iPad - page 296

In theory, the iPad can use the same 30-pin dock donnector to interface with any existing iPhone or iPod accessory, the practicality is that there’s simply no way you’re going to smash it into an existing speaker dock’s iPod port.

The Cerulean RX Stereo Bluetooth Receiver can help with that: it’s a simple wireless adapter that is small enough to fit in any iPod dock and, once connected to your iPad (or any other iPod product), it will happily stream music from across the room over A2DP, no batteries required. And if you’re using it with an iPhone, it’ll even pause and resume music during a call.

A cool accessory that would go a long way to making an iPad work well with a high-end speaker dock, but unfortunately, it’s not cheap: expect to pay $89.99.

The Todo app for the iPad was released recently, and to celebrate Appigo is offering this gorgeous little piece of productivity for $4.99; 50% off of its everyday $9.99 price tag.

About Todo:

Todo is a powerful set of tools that makes task management simple and fun. Use Todo on your iPad or iPhone alone or synchronize your tasks to your desktop (iCal or Outlook) using Appigo Sync (free download) or to the web using the popular online todo list Toodledo. Todo helps you focus on what matters most and allows you to integrate the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology or your own.

Appigo has noted that future updates to Todo for iPad are free.

Quickerteck has done it again! First they brought us a charge monitor for the iPad that indicates if you’re getting enough juice to charge your pad. Now they’ve brought us a 10 watt foldable solar panel for the iPad that comes with the aforementioned charge monitor.

Quickerteck states that the panels will charge your iPad as fast as using a wall charger and they can be yours for a cool $250.

The name of the product is the best part: Apple Juicz.

My questions to you: Would you use this? Is it reasonably priced?

It looks like in-flight entertainment will become a little less annoying in July 2010.

Bluebox Avionics has announced its Ai IFE  which “leverages the power, flexibility and quality of the most advanced consumer device ever produced” (apprently that’s the iPad). Flight attendants would either pass out iPads or chain them to your tray tables and you could enjoy a Airline specific iPad experience  thanks to Bluebox’s proprietary security solution and custom apps.

I’m not sure how practical this is, but it would be nice to move away from the seat-back touchscreens with the hidden credit card swiper.

[via Engadget]

It’s common knowledge that plugging a regular SIM into the iPad is as simple as cleaving it down to microSIM dimensions… but what if you want to use the unlimited AT&T iPad data plan on your iPhone? Over at HiJinks Inc, they’ve posted a great guide to doing just that.

Steve Jobs and Gawker haven’t seen eye-to-eye lately, so it’s somewhat surprising to see the Apple CEO engage in a lengthy email exchange with Gawker’s Ryan Tate over the App Store’s walled garden ecosystem and Apple’s ongoing feud with Adobe and other intermediary APIs.

Less surprising is the fact that Gawker’s Tate, in response to Jobs’ polite, reasonable and clear-headed replies, quickly resorted to disrespectful dickhead mode (partly fueled, it seems, by one too many cocktails.

The exchange begins with a simple question by Tate: how does Jobs think Bob Dylan would feel about Apple if he were still 20 today? “Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with revolution? Revolutions are about feedom.”

Jobs’ response is to say that the iPad is about freedom: freedom from spyware, freedom from poor performance and (lamely) “freedom from porn.”

“Some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is,” Jobs wrote.

Gradaddy’s song “Jed’s Other Poem” off of their album The Sopftware Slump has to be one of the most sweet and lonely ballads ever ostensibly written by a sentient robot, but Stewart Smith’s retroactively official “music” video for it — which prominently features an Apple IIe running a hand coded AppleSoft II program illustrating the lyrics — is probably what has made the song so famous.

Now, that music video has come, in a round about way, to the iPad. Smith, the original video’s programmer, happened to notice that the guys from Panic Software had an old Apple IIe sitting around, so he asked if they could run his animation on it. They didn’t have the old cassette drive to help Smith out, but they did have an iPad… and that worked just fine.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLz72XErN8U&feature=player_embedded

The iPad is a perfect accessory for the living room table, and Comcast’s forthcoming remote control app, the Xfinity Remote, capitalizes on that by pairing your iPad to your cable box through Bluetooth, allowing you to easily search listings and access movies on demand through an extremely attractive interface.

Additionally, Xfinity comes with some powerful social and sharing features, which allows you to share television or movies that you’re watching with other friends, even if they’re not in front of the same television.

You can find more information about Xfinity Remote here. It looks great, but at the end of the day, perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the app is that it’s for Comcast instead of a better cable provider.

iPads don’t charge through USB ports that aren’t 10 watts, which is a bummer, especially if you’ve got a laptop that won’t juice your tablet. Enter Quickertek’s iPad Charge Monitor, perhaps the most useless accessory of all time. It’s a $29.95 dongle that tells you if your iPad isn’t getting enough juice to charge… a function already provided by your non-charging iPad. Who can put a price on confirmation of the obvious, though?

[via Gizmodo]

CBS announced on Friday that they will be going the HTML5 optimized route to bring content to your iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Instead of creating a slick app like ABC’s, CBS thinks the best way to enter the post-flash mobile web is through CBS.com.

CBS Interactive SVP Anthony SooHoo confirmed to NewTeeVee.com that the 2010 Fall line-up will be available to non-flash users. I love how CBS’s move to HTML5 is based solely on the iPad:

Unlike ABC, which built an iPad app to deliver its full-length episodes and promotional clips on the device, CBS decided to focus on delivering video through its website, CBS.com. Since the Apple tablet doesn’t support Adobe Flash, CBS has created a video site for the iPad through HTML5 instead. It’s still early days, but Soohoo expects CBS to deploy more and more video that is iPad-ready, until it reaches content parity with what’s available on the website through a PC.

Interestingly enough, CBS is exploring some unique advertising opportunities to take advantage of the iPad’s multitouch capabilities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fihOmQY-JxY&feature=player_embedded

Apple’s latest iPad ad, “What is iPad?” is a cheery nod to Apple’s classic “What is Newton?” ad, although I prefer the latter commercial’s droll, humorous tone. Still, when Apple says, “You already know how to use iPad” and then earnestly claims a new revolution has begun, it’s hard not to get a few chills down your spine.

I didn’t think anything could make me happier than Netflix coming to the iPad and soon iPhone, but I was wrong.

It’s just a mere mention, and there’s no promises or commitments, but Boxee has hinted at eventual expansion into Apple’s mobile universe. In Boxee’s post about payment system provider Vindicia, they mentioned their plans to move to the mobile platform:

Vindicia’s flexibility also makes it possible for us to enable payments on our website and across mobile platforms like the iPhone, Android and iPad. Boxee’s eventual expansion to these platforms will pave the way for universally accessible content no matter where a user is (we love this idea!).

Last year, we  were pretty impressed by UpNext’s 3D mapping app for the iPhone, which rendered landmarks like the Empire State Building in 3D — which is, of course, cool; but it was only available for NYC, there was no iPad version (because there was no iPad — wow) and it cost a whopping $3.

Now, UpNext 3D Cities has a new name and is available for a bunch of new cities (San Francisco, Boston, DC and Austin, home of SXSW), it’s been tweaked to play well on the iPad and its price has been reduced by $3 — yes, it’s free.

But the pretty, 3D-rendered buildings are just icing on the cake — check out the cool way the app graphically illustrates where to find Asian restaurants through a sorta infrared-vision trick toward the end of the above clip, or the way it overlays public transportation routes. And if that’s not enough, they’ve added the ability to see what’s trending and where your friends be at in Foursquare.

Even though the iPad will go on sale in Canada at the end of the month (May 28), our friends north of the border are buying them by the boatload on the grey market.

It’s not hard to smuggle an iPad across the border, but Canadians have to jump through a couple of hoops to download apps from the U.S. App Store.

Reader Tyler Hojberg emailed us with the details.

HyperMac already has a great range of MacBook battery juicers which can power your Apple laptop for up to 34 hours through an adapter attached to your default Apple power brick, but now they are getting into the iPad game with a range of batteries featuring 10 Watt USB ports that can power your tablet for more than four days.

Buy the most expensive HyperMac — a four-and-a-half pound, 222 watt hour monster battery costing $500 — and you’ll get up to 99 extra hours of battery life from your iPad. Of course, that battery costs about as much as the iPad itself, but for just $169 $200, you can get a smaller 60 watt hour battery that will still keep you going for another 34 hours.

Veteran pop artist David Hockney, who has been fingerpainting daily on his iPhone, has now started sketching on an iPad.

It seems he may be ready to ditch the phone for the digital sketch pad:
“The iPad is far more subtle, in fact it really is like a drawing pad. They will sell by the million,” Hockney told The Standard. “It can be anything you want it to be. This is the nearest we have got to seeing what I would call a universal machine.

Hockney, 72, has been using Apple devices to create art since 2009, favoring the Brushes app, which is what he uses on the iPad, too.
“What makes the iPad better than the iPhone is its larger size. The iPhone was more about the relationship between the hand and the ear whereas this is all about the hand and the eye and makes for far better co-ordination.”

We’ve done a few stories on iPhone art, if you’re ready to trade the iPhone for the iPad — or not — we’d like to hear from you.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za8V2IiGCfY&feature=player_embedded

The iPad’s amazing display can handle eleven simultaneous touch events, or enough probing digits to comfortably handle all but polydactylic concert pianists. Just to prove it, though, Instinctive Code developer Matt Gemmell wrote an open-source program to test it all out.

Yup. It goes up to 11. Not a bad little program, but personally, I still prefer the Plants vs. Zombies proof:

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP6lIcScVh0&feature=player_embedded

[via 9to5Mac]

Responding to a number of iPad WiFi issues including weak signal reception, forgotten passwords, dropped connections and other network problems, Apple tech support has promised a patch for a “very small number” of beleaguered iPad owners.

According to a recently published note on Apple’s tech support site, iPad owners having problems connecting to WiFi networks should first consider updating their router firmware, using WPA or WPA2 wireless security, renewing your IP address, switching channels and (bizarrely) “adjusting screen brightness.”

If none of that works, hold out for a patch. According to the note, ” Apple will address remaining Wi-Fi connectivity issues with a future iPad software update.” Hopefully sooner rather than later.

With the iPad’s arrival to nine countries on May 28th, Apple is beefing up it’s bid for world e-publishing domination.

The iBooks app and iBookstore will be available through iTunes alongside the iPad’s next international release. Apple’s country specific press releases for Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Spain, and the UK all indicate the immediate availability of iBooks and the iBookstore when the iPad hits stores.

iBooks comes to the iPhone and iPod touch with the release of iPhone OS 4 this summer.

[via MacRumors]

I guess it’s time to add another line to the Steve Jobs Email Reply Generator.

When asked Friday about why there isn’t a stock printing function for the iPad, (possibly fake) Steve Jobs replied in true sensei form:  “It will come.”

iWork makes its beautiful debut on the iPad and we still can’t print. What Steve should have said was “It will come on Tuesday.”

While it’s easy to put words into Steve Job’s email mouth and make the news, I’m just impressed this guy–fake or not–replied in 16 minutes.

[via MacRumors]

Before the iPad was officially announced, Steve Ballmer took the stage at CES and unveiled the HP Slate, a Windows 7 running tablet PC to be released later this year. According to Ballmer, the device was proof that Microsoft could do a multitouch operating system just as well as Apple.

On their part, though, HP seems to disagree. Their recent acquisition of Palm puts them in control of webOS, a fantastic mobile operating system designed from the ground up for mobile phones and tablets. As a result, it looks like they’ve canceled Slate in favor of a forthcoming, webOS-based tablet codenamed the Hurricane.

According to The Examiner, the Hurricane could be released in Q3 of 2010. HP’s acquisition deal isn’t due to be finalized until July 31st, so that’s the earliest possible date we could see a webOS tablet.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wklrVOFMKA&feature

The guys over at Redmond Pie have gotten their jailbroken iPad working with the Magic Mouse, thanks to the BTStack Mouse Driver application, which can easily be found on Cydia.

I’m struggling to see the point of this, other than “because we can.” You simply can’t do anything with a mouse under iPhone OS, short of badly emulate the job of a finger. There’s no contextual menus to open, no text to highlight, no windows to move around, no dock to multitask with. Why would you bother?

Using a mouse with a finger-based OS makes about as much sense as using a finger to navigate a mouse-based OS (and we all see the hatchet job Windows 7 did there). If you want a mouse so badly, just buy a netbook already… don’t fool yourself that using a mouse under iPhone OS is anything besides sheer pig-headed folly.

If you live in Canada, the UK, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain or Switzerland, you can now pre-order your very own iPad, just like those cowboys in America have been yodeling about! Just hit up your local online Apple store and register your pre-order for delivery on May 28th.

It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

This time, we review AlphaBattle, Chop Chop Runner, Compression, ESPN Pinball on iPad, Mini Golf Wacky Worlds Free, Opera Mini, Parcel Panic, and Pinball HD.

In a post on Yahoo’s Mobile Blog, the big purple Y! seems pretty gobsmacked that 10% of iPad traffic is coming from outside of the US, despite the fact that there has yet to be an international roll out of the tablet.