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Episode 3 of The CultCast just landed in iTunes friends, and there’s no doubt it is entertainment of the highest caliber!

In this episode, we talk all things “new” iPad. Find out which new features are our favorites, which ones surprised and delighted us, and which we are baffled are not included. Plus, should you upgrade from the iPad 2? All that and more if you can believe it. More!

You can download episode 3 right now in iTunes or subscribe and we’ll deliver a fresh new episode delivered to you every Thursday night. One click, it’s that easy!

Seriously, guys, if you haven’t already, it’s time to pre-order a new iPad, as multiple models are starting to slip from a guaranteed March 16th delivery date to “shipping on March 19th.” For example, the 16GB WiFi-only model, seen above. And when they say “shipping on March 19th”, they mean shipping all the way from China, which could take up to week. So get your order in now, or prepare to camp on launch day.

Earlier this year, OnLive debuted its OnLine Desktop app for the iPad. The app offers users a virtual desktop environment that includes Windows 7, Microsoft Office, Adobe Reader, and Internet Explorer (which allows iPad users to watch Flash-based web content). The service comes in both free and paid versions that include 2GB of cloud storage and OnLive plans to expand the service with more advanced plans for both end users and for businesses.

While users and reviewers have been largely happy with OnLive Desktop, it seems that Microsoft isn’t. After being mum on OnLive’s decision to release the app and service, Microsoft announced this week that it views OnLive as violating its license agreements and essentially pirating Windows.

At issue is the draconian puzzle that is Microsoft’s licensing system and how the company charges for virtual desktops.

With the U.S. Department of Justice gearing up to slap Apple with an antitrust lawsuit, the Cupertino company has spoken out over claims it has teamed up with publishers to raise the price of e-books, and downplayed the threat from Amazon’s Kindle. It argues that it gave publishers the opportunity to set their own prices, and that it cannot be blamed for e-book price hikes.

Are you a Brit who ordered a new iPad on Wednesday? Check your email: Apple might have just welched on their deal with you to get it delivered by March 16th.

BBC executives are said to be planning a new ‘”download-to-own” service that will allow U.K. viewers to purchase TV shows online at around £1.89 ($3) an episode. The BBC is hoping that the scheme, dubbed “Project Barcelona,” will be able to rival iTunes.

Every time a new Apple device comes out, there’s a general commotion as analysts try to break it down atomically into its base elements, weigh the dust and figure out how much it all cost Apple to build, thus extrapolating how many oodles of money Cupertino’s raking in with each gadget sold.

For the new iPad, the initial estimates are in, and surprise! Despite improving the iPad’s battery, display, wireless internet speeds and GPU, Cupertino’s making a healthy profit on each iPad sold.

The new iPad arrives in the U.S. and ten other countries exactly one week today on March 16, and the first shipments have already started leaving the Foxconn factories in Chengdu, China. It’s unlikely, however, that they’ll arrive early.

China Telecom has become the second Chinese carrier to offer the iPhone 4S today, ending the exclusivity enjoyed by China Unicom for the last 18 months. The company announced back in February that it would begin selling Apple’s popular smartphone from March 9, and it has taken over 200,000 pre-orders in just the last week.

If you live in the U.K. and you haven’t pre-ordered your new iPad yet, you’ll need to prepare yourself for a lengthy wait. You will no longer get the new tablet on launch day, March 16, with shipping times slipping to 2-3 weeks for all models.

You can now pre-order a new iPad from RadioShack with the purchase of a $50 gift card. Like Apple’s online store, pre-orders are guaranteed to deliver when the device goes on sale Friday, March 16th. As the first retailer besides Apple to offer the new iPad, RadioShack will also be offering AppleCare+ for iPad alongside Target, Apple, and carrier partners.

Developers of iOS apps spent last night absorbing all the news from Apple, and trying to figure out how they might be able to make the most of the new iPad’s features.

We asked some friendly devs for their observations. One predicted big things for iPad gaming, but we got some other interesting viewpoints too.

Here’s a round-up of some of the comments we got back from the developer community. If you make apps and want to have your say, get in touch – or let loose in the comments.

I’ve always wanted my own butler that I can order around and have him go fetch me a delicious Chipotle burrito whenever I want. Problem is, I don’t have half a billion dollars to pay for one, so I’ll never be cool like Batman and have a elderly british fellow named Alfred to satisfy my every need. Siri is the closest I’ll ever come to having a true personal assistant, except she doesn’t come equipment with Michael Caine’s impeccable British accent. But is Siri better than Alfred?

Do you know what was the most tweeted about thing yesterday? No, it wasn’t Peyton Manning. It was the iPad 3, the new iPad. Twitter just released the chart shown above to show just how bonkers the Twittersphere went during the iPad keynote.

Sure, it wasn’t on par with the death of Michael Jackson, but it was a pretty big deal. There are a couple of peaks that stand out:

A common complaint that I heard earlier this week at the CITE conference in San Francisco was that Apple wasn’t a “real” enterprise vendor. IT professionals have whined and moaned about the fact that Apple doesn’t behave like most enterprise vendors for years (as a long time Mac and Apple IT professional myself, I’ve probably muttered under my breath about Apple’s approach to the enterprise many more times than most of the CITE attendees). What’s changed, however, is that CIOs and other IT leaders can no longer simply say “no” anytime Apple or an Apple product is mentioned.

This week, Apple even reiterated the point by dropping Apple Configurator, a completely new free tool for managing iOS devices in business. It’s a tool that offers new workflows when it comes to how businesses work with iPads (and to a lesser extent iPhones) and Apple released without telling its mobile management partners or its enterprise customers.

To all those IT folks bitching and complaining that Apple doesn’t publish 18-month roadmaps and doesn’t reach out to every enterprise months in advance of a product upgrade or cancelation, I have to say this: deal with it.

A new version of social networking app Path is now available in the App Store for iPhone users. Path 2.1 features several new features and improvements, including a Shazam-like ‘Music Match’ tool for identifying music playing around you.

The app’s camera features have also been improved with focus and exposure options and a new setting called “Pow!” for creating comic book-style pics. Nike+ integration has been added to let you journal your runs in Path.

The new iPad isn’t just faster than ever, it has four times as many pixels, a power-hungry new mobile broadband technology, twice the RAM, and more.

All of these things add up to the new iPad being the best iPad yet, but it comes at a cost: they’re all more battery hungry than their predecessors. How, then, did Apple manage to get 10 hours of battery life — the same as before — out of the new iPad, while keeping it roughly the same weight and thickness?

Easy… and by easy, we mean “insanely difficult.” They increased the battery capacity by 70%… then densely packed it to fit the iPad 3’s case.

If you’re anything like me, now that you’ve pre-ordered your new iPad, you’ll be obsessing over its order status.  You know it’s not going to arrive until March 16, but once every hour you’ll logon to the Apple online store to see how your package is getting on anyway.

It’s even easier to do this with the free Apple Store app for iPhone. Here’s how.

Kyle Lambert is one of the best iPad artists on the web. He also happens to be a big fan of Pixar’s animation team, so when he started following Lee Unkrich – the director of Toy Story 3 – he noticed how passionate Lee is about Stanley Kubrick and his film The Shining. Combining Toy Story 3, with Lee’s obsession for The Shining and Lambert’s iPad drawing talent resulted in one of the more interesting artistic mashups we’ve seen in a while – Toy Shining.

We could tell you more, but we’ll just let you oogle at Kyle’s awesome iPad drawings of Woody occupying Jack Torrance’s spot in Kubrick’s cinematography masterpiece, but remember, everything was created just using an iPad.

If you happen by the Palo Alto Apple Store Monday afternoon, that group of elderly women dressed in white dancing the robot to techno music on the sidewalk aren’t some funky flashmob.

They’re Raging Grannies, and they’re are mad as hell about worker conditions in China where Apple products are made.

Galvanized by a recent Mike Daisey story on NPR about Foxconn, they’re staging monthly protests outside the Palo Alto Apple store. They’ll be on the sidewalk grooving to bring more attention to Apple’s labor policies in China at 3 p.m. on March 12.

As Tim Cook put it at this morning’s event, Apple’s iCloud “just works” and 100 million customers love the lofty storage service.

Greenpeace, however, says Apple’s iCloud is an unsustainable coal-fueled mess and that the just-announced movie service will only make it worse.

“Apple is about innovation, but buying coal at really cheap source is not innovative,” Greenpeace senior policy analyst Gary Cook told Cult of Mac. “Those data centers [supporting iCloud] are fueled by about 60 percent coal.”

Want to catch up on all the new iPad news but don’t have time to watch the entire 85 minute keynote? We compressed the entire thing down into just 90 seconds for your viewing pleasure. Catch the video after the break.

At yesterday’s press conference, Apple made a big deal about how you could tether your new iPad to your laptop or other device, “if your carrier supports Personal Hotspot.”

Hey, guys, guess which of the two big U.S. carriers won’t support Personal Hotspot on the new iPad? Yup, the usual bastard: AT&T. But Verizon seemingly will. That means that if you’re an AT&T customer. there’s no way to tether your laptop to your iPad’s blistering LTE speeds… short, of course, of an A5X jailbreak.

When Apple unveiled its new iPad yesterday, the Cupertino company labeled its 5-megapixel rear-facing camera an “iSight camera.” The iSight name has been used for years to label the cameras built into the Mac, but the new iPad is the first time we’d heard it used for an iOS device.

Apple has now extended that name to the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S, updating its website to advertise iSight cameras for both.

Yesterday we told you that the newly-released iPhoto for iOS wasn’t using Google Maps data to provide map tiles for geotagged pics. The news was particularly shocking because Apple has always used Google Maps in the past to provide mapping data in its apps.

As it turns out, the Cupertino company is actually using open-source technology from OpenStreetMap to provide custom map tiles in iPhoto for iOS.