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Some say that the iPad is almost unusable without a case. I actually love the feel of using mine bareback, but The Lady literally refuses to pick up an iPad if it isn’t protected in some way (she has a history of dropping the things).

But whatever your view, one thing is certain: a case can add all sorts of functionality to your iPad, or keep it safe in more dangerous situations. Here’s our pick of the best cases out there.

The Best Keyboard Case

Logitech Zagg Keyboard Case for iPad 2 — $100

Now also available for the iPad 3, the Zagg wins for its compact size, light weight and clever design which allows it to double as a case (complete with sleep/wake magnets). It also has a great-feeling keyboard which is as good as Apple’s own.

The Best Hard Case

Pad&Quill Contega — $100

The new Sure-Lock bumper system keeps Pad&Quill’s Contega ahead of the competition, and keeps the iPad safely inside the tough baltic birch and leather Moleskine-Style case, while the sleep/wake magnet and clever articulated rear cover (which turns the case into a stand) mean it’s anything but old-fashioned.

The Best Slip Case

Dicota PadCover — $20-$50

I have had this slipcase since the iPad 1, and it’s still going strong. The PadCover is made from leather and wool, with a soft lining and handy pull-tab which ejects the iPad from within. If you’re using the iPad 2 or 3, you can fit in a smart cover, too. Discontinued by the manufacturer, but still available to buy in various places.

The Best Rugged Case

G-Form Extreme Portfolio — $90

The impact-absorbing material of G-Form’s cases is also used to make padding for professional athletes. The Extreme Portfolio will soak up the power of a bowling ball dropped onto its face, and yet remains flexible and comfortable to use. It’s the case we turn to when we really need to protect our iPads.

The Best Folio Case

Skech Porter — $60

The Skech Porter offers all the protection of a fat folio case in a slim, great-looking package. A clever crease in the rear panel lets it work as a multi-position stand without adding extra bulk, an elastic handle is surprisingly handy and it packs a full compliment of magnets and camera holes.

The Best Rear Shell

Speck Smart Shell — $30

This thin shell adds bulk at the corners where it’s needed, and has cutouts for everything from the camera through the speaker to the Smart Cover that it is designed to compliment. The plastic is smooth but grippy, and the little lozenge-shaped metal panel holds the Smart Cover in place when it is open.

The Best Minimal Case

Apple Smart Cover — $39

The original, and in many ways still the best. Apple’s Smart Cover works in concert with the iPads 2 and 3, offering protection and a stand with minimal materials. It set the standard for every iPad case since, and is still the one to buy if you can’t bear to hide your beautiful iPad inside a heavy folio.

The Best Case To Use At Home

Don’t Panic — $99

Our full review is waiting until we see a newly tweaked version of Thomas Fulton’s felt and leather case, but the Don’t Panic is already my favorite iPad case to use around the home. It’s light, offers some protection, and a clever arrangement of straps and magnets lets you prop it up on your bed, type, wrap it around your thigh, or just about anything you like. I think of it as my iPad’s favorite pair of slippers. It would be great out of the house, too, but the magnet in my prototype likes to zap my credit cards.

The Best Travel Case

Lacambra iPad Case — €115 ($150)

If you’re traveling around the world or to-and-from work, the Lacambra case has your iPad covered. Made to order in Spain from leather, the case zips closed and keeps the iPad safe inside. There’s a cut-out for the volume switch, pockets for business cards and boarding passes, and some extra tabs and straps to make typing or movie-watching easy. Don’t leave home without it.

The publication MIT Technology Review compares major consumer technologies, from the telephone and television to the mobile phone and tablet. Their conclusion is that mobile phones have gone “mainstream” faster than any other major technology in history, achieving this status in just 20 years.

They also break down speed of acceptance in stages, which makes for interesting comparison. For example, it took landline telephones about 45 years go to from 5% penetration in the United States to 50%, compared with just 7 years for mobile phones.

What’s most surprising about the report is that touch tablets are actually spreading way faster than even cell phones. And this fact is more interesting still when you consider that one company, Apple, is almost solely responsible for this growth, and one product, the iPad, pretty much is the touch-tablet market.

Read the whole report here.

Even as the iPad continues to slowly strangle the life out of the netbook market, HP is determined to rebrand that small, inexpensive laptop category while also breaking away from Intel’s MacBook Air-like ultrabook standard. Calling the new line of laptops “sleekbooks,” HP is repudiating Intel’s ultrabook requirements and cozying up with Intel’s longtime rival AMD.

The new sleekbook devices were announced along with new ultrabook models in HP’s Envy line. The new sleekbooks aim to strike a balance somewhere between Intel’s rigid ultrabook specs and the netbook ideal of minimal, low-cost notebooks.

Before we read any further into these claims, let me just reveal where they came from: DigiTimes. While the site has published a few accurate reports on upcoming Apple products in the past, most of its rumors are worryingly farfetched.

The latest claims sources in Apple’s supply chain have detailed the Cupertino company’s launch plans for 2012, promising three new iOS devices between now and the end of the year. One of those will, as you’d expect, be the sixth-generation iPhone, but before that, we will see a new, 7-inch iPad.

What’s more, that new iPad you just bought will apparently be replaced by an even newer one during the fourth quarter.

If you’ve updated your iOS devices past iOS 5.0.1, then you would have lost your untethered jailbreak. Hackers are working on a solution for Apple’s latest firmware, but it’s expected to be at least several months before it makes its public debut.

Fortunately, there is hope. The upcoming Redsnow release will allow you to downgrade your A5-powered devices — the iPhone 4S, iPad 2, and the new iPad — so that you can reinstate your untethered jailbreak.

Just hours after announcing its acquisition of Penultimate, Evernote has released an update to its iOS app that promises to deliver some major improvements to note taking on the iPhone. It has improved the way in which the app handles attachments and checkboxes, added support for Photo Stream, redesigned the audio recorder, and more.

Apple’s effort to make the future iPhone smaller and thinner has caused it to focus once again on making SIM cards even smaller. The Cupertino company has designed a new “nano-SIM” that is even smaller than the micro-SIM that was introduced with the iPhone 4 back in 2010.

However, rival smartphone vendors like Nokia have publicly voiced their concerns over the new standard, calling it an attempt to devalue its rivals’ intellectual property. Apple has now amended its design slightly to quash some of those concerns, and ETSI is set to case its vote on the design this month.

TeleCommunication Systems continues to provide the best solutions for reliable emergency communication in the wireless industry. They recently paired up with Verizon to work on bringing SMS-To-911 to the U.S., and if that wasn’t enough, they’ve gone ahead and announced the availability of TCS VoLTE (Voice Over LTE) 9-1-1.

2012 has been a good year for vintage Macs surfacing from obscurity. Earlier this year we brought you news about an original 128k Mac with 5.25″ Twiggy floppy disk for sale on eBay. This same owner contacted Cult of Mac recently to share some photos of his latest rare find: a prototype Macintosh SE with a clear plastic outer case, used for engineering air flow studies.

Who says all old Macs were beige?

Four apps enter, but only one can reign supreme! Listen to us passionately pitch our favorite apps of the week then vote on which one conquers them all on the latest CultCast.

Plus — is the iPhone 5 getting a 4-inch retina screen? And is Apple about to kill off Macbook DVD drives? Don’t miss us Yay and Nay our way through all those rumors and more – subscribe to The CultCast now on iTunes.

Following Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram, news and rumors surrounding the photography app have continued to swirl.

What would happen if Instagram sold a standalone camera to take and share pictures? While such a thing will obviously never happen, the idea was interesting enough to inspire “Socialmatic,” a physical camera concept for Instagram.

I’m expecting some really cool iOS/Android stuff to pop out of indy dev First Post. The year-and-a-half-old startup is run by Jacob Robinson, the former art director at Sony Online Entertainment (who had a hand in forming legendary titles like the EverQuest series, DC Universe, Star Wars Galaxies and Unreal Tournament). It’s also completely self-funded, “which is not an easy thing to do at all,” says Robinson.

First Post’s debut game, Snacksss, may not exactly be the stellar breakthrough title one might have hoped for; the cartoony, Sonoran Desert-themed iPhone game has lots of pretty artwork but needs help in the gameplay department, which has the player listlessly flicking a hungry snake at rabbits ad nauseam.

Apple will be rolling out its newest iPad to 30 more countries, including Brazil, this weekend. 23 countries will start selling the third-generation iPad Friday, May 11th, and 7 more countries will be added Saturday, May 12th.

After this rollout, the new iPad will be available in 90 countries around the world. Interestingly, Apple’s latest iPad is still not officially available in China.

May is Mobile Management Month at Cult of Mac, where we will be profiling a different mobile management company every weekday. You can find all previous entries here  and read our Mobile Management manifesto here.

Fiberlink’s Maas360 offers a range of management capabilities with an emphasis on app and information management. A document management app can be deployed to devices to provide secure on-device storage for business data with optional sandboxing to prevent corporate files from being opened by unapproved apps. App management includes an enterprise app store with granular policy options for determining app access as well as app blacklist capabilities. In addition to traditional mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, MaaS360 can also apply some management policies for MacBooks and Windows notebooks. This combination of available features making one of the more robust mobile management systems on the market. The company also has a strategic partnership with Verizon Wireless.

As it has said many times before, T-Mobile is eagerly awaiting the arrival of the iPhone on its network. The carrier has been largely unable to attract unlocked iPhone owners due to the fact that frequency incompatibilities make it impossible to use 3G data speeds on T-Mobile’s 1700 MHz AWS band. T-Mobile started transitioning part of its spectrum over to the iPhone-friendly 1900 MHz band last year, and scattered reports have said that a small number of iPhone users can now use 3G speeds in certain areas of the United States.

Not only is T-Mobile saying that its 3G network will be ready for the iPhone by Q4 of this year, but it also plans to offer HSPA+ 4G speeds on an iPhone-friendly frequency.

The New York Times published a story recently that attacks Apple for avoiding billions of tax dollars every year, but does it matter in the court of public perception?  A new study says that Apple’s reputation score in the aftermath of the report remains relatively unscathed. Compare this to General Electric (GE), a company also reported to be avoiding paying their fair share of taxes. GE’s score dropped considerably in the same amount of time after a similar New York Times story on them last month.

Compared to GE? Apple’s Teflon.

Update: Looks like Padbury has taken the screensaver off his Dribble account. If anyone has a mirrored link for others to download, please post in the comments.

We love beautiful wallpapers and screensavers here at Cult of Mac. When Apple User Interface Designer Robert Padbury posted a beautiful screensaver to his Dribble account, we fell in love. The “Minimalist Clock Screensaver” comes in 12-hour and 24-hour versions, and you can grab it now for free to install on your own Mac.

While we may not have jetpacks or flying cars, the future is here. Lilliputian Systems, originally part of the Massachussets Institute of Technology (MIT), is releasing a new fuel cell external battery pack that they promise can charge smartphones like your iPhone up to fourteen times per single charge.

AirPlay and AirPlay Mirroring add a lot of value to the second and third generation Apple TVs. Paired with a recent iPad or the iPhone 4S, an Apple TV can instantly become a gaming solution and a theater for home movies – and will be amazing when combined with Mountain Lion when it ships this summer.

AirPlay also turns that Apple TV into powerful and extremely portable presentation system that’s a great fit for the classroom or the board room. The only challenge is that the Apple TV’s only output option is an HDMI port, which can be a big problem for connecting to older display technologies including many projectors and computer displays – a problem solved by cable and adapter maker Kanex.

The Touchtype is a new Kickstarter project that aims to be the ultimate case for iPad typists. Like the Incase Origami Workstation, the Touchtype conveniently holds an Apple wireless keyboard and iPad inside a thin design.

Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard can be stored underneath the iPad, and the case itself props up any iPad model to let you type. With support for all of Apple’s tablets and a sleek, utilitarian design, the Touchtype looks like an awesome accessory for those who still want to use a physical keyboard with the iPad.

It looks like Square has yet another competitor in the mobile payments arena. Global payment leader VeriFone has announced SAIL, a credit card reader much like Square’s, that will attach to a number of mobile devices. While VeriFone may have a little catching up to do, they have the advantage of an extensive network with a commanding percentage of retail transactions passing through their service.

Seemingly in response to word that three new small regional carriers were going to be offering the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S with a $50 discount, RadioShack has just announced that they’ll be matching the offer.

Starting immediately, if you buy an iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S at RadioShack, you’ll get $50 off the normal price on all carriers. That means that the iPhone 4S will be priced at $149/$249/$349 and the iPhone 4 will be available for $49.

If you’re in the market for an iPhone, this is a pretty killer deal. Better act soon, though: the offer ends at the end of June.

World World Robots is a great series by artist Ashley Wood Three A that describe a grungy apocalyptic world in which gas-masked humans are openly at war with various cool looking models of murderous rogue robots, spanning the surface of the earth, the moon and even mars.

There’s an accompanying toy line by Three A, and one of their latest models is this awesome robot inspired by our favorite company. Bearing the designation STEVE-J, the Caesar APP-EL comes with a rainbow shield after the style of the vintage Apple icon, his own miniature iPad and some vintage iPod styling. It even comes in an Apple-inspired box.

Source: The Fwoosh
Via: Reddit

WWDC may have sold out quickly, but as we reported there are alternative events for IT professionals  and developers that want to network and hone their skills. One of those is the annual European Macintosh System Administrators Meeting, which began accepting registrations this week for this year’s event, which will be held in Sweden this September.

Unlike WWDC, MacSysAdmin isn’t intended for developers as much as it is IT professionals that need to deploy and manage Apple technologies in business and education.

During Steve Jobs’s so-called “Wilderness Years” after he left Apple in 1985 but before his triumphant return to the company in 1997, the company went woefully astray, releasing dud product after dud product and seeing its market share and influence erode as PC makers like Dell took Cupertino’s once proud crown.

Only Steve Jobs’s triumphant return to the company in 1997 righted Apple’s course and made it the company it is today, but speaking to journalist Brent Schlender — who interviews Steve dozens of times over a quarter-century — Jobs said that watching Apple’s disgrace while he was away from the company was like watching your own child turn into a serial killer.