John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
The iPad may be selling like gangbusters, but an interesting survey done by NPD suggests that it’s still not the ideal device for a slim majority of computer users: amongst surveyed 18-34 year olds, 51% said they would rather have a more conventional portable like a laptop or netbook than an iPad. Even Apple owners aren’t totally convinced: 44% said they’d rather have a MacBook than an iPad.
According to NPD’s vice president of industry analysis, Stephen Baker: “The most interested potential iPad customers see it primarily as a music device, or for its internet access capabilities.”
If you”re curious about how you’ll browse the App Store on your iPad, look no further than this video.
It’s a familiar and intuitive experience. In short, it’s more like browsing the App Store through iTunes on your Mac than launching the App Store on your iPhone, with apps displayed in multiple columns and big, beautiful Coverflow.
The one big thing that stands out to me about the video is that much like the launch of the iPhone App Store, developers are still experimenting with how to price, name and list their apps.
Understandably, iPad apps cost more than their iPhone versions… but expect a lot of fluctuation here, as App Store developers try to figure out if the iPad App Store can escape the $0.99 curse of iPhone apps.
It’s also interesting the naming conventions developers are using to differentiate their iPad versions from the iPhone apps are all over the place. Fieldrunners for iPad is listed right below Flight Control HD, and XL is also a naming convention that is gaining traction. Presumably the different naming schemes will be consolidated at some point… my guess with a little bit of strong-arming on behalf of Apple.
Personally, I prefer HD, which not only plays up the iPad’s higher-resolution display but also keeps extraneous characters down to a bare minimum.
According to 9to5Mac, Apple has started sending out shipping notifications to the earliest iPad pre-order customers.
WiFi only, of course. Curiously, even though it’s only March 29th, those who chose expedited shipping are being told to expect delivery on April 3rd. Don’t expect yours early… but do expect a lot of incremental iPad status updates like this in your newsfeeds this week.
What about you guys? Have you gotten your shipping notifications yet? Excited? Let us know in the comments.
According to Steve Jobs (as relayed by MediaPost), a mere four days after putting the iPad in eager customers hands, Apple’s going to launch the “next big thing,” a new “revolutionary” service to take the tech world by storm. But it’s not going to be a gadget. It’s an advertising network.
Meet iAd, another tin-eared Apple brand name that may be creatively bereft, but certainly gets the point across: a mobile advertising network for iPhone OS devices.
Of course, this won’t take any one by surprise who has been following the recent mobile advertising tiffs between Apple and Google. In January, Apple bought mobile advertising company Quattro for $275 million… a few months after Google had snapped up AdMob.
Apple’s also been warning developers from creating apps that use location-based data to serve up ads from competing mobile ad networks. Guessing that Apple would roll their own mobile ad network soon wasn’t a matter of prophecy.
At first blush, it seems weird that Cupertino would roll-out another big product so close to the iPad launch, but there’s little to lose here. Apple’s going to want developers to start building iAd functionality into their apps. This isn’t a consumer product or service, after all… it’s a developer service that will be completely invisible to most users.
As long as this isn’t another Mobile Me fiasco, launching iAd sooner rather than later shouldn’t take any of the luster off of the iPad launch.
This week hasn’t heralded any major App Store gaming releases, so this weekend, in the wake of the inamorata’s shamelessly bragged-about decimation of my all-time high score, I’ll be revisiting an old iPhone favorite: GeoSpark ($1.99) by Critical Thought Games.
Earlier this week, as if in response to the iPhone’s incredible gains on the handheld gaming market, Nintendo announced the successor to their popular DS console, the 3DS. The main difference over their earlier, dual screen device? 3D without glasses.
The problem with this approach is that the Nintendo DS’ screens are too small for true, pop-out-of-the-display 3D to really work… and it also raises some big questions about touchscreen gaming.
Over at Kotaku, Deputy Editor Steven Totilo has an interesting theory on how Nintendo is going to do 3D gaming without 3D displays: they’ll borrow a trick from the book of App Store developers like Ngmoco and fake the 3D by using the accelerometer.
Star Wars titles on the iPhone tend to be bog-standard, lightsaber-swishing affairs, but THQ Wireless looks like they finally might have a Star Wars game in development that’s worth picking up: Star Wars Cantina.
As the title perhaps implies, this is a light-hearted simulation of running a cantina at the famous Mos Eisley Spaceport.
According to the official blurb, “Your task is to see that the right beverage finds its way to the right customer. And don’t keep them waiting, some of the customers are real troublemakers! Working towards your daily quota, accuracy and speed are essential. As a reward for a job well done, outfit your cantina with decorations and attractions to appeal to even the most difficult customers.”
Star Wars Cantina should be coming to the App Store soon. It looks great. Now what about the HD version?
Pioneer have just unveiled two new high-powered 7.1 SurroundSound AV receivers… both of which come with a homegrown remote app, making them perfect additions to your home theater set-up if you like to do all of your media control through your iPhone or iPod Touch.
Both the VSX-1020-K and VSX-1120-K feature Bluetooth audio streaming, HDMI 1.4 connections for 3D home theater systems, Internet radio support and Dolby ProLogic IIz decoding in the 5.1 channel receivers. For $200 more, the VSX-1120-K includes the Marvell Qdeo video processor, which provides excellent clarity and superb accuracy for the highest quality video switching.
As for the app, iControlAV is Pioneer’s first foray into app development, and predictably allows its flagship AV Receivers to be fully controlled over WiFi.
Unfortunately, there’s no release date available for either model, but the VSX-1020-K starts at $549, and the VSX-1120-K will cost $749.
After Jerome York’s recent death, the Wall Street Journal has an interesting overview of the history and composition of Apple’s Board.
Apple’s current board is only made up of six individuals, making it one of the smallest boards of the Fortune 500.
One of the reasons Apple’s board is so small is that one of the stipulations of Steve Jobs’ return to Apple was that all of the members who “let things go to hell” were fired, and the remaining board members were hand-picked for their personal loyalty to Jobs, which was tested by Jobs recent illness.
Despite this, the recently deceased York himself was disgusted with the way Steve Jobs handled his illness, saying that Jobs should have publicly disclosed his health problem three weeks earlier in the same news release that announced he was pulling out of the Macworld trade conference. He claimed the concealment “disgusted” him: “Frankly, I wish I had resigned then,” York said last year.
It remains unclear when or even if Apple will choose to replace York, but if so, it’ll be another cherry-picked Jobs candidate.
It’s worth noting that while the remaining members are extremely loyal to Jobs, York’s passing actually removes one of the most vocal and outspoken independents on Apple’s board, which could increase shareholder unrest.
According to mobile advertising company AdMob, Apple’s iPhone OS now accounts for fifty percent of worldwide smartphone traffic on its networks, increasing its share from 33 percent just a year ago.
The iPod Touch is also a huge winner: although it’s not a smartphone, the iPod Touch lead AdMob’s Mobile Internet Device (MID) traffic, their biggest source of network growth over the last year.
The venerable but aging Symbian OS was the main loser in Apple’s market gains: the smartphone OS plummeted from 43% in February 2009 to a mere 18% in 2010.
You may want to put your Mac on mute — audiophonic doofus explosion incoming — but what you’re looking at here is the first working, untethered jailbreak of the iPhone 3Gs and iPod Touch G3… and if its developer is to be trusted, it should work on the iPad when it comes out next Friday too.
According to jailbreaking wunderkindGeorge Hotz (aka geohot), the jailbreak should be out soon, although asking for a release date “won’t make it happen any sooner.”
If geohot’s right about the iPad jailbreaking technique being similar to the iPhone 3Gs and iPod Touch G3, we could be looking at a zero day iPad jailbreak. Oh, good. I don’t think I could do without 5 Icon Dock HD.
The iPad certainly hasn’t made the once-untouchable Kindle look cutting edge, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves: the Kindle’s still got some advantages on Apple’s e-reading tablet. For one, the Kindle’s e-ink screen is much easier for long reading sessions than the iPad’s LED-backlit LCD display… and because of the power efficiency of e-ink, the Kindle can go weeks at a time without needing a charge. For a lot of people, the Kindle is going to be good enough, especially for the $259.99 price.
The problem is, while the Kindle has some advantages on the iPad, what it’s doing technologically is easily done for less. Enter the Kobo, a $150 e-reader that smartly shaves a few specs to undercut the already-ailing Kindle by over a hundred bucks.
According to tech apocrypha, after Commodore International released their revolutionary PET 2001 home PC, a couple of scruffy young men named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak plopped down in Commodore’s offices with a cardboard box full of circuit boards and tried to pitch the more established electronics company the first Apple II prototype, a revolutionary home PC with far more advanced color, graphics and sound capabilities. Jobs and Woz had no money, and they wanted Commodore to push the Apple II to market.
Instead, Commodore balked, following up the PET 2001 with the VIC-20 in 1980, and then finally bringing to market the computer they would become best known for: the Commodore 64. Largely thanks to a sub-$200 price drop, It went on to sell 17 million units, making it the best-selling single personal computer of all time with an astonishing 30-40% market share between 1983 and 1986. The computer was such a success that was only discontinued in 1994.
Oh, how things change. Now, Commodore International is basically dead, and the company Commodore shuffled out the door is one of the most profitable computer companies on Earth. But after sixteen years, the Commodore 64 has finally raised a mottled hand out of the grave. Can it compete with Apple once more?
Early last year, Palm bet the farm. They hired a bunch of ex-Apple engineers, killed off all of their old Palm OS devices and announced a new smartphone operating system, webOS, the first truly exciting alternative to the iPhone OS since its unveiling in 2007. They went all in, with their only conciliatory gesture to the existing Palm OS ecosystem a third-party emulator.
Unfortunately, as great as webOS is, that gamble hasn’t paid off for Palm: they are now in dire financial difficulty, and it looks likely that the once revolutionary mobile device maker will soon only be remembered as a footnote in smartphone history.
It’s a shame, and the death of Palm might otherwise have signified the final death of PalmOS, which — before the App Store — was perhaps the most vibrant, crowded and creative platform of mobile app development.
Good news for Palm OS nostalgists, though: the StyleTap emulator has just come out on Cydia, allowing anyone with a jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch to use it to run Palm OS apps. It’s a bit pricy at $49, but at first blush, StyleTap looks pretty flawless. If the impending death of Palm has you finally considering trading your Pre in for an iPhone, StyleTap will help make that transition a bit easier.
Maintaining the pretense of objective journalist integrity by reporting in third-person upon itself, the Wall Street Journal claims that “according to a person familiar with the matter,” they’ll be charging you $17.99 a month to read on your iPad.
That’s ten bucks less than a monthly subscription costs… but that’s still a hefty price tag for digital content. My gut instinct is that only existing Wall Street Journal subscribers would be tempted by an annual $216 subscription… it’s not a price point that is going to attract new customers. That multimedia content better snap. What do you think?
With every CanSecWest comes new proof that our Macs and iPhones are nowhere near as secure as we optimistically believed, but the latest hack to come out of the famed security conference’s Pwn2Own hacking contest should be enough to alarm everyone: a pair of European researchers have shown how just visiting a website can compromise a fully patched iPhone and hijack the entire SMS database.
The two researchers — Vincenzo Iozzo and Ralph Philipp Weinmann — lured a target iPhone to a malicious website and stole the iPhone’s entire SMS database (including deleted text messages) in just twenty seconds.
It’s certainly not the prettiest (a Frankenstein) or the most powerful (a sloth) but it’s the one with the twenty hours of battery life spread between two interchangeable batteries always swinging from a satchel (read: man purse) on my hip.
What was once a lackluster Windows XP lilicomputer is now, thanks to the OSx86 project and this wonderful guide, the one Mac I’m always guaranteed to have on me.
On Monday, April 12th, Adobe’s going to unveil their Creative Suite 5. We don’t know much what’s going to be different, except that Flash CS5 is finally supposed to allow developers to export Flash-based applications as App Store .ipa files.
That said, the video above gives a tantalizing look at one of the new features in Photoshop CS5: content-aware tools, which allow the program to make educated guesses on what you want to fill or replace a section of image with.
You need to watch the entire clip to see how impressive this is, but by the end of the video, CS5’s content aware tools have gone from simply plucking stray shadows and lens flare’s out of shots to seamlessly autofilling 30% of a missing panorama in just a few seconds.
Sure, these examples are obviously cherry-picked by Adobe to apply to the strength of Photoshop CS5, but if their content-aware tools are even half this good at release, CS5 seems like a must-have update.
Ported and expanded from the popular Amiga shareware game Deluxe Galaga by the original author, Edgar Vigdal, the 2D space SHMUP Warblade features well over 100 levels, multiple power-ups and dozens of enemies. Without a doubt, its one of the best Galaga-inspired arcade shooters on OS X… and now it’s heading to the App Store.
Most SHMUPs require extremely precise controls, but Warblade is no danmaku, and the game’s level design is forgiving enough that it looks like the iPhone’s touchscreen will work out pretty well. Vigdal claims that the port is 80% done, so we should see it on the App Store soon.
I’m pretty excited: the App Store seems woefully short on good SHMUPS. Until someone gets around to porting Cho Ren Sha 68K to the iPhone, Warblades looks like it’ll be the best SHMUP gaming on the Apple handheld is going to get.
Using any application that supports UPnP/DLNA media steaming for the iPod Touch (e.g. PlugPlayer), the latest update will allow you to stream music and movies to your Apple handset from the MiFi’s microSD card slot.
With microSD cards now coming in capacities up to 32GB, what this means is that you can now pretty easily double the capacity of your media library if you’re willing to pick up a MiFi… and while the MiFi might be a redundant addition to your gadget bag if you’ve got an iPhone 3G, it would be an excellent way to keep your iPod Touch mobile and media rich without signing a two-year contract.
In an endless sea of interchangeable memory cards, Eye-Fi has managed to stand out from the crowd by infusing their line of postage stamp sized SD cards with WiFi capabilities… and looking hip while doing so.
Their latest card, the Eye-Fi Pro X2, is a lightning-fast, Class 6 SD card that will wirelessly sync you photos or videos to iPhoto without ever once having to pull out your digicam’s mini-USB cable. The Pro X2 can also automatically upload to MobileMe, Flickr, Evernote, Picasa, Facebook and YouTube through the card’s 802.11n WiFi chip, and it’ll even send notifications automatically by email, Facebook, Twitter or SMS when you’ve uploaded something new. It all happens invisibly as soon as your Eye-Fi card is within range of a hotspot it can connect to.
Eye-Fis are fantastic cards, but they don’t come cheap: the Pro X2 costs $150 for an 8GB card.
On Friday, we started something new here at Cult of Mac: we asked you what iPhone games you were playing that we might recommend for our weekend gaming feature.
Despite what Apple and even my fellow Cultists of Mac tell me, for me, the iPad isn’t a compelling gaming or productivity platform (at least primarily) and it’s not a viable laptop or even netbook replacement. For me, the iPad is a thing, attractive lozenge of aluminum and glass that will usually sit on my living room table on top of the pile of magazines and newspapers that are usually placed there. Despite Steve Jobs’ assertion that people don’t read anymore, the iPad is an e-reader, first and foremost…. and it’s going to be the best e-reader ever released.
It does not appear that I’m alone in this opinion. comScore recently polled 2,176 iPad customers and discovered that over one-third of them said that they mainly thought they’d use the device as an e-reader.
Dip a human being in glue, roll him up in crushed glass and steal $2,250 from his wallet and it’s called torture, but when CrystalRoc does the same thing except for calling the crushed glass “Swarovski crystals,” not only does no one call the cops, but George Michael excitedly calls up his personal shopper for one.
It’s all just semantics though. It’s still torture.
There are a few apps I find absolutely indispensable, and Instapaper Pro is at the top of the heap. When I find an interesting long article during the day (for example, this wonderful New York Times piece on the evolution of the science museum from wunderkammer to proslytizer) I just click Instapaper’s “Read Later” bookmark and give it the attention it deserves later, in a stripped down, paginated, ultra-readable iPhone-friendly format.
I’ve been eagerly anticipating what Instapaper developer Marco Arment had up his sleeve for the iPad version, and now he’s given users a sneak peek on the official blog. There’s no huge surprises here, which even Arment admits: “No multi-column reading, no fake book-page animations, and no giant newspaper graphics,” he says. Never the less, it looks perfect, right down to the dual-pane navigation view. Even better: Arment says that existing Instapaper Pro customers will get the iPad version for free.
Once Apple.de gets around to allowing me to buy an iPad, I think this is the app I’m most looking forward to giving a try. I intend on buying the stock 16GB iPad WiFi, and Instapaper is that rare app that actually gets better and more indispensable when you don’t have a mobile broadband connection. This is a must have program for everyone who loves reading, and reading’s going to be the thing the iPad excels at most.
