Courtesy of Apple IPhone 3G

You may have seen the Apple advertisement in the New York Times this morning (back page of the Business section) extolling the virtues of the iPhone. Nothing new there.

If you made it through the fine print, you may have noticed that there are now 10,000 applications available for iPhone and the iPod Touch available on the App Store. Nothing new there, either.

What is new, and absolutely stunning, is the small print at the bottom of today's ad. Apple

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[AAPL  Loading...      ()   ] now says that iPhone users have "downloaded over 300 million" applications from the App Store, from games to business programs. Why is that stunning? Consider that on the company's conference call on October 21, Apple disclosed that the following day, Apple expected users to download their 200 millionth app. Which means, as of today, users have downloaded a staggering 100 million apps in just the past 6 weeks.

So all that talk of a "bubble" in apps demand was just that, talk! Experts expected an initial big shot in the arm, and that demand would trail off as the weeks passed by. These figures suggest that the app store is only gaining momentum, and it's another big reason for users to choose iPhone over Research in Motion's

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[RIMM  Loading...      ()   ] BlackBerry, which has a nascent app store of its own, but is nowhere near as robust as Apple's. The iPhone/iPod/iTunes/App Store eco-system just makes it that much easier to stay inside the Apple world, rather than having to search high and low on the net for music, movies and apps from one site to the next. And when it comes to new technology, "easy" is the name of the game.

"It's unbelievable," says Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster. "It's a differentiator. We think in '09, it's going to be a $1 billion market place and Apple will probably take about 30 percent of that. There's virtually no operating expense for them. They just approve the apps. It increases our confidence that" Apple can make these numbers.

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I have written extensively about the importance of the Apple App Store to the iPhone; that iPhone is more a platform than merely another Apple device. The App Store could someday (maybe sooner than we thought?) match, or even supplant iTunes as a top profit center, and something that likely hasn't been figured into many earnings models. At least not to the extent that the store is growing today.

IPhone's momentum only stands to gain traction as more and more developers come up with new programs for customers to buy. It's a device that doesn't need conventional, hardware upgrading from Apple if there's a massive, grassroots movement to update the device by offering new programs. Thousands of them. And once again, the Apple model is working. Big time.

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