We all know the wait for the iPad, at least in the U.S., will be over on April 3, right? Wrong. True connoisseurs know they need to wait until June 1, when Mervis Diamond Importers will unleash the hideous and despicable Diamond iPad on the world. It’s a bejeweled and bedazzled monstrosity boasting 11.43 carats worth of diamonds to make your magical technology device far more ugly and way more likely to cut your fingers as you watch a movie or read a book on it. All for the low price of $20,000 and your dignity.
For the truly elite only. Do you have enough cash and little enough common sense to go for it?
If you’re in the market for an iPad — and you know you are, because it’s killer — you’re probably wondering which model to buy.
Naturally, you’re looking at the cheapest $499 iPad, which has Wi-Fi only, but you’re thinking you might also want 3G. After all, you can pay-as-you-go for data, and who knows when you might need it? And what about storage?
I’ve though it through, and concluded that most people should buy the 32GB iPad with Wi-Fi + 3G, including the wireless keyboard. Here’s why:
U.S. bookseller Barnes & Noble claims to be unconcerned about the iPad’s threat against their own e-reader, the Nook. Indeed, they are so excited about the possibilities of the iPad that they are now promising iPad owners that they can expect to download their own free Barnes & Noble e-reading software just around the time of the iPad’s launch, which will allow individuals to buy any of more than a million eBooks as an in-app purchase.
In truth, it makes sense: the Nook’s not really doing much business, and the iPad is going to be huge. Unlike the closed ecosystems of other e-readers, Barnes & Noble can launch all feet in and essentially parasite off of the iPad’s success.
The question is: will Apple allow Barnes & Noble and Amazon to open competing e-book stores? I tend to doubt it: Apple’s taken strong stances in the past against the duplication of functionality, and they are going to want to keep a stranglehold on the iPad e-book marketplace, the same way they control the iPod’s music and video marketplace. The more booksellers on the iPad, the better from a consumer perspective… but I really worry that Apple’s going to stamp down hard not just on commercial e-reader apps, but fantastic existing apps like Stanza.
Did you buy an iPad when Apple began pre-sales this morning? If so, you weren’t alone. Indeed, Apple may have sold 20,000 iPads per hour, leading one commentator to suggest the Cupertino, Calif. company was earning $10 million per hour on its new tablet device.
The estimate comes from Andrew Erlichson, CEO of Phanfare, a photo share site. Erlichson said he purchased two iPads and noted the order IDs.
Still confused about which iPad to pre-order? In collaboration with handsome Wilson Rothman, Gizmodo’s lovely own Rosa Golijan put together this handy, haiku-ified iPad buying guide which — while thoroughly tongue in cheek — more or less lines up with my own feelings on the matter: if you’re buying the iPad WiFi, there’s little reason to invest in more than the base model, while the 32GB iPad 3G will likely be the least regrettable purchase in the tablet’s first generation over the long term.
Though a few early adopters have noted that the confirmation emails for pre-ordered iPads are slow, it looks like the in-store pick up option should be fun with some kind of launch fete in the works.
Update 2: Apple is sending out emails confirming the 5.30 AM PST/8.30 AM EST time, according to TidBits and others. Emails were sent to customers who signed up for pre-order info (I signed up but didn’t get the message for some reason).
Update: Reader Bob Penn says the staff at his local Apple store insists that pre-orders begin at midnight. I for one will be staying up until the witching hour just to see.
Pre-oders for the iPad start at 5.30 AM PST on Friday March 12, Apple PR told TUAW. That’s 8.30 AM for East Coasters.
Better set your alarm clocks.
All models of the iPad will be available for pre-order, but only the Wi-Fi model will ship on April 3. The 3G model won’t be available until late April.
As the first example of what will likely be a growing trend, Google — always a progressive front runner in getting their products on Apple’s devices as soon as humanly possible — have just revealed an iPad-friendly version of Google Reader called Google Reader Play.
Google Reader Play makes RSS feeds more accessible to tablet users by treating each news feed like a Flickr slideshow. Only one news item is shown at a time: each is recommended based on what a subscriber has previously liked. It also pulls items and shared articles from a subscriber’s own Google Reader account.
It’s not quite iPad ready just yet — load Google Reader Play up on your iPhone and you’ll quickly discover you can’t swipe to flip to the next item, which is an obligatory interface feature for the iPhone OS — but I’d expect all of these tablet-specific problems to be resolved by April 3rd.
With just a few weeks to go before the iPad hits stores, here’s the best way to ensure you’re at the head of the line to get one (or three).
If history is any indication, the iPad will be in short supply when it goes on sale April 3. Plus there are rumors of production delays that may further constrain supply.
The best way to get one is to place an advance order on Apple’s online store the minute Apple starts accepting them on Friday March 12.
Trouble is, no one knows what time Apple will update its online store. But there’s a way to get alerted.
Thanks to a bunch of nerds in Berlin, you can be pinged the minute the store is taken offline and, more importantly, when it comes back up.
AppleStoreCheck.com constantly monitors Apple’s online store for changes. Sign up, and the service will alert you by email, RSS or Twitter the minute Apple starts taking iPad pre-orders.
As AppleStoreCheck says: “We’ll check the Apple Store for new products and changes – so you don’t have to.”
iPad pre-orders will initially be limited to US customers, but includes both iPad Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi+3G models, which will ship later. The iPad will be available to pick up from the Apple Retail stores on April 3, or delivery through the mail.
Digital Americana has just popped up out of nowhere, claiming to be “the first literary & culture magazine developed especially for the interactive tablet experience.”
Back in January, we reported on the blurry images of some ancient Apple Newton prototypes that were doing the rounds on the internets.
Since then, Grant Hutchinson, who was mentioned in that article, has taken a fantastic set of photos of the Newton “Cadillac” prototype. We asked him if we could show you some of those photos here, and he kindly said yes.
After all, slowed down by 15% and annotated by Neil Curtis, the iPad spot is just as surreal as the Old Spice ad. In fact, it is rife with goofs, most notably multitouch interactions that have little to no bearing to what the model is doing on screen. As for that iPad model, s/he is practically the Orlando of Apple spots, transmutating from female to male to female again over the course of the ad… all the while magically warping in and out of different pairs of pants.
It’s a bit strange to see a company as detail-obsessed as Apple make so many careless little mistakes… but you’d be hard pressed to catch any of these gaffes at regular speed. It just goes to show that as nitpicky as Jobs can be, the collected Internet will always one-up him.
You’re probably already familiar with Vers’ signature line of wooden cases for the iPhone and iPod Touch. No surprise in the wake of the iPad’s announcement, then, that they have just announced a new wooden iPad Case, which (for $80) will ensconce your tablet in dead cedar flesh.
It looks pretty good, and I like the built-in kickstand, but personally, I’ve never quite understood the appeal of wooden casesl, but that might have more to do with my hysterical phobia of slicing a splinter through the fleshy web between my thumb and forefinger than any real failure of the concept.
A few short months ago, the Kindle seemed completely unassailable. While Amazon’s e-reader was hardly a tech revelation, before the iPad, it didn’t need to be: Amazon’s gigantic e-book store engorged with millions of $9.99 titles and free online connectivity through Whispernet was a huge wager that other companies struggled to meet.
In the wake of the iPad, though, the Kindle’s prospects look bleak. Before they’ve even released it, the iPad has managed to slaughter the Kindle in the eyes of the gadget-buying product. Case in point: ChangeWave Research has surveyed 3,171 consumers about their e-readers, and 27% say they’d rather have picked up an iPad… if it had been available at the time they picked up their original e-reader.
It’s a hypothetical exercise, of course: — despite the headlines on some blogs, those surveyed aren’t saying they would have waited for the iPad — but it’s still impressive that Apple has managed to impress so many existing Kindle owners with a device that costs more in both initial expenditure and e-reading upkeep in every way. But it’s also unsurprising: just like the iPod made all other MP3 players on the market look like antediluvian crapgets, the iPad’s done the same to e-readers.
In his emails to Apple customers who take the time to write him and ask him questions, Steve Jobs usually comes across as a really busy guy who, despite his workload, is really trying his best to maintain a human, one-on-one connection to his customers.
On some other occasions, though, Jobs will occasionally comes across as a devastating master of pith, capable of infusing a few matter-of-fact words with a palpably scornful undercurrent, as if — if he wasn’t just so darn busy all the time — he might instead muse for a few hundred words on just what it must be like to be as stupid as the quivering, moronic biomass to which he must deign to pander… and of which his correspondent is just one molecularly small part.
Apple just premiered the very first iPad commercial during the first ad break of tonight’s Academy Awards. It was very good, just a rock song and demoing every imaginable feature while continually rotating from portrait to landscape. We’ll post as soon as Apple or Youtube does.Embed from Engadget now in post. Real Apple version here.
International roll-out in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK of both the iPad WiFi and iPad 3G will happen in late April.
Hurrah! The end is in sight! So much for those rumored delays: this puts the iPad launch exactly within the 60-90 day launch window Steve Jobs promised on January 27th.
Who else will be compulsively refreshing Apple.com on March 12th along with me?
We’ve already got a good handle on how periodical publishers intend on using the iPad to revitalize their businesses, but what about book publishers? Outside of just having another e-book platform to publish for, how can the iPad’s incredible multimedia and interactive capabilities be leveraged to transform the way we experience literature?
On Tuesday, Penguin Books’ CEO John Makinson tried to answer just those questions, demonstrating some upcoming books that will be coming to the iPad. Perhaps the most impressive demo was for the iPad version of the beloved children’s book, Where’s Spot? which has been transformed into an adorable interactive learning app. Penguin’s not stopping there: their Vampire Academy e-book is “an online community for vampire lovers” that features live chat between readers (a nice touch, but parents might get their heckles up at the idea of a real-life Edward Cullen prowling for pre-teens in the pages of their cildren’s book) , while a Paris travel guide switches to street map view when it’s put on a table.
The dread iPhone backup progress bar (via iPhone Lover)
Just a shade over nine years ago, Apple launched iTunes, a fairly late, fairly average MP3 player with CD burning built in. And though it lacked many of the features of Audion, then the best music player for Mac, it not only became the market leader, but it set the stage for the iPod, widespread legal music downloads, legal TV, the iPhone, and soon the iPad. It would be no exaggeration to say that iTunes saved Apple. It would be no exaggeration to say that iTunes is now Apple’s most successful piece of software ever in terms of users.
But it would also be no exaggeration to call it the worst piece of software Apple makes and the one thing that could disrupt Apple’s current march to mobile device dominance. It has bloated into a crashy kludge that the rest of the Apple universe depends upon. Despite a lot of good intentions from amazing software developers, iTunes has become Apple’s Internet Explorer 6 — an unmitigated disaster.
It was bound to happen: every new Apple product announcement inevitably becomes the lure for some unscrupulous scumbucket’s latest scam, and the iPad certainly wasn’t going to be any different. But the latest online scam to prominently feature an Apple product seems a bit more dastardly than most. According to security firm Sophos, a new iPad scam has hit Facebook, and far from giving you a free iPad, it could cost you a pretty penny.
The scam starts innocently enough: you are directed to a Facebook page which reads “iPad Researchers Wanted — Want to beta test Apple’s latest product?” The page then goes on to encourage you to become a fan and to recruit your friends, claiming propagation of the scam will increase your chances of being accepted into the beta.
But here’s the insidious part: go to the page brings up a pop-up window, claiming to be a quiz that you need to fill out to be eligible for the beta… and the quiz asks for your permission to get your date of birth and cellphone number from Facebook.
“That’s where the scam happens,” says Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. The hackers who created this page are trying to sign you up for a premium rate cellphone service, that will charge you something like $10 a week until you unsubscribe.”
The good news here is Sophos alerted Facebook, who quickly pulled the scam… but the bad news is, it’s doubtlessly going to pop right back up again.
The lesson here, of course, is if it’s too good to be true, it always is… and Apple’s never going to let a schmuck like you or me beta test its new products.
For hardcore users, the iPad’s WiFi-only SKUs may seem like “why bother” affairs… especially given the $30 month-by-month data plan AT&T is offering to customers who pick up the marginally more expensive 3G version.
There’s enough left over bits of iPhone-specific functions diffused through the iPad SDK to be skeptical of any claims of unannounced telephony “features” in Apple’s forthcoming tablet, but this one’s getting a bit of bit of press: enable passcode lock on your iPad, enter your code wrong five times in a row, and you suddenly have the functionality to slide for an emergency call, just like on the iPhone.
It seems just like residual iPhone functionality crawling around the iPad SDK, but 9to5Mac thinks it could be something more: they point out that FCC regulations mandate that all cellphones must be able to place emergency calls even without a contract.
I seriously doubt that’s what is going on here. 3G is not the same as voice, and the FCC doesn’t enforce the “emergency call” functionality on 3G-only devices. If they did, your 3G netbook or Kindle would have to be able to make emergency 911 calls. This is just residual code… but hey, it makes for a good headline.
Axiotron, makers of the thing that was closest to being an iPad before the iPad was announced – the Modbook – are not going to give in without a fight. No sir.
They’ve sent out a press release today, announcing a new promotion for buyers of all new Modbooks. Something they hope will make customers think twice before buying an iPad.
