iPad - page 282

Forget drug mules: Chinese officials recently busted a ring of housewives acting as iPad mules.

Customs officials in Shenzhen caught 14 women, described as fashionably-dressed housewives, trying to carry 88 iPads and 340 mobile phones across the border from Hong Kong. The goods were worth an estimated 950,000 yuan, or about $143,000.

The methods sound similar to drug runners: one of them strapped 65 mobile phones around her waist and another 20 stuffed into a handbag, according to newspaper Guangzhou Daily.

Why the smuggle trouble? Even though the iPad is made in China, only the wi-fi version is available currently on the mainland.

If you have your hands on Apple’s latest must-have gadget the iPad, you’ve probably wondered how to keep other people’s hands off it.

Sure, you can password protect the screen. But that’s not going to do much if someone decides to pick up the handy tablet and run with it.

Enter the iPad lock. Well, it’s actually a $40 case with room for a standard computer lock (sold separately.) The hard clear plastic case has a prominent slot on the side, then you attach a lock which you need to secure to a table or other stationary too-big-to-walk-off-with item.

Even though the introduction of the iPad-only publicationThe Daily is slated to also herald the coming of iTunes app subscriptions early next year, don’t necessarily expect that move to suddenly make your iPad a digital stand-in for the local newsstand: traditional magazine publishers remain skeptical of Cupertino’s app subscription plan because of the company’s refusal to share credit and billing information.

Apple continues to gobble up worldwide market share thanks to the popularity of the iPad, but limited content offerings in local languages are a speed bump.

Apple snared a 12.4% share of global mobile PC shipments in Q3’10 – taking the third spot worldwide behind HP and Acer, according to DisplaySearch’s Quarterly Mobile PC Shipment and Forecast Report

Still, early adopters in places like Japan are not snapping up the tablet, in part due to the lack of content in Japanese.

There are many good ways to promote your product or service. Here at Cult of Mac, we’re particularly taken with people prancing around in animal costumes, then being hit in slow-motion by a barrage of baseballs while the product’s name flashes on the screen. Advertising’s not so hard after all.

Of course, not every advertiser is so inventive, and so there is a lesser school of guerilla advertising: destroying a beautiful and expensive gadget in a web video in lurid, torture porn detail, then directing viewers to a stupid, countdown and uninformative website that the viewer will forget the second it fails to illuminate.

In this case, the site in question is Say Hi To Space, and while the video is beautifully produced and an industrial drill a novel way to destroy an iPad, one can’t help but feel that the iPad’s lack of a camera is just a slight-of-hand justification for the iPad’s destruction… one that will ultimately lead us to a website that has nothing to do whatsoever with Apple or its products.

A small publishing company called Peter Pauper Press today announced an iPad version of a print book called The Little Black Book of Kama Sutra.

The book is part of a continuing series of “Little Black Books” and “Little Pink Books.” Other titles include The Little Black Book of Cocktails and The Little Pink Book of Etiquette.

The Kama Sutra book is very much in line with a growing trend of publishing books as interactive apps instead of as e-books. The only trouble is that the book is sexual in nature and illustrated with photographs. The publisher isn’t even going to try to get it past Apple censors, but instead intends to distribute it independently rather than through the iTunes App Store.

The Kama Sutra puts Apple in an awkward position.

A private pilot is using an iPad to help stay on course, in addition to the standard navigation system.

Jeff Curl has loaded up his iPad with worldwide charts and says it helps him make better decisions in the air.

“I can see the route structure and see what kind of rate I want to file, I can also pull up my radar and see I don’t want to go straight, I’ve got a huge line of thunderstorms,” he said.

Fuze Box, the company behind the groundbreaking meeting and collaboration tool Fuze Meeting, raised the bar for easy multiparty videoconferencing Thursday with the announcement of its private beta for Fuze Presence — bringing multiparty high definition (HD) video to Mac iOS and Android mobile devices.

With many video conferencing solutions tied to a desktop-only experience featuring unreliable video quality and poor latency, Fuze Presence moves the current collaboration space into the realm of H.264 codec technology promising multi-party collaboration delivered at 720P, with high fidelity sound and under 200 ms latency. The technology also supports VoIP, screen sharing, content sharing and a full suite of collaboration tools.

Steve Jobs has made no bones about being skeptical in regards to multitouch displays on desktop and notebook Macs, observing that multitouch works best when a display is horizontal: anything else just leads to gorilla arm.

Right now, that means that Macs’ multitouch options are limited to accessories like the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad, but given the iPad’s success, it’s natural Apple is trying to find a more directly interactive approach to horizontal multitouch, in which the display can convert flush with a lap or a desk when it’s in touch mode.

Now a bevy of new patents have been awarded to Apple, most interestingly in a convertible MacBook-to-iPad-like device, spotted by Patently Apple.

Wall Street investment banking icon JPMorgan Chase & Co. is giving iPads to every associate in its global investment banking division, according to a company e-mail obtained by Bloomberg News. Employees receiving the devices will get to keep them free of charge as long as they remain at the unit until the pilot program ends on May 1, 2011, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.

Industry analysts viewed the move as a significant victory for Apple in its quest to wrest control of the Enterprise communications submarket away from Research in Motion, Ltd., whose Blackberry handheld devices have been a ubiquitous companion of “serious businesspeople” for more than a decade.

The flocks of kids I always see clustered around iPads whenever I walk into an Apple Store suggest that kid + iPad = best new toy ever. Only problem is,  really young kid + iPad also = anxious parent.

Griffin thinks it has a case + app combo to fix that. LightBoard is a shatter-resistant polycarbonate case that fully encloses the iPad (Including the screen, but with cutouts for the speaker and headphone jack) and doubles as a table. Then the free LightBoard Trace app superimposes traceable drawings through a piece of paper laid over the screen and held in place by a clip on the case.

LightBoard is available through Griffin’s website for $40.

Will the iPad kill — or save — the newspaper? Countless observers have argued both cases. I come to bury these notions, not to praise them.

The newspaper industry is suffering through a painful transition, characterized by layoffs, closures, mergers and the abandonment of mission and even dignity in the quest to maintain relevance to advertisers.

The “iPad-will-destroy-newspapers” crowd assumes that paper is the problem. Paper is expensive, slow and bad for the environment. Because the iPad delivers news cheap, fast and without the conversion of trees into trash, the public will choose iPad-based news, which will kill off newspapers.

The “iPad-will-save-newspapers” people, on the other hand, see the wide range of news-reading apps as the newspaper’s salvation. There’s some logic to this, given that the iPad is a theoretically superior advertising platform. But that’s not going to happen.

Thanks to the inclusion of WebSocket support for the iPad’s Safari browser in iOS 4.2, the doorway for collaboration through the web between the iPad and assorted devices has been flung open.

One of the first apps to take advantage of the iPad’s new trick is $10 SyncPad, which presents users with a faux whiteboard to scrawl notes on, then lets other users of the app scribble on that same whiteboard over the Internet, with the results showing up in realtime (well, almost — the developer, Davide Di Cillo of development company 39 Inc., told us it updates a little slowly, but that the problem’s been fixed in the latest update, which is waiting for Apple’s approval).

There’s no limit to the amount of collaborators, although each has to have (of course) the app and an Internet connection; the iPad-less can view the whiteboard through a web browser for free, but have to make do without being able to add input for the time being — although Di Cillo says they’re working on a fee-based version that’ll allow collaboration via a browser as well. There’s also a view-only free version of the app for the iPad.

Whenever it arrives, it looks like Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily won’t be the only iPad-only magazine around: British billionaire and part Virgin Airways owner Richard Branson is also planning on launching a new iPad publication called Project, and it’s likely to be revealed as early as tomorrow.

Did you miss out on that incredible $399 iPad deall TJ Maxx was using to lure customers into their stores this past Black Friday? You might be in luck: a new deals site has just gone online, and their goal is to deliver 32GB WiFi iPads to their customers for a hundred bucks off the standard price.

The past week’s rumor cycle has consistently pegged early December as the date when Apple would simultaneously introduce iOS 4.3, iTunes in-app subscription support and News Corp’s new iPad-only magazine, The Daily… but according to sources, that date is very likely aggressive, and the actual rollout has been delayed until early 2011.

Apple’s iPad is the first generation of what I hope will be a long line of magical tablets. Unfortunately,  it has one minor problem that will be more evident now that iOS 4.2.1 has been released.

That problem will be the made evident by the over zealous use of multitasking on a device that only has 256MB of memory in which to run applications. The iPhone 4 twice that or 512MB.  Users won’t be able to help themselves because multitasking is just to valuable to ignore or give up.

So the problem of having less memory to run apps will be frequent warnings that “your device is running low on memory. ” I’ve seen it happen to others and the image above is my own personal encounter with the problem. Apple had given the iPhone 4 pretty liberal amounts of application RAM, so I was  a bit taken aback that the iPad didn’t have at least 512MB to 1GB of RAM when it was released.

Fortunately, the work around is easy.

The Black Friday weekend means sales and discounts galore, and iOS developers are offering some crazy reductions on the some of the App Store’s best downloads.

We’ve compiled a list of some of the greatest apps on sale, such as Readdle’s Printer Pro & PDF Expert; the Quickoffice Mobile suites, AutoStitch Panorama, and many, many more.

Check out our extensive list of apps on sale after the break, and grab yourself a bargain for your iPad, iPhone & iPod Touch.

The Black Friday weekend means sales and discounts galore, and iOS developers are offering some crazy reductions on the some of the App Store’s best downloads.

We’ve compiled a list of some of the greatest games on sale, such as EA’s NCAA Football, Need for Speed & Madden NFL; and Gameloft’s Shrek Kart HD, Hero of Sparta 2 & Let’s Golf 2 HD.

Check out our extensive list of games on sale after the break, and grab yourself a bargain for your iPad, iPhone & iPod Touch.

It is going to be tough Christmas if you are a company that plans on selling a potential iPad rival. One company, Maylong, is selling their Android powered M-150 TabletPC at Walgreens for $99 and it’s going to be hard to sell after a review on Ars technica concluded with a verdict of “run screaming in the other direction. ”

Now Best Buy has come to the rescue with great ideas for iPad rivals that just don’t cut it via their BBYOpen blog.  Here are a few of my favorite suggestions they had for anyone unlucky enough to find an M-150 or something just as bad under their Christmas tree this year.

‘Tis the season: time to gather with friends and family and answer an endless barrage of hideous tech support questions.

You’re reading this Web site. That means you’re the most technical person in your extended family and therefore know off the top of your head why your mother-in-law’s PC won’t print, right? Your uncle is convinced that if he can corner you between dinner and pie, you’ll solve the riddle of that obscure error message he gets every time he boots his PC.

And your cousin wants to buy her husband the latest gadget. She has a Black Friday coupon for something, but doesn’t remember what it’s called. Should she buy it?

Ugh! Where’s that eggnog?

Fortunately, Apple has provided us all with a universal answer: “Get an iPad!”

Click here to read the whole article.

If you still rely on your TiVo more than your new AppleTV for watching television, TiVo’s soon to come out with a new app that will make it even easier to use their service from a supine position on your couch, using an iPad as an advanced remote control.

What’s at the top of most kid’s lists to Santa this Christmas season? It’s not a Red Rider BB Gun, or an Xbox 360, or some sort of transforming Killbot. It’s an Apple iPad, at least according to the latest survey by the Nielsen Company.

Ever since 2002, Oprah Winfrey has ended each year with a Christmas celebration in the form of her “Favorite Things” episode, in which she has lavished the members of her audience with the products of the year that entertainment’s most influential woman has gazed beneficently upon.

This past Monday, Oprah held her 2010 Favorite Things episode, and she gave all 275 members of her studio audience an item she declared “her number one favorite thing ever.”

What was it? A brand new iPad.

iOS 4.2.1 was just released, but already the rumor mill is churning about iOS 4.3… and it looks like it might arrive before the end of the year, much earlier than anyone had previously thought.

According to sources, Apple plans on releasing iOS 4.3 on Monday, December 13th… just three weeks after the debut of iOS 4.2.1.