When Apple first revealed the $30 iPad Camera Connection Kit, which contains a little dongle that allows you to use a USB 2.0 cable to transfer photos from your camera to your iPad’s iPhoto library, a lot of people wondered if it might be used to connect other USB devices as well.
As it turns out, you can: you can use the Camera Connection Kit to hook up an audio headset and a USB keyboard.
Not terribly exciting, but as the Camera Connection Kits begin to be shipped, it might hint at more exciting USB interoperability to come. A game pad certainly would be nice.
In an age when voice and video from half a world away can be sucked up from the soup of electromagnetic radiation invisibly swirling around us, plugging in my iPhone to sync with iTunes makes me feel like a caveman. I’ve been waiting for an app that would allow me to wirelessly sync my iDevices for awhile, and now, it looks like it might be here: Wi-Fi Sync by Greg Hughes allows you to pair your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to your computer through WiFi, no wires required.
Here’s a interesting story about secrecy and making mistakes at Apple. The story is told by Woz, Apple employee number one (check out his hilarious shirt).
While Woz was waiting in line to buy the iPad last month, an Apple test engineer showed him a prototype iPad. It was just a few hours before the device went on sale. Woz, who is still an Apple employee, fired up the Numbers app. Little did he know, the unit was 3G test prototype, and was not to be shown or used outside of secure areas at the company HQ. Unfortunately, Woz’s playing with it must have somehow sent up a warning flag at Apple.
“… I can tell you that the test engineer who showed me an iPad after midnight, for 2 minutes, during the iPad launch was indeed fired. I opted to spend 2 minutes with Numbers on this iPad, trying some stunts I’d seen on Apple’s website demo video. I was not told that it was a 3G model and I had no way to know that. I was told that this engineer had to wait until midnight to show it outside of Apple’s secure area. And I’m an Apple employee who he was showing it to. My guess is that he was allowed to take the iPad outside of the secure area but still not supposed to show it.”
The test engineer was fired for betraying Apple’s ironclad rules on secrecy. The device was not to be shown to anybody — not even Woz. (And worse, Woz told Steve Jobs about seeing the iPad that night. Jobs himself said it was “no big deal.”)
On the other hand, Gray Powell, the Apple engineer who lost an iPhone 4G prototype at a bar, is still employed at Apple.
“Product secrecy is good for Apple and should be strictly enforced, but maybe 10% of niceness and 90% of strictness is OK too,” writes Woz.
It seems mistakes are forgiven, but betrayals are not.
99 year old Virginia Campbell just got her first computer… and it’s the iPad.
Emphasizing Apple’s own “it just works” mantra, Virginia was quickly able to make sense of the iPad’s operating system and use Pages in landscape mode to write the following limerick:
To this technically-ninny it’s clear
In my compromised 100th year,
That to read and to write
Are again within sight
Of this Apple iPad Pioneer.
My own limericks tend to be smuttier and focus on a strange Venusian improbably named Michael Hunt, but I admire Virginia’s: at the very least, it’s probably the best and sweetest advertising Apple could possibly get.
Apple’s ordering system automatically canceled Volosin’s purchase, informing him that he could not order more than three.
“They were limiting people form ordering too many, which I thought was interesting,” he says. “They’re used to dealing with consumers and not bulk orders.”
With the iPad kinda bridging the chasm between iPhone and MacBook, it becomes increasingly likely a 70-page legal brief some lawyer’s been working on for months will be lost when junior accidentally flings the iPad into the pool while taking a turn a little too hot in Real Racing HD.
That’s where DriveSavers comes in. Located about a half hour north of San Francisco, these guys are experts at recovering data from hard drives and the NAND flash chips used in the iPhone — and the iPad. The only difference is the iPhone has one set of chips, while the iPad has two.
It’s not cheap, though — DriveSavers says the average bill for recovering data from an iPhone runs about a grand. Ouch. They will, however, provide a free evaluation on an iPad mailed to them, explaining what can be recovered and how much it’ll cost.
The lesson here? Back your stuff up. And maybe get junior a helmet; kid seems a little accident-prone.
When Jobs announced the iPad, declared the netbook to be dead and claimed that the iPad was a decent productivity machine, I was cynical. Lustful for an iPad I was, but as a blogger, the ability to type in one window while referencing a source in another is invaluable. Simply put, my netbook allowed me to do that, but the iPad didn’t… and until it did, there was little chance I’d ever do serious work on it.
I should have taken account the ingenuity of app developers though. Desktop for the iPad essentially allows you to split screen your iPad. You can specify what functionality you want each split screen panel to have, but for my purposes, I could browse a page in Safari on one side of the screen while using the “Email Composer” on the right side to type in text.
What a perfectly elegant little solution, especially for just $0.99.
$0.69 for an iPad stand? Bah, we say. Ian Collins shows us all how to make up to four free iPad stands out of its own packaging materials. Ghetto? Perhaps. We prefer to call it recycling.
Oooooh, take a look at this. Above you see a screenshot of MidiPad, a software controller for software sequencer Ableton that’s “coming soon” for iPad.
Twenty doctors are using iPads to keep track of patients in a trial program at a California hospital district.
At Kaweah Delta Health Care District in Visalia, doctors and staff already use smart phones, including the iPhone, to access the hospital’s network. Over the weekend, the small group of doctors in a trial run were given iPads to keep abreast of patients, whether they are off site or in another wing of the hospital.
Technology director Nick Volosin has already ordered another 100 iPads to equip hospital employees including home health and hospice care workers, nurses, dietitians and pharmacists.
Scott Beale / Laughing Squid http://laughingsquid.com/
Scott Beale of Laughing Squid snapped this spiffy wooden stand cradling an iPad cash register at soon-to-be opened San Francisco coffee house Sightglass.
The iPad will ring up those double-ristretti with Square, an app with a peripheral credit card swiper (see the built-in one on the bottom of this wooden stand) that turns the iPhone and iPad into cash registers, accepting cash or credit card payments. Square can calculate sales tax, accept touchscreen finger signatures and then generate email or SMS receipts.
No word on who crafted the fab stand, yet, though.
Even HP’s aware that they’ve got a tough fight on their hands convincing consumers that they want to give them their $500 bucks for an HP Slate tablet as opposed to the iPad… but the PC manufacturer may still be be too optimistic.
If an early review of the device is anything to go by, it’s not going to be a fight… it’s going to be a slaughter.
Landing Pad is a lovely piece of work; a blog that celebrates the beauty of the best-looking iPad apps around, in all their full screen glory.
No scrappy little thumbnails here; at Landing Pad, each app is shown full-size, as Steve Jobs intended it to be seen.
In all seriousness, for those of us outside the US who still haven’t even seen an iPad yet, this is the next best way of getting a good idea of what it looks like after watching Apple’s official (and somewhat too clean) videos.
“The iPad and iPhone provide a platform that makes excellent design the standard, not the exception. The elegance and power of multi-touch technology and the iPhone OS, matched to restraints on factors such as screen size and browser, have allowed the creation of applications that fit perfectly in the environment they inhabit. More and more, websites and applications built specifically for iPhone OS are overtaking their desktop companions in ease of use and sheer beauty.”
Bill Jordan went to Denver’s Cherry Creek Apple store to buy an iPad for a co-worker as a perk for getting a promotion.
In what may be the most violent iPad theft to date, police say surveillance video shows the 59-year-old Jordan shadowed by two young men who assaulted him before he reached the parking garage.
Think you can do a better job running a 3G network than AT&T. Here’s your chance to prove it: Telecom Tycoon HD is a mobile broadband network sim for the iPad that allows you to roll-out a 2G, 3G and LTE network across a virtual city.
We were pretty confident that the iPad-like, unibody-looking iPhone 4G leaked in grainy pictures last week was utterly bogus. Heck, we still think it was probably bogus, but bogus or not… maybe the renderer of those images was on the right track.
You probably remember the picture above. It was leaked to Engadget a day before Steve Jobs announced the iPad, and it was our first look at Apple’s much-rumored tablet. At the time, no one really paid much attention to the iPhone-like devices to the right of the iPad and captured in the iPad’s reflection: what people really cared about was the tablet itself.
Now, though? Those two pointing arrows seem to provide strong indication that Apple will extend the iPad’s design to the iPad 4G, with further confirmation provided by these MacRumor shots of alleged iPhone 4G components.
At this point, we seem to know what the iPhone 4G will look like and what it’s specs will be. What will Apple surprise us with when it’s officially unveiled in June?
Congratulations, yankees! Apple has just updated its online store, listing the shipping date for the iPad 3G.
When will you be able to hold one in your greedy little hands? If you ordered an iPad 3G, prepare for it to be delivered on May 7th… hopefully hand-delivered by UPS as opposed to being smashed through your mail slot.
For Europeans like me, this is something of a bitter pill: it means you damn cowboys will be browsing the mobile web on the iPad a full three days before Apple even announces the European pricing and release dates. The only solace? This hopefully indicates that the WiFi and 3G models will be available simultaneously in Europe.
Update: Apple is assuring existing pre-order customers that their existing iPad 3G orders are still coming in late April. The May 7th date only applies to new orders.
Thank you for your recent order of the magical and revolutionary iPad 3G.
We would like to confirm that your order will be shipped in late April as communicated at the time you placed your order. You will receive a confirmation notice when your order has shipped.
A clever Craigslist capitalist is selling these cool iPad stands for $10. Says the ad:
This is a nice elegant portable durable plastic iPad stand to use either when using a Bluetooth keyboard or when watching a video or photo slideshow in vertical or horizontal position. The stand can easily be packed to take with you, unlike cumbersome wire stands or docks. It puts the iPad at a great angle for viewing and has a nice contoured shape which will not scratch your iPad. The beautiful black color blends in with the iPad the best out of any stand we have seen for a sleek professional look.
CC-licensed, thanks to Dimdim Web Conferencing on Flickr.
Although a few small, private colleges have rushed to adopt the iPad — pledging them to incoming students before they were even in stores — several big universities have delayed adopting them for at least a few semesters.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Princeton, Cornell and George Washington universities have deferred admission of the iPad for students.
Princeton and George Washington decided to wait over security issues; Cornell is concerned over connectivity and bandwidth.
We like our Steve Jobs slightly grumpy, so after his humorous prosaic experiment with Californian surfer lingo yesterday, it’s nice to see him get back to keeping it real: namely, by calling a potential customers nuts.
It’s part of the Congressional record: the head of the NSA says the iPad is “wonderful.”
During hearings to determine whether he will take charge of U.S. Cyber Command, the head of the National Security Agency, Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, said:
“I am a technologist. I love computers. I have a new iPad,” Alexander told the committee of Senators. A few minutes later, Democratic Senator Mark Udall of Colorado couldn’t help but bring it up again. From the Congressional Quarterly transcript:
Udall: I’m tempted to get a critical review of the iPad, but perhaps we can do that–
Alexander: Wonderful.
Udall: Wonderful. I will put that on — for the record.
The iPad in Germany will have data plans from at least three carriers on launch, Cult of Mac has learned.
In a surprise move, Apple isn’t partnering with T-Mobile, the official iPhone carrier, but E-Plus, the country’s third largest mobile operator.
However, not to be left out, T-Mobile is also preparing to offer a low-cost data plan for the iPad.
T-Mobile’s move as well as recent announcements by other European providers illustrates the likelihood that multiple carriers in several countries around the world will offer competing data plans for the iPad, which should drive down monthly data costs and also result in heavily subsidized iPads offered by multiple networks to anyone who is willing to sign a traditional contract.
It may also indicate that month-by-month 3G off-contract will widely be available both in Europe and abroad through Apple’s exclusive iPad 3G partners.
