Interesting stats courtesy of Tim Bray:

$350 for Apple · They’re obviously the best at turning a profit on selling phones. As Asymco reports, Apple gets about $650 per iPhone, has a margin around 55%, and thus makes a gross profit of $350 or so apiece.

$590 for AT&T · I went and dug through their 2011 Q3 numbers: They claimed a smartphone ARPU (dollars per customer per month) of $83.46 and reported a 29.6% gross margin; which over two years (a reasonable lifetime for a phone), by my math comes to just under $600.

(Dear businesspeople: I know the difference between “gross profit” and real money, and there are probably lots of places in the preceding two paragraphs where you might want to quibble with the accounting. But stay with me a minute.)

$12 for App Writers · Back to Asymco; Horace calculated the total amount that the average user spends for apps on the average iOS device. Everyone thinks that iOS is the place to go to monetize apps. Yep, twelve bucks per device.

Yes, that $12 per device is pretty bad but I think much of this is a bi-product of what is available for the devices now. There are very few categories in which I have to spend money in order to get a high-quality app. And if you add in the fact that many families have multiple devices — and that everyone in a family gets the app for one price — then the price is actually higher. Let’s say the typical family has three devices — two iPhones and an iPad — then we are really talking $36 per family. Not great but better. Okay, that really stinks if you figure that Angry Birds has probably taken $4 per device all by themselves. (Just kidding. Probably more like $1.)

The reality is, for most of us there are only, as Tim put it, table scraps available in selling apps in App Stores. But that is the reality and we as developers need to figure out how to make that work for us.

Hello, Google Play: Google launches sweeping revamp of app, book, music, and video stores

Smart move by Google, I think, to rebrand its content store. It doesn’t make sense to call it the Android Store when it includes all markets, including Chrome books, Android and Google TV. I assume the content can be run on Mac and Windows, too, or at least books, music and videos can.

But “Play”? For music and videos it makes sense to me. But for apps and books? Play implies that only games and entertainment apps are important. Does Google Play sell books for learning? How about productivity apps? Can I find work-related stuff in Google Play? And is that the logical place to look for these things?

comScore: Japan, An Early Mover In Mobile, Trails The U.S., Others In Smartphones

This headline (and story) doesn’t surprise me at all. The important quote:

Ironically, it seems that Japan’s early move into mobile content – the i-mode service from DoCoMo, launched in the 1990′s, being one of the very first plays at offering more than just voice and text to users – is partly to blame.

Why is this ironic, though? It is typical. Leaders don’t generally transition quickly from one paradigm to another because the old is good enough. DoCoMo was kind of like smartphone technology years ago and it was heavily adopted in Japan, a decade and a half before anywhere else. It is not surprising at all that the consumers there have been slower to transition to smartphones.

A great example in the US is how long it took for cell phones to take off relative to other countries. We had awesome and expensive copper wiring going to every house in America. Of course there is little incentive for people to change and little incentive to “string the last mile” of cell phone service across the country. Other countries had no copper wiring, no landlines, and were much faster at adopting cell phone technology.

This is why most companies can’t make the transition from one business paradigm to another, too. It is why Google sucks at social, why Microsoft has struggled at mobile.

Japan is way more typical than this article wants to admit. There are examples everywhere.

“It’s like we said on the iPad, if you see a stylus, they blew it.” – Steve Jobs, iOS 4 launch

The one thing I still can’t get rid of is a pad of paper. It is just too versatile. I can take notes, draw, create checklists, anything. I can write in pencil or pen. I can highlight my notes. With a pencil, I can even erase and try again. Of course this stuff doesn’t transfer to a computer very well and it sure isn’t searchable. I would really like to be able to do something with my notes.

I tried using my iPad and it works perfectly fine for basic note-taking with the built-in keyboard but I can’t draw on the page very well. I’ve tried a number of third-party note taking apps and find every one deficient for one reason or another. I have even tried the stylus-driven ones but find that the tip size coupled with poor precision and this horrible problem of not being able to put my hand on the screen just kills it every time. I have very neat handwriting on paper but on an iPad it is illegible.

I thought about other tools for this. Livescribe is very interesting, for example. I get the better part of pen and paper and then can sync that to a computer to make it searchable. But the idea of writing in pen bothers me. I really love my eraser.

I have a hard time believing that Apple doesn’t see this as an opportunity, that a developer or two hasn’t been working on a special Bluetooth-enabled stylus and programming interface that has the kind of precision of a pen and paper with all the benefits of doing it on a tablet. If we can tell slight angles of a device and use that to race cars I would think it would be quite easy to recognize the optional stylus.

To me, Steve Jobs’ statement was bull. If the only mechanism for inputting on the device is a stylus, fine. That’s bad form. In the real-world we use all kinds of medium: pencils and pens, markers, paintbrushes. But on the iPad we have pretty much been relegated to finger-painting.

If I had an iPad 3 wish, this would be it. The one feature I’d love to see is that stylus and programming interface from Apple that shows how amazing and magical writing can be.