Horace Dediu:

[A]lmost all the value from the Android ecosystem is concentrated in Samsung. I did not include Google in this analysis since its mobile is so small as to be not visible in its accounting. A separate analysis of Android economics shows that Google’s benefit from the platform is modest. In contrast, Samsung, and Samsung alone, is benefitting greatly. It could even be said that today Samsung is the only Android profit engine.

My thanks to Nice Mohawk for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.

Ita is a brand new list-making app that’s designed to make it fast and simple to collect and organize information. You can drag items to rearrange them, tap to mark items completed, and add multiple items quickly, all from the main list view. If you make lists, you’ll love how fast Ita makes it to collect and complete your stuff.

Ita is beautiful, taking inspiration from high quality paper notebooks and classic typography. And as you use lists, they’ll show signs of wear, just like a piece of paper. Your lists will remember how they look, and that look syncs across iCloud with the rest of your data. Ita is a universal app for iPhone and iPad and is fully accessible using VoiceOver.

Ita is on sale this week for $1.99. Two bucks for the first list app that’s actually better than a piece of paper.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate

My Nexus 7 is due to arrive tomorrow. In the meantime I guess I had better sharpen my knife.

And there was much rejoicing.

Matt Alexander interviewed me for his “Real Life” series. I really love how this interview turned out — we talked a lot about how gadgets and our digital life impact and relate to our physical real life.

Nice overview of the whole enchilada by Jerry Hildenbrand.

Dan Nosowitz on the Nexus 7:

The Nexus 7 is the best of its breed, but it also doesn’t give me any evidence that the breed is one that really holds all that much promise. Aside from reading books, I think it’s pretty clear that a 7-inch tablet is not preferable to a larger one like the iPad or the upcoming Microsoft Surface. It’s like comparing a moped to a car. Both get you from point A to point B, and it’s not bad for what it is, but they’re not really at the same level as far as capabilities go.

He likes it — especially the size:

For me, the key is the size. Again, I was skeptical at first, but for many situations, I’ve come to love the 7-inch frame. The iPad is brilliant when you’re sitting on a couch or camped out in a coffee shop. In my view, the 9.7-inch iPad is slowly but surely becoming a laptop replacement. I expect this to continue. But a 7-inch tablet is different. The iPad is clunky to read in bed, for example. The Nexus 7 is perfect for that. […]

Whereas laptop sizes vary mainly to please screen size preference, I suspect that 7-inch tablets will fit naturally into different use cases than 10-inch tablets. In other words, I believe they’ll end up being closer to two different categories rather than two variations of the same category.

So if the iPad is a valid laptop / PC replacement, would that make a 7.85-inch iPad Mini more like what people originally assumed the iPad would be? Who can say, since we’re speculating about an unannounced and as-of-yet non-existent product, but perhaps “a big iPod touch” may turn out to be a fair description of the iPad Mini after all (it was a completely incorrect description of the original iPad).

This Safari extension gets a Kickstarter page to serve up the HTML5 video rather than the Flash one. It takes about 4 or 5 seconds before the extension kicks in and the video loads, but it sure beats having to change Safari’s user agent or launch Chrome.

(Thanks, Dustin Davis.)

Update: Looks like you won’t need this extension come Monday.

Dan Moren reviews Ticket to Ride for the iPad. This is one of our favorite board games. I also have it on my iPad and it’s pretty fun.

Another great board game also has an iPad counterpart? Puerto Rico.

I love facts like this. The problem is, when bringing up facts like this when I’m at the movies with my friends I only reaffirm another fact: I am way nerdier than they are. But hey, the more you know. Am I right?

Seth Godin:

Too often, we’re presented with choices that don’t please us. We can pick one lousy alternative or the other. And too often, we pick one.

Put another way: good enough is the byproduct of doing the best you can based only on the resources and knowledge currently available to you.

David Sparks:

I think a 7 inch iPad in the $250 price range, along with the app store and all the other great things that Apple has built, would be devastating to competing tablet manufacturers. Apple employed a similar strategy in the iPod market and the rest of the MP3 player market never recovered. I don’t know whether Apple calls it the next generation iPod touch or the iPad Mini but the result would be the same either way, a lot of units sold to customers that would otherwise have gone to Amazon, Samsung, and others.

This pretty much sums up my thoughts on the iPad Mini as well.

Other than the iPhone and the iPad, all there rest of Apple’s product lineup has screen-size differentiation: different sized MacBook Airs, different sized MacBook Pros, and different sized iMacs. For portable devices especially, the size of the screen has a significant role in the usefulness of the device for the user. Some people need bigger screens and some people need smaller.

A smaller iPad would appeal to an awful lot of people. And not just because it would be cheaper; the size would have appeal as well.

If Apple does create a new iPad with a smaller form-factor its market appeal would be the same as the iPod lineup. There are some folks who own a few iPods (a shuffle or nano for the gym, and a classic or touch for the car / home stereo), and then there are most folks who own just one. It could easily be the same story with iPads: most would only need one or the other size, but some would use both.