"Before the iPhone, Motorola's RAZR was the world's must-have handset. But the company failed to come up with a successor and has been bleeding market share ever since," notes Nathan Slaughter.

The editor of Street Authority Market Advisor explains, "Now, Motorola Mobility (MMI) is back. After being lost in the woods for a few years, this former leader has found its way.

"By last summer, Motorola clung to just a 3% sliver of the global mobile phone market and had slipped into 8th place. But the tide began to turn shortly thereafter -- and I am expecting a big comeback in 2011.

Google's (GOOG) management philosophy is to launch quickly and then to iterate. However, in the case of its eBook project, the process has been fairly slow. But after several years, it is finally open to the virtual public.

All in all, it's a pretty good resource, with three million books from over 4,000 publishers. Roughly two-thirds of these titles are free (since they are now part of the public domain).

Talk about a good first weekend. This morning Apple (AAPL) announced that it sold more than 300,000 iPads as of midnight on Saturday, including deliveries of preordered iPads to customers, to channel partners, and sales at Apple Retail Stores. The company added that iPad users downloaded more than 1,000,000 apps from their App Store and more than 250,000 ebooks from its iBookstore the first day.

Steve Jobs noted that "It feels great to have the iPad launched into the world -- it's going to be a game changer ... iPad users, on average, downloaded more than three apps and close to one book within hours of unpacking their new iPad." This is great news for the company, and it lead to JPMorgan upping the company's price target to $305 from $240 while raising 2010 EPS estimates to $12.74 from $11.59. Kaufman expects AAPL to now reach $295 as well.

There are times when technology displaces existing products and services, and times when it augments or supports existing products and services.

Further, while there is little doubt that online news and publishing is displacing newspapers and magazines - - it's at minimum forcing them to revise their missions and alter business models - - the same can not be said, at least at this stage of the digital age, regarding the Internet's impact on books.

Try curling up with a good computer screen

Initially, critics and other observers declared 'the end of books' - - that readers would gravitate toward reading books on computer screens. Reading a book on a computer screen?

Thankfully, the initial panic that gripped book publishers soon faded after what was clear to anyone who reads books became clear to publishing executives during a calmer moment: that the experience of reading a printed book in a traditional setting (such as in your favorite chair in a living room or study, or even on an outdoor deck / patio) is vastly superior to reading a book on a flat panel screen. Try curling up with a good computer screen.

Amazon launched an ebook reader called the Kindle. Tied into Amazon's new ebook program, it offers fairly price books and a seamless ability to get them anywhere you happen to be. Is all that enough?

Is this the death of paper books?

This week, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) unveiled its new e-book reader, the Kindle. As Beth Gaston Moon reported in her preview, the 10.3 ounce hand-held reader will retail for $399.

I had great hopes for this device, not the first to market but certainly the best. The type appears crisp, promising to be as readable as paper print. The home run here for Amazon is the content delivery system. Through an arrangement with Sprint, Amazon will deliver content to the Kindle on demand anywhere within Sprint cell network coverage, without the need to be a Sprint customer.

Other positives for marketing the device include the availability of newspaper and blog feeds via the same network, as well as free access to Wikipedia and a built-in dictionary. A high-capacity battery and the ability to expand memory via an SD card are also good selling points.

With all the excitement around the iPhone's release, people are now beginning to wonder what comes next for the iPod line in general that's not the iPhone. Analyst for Piper Jaffrey Gene Munster pointed out not too long ago that the iPhone is a look at what the next refresh of high end iPods will be like: more touch screen media, but without the wireless phone and internet features.

This raises an interesting development, as Teleread points out the e-book industry could take very good advantage of this. A no-phone iPhone would be a multi-media device with a big screen. Already iTunes has the ability to sort, tag, and display PDF files in the same revolutionary and easy-to-use manner as songs. Could this be applied to books and other text media?

The high resolution on the iPhone and large screen would lend itself well to emulating a page, and the simple and easy to use interface could host an e-book program, maybe even through iTunes. Since Apple is hoping to net a million sold, the e-book makers do not have to try and convince the public to buy yet another expensive e-book reader. The iPhone, or the next iPod refresh, will already be out there.