iPad - page 202

What better way to test a ruggedized iPad case than an excursion outdoors? And what better way to test a heavy and bulky ruggedized iPad case than on a bike trip, where the extra ounces and inches won’t really be felt?

That’s why, when we headed out this past weekend on a bike tour to the *Delta de L’Ebre* (Ebro Delta) in southern Catalonia, I saddled up, and I zipped the iPad 3 into an a G-Form Extreme Portfolio for the iPad 3. Short answer: It was invaluable, if a little unwieldy. Long answer — read on.

[This post has been updated to reflect the fact that Scosche’s reVOLT charger only comes with two ports]

There seems to be some discrepancy in talent between the naming and the product departments at Scosche: the former can come up with a product name like “reVOLT pro h2,” and the latter with a product like, well, the product inside the package with “reVOLT pro h4” written on the outside. Revolting nomenclature aside, the pro h2 is a charger which can juice up to two iPads at the same time, via its duo of 10W (2.1A) USB ports.

There’s plenty of news out there about the way mobile technology, BYOD programs, and other facets of the consumerization of IT trend are reshaping the workplace and the IT department. The traditional daily routine of typing a username and password into PC in the morning, using that computer all day long, and shutting it down before heading home is gone for many of us.

Today, we use a mix of devices in the office, during meetings, on the road, and often from home. That mix of devices, a range of different apps, cloud services, and remote access empowers us in ways that were unimaginable a few years ago. In this new workplace, however, do we need something more than the old username and password to make resources available and keep them business data secure?

Evernote, the clunky-but-popular note-taking app and service, has acquired Penultimate, the slick, smooth and generally fantastic drawing and handwriting app. So good is Penultimate, in fact, that it is Apple’s 4th best-selling iOS app ever.

So what does the acquisition mean for Penultimate and — more importantly — Penultimate’s customers?

Apple’s new iPad seems to have been a huge success since making its debut last month. Although it doesn’t feature a new form factor and actually measures in a little thicker than its predecessor, that high-resolution Retina display, the 5-megapixel iSight camera, and voice dictation have all made this iPad a crowd pleaser, helping Apple shift 3 million units in its first three days of availability.

However, Raymond Soneira, CEO of DisplayMate Technologies, claims that this isn’t the iPad Apple wanted to release. Soneira says that Tim Cook and co. wanted to make the tablet thinner and introduce a new display with IGZO technology from Sharp. Instead, the company had to resort to “Plan B.”

One of the surprising, and some might say disturbing, realities of today’s consumerized IT departments is that IT staff are being left out of the loop on technology projects. Nowhere is that more evident than when it comes to developing mobile app strategies, particularly customer-facing app strategies.

Instead many business and marketing managers are recruiting or contracting app developers directly, often bypassing CIOs and IT managers in the process. While this new trend is primarily focused on app development, it could easily be the start of a slippery slope that leads to more and more outsourcing of technology projects and management.

An update to the GPS photo-tagging app PlaceTagger brings support for the iPad, and also shows us exactly what iCloud was meant for. The v2.0 version not only lets you import photos via camera connection kit and then tag them right there on the iPad — it also syncs the GPS data seamlessly to the Mac version so you can tag photos right there. No tedious exporting of GPX files (unless you want to), nor even having to fix time discrepancies with the iPad and the camera’s clocks.

While we can debate how much the iPad cannibalizes Apple’s MacBook sales, there’s no doubt that the device is continuing to kill of the entire netbook industry. While iPad sales are literally selling as fast as Apple can make them, netbook sales continue to plummet – with the first quarter of this year representing a sixth consecutive quarter in which shipments of the small, inexpensive, and often low quality PC notebooks have declined sharply.

Here’s a win for customer service: Several readers have written in to ask about the excellent Skech Porter case for the iPad, which I reviewed a while back, but which is all but impossible to actually buy. Cult of Mac reader Chris decided to get in touch with Skech and ask just what was going on. The result will warm your cold little hearts.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V25cOgGMgZM

If you’re a mobile gamer, then Gameloft is the development studio to keep your eye on over the coming months. In addition to the much-anticipated N.O.V.A. 3, the company has confirmed it is also working on the official Men in Black 3 mobile game, and Asphalt 7: Heat, the next release in its popular racing series.

Despite its focus on a speedy international rollout for the new iPad, which has seen the tablet hit 57 countries in just over one month, Apple is still keeping on top of demand and working to reduce shipping delays in its initial launch territories. After delays dropped to just 3-5 days in the United States last week, customers in Europe are now facing a wait of just 7 days.

Lego Harry Potter is finally back on iOS to play out his final years at Hogwarts, and he’s at the top of this week’s pick of must-have iOS games. Toothless from DreamWork’s How To Train Your Dragon also makes his App Store debut in a terrific physics-based puzzle game, and we’ve chosen one of the cutest adventure games you’ll ever play.

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Is Apple secretly plotting to become your next wireless carrier? It could happen sooner than you think. And will the iPhone 5 sport a widescreen 4-inch retina display? It’s a rumor rundown on our brand new CultCast!

And you asked for it, you got it — we’ve gathered a list of our most-loved apps of the week, and we’re ready to pick the best of the bunch.

Catch all that and more on this week’s CultCast.

An innovate idea for iOS often gets introduced to high praises from the Apple community, and one of three things usually happens: 1.) Apple implements the idea, 2.) Jailbreakers implement it first and Apple eventually does the same, 3.) Apple ignores the idea entirely and jailbreakers enjoy it exclusively. We’re hoping that number 2.) will happen in this case.

Remember when we showed you the amazing concept video for easily editing text on the iPad? Put together by Daniel Chase Hooper, the concept showed how you could edit text with finger drags and gestures instead of the tedious ‘tap and drag’ method Apple currently implements. Many of us said we wanted to see Hooper’s concept in iOS 6.

As it is known to do, the jailbreak community has already heard our collective cry and answered with a new jailbreak tweak that just went live in Cydia today. Dubbed SwipeSelection, a new way of editing text is now available for jailbroken iPad and iPhone users.

Speculating about future Apple products is really hard to do well. That doesn’t keep everyone from trying. Even grizzled Apple-watching veterans often fail catastrophically with each new Apple announcement.

The reason it’s difficult is that “evidence,” which would normally be the best tool for predicting things, doesn’t work in Apple’s case.

The best criteria are strategic and cultural analyses. But even these are not perfectly reliable.

If you’ve struggled to accurately guess in the past what Apple will announce, don’t feel bad. Even Apple executives themselves don’t know until often very late in the game.

Here’s why predicting Apple products is so hard.

After months and months of waiting, Spotify finally released its iPad app this week, and it does not disappoint. It features a terrific interface optimized for the iPad’s larger screen, plus plenty of other great features. There’s no wonder why it’s at the top of this week’s must-have iOS apps roundup.

Other picks include a great little app for controlling Bluetooth from your home screen, an impressive photography app from Polaroid, an innovative new web browser, and more.

Kids – iPads should not be used as chew toys. They’re made of metal, and glass. Both of which don’t like to play friendly games inside your mouth. Apparently this whole thing needs to be stated for children and parents alike, because some people like putting their iPad in their mouth to hold it.

A little girl from Taiwan obliterated her front teeth while she was laying on her bed playing with her iPad. She got tired of holding it and slipped down to her mouth and found out the iPad treats teeth like sledgehammer would.

There is one huge problem with iPad styluses: the rubber tips tend to drag or even stick on the screen, especially when the screen gets greasy (which is always). Some styluses are better than others: The Wacom Bamboo manages to glide right up until Peak Filth, and the latest Alupen Pro comes with instructions to never touch the tip with your fingers (as you’d expect, I touched it immediately and often after reading that).

But the TruGlide Stylus takes a different take altogether: it ditches the rubber and replaces it with something that looks like a tiny metal scouring pad. Only it doesn’t scour — it glides.

BYOD programs have a tendency to worry IT departments. After decades of being charged with keeping computers, supporting devices, and data safe and in working order, losing control of hardware is a massive culture shift. Even absent a BYOD program, the growing number of mobile devices that are used outside of the office and take corporate data outside the security of an enterprise network can be disorienting for long term IT professionals.

That leads to a tendency to clamp down with every ounce of security muscle available – mobile device management (MDM) can’t entirely secure an iPhone or iPad, but they can do a pretty good job of locking it down, monitoring it in the office or on the road, and make it easy to wipe everything off of it at a moment’s notice.

May is Mobile Management Month at Cult of Mac, where we will be profiling a different mobile management company every weekday. You can find all previous entries here and read our Mobile Management manifesto here.

Centrify’s DirectControl for Mobile offers free device management capabilities. Unlike many other management solutions, device management can be performed using mobile-specific Active Directory group policy extensions rather than any additional interface (though a cloud service interface is also available). Being a free solution, DirectControl for Mobile focuses on a handful of device security functionality. Centrify plans to extend the offering over the course of this year with a full featured premium edition. Although completely functional (see our review), Centrify still lists DirectControl as being a beta release. For organizations with minimal needs or limited budgets, DirectControl is a good option. Centrify also produces a Mac client management tool called DirectControl for Mac that uses Active Directory extensions for securing and managing Mac workstations.

Everyone knows that Apple leads and others follow, right? It’s iOS that people are copying elsewhere. No-one would ever dream of making a music player for iOS that uses the same UI as Microsoft’s Metro) mobile OS design language. Would they? Wait – would they?

When most of us here words like forensics, we picture an episode of CSI or NCIS. We think of ballistics results form a murder scene or fingerprints on a gun. An iPhone or iPad isn’t the first automatic visual that comes to mind. Yet more and more iPhones and iPads are becoming the subjects of forensic investigations according to warrants issued via the U.S. federal court system.

Barnes & Noble’s announcement that it was spinning off its Nook business and that Microsoft would be a significant stakeholder in the new company raised a lot of eyebrows. The partnership seemed unnecessary in order to meet the goals of settling a patent dispute and ensuring a Nook app for Windows 8 tablets.

It turns out that Barnes & Nobel will be shifting its textbook business to the new company along with the Nook and that Microsoft’s $300 million investment will likely be centered around creating an e-textbook initiative that will likely compete head-on with Apple’s fledging iPad-based e-textbook business.

When Apple introduced the new iPad earlier this year, it didn’t just discontinue the iPad 2; it dropped its price and sent it out to do battle with cheaper, Android-powered tablets from the likes of Amazon. But that’s not the only change the Cupertino company made to the device.

Although there’s no mention of it, if you buy a brand new iPad today, it will pack a new A5 processor under the hood that’s a little different to earlier A5 chips, and delivers much better battery life.

One of the problems with modern glass displays on smartphones, tablets, and computers is screen glare. If you’ve ever tried to use your iPad out in the sun or check your iPhone on the beach during a bright, sunny day, you know what it’s like — any kind of light creates a glare that can be almost unbearable. Amazon has touted the Kindle’s E-ink display for its anti-glare technology, while all of Apple’s products with glass screens, including the non-matte MacBooks, are notorious for their tendency to collect smudges and reflect ambient light.

MIT researches have developed a water-repellent, self-cleaning glass that “virtually eliminates” reflections of any kind. The new glass will hopefully start making its way into the technologies we use on a daily basis, especially our beloved Apple devices.