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A comment on Japanese Company to Buy iPhone Game Developer (Ngmoco for $400M). Parent comment

Re:Japanese Company to Buy iPhone Game Developer (Ngmoco for... by masklinn on Tuesday October 12, 2010 @05:56AM (#1782836)
> I don't know about other countries but you can buy iTunes credit in every supermarket, petrol station and department store in Australia.

Very easy to find in western europe as well.

> Another massive advantage iOS has is... the iPod Touch. Lots of these have been sold? 100+ million?

That's total iOS devices (120 millions, announced by Apple in early september). Asymco[0]'s estimates are 45.2 million iPod Touch sold as of early september.

But yes, it is a very good point and one Gruber has wondered about a few times so far: neither Android nor WP7 have an equivalent of the Touch so far, and it is a major force for sales.

http://www.asymco.com/2010/09/03/ipod-touch-made-up-37-7-per...

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Re:Japanese Company to Buy iPhone Game Developer (Ngmoco for... by danilocampos on Tuesday October 12, 2010 @01:38PM (#1784179)
What Gruber misses is that the iPod touch is a freebie Apple gets thanks to the virtuous cycles they've created elsewhere in their business.

Apple has both an outstanding content channel and an instant payment mechanism. Selling content is easy. Which means they get great content to sell: music, movies, TV, and now, applications.

There's as much demand for content as for hardware in Apple land. Apple makes a killing on the hardware, gives most of the content revenue to partners, and everyone is happy. So you slip in an iPod touch, and boom: more content consumption, more hardware sold.

Without compelling content, who needs a non-phone Android device? Without an amazing instant payment mechanism, who wants to make great content for Android?

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