Apple had five percent of the revenue from U.S. video game software sales in 2009. While 5 percent doesn’t sound like much, its a 500 percent jump when compared to the one percent the Cupertino, Calif. company held in 2008.

Such a jump in a relatively short period of time was deemed “significant” by Flurry Analytics, which released the figures. The numbers were even more stark when compared to the overall U.S. video game software industry, which slipped to $9.9 billion in 2009 versus $11 billion in 2008.

Peter Farango, Flurry’s vice president of marketing, said console games lost ground to portable devices, including the iPhone. But the good news for Apple doesn’t stop there.

If you exclude the big-three gaming consoles: the Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360, games sold in 2009 via iPhone’s App Store grew to 19 percent of the U.S. portable gaming market, up from 5 percent in 2008.

The rise of the iPhone and iPod touch in gaming meant the market share owned by Sony’s PSP line was cut in half, while Nintendo’s top-dog status fell from 75 percent down to 70 percent, according to Flurry. In late 2009, Nintendo announced corporate profits fell 52 percent, or a $702 million loss. Some reports suggested the increased competition by the iPhone and iPod touch was a factor in the lower profits.

Nintendo isn’t standing still amid this new threat. Earlier this week it introduced a 3D version of its popular Nintendo DS platform reportedly to be called Nintendo DS3.

Apple is also making more blatant efforts to capture the gaming sector. In 2009, Apple released new version of the iPod touch with beefier graphics capabilities. In November 2009, the Cupertino, Calif. company began a search for an AAA game developer. A month later began seeking a video game artist for the company’s iPhone Gaming Group.

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The school district intended to offer them as a reward to parents who would fill out a 10-minute online survey, Bay News 9 in Tampa Bay, Fla., reported Thursday.

The state survey was to ask 26 questions about how well the child’s school partners with parents of students with disabilities, Florida’s The Ledger reported.

The money for the iPod Nanos, $350,000, was to come from the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, but Florida education officials informed the district the money could not be used in that way, Bay News 9 said.

“We’re discontinuing the program because the money has to be used directly for the students and not to the parents,” Assistant Polk County School Board Superintendent Nancy Woolcock said.

The intention was for parents to give the iPods to their children, not keep them for themselves, she added.

Woolcock said it was still a good idea, and she hoped to get iPods for disabled students next year.

The device comes in the form of a tablet, just as everyone speculated, but is called an iPad, instead of the rumoured iSlate or iTablet. Frankly, iPad is such a lousy name for an Apple product!

Anyway, don’t be turned off by its name.

The iPad is a 0.5in thick, 9.6in x 7.5in, 1.5/1.6 lb. tablet with 9.7 in LED-backlit display with full multi-touch capability. The resolution, however, falls short of wide-screen, at 1024×768.

And similar to the iPhone, the touchscreen has fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating.

Its similarities with the iPod Touch don’t stop there – the iPad has an accelerometer, ambient light sensor, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and comes in 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of solid state storage.

And it runs most of the apps on available on the iTunes App Store! Yes, that means your iPod Touch/iPhone apps will work – except those that require a camera or a phone, of course.

Running applications that were designed for the iPod Touch/iPhone screen, however, will get automatically scaled to allow it to be displayed in full screen.

Awesome, huh? Imagine, Super Monkey Ball on that gorgeous screen! Multimedia capability, audio/video playback, speakers, headphone jack and mic, comes standard on this tablet, even allowing you to connect it to the TV or projector, using an optional cable.

What is different on the iPad, as compared to the iPod Touch, is the optional support for 3G. The 3G version comes with full location-aware functionality (WiFi, Digital Compass, Assisted GPS and Cellular), as opposed to WiFi and Digital Compass support on the WiFi only, non-3G model.

And oh, the 3G connection is not locked to one provider. Apple, however, is negotiating with carriers to provide affordable pre-paid packages for data.

The iPad also comes with its own store – the iTunes App Store works, but the new store is the iBooks store. iBooks now mean electronic books, instead of the old portable laptops that Apple used to make.

This puts the iPad in direct competition to Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook.

Funny, though, with ebook readers from Amazon and B&N having iPhone/iPod Touch versions, the iPad can now automatically render books bought from both stores. How cool is that? Imagine having access to all those three bookstores!

The iPad comes with optional accessories, such as Dock Connector to VGA/Composite/Component cable adapter, the Dock, Camera Connection Kit (to let you retrieve photos from your digital cameras), an iPod Keyboard Dock (Dock connected to a keyboard) and a case.

Two surprises that came with the iPad – 1GHz Apple A4 Processor and the price. The processor is the first high-performance, low-power SoC designed by Apple.

This may be from their acquisition of PA Semiconductors not too long ago. This signals that this same chip will probably run the next generation iPhones and iPod Touches.

The price came as a surprise, too. The WiFi-only 16GB iPad is pegged at $499, with the 32GB at $599 and 64GB at $699. The WiFi+3G models are USD130 more. Not bad, I’d say.

Sounds great on paper, right? There are quite a number of questions that can only be answered when the device ships in 60 days.

Personally, the 10-hour battery rating claimed by Apple is equivalent to how many hours in actual real world scenarios.

Usually, when Apple say seven hours, you’d get five. Does this mean that, on average, we get from six to eight hours on the iPad?

The iPad obviously runs on the iPhone OS, does it mean that there is still no multi-tasking on this version, iPhone OS 3.2?

Will the WiFi-only version tether with the iPhone? How much RAM does it come with (considering the iPhone 3GS comes with 256MB and the Google Nexus One comes with 512MB)?

I cannot wait for TechNews Lab to get its review unit (unless I get one first, of course. hahaha).
So, if you want to see the iPad technical specifications, features, etc., go to http://apple.com/ipad.

Apple is putting all their energy into their upcoming iSlate tablet. They also realized that many of those who purchased the third generation iPod Touch last fall would be really upset. The camera version was supposed to be released last fall, but quality control problems changed this.

An iPod Touch will definitely have a camera in the 4th generation version that is due to be released in September. It’s a long wait, but probably worth it.