Following a two-week free trial – monthly subscriptions start as low as: $13.99 for newspapers and $2.99 for magazines. The current edition of a newspaper or magazine can be immediately added to a customer’s library, and with the subscription, customers will receive wireless delivery directly to their Kobo iPad or iPhone App or their Kobo Wireless eReader. It is so convenient – readers can now get their morning paper delivered right to their Kobo Wireless eReader just in time to enjoy with their morning coffee. The new Kobo iPhone and iPad apps are available for download today from the iTunes App Store. Subscriptions and 2 week free trials can be accessed directly from the iPad, iPhone, and the Kobo Wireless eReader’s onboard store, or from the Kobo Newsstand at www.kobobooks.com.

For more information, visit www.kobobooks.com.

*Pricing and delivery method varies based on the publication.

About Kobo, Inc.

Kobo is a global eReading service backed by majority shareholder Indigo Books & Music, Borders Group, REDgroup Retail, and Cheung Kong Holdings. Kobo believes consumers should be able to read any book on any device. With a catalog of over two million eBooks, and an open platform, Kobo enables retailers, device manufacturers and mobile operators to bring the joy of eReading to customers everywhere. For more information, visit www.kobobooks.com.

One of the things discussed when the iPad was launched was it’s impact on the print media. Would the iPad save it by enabling magazines and newspapers to utilize the new features to earn more revenue to stabilize the falling revenues of the print media or would it be the death nail in the print media’s coffin as millions of users changed their reading habits to the electronic form? The outcome to that debate has a long way to go but what the iPad is enabling is for new alternatives to the print media to grow and in this case it’s a new magazine app called Sideways.

Sideways is a lifestyle magazine with topics covered in it’s first issue including the World Cup, music, apps, food, technology and opinion. The app looks really nice and includes inbuilt music and video as well as the glossy pictures and clear text.

Sideways can be read in both landscape and portrait mode although the landscape view works best enabling a navigation bar on the left while the main content appears on the right. Navigating the app is easy too with the touch screen being utilized to scroll through the articles and that you have selected. Some of the screens do open up in ‘pop-up’ windows which you can then close down to return to the app.

Some of the nicest content in this first edition of the application were the music reviews which were video based and ran smooth and clear even at full screen.

With any magazine though, however good it looks, it will be based on it’s content and it’s writing and while some of the writing is engaging the articles are relatively short compared to the established magazines of the print world.

At $4 per issue I would hope to see an increase in the content per magazine especially as some content is not available with the launch of each issue but will become available days, if not weeks after the initial launch. It’s also worth noting that an internet connection is required for some of the content so those of you with WiFi only iPads will need to ensure that you have it connected to a WiFi hotspot to enjoy all of the content.

For its initial launch Sideways has produced a well rounded magazine app, if it can increase it’s content to offer even more value for money then they could have a winner on it’s hands.

Pros

• Great looking
• Multi-media options
• Good range of articles

Cons

• Articles are well written but short
• Not all articles available at launch
• More content required for $4

Sideways – The Magazine, June 2010

Price: $3.99 (iTunes Store)
Category: Lifestyle
Released: Jun 09, 2010
Reviewed Version: 1.0
Size: 2.7 MB
Language: English
Seller: Sideways Software LLC
© 2010 Sideways