An iPad has survived a massive 100,000 foot fall in the latest publicity stunt for case manufacturer G-Form. The iPad was solely clad in a G-Form 6oz Extreme Edge case and taken into space on a weather balloon.

The company released a stunning hi-def video Thursday where the nearly naked iPad is shown hanging above the Earth in the blackness of space. In the video, the iPad is lifted to over 100,000 feet by a weather balloon which bursts at altitude, then releasing the iPad to free-fall to Earth where it crash lands on a rocky hillside in the Nevada countryside. Perhaps even more remarkable than the dramatic hi-def footage itself is the fact that the iPad survives the adventure, remaining fully functional.

The video is really impressive on its own, without taking into account the magnitude of the fall or the fact that it is an iPad. It’s not something I would be willing to try with my iPad 2 but it is definitely a great way to show some faith in your cases!

Source: YouTube

According to Apple’s on-device counter, the iPad App Store is now home to over 100,000 apps and games, this less than a month after Steve Jobs announced 90,000 during the WWDC 2011 keynote.

This is obviously a huge advantage, especially when Google’s Android Honeycomb devices, RIM’s BlackBerry Playbook, and HP’s webOS TouchPad are launching with very, very few native tablet apps in their own markets.

How many iPad apps have you downloaded?

[MacStories]

Apple has just announced that there are now, officially, over 100,000 iPhone and iPod touch apps in the iTunes App Store:

“The App Store, now with over 100,000 applications available, is clearly a major differentiator for millions of iPhone and iPod touch customers around the world,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “The iPhone SDK created the first great platform for mobile applications and our customers are loving all of the amazing apps our developers are creating.”

Effusive developer quotes abound as well:

“The App Store has forever changed the mobile gaming industry and continues to improve,” said Travis Boatman, vice president of Worldwide Studios, EA Mobile. “With a global reach of over 50 million iPhone and iPod touch users, the App Store has allowed us to develop high quality EA games that have been a huge success with customers.”

“With 10,000 downloads a day, worldwide customer response to our I Am T-Pain App has exceeded our wildest expectations,” said Jeff Smith, CEO of Smule. “The App Store has given us a unique opportunity to create and grow a very successful business, and we’re looking forward to an exciting future.”

Serving 77 countries, with well over 2 billion downloads, jokes, whines, complaints, and rejections aside for the moment, that’s a massive milestone for Apple. Congrats.

The internets are a rocking with posts about the iPhone’s App Store unofficially hitting 100,000 apps, but while we wait for official word from Steve Jobs, the blogsphere is also debating the important of the sheer quantity of those apps, and whether that’s more important that quality.

It isn’t.

Scoble (and others, I think MacBreak Weekly covered this earlier) suggests that the huge number of apps makes for a greater chance each individual user will find that unique assortment that best fills their needs. In other words, while everyone has the same iPhone, they don’t all have the same apps, and those apps essentially create a personalize experience — a different iPhone — for each user.

What’s more, those must-have apps, and the money, effort, and time spent in acquiring, setting up, and becoming proficient in them, creates a cost that prohibits users switching to another platform. To go from iPhone to Android, in Scoble’s example, means you lose Tweetie, Tap Tap Revenge, Photoshop.com, NASDAQ, etc. (Never mind if you’ve bought Navigon or other, high-priced content).

John Gruber, for his part, asks if the App Store is popular because the iPhone is great, or is the iPhone great because the App Store is popular.

The number of apps already in the store — and, even more so, the momentum with which new ones are being added — almost certainly guarantees the continuing popularity of the iPhone and iPod Touch for the next few years. But Windows is proof that popularity doesn’t guarantee market-leading quality.

But the iPhone isn’t Windows. Neither popularity levels not quantity of software can be used to balance that particular equation.

Unlike the iPhone, Windows has never been a poster-child for great user experience (Windows 7 may alter that, but it’s just going to market now). Fact of the matter is, the iPhone debuted in 2007 without an App Store at all, and sold for the entire first year (until the launch of the iPhone 3G and iPhone OS 2.0) without an App Store. It sold on the strength of its user experience.

It’s that focus on usability that makes the iPhone great, and that in turn makes many of the apps great. Just like with the Mac, Apple has built in core technologies and development tools to handle a lot of the heavy lifting. So, while it still takes the very best developers to make the very best apps, even fair-to-middling developers can make apps that are surprisingly usable.

Those great apps, combined with a large quantity of usable if not inspired apps, is what makes the iPhone so compelling. The App Store itself is proof. Where Palm, Windows Mobile, Nokia, and RIM have had apps — many thousands of them — as well, it took Apple to create a single place, with a single home screen icon, to find and acquire them all. If it was just quantity, Apple would have had a hard time catching up to them.