Gadgetory

amazon is ready to shake things up with a new smartphone I'm Bridget Carey and this is your cnet update this is going to be a big week for Amazon the company is expected to reveal its first smartphone on Wednesday but just before we see a new phone amazon wanted to boast about the size of its App Store it announced there are nearly tripled the amount of apps in its App Store since last year amazon is selling more than 240,000 apps and games that's roughly the same amount of Windows Phone apps it's also a quarter of the size of the app stores for Apple and Google kindle tablets can buy from the amazon appstore and it's also available to anyone with an android device a large app store is crucial to convincing consumers that an Amazon smartphone would be worth buying the company also says Amazon's coins are growing in popularity as a credit to buy things in the App Store the benefit to using Amazon coins over normal money is that sometimes it's cheaper to buy things with Amazon coins and in other digital currency news bitcoin is back in the Apple App Store iPhone owners can once again download Bitcoin wallet apps to make payments using the digital cryptocurrency coin pocket was the first to return to the US App Store which let's just send and receive bitcoins and transfer funds between wallets late last year Apple removed and rejected virtual currency apps but it reversed its dance and it's now allowing approved virtual currency apps at least for the time being to keep Bitcoin users from switching to android if you're unfamiliar with Bitcoin it is an occurrence you can touch there are no actual coins everything is digital and it's not tied to any nation bank or central authority it's growing in popularity as more businesses accept Bitcoin for payment just last week Expedia began accepting bitcoins for booking hotel reservations and if you're looking for some shall we say more traditional apps well check out the new swiftkey on android the popular keyboard app used to cost four dollars but now it's free instead of charging you up front you only have to pay for the extra keyboard designs and add-ons it comes with 14 free keyboards and new designs will cost a dollar now this app will be coming to the iphone in the fall Apple is allowing custom keyboards for the first time in iOS 8 that's your tech news update but there's always more at cnet com and you can stay updated by following me on Twitter from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey