If you make anything but iPad cases, you’d be a fool to announce a new product on the same day as an Apple keynote. So, it’s a sign of how smart the folks over in San Francisco-based Waterfield designs are that they held off announcing their new bag until now. It’s a smart little waxed canvas number called the Muzetto Outback.
The new iPad arrives in the U.S. and ten other countries exactly one week today on March 16, and the first shipments have already started leaving the Foxconn factories in Chengdu, China. It’s unlikely, however, that they’ll arrive early.
Like trying to demonstrate a stereo through the speaker of a mono TV, or showing an ad for a color TV on a black-and-white set, it’s almost impossible to show off the new iPad’s Retina display on your sucky old low-res screen. Almost, but not quite. As you can see from the picture above, Apple has added a clever interactive loupe to the iPad’s Features page.
If you live in the U.K. and you haven’t pre-ordered your new iPad yet, you’ll need to prepare yourself for a lengthy wait. You will no longer get the new tablet on launch day, March 16, with shipping times slipping to 2-3 weeks for all models.
You can now pre-order a new iPad from RadioShack with the purchase of a $50 gift card. Like Apple’s online store, pre-orders are guaranteed to deliver when the device goes on sale Friday, March 16th. As the first retailer besides Apple to offer the new iPad, RadioShack will also be offering AppleCare+ for iPad alongside Target, Apple, and carrier partners.
Developers of iOS apps spent last night absorbing all the news from Apple, and trying to figure out how they might be able to make the most of the new iPad’s features.
We asked some friendly devs for their observations. One predicted big things for iPad gaming, but we got some other interesting viewpoints too.
Here’s a round-up of some of the comments we got back from the developer community. If you make apps and want to have your say, get in touch – or let loose in the comments.
Do you know what was the most tweeted about thing yesterday? No, it wasn’t Peyton Manning. It was the iPad 3, the new iPad. Twitter just released the chart shown above to show just how bonkers the Twittersphere went during the iPad keynote.
Sure, it wasn’t on par with the death of Michael Jackson, but it was a pretty big deal. There are a couple of peaks that stand out:
A common complaint that I heard earlier this week at the CITE conference in San Francisco was that Apple wasn’t a “real” enterprise vendor. IT professionals have whined and moaned about the fact that Apple doesn’t behave like most enterprise vendors for years (as a long time Mac and Apple IT professional myself, I’ve probably muttered under my breath about Apple’s approach to the enterprise many more times than most of the CITE attendees). What’s changed, however, is that CIOs and other IT leaders can no longer simply say “no” anytime Apple or an Apple product is mentioned.
This week, Apple even reiterated the point by dropping Apple Configurator, a completely new free tool for managing iOS devices in business. It’s a tool that offers new workflows when it comes to how businesses work with iPads (and to a lesser extent iPhones) and Apple released without telling its mobile management partners or its enterprise customers.
To all those IT folks bitching and complaining that Apple doesn’t publish 18-month roadmaps and doesn’t reach out to every enterprise months in advance of a product upgrade or cancelation, I have to say this: deal with it.
The new iPad isn’t just faster than ever, it has four times as many pixels, a power-hungry new mobile broadband technology, twice the RAM, and more.
All of these things add up to the new iPad being the best iPad yet, but it comes at a cost: they’re all more battery hungry than their predecessors. How, then, did Apple manage to get 10 hours of battery life — the same as before — out of the new iPad, while keeping it roughly the same weight and thickness?
Easy… and by easy, we mean “insanely difficult.” They increased the battery capacity by 70%… then densely packed it to fit the iPad 3’s case.
If you’re anything like me, now that you’ve pre-ordered your new iPad, you’ll be obsessing over its order status. You know it’s not going to arrive until March 16, but once every hour you’ll logon to the Apple online store to see how your package is getting on anyway.
It’s even easier to do this with the free Apple Store app for iPhone. Here’s how.
Over the last couple of years, I have developed an obsession with traveling light that has been wonderfully encouraged and cultivated by Mssrs. Cook, Ive & Co. When I go out of the house and need to work remotely, my bag is as light as I can possibly make it: an 11-inch MacBook Air, an iPad 2, my iPhone 4S, a couple pens and a steno-pad for notes. Despite the sheer amount of silicon and tech stuffed into my shoulder bag, it’s always light, always svelte, always uncluttered. As they have done with so many other things when it comes to consumer electronics design, they have turned making gadgets thin into a cutting-edge art.
Well, except for one thing. The chargers.
The standard Apple MacBook Charger is easily two to three times thicker than my MacBook Air. The same can be said about the Apple 10W USB charger, which is just a brick compared to the thin slate it powers. Between the bricks and the cords, Apple’s chargers add an extreme amount of thickness and ungainliness to a streamlined gadget bag… and since my MacBook Air, at least, doesn’t have 10W USB ports, I can’t piggy back charging my iPad off of just the one charger.
Well, not without TwelveSouth’s ingenious, button-cute accessory, the <a href=”https://twelvesouth.com/products/plugbug/”>PlugBug</a>, that is.
Kyle Lambert is one of the best iPad artists on the web. He also happens to be a big fan of Pixar’s animation team, so when he started following Lee Unkrich – the director of Toy Story 3 – he noticed how passionate Lee is about Stanley Kubrick and his film The Shining. Combining Toy Story 3, with Lee’s obsession for The Shining and Lambert’s iPad drawing talent resulted in one of the more interesting artistic mashups we’ve seen in a while – Toy Shining.
We could tell you more, but we’ll just let you oogle at Kyle’s awesome iPad drawings of Woody occupying Jack Torrance’s spot in Kubrick’s cinematography masterpiece, but remember, everything was created just using an iPad.
Want to catch up on all the new iPad news but don’t have time to watch the entire 85 minute keynote? We compressed the entire thing down into just 90 seconds for your viewing pleasure. Catch the video after the break.
At yesterday’s press conference, Apple made a big deal about how you could tether your new iPad to your laptop or other device, “if your carrier supports Personal Hotspot.”
Hey, guys, guess which of the two big U.S. carriers won’t support Personal Hotspot on the new iPad? Yup, the usual bastard: AT&T. But Verizon seemingly will. That means that if you’re an AT&T customer. there’s no way to tether your laptop to your iPad’s blistering LTE speeds… short, of course, of an A5X jailbreak.
When Apple unveiled its new iPad yesterday, the Cupertino company labeled its 5-megapixel rear-facing camera an “iSight camera.” The iSight name has been used for years to label the cameras built into the Mac, but the new iPad is the first time we’d heard it used for an iOS device.
Apple has now extended that name to the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S, updating its website to advertise iSight cameras for both.
Along with announcing the new iPad and Apple TV (and related iOS and app updates), Apple released a new tool for managing iOS devices in business and education. The new Apple Configurator app is a free download in the Mac App Store for Macs running Lion. Although it takes the sting out of managing iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches for smaller organizations, it won’t replace more full feature mobile management solutions for mid-size or larger companies.
Apple introduced its new A5X processor in the third-generation iPad yesterday, and based on the company’s previous moves, we’re expecting the chip to appear in its next iPhone. However, that may not be the case. According to analysts, the chip requires too much power to be used in the iPhone, and Apple will need to create a more power-efficient chip with a new manufacturing process for its next smartphone.
One of Apple’s biggest announcements yesterday — apart from something about some new iPad — was iPhoto for iOS. We’d suspected that Apple would fill in the hole in its iLife suite, and we were right. What we weren’t expecting was something as fully featured as iPhoto turned out to be. That said, it seems the app was really built with the iPad 3 in mind: It works great on the iPad 2, but it’s a little glitchy in places: just like its desktop cousin.
Just a week after we got Photoshop on the iPad, along comes an app that looks like we all expected Photoshop on the iPad to look. It’s called Laminar, and the best way to describe it is as Lightroom lite.
Several reports that surfaced during the days preceding Apple’s latest iPad event suggested that while the U.S. would get LTE connectivity in the new device, it would be stripped out for those in Europe, where LTE networks are yet to launch.
To everyone’s surprise, Apple left the LTE chip in for us Europeans. But the problem is it won’t support European LTE networks.
I’m amazed at how well Apple is managing to meet demand for the new iPad so far: 16 hours after the pre-order page went live, you can still order an iPad for March 16th delivery. That’s a herculean feat, given how many people want one, but Tim Cook’s been complaining for the last year that they would “sell more iPads if they could build more”… obviously he’s since gotten his house in order.
Never the less, it looks like Apple is finally starting to run out of pre-order units. Specifcally, as of writing, delivery estimates for the white iPad LTE on AT&T have slipped to March 19th, although you can still get any of the models on March 16th in black, and Verizon and WiFi-only models are still unaffected.
The moral? If you want a new iPad, it’s time to pre-order now. My guess is that before the day has passed, the delivery estimates are going to start slipping across the board.
The new iPad’s Retina display “will have a huge impact on games”, one developer told Cult of Mac this morning.
During Apple’s iPad keynote yesterday, Phil Schiller, its senior vice president of worldwide marketing, claimed the tablet’s new A5X processor offers 4X the graphics performance of NVIDIA’s quad-core Tegra 3 chip.
NVIDIA says that while it was “certainly flattering” to be called out by the Cupertino company, it will be performing its own benchmarks on the new iPad to see if Apple’s claims are really accurate.
Apple is getting really serious about using the iPad in large organizations. School and workplace admin people are going to be very pleased with Apple Configurator, a new Mac app which lets you — surprise! — configure multiple iPads at once, all from the comfort of your own computer screen.
The curtains have barely drawn to a close after Apple’s new iPad keynote, but the spotlight is still shinning on Cupertino, only this time in a negative way. A new report by the Wall Street Journal claims that Apple’s E-Book pricing has come under scrutiny of the U.S. Justice Department who is threatening to sue Apple for allegedly colluding to raise the price of electronic books.