While Google's intentions are far from being philanthropic, its strategy to bring us back to an open Web and away from Apps is worth admiring.

Apps didn't level the playing field: they made the Internet become a lot more short tail than it should be. The App Store (and Google Play) drive traffic and visibility to a handful of services while the open web, through search and hyperlink, let you discover small but good websites. 

If we want niche services to continue to exist on mobile, we need an open web where they can exist.

I don't know if a Google Now can achieve that but between Apple who wants to kill it with Apps and Facebook who wants to destroy it with direct publishing, it's good to see one of the giants push to defend the open Web. 

Poor Steve...

The only few times where I've used a stylus on the iPad was to draw with the Paper App. And Paper has an amazing stylus for that which extends the features of the App and tablet. 

But beyond that (and maybe a few other niche applications), we should never have to use styluses. 

This is part of a worrying trend for Apple fans: first, the new iPhone double tap feature to adjust for screens which are too big, then this... Where is the legendary "it just works" integration of hardware and software?

Excellent analysis by Gilles Raymond, the founder of mobile and tablet news app News Republic.

In other words, the App Store model is fundamentally a short-tail model which is mimicked after the iTunes store, itself derived from the way music companies launched records: hits or miss...

What the world badly needs is a long tail social/SEO discovery model like we have on the Web and which makes it possible for niche content publishers or e-commerce shops to be discovered. Small is beautiful and I love the variety of the Web: as a former mobile guy, I miss it badly on my smartphone.

But beyond my own opinion, it's the whole ecosystem that needs a healthy mix of organic and paid discovery in order to develop its full potential.

Really useful and nicely made curation because for once Apple didn't announce anything big but a gazillion minor things.

Newly introduced AppLinks could finally end the fact that you can't link from one app to the next just like you can on web sites.

If this works (and if you've tried Facebook messenger, you've seen it does), this is huge news for the mobile industry as it could completely revamp the distribution model for mobile services which - right now - are the monopoly of App Stores. 

With App linking, we could potentially finally see long-tail Apps get some traction without being an AppStore hit - a model built from iTunes around the old-fashioned idea of music hits. Google in particular could use this to directly link search results to screens within Apps. Which means SEO would - finally work - for mobile Apps discovery.

And of course Facebook - the giant of display ads and mobile download ads - will leverage this too.

I haven't seen these new developments in action and I wonder what this means for the iPad as a device format. Is this a simple and welcome enhancement of the input method or is it Apple's admission that hybrid devices such as Microsoft's surface are better?

Apple presents this as a way to shift Apple from a content consumption to a content creation device, a trend already solid for visual content.

Carriers must hate this. The SIM card which had always been the most precious piece of equipment for them, connecting subscribers and all their data, billing info to their systems, is no longer their monopoly. With that move, Apple can now establish a position where it can broker relationships with carriers as opposed to the other way around. And eventually could end up acting as its own carrier.

A good analysis of why it takes more than shipments being bigger on Android than iOS for Google to win. 

Would you start an App on Android only? 

This rant by Marco Amrent, Tumblr's former CTO, is spot on and echoes what I've been saying for some time now: http://sco.lt/8dhn3R 

The App Store model is fundamentally flawed because it's optimized for the short tail leaving 99% of app developpers little chance to succeed and - in the long run - demotivated. 

Apple les needs to change that by killing featured apps. Let search rule!

It's interesting to see some signs of disappointment for tablets after so much hype for the category. But the metaphor is valid: after the passionate love affair, we might be settling for a marriage of reason as the category matures. 

I see yet a number of reasons for tablets to still exist in spite of increasing pressure from phablets and bigger and bigger phones. Among others:

- games: the iPad is now a significant gaming platform.

- curated computing: the idea that less is more and that we sometimes need a simpler computer.

- after work, chill-out computing: a device that doesn't tell us "go back to work" by offering us a different context.

Interestingly, portability has nothing to do with any of the above.

Why? Because Apple doesn't understand data and the cloud as it should. 

I have to say I yet have to be impressed by a cloud-based service by Apple. After the MobileMe fiasco, iCloud is far from being on par with Google Docs, Dropbox or Evernote.