“Sesame Street” E-Book Hits iPad and Chrome Web Store Simultaneously [VIDEO]

Earlier in the week, ScrollMotion released a new Sesame Street e-book simultaneously for the iTunes App Store and for the Google Chrome Web Store.

Over the last year, nearly a dozen Sesame Street e-books have been released for the iPhone and iPad, but this is the first title Sesame Street has released for Google Chrome.

With Chrome 9, the Chrome Web Store is now available to all users in North America. That means users can install free or paid web applications for use across machines and even on the CR-48 netbook.

Built using HTML5, this is ScrollMotion’s first Chrome Web Store release. When we talked to ScrollMotion last fall, co-founder Josh Koppel told us that because the company can build apps using an HTML5 base, porting those apps to other platforms — in this case the Chrome Web Store — is much less complicated.

Bert and Ernie: What’s Cooking [iTunes link] is $2.99 for iOS (it works on both the iPhone and iPad) and $1.99 for Google Chrome.

The story book is cute — read by Gordon from Sesame Street — and the iOS version includes the option for the reader to record his or her own voice for playback. Both versions of the app include options for reading along and for coloring digital images of Sesame Street characters.

We bought the Chrome app to give it a spin and while the quality of the book and voice recording is good, we still think the desktop reading experience leads a bit to be desired. To us, it underscores why the iPad, iPhone and future Android tablets will have so much of an advantage over the CD-ROM children’s book of the 1990s: touch matters. Touch controls makes interacting with content more natural and makes the overall experience more engaging.

The promise of HTML5 is that the apps will be usable on other devices. Just imagine how cool it would be if Chrome web apps could work on Honeycomb. That might not be in the cards for the immediate future, but we expect to see some sort of fusion between the two platforms at some stage.

In the meantime, this is just one more example we can chalk up to the iPadification of the web).

Motorola Xoom as a test for life beyond the iPad

Is the iPad a one-hit wonder or will the tablet market take off broadly in 2011? That's the question Motorola's Xoom tablet will likely answer.

Motorola's Xoom may determine how real the broader tablet market is.
(Credit: Motorola)

And this broader market, of course, includes Hewlett-Packard's WebOS tablet and RIM's PlayBook, among others. But Motorola's Xoom stands as the biggest potential consumer rival to the iPad 2 because Motorola is a first-tier supplier that has already competed mightily against Apple in the smartphone market (think Droid) and, more importantly, packs in plenty of eagerly awaited goodies, including: Google's Android Honeycomb operating system for tablets, a powerful dual-core processor, a high-resolution (1,280x800) display, dual cameras, and lest we forget, the Verizon 3G (and soon-to-come 4G) network.

That said, tucked into a research note I received on Friday from Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw, was this morsel: "The magnitude of tablet opportunity beyond Apple is unclear." And he also writes that "we believe that iPad volumes in the current quarter will dry up ahead of the iPad 2 launch."

So, will we see long lines at Verizon stores the day of launch, like the iPad? Or has the tablet novelty worn off enough that it's not a line-forming impulse-buy anymore? And/or is it principally a phenomenon linked to the cachet of Apple products?

Based on my own experience, I believe that the media tablet is more than a one-hit wonder. The sheer utility of my iPad has cut my laptop use almost in half, as I've written before. (And the iPad trumps my iPhone too, in a number of respects, like mapping.)

So, what kind of numbers do we need to see? Considering that the market is still nascent, that's a tough call. Kumar said that Apple shipped between 6 and 7 million iPads in the most recent quarter, "with the lower end (Wi-Fi) dominating the mix." With Apple as the high-water mark, we can't expect those kinds of numbers from Motorola initially.

Asia-based rumors claim Motorola is aiming to ship as many as 800,000 out of the gate and RIM a bit more. Those would be healthy numbers.

And Motorola appears to be doing all it can do to make interesting accessories, too--like this speaker dock and Bluetooth keyboard, among other add-ons.

Who knows, the tablet, in one form or another, could eventually make the laptop obsolete. That would result in huge, market-upending numbers. But I'll leave that highly-speculative analysis for next yea


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Rush to compete with Apple's iPad places strain on component suppliers

As device makers hope to take on Apple's iPad in 2011, the plethora of devices set to come to market is reportedly placing a significant strain on component makers, which could cause "disruptions" in the global supply of display panels.

According to Taiwan's DigiTimes, the display industry is expected to experience both shortages and excess inventories throughout 2011. iSuppli IHS has predicted that global tablet shipments will more than triple in 2011, reaching 57.6 million units, with Apple retaining the lion's share of shipments with 70.4 percent.

Because the tablet market is growing but the true sales potential remains unknown, display suppliers will be "forced to gamble production capacity on the unrealistically high projections of their tablet customers," said Joe Abelson, vice president of displays at IHS. Manufacturers adopting different display sizes and specs will lead to shortages and excesses in 2011, he predicted.

A side effect of this strain could be heavy discounts on unused displays, or even scrapping of unwanted hardware. iSuppli also believes the demand for netbooks will continue to shrink as tablets grow.

In 2012, iSuppli sees Apple retaining 61.7 percent of the tablet market with the iPad. Competitors are expected to increase their share, splitting up the remaining 38.3 percent of sales.

DigiTimes has previously reported that Apple's overseas partners are set to begin production of the next-generation iPad this month. In all, about a half-million iPads are expected to be assembled as Apple stocks up for a forthcoming launch of the second-generation device.

Forecasts for this year also call for a "breakthrough" in manufacturing of active-matrix organic LED displays. Investments in AMOLED are seen as finally paying off, making the screens more popular in mobile devices, and perhaps even appearing in HDTVs for sale on retail shelves.

The Taiwanese industry publication reported in December that constrained supplies of AMOLED screens would keep the display from Apple's next-generation iPad. The Cupertino, Calif., company will reportedly stick with an LCD screen for the second-generation tablet.