Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review, which (full disclosure!) is the publication you are reading now, recently penned an intriguing takedown of the idea that apps are the future of publishing. He's way too classy to point out that it's a direct and concrete rebuttal of WIRED editor in chief Chris Anderson's "The Web is Dead" feature of 2010, but I guess that's why he keeps thugs like me on the payroll.

So! Apps will take over, claims the editor in chief of one esteemed technology publication, only they didn't, says the head of another. I call it a draw, and here's why.

Apps did take over. But not in a way that's going to make any publisher on Earth happy.

I love reading news in apps, and on a tablet or phone, I definitely spend more time reading news in apps than in the browser. So do millions of other people. Of course, we're not using the bloated, walled-garden style apps that publishers want us to, even if they're free with our print subscriptions.

We're reading in Instapaper. And News.me. And Zite, and Flipboard, and Pocket (formerly Read it Later). If I didn't have to cruise the web for work, I don't know if I'd read anything in a browser anymore. And in the case of both Instapaper and News.me, advertisements are stripped from the content I'm consuming. Is that a suicidal thing for a journalist whose income is ultimately dependent on ad revenue? Probably, but I can't help myself. The reading experience is just so good.

In this era, social -- Twitter and Facebook -- are how we find things to read. And then we time-shift our consumption of this material. It's TiVo for the web, which previously demanded that we interrupt our workday or carry around a browser full of open tabs in order to read the things we're interested in.

Gawker alum and The Awl founder Choire Sicha has argued that these webpage-scraping reading apps are straight-up theft. I don't know if that's true, but one thing's for sure, the more popular they become, the less time we're all going to spend on webpages, "engaging" with advertisements.

Ultimately, it makes me wonder whether paywalls really are the future of good content. We became accustomed to paying for content with nothing but our attention, and now we're not even willing to offer that -- at least not in a way that is monetizable. (I surely hope it doesn't come to in-text product placements.) 

Alternately, if publishers think that aggregator apps are a bridge too far -- the app equivalent of a Huffington Post that doesn't even bother to re-write the stories from which it draws -- I wonder if it will mean the end of apps like Instapaper.

All I know is that what's going on with apps and publishing right now doesn't appear to fit anyone's narrative.

Diagram from Sonosite's patent for "Housing for an electronic device"

In what might be a larger trend for makers of all kinds of screen-centric, processor-intensive technologies, engineers for portable ultrasound device maker Sonosite appear to be contemplating replacing the guts of their machines with Apple's iPad or other tablet.

Sonosite describes itself as "the world leader and specialist in hand-carried and mountable ultrasound." It's got a market cap of more than $750 million, and it makes at least a half dozen different portable ultrasound machines. It's not a new technology, but the ability to take it anywhere means it's being used by doctors in unexpected contexts, such as daily monitoring of athletes and catching otherwise invisible cancers.

The just-released patent application indicates that Sonosite might be working on a case that not only connects the iPad directly to an ultrasound wand, but also contains additional hardware. This hardware almost certainly includes a battery but probably also additional chips to pre-process images generated by the ultrasound wand.

This would add additional bulk to the iPad, but it would still comprise a package that would probably be lighter and more portable than Sonosite's current offerings.

More importantly, this design could take advantage of user-familiarity with Apple's hardware. The company has already developed a touch-screen interface for at least one of its products, and has dabbled in educational products on the App store.

Many existing medical imaging systems incorporate commodity hardware. Given the versatility of smart phones and tablets, it's worth asking whether this isn't an indicator of a larger trend in which companies that used to invest heavily in custom hardware might pare down their R&D efforts so that they can concentrate on accessories and software that transform existing mobile devices.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, via MG Siegler

I'm not going to win any genius points for making this observation, especially because I stole it from Benedict Evans, but the new iPad's 2048x1536 screen resolution presents a unique set of problems for image-heavy apps.

For those of us who remember the old days, when it was the people doing design for print who bought the extra RAM for their towers in order to handle "giant" images, it's clear that the base 16GB iPad 3 isn't going to cut it any longer.

Those 250 MB copies of WIRED you've grown fond of? A 4x increase in resolution won't translate directly to a 4x increase in file size, but I can only imagine that the folks at Adobe are furiously trying to figure out how to tamp down the file size of the magazines and ebooks their publishing system produces.

The one thing Apple's super high resolution screen won't penalize, of course, is text. And maybe app developers will fall in love with vector graphics all over again. Lord knows the tools to render gorgeous graphics with them are already right there in HTML5.

For fans of reading on these devices, it's a brand new day. As someone who has just recently discovered that the real reason some prefer the Kindle to the iPad for long reading sessions is screen resolution -- realized through the controlled experiment of discovering that reading on an iPhone 4S is also more pleasurable than an iPad 2, despite its larger screen size -- I can say with confidence that this will only accelerate the transition of reading from print to tablets.