Web surfing on the iPad 3G using its cell connection is really pretty good, especially if you get away from congested urban areas.
Using the iPad over the weekend, I’ve been pretty impressed by the speed of the iPad 3G for routine Web surfing. Video, however, is another matter — it’s a disappointment.
We start off another week with a deal on refubished 16GB iPhone 3Gs for $449. Also on tap is the latest batch of App Store freebies, including “Meatball Madness!” memory game and myTracks 2 for Mac, a GPS track management utility and geotagged photo linker.
We’ll also check out other bargains, including external batteries for your iPod or iPhone, along with many other items. As always, details on these and many more products are available on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.
What you see here isn’t World of Warcraft running natively on the iPad, but rather WoW streamed through the Gaikai online gaming service, which allows you to play games within your browser using HTML5 and their server streaming technology. In other words, it’s a thin client.
I imagine this is pretty maddening to play — WoW depends on a mouse and keyboard — but if thin clients get big enough, developers will start programming for iPad-based input, even for non-native games. As a reformed WoW addict, I hope to god that doesn’t happen: I don’t need another reason to start back up.
If you’re interested in the possibilities here, you can sign up for Gaikai’s private beta here.
[via MacStories]
Apple sold 300,000 iPad 3G devices during the first weekend the device was available, one analyst estimates. Nearly all stores surveyed – 49 out of 50 – had run out of stock, according to Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster.
Munster’s comments about lack of availability of the 3G models coincides with Monday remarks by Apple CEO Steve Jobs that the Cupertino, Calif. company was trying to keep up with demand. More than 1 million iPads were sold in the first 27 days, the company announced.
If you are looking for a way to check your hair surreptitiously at the upcoming WWDC, behold the “MocBook” pocket mirror and card holder.
It comes from Japan, where locals love mignon tech, and is available in versions that mimic the MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.
Steve Jobs is very serious about HTML5 being the future of the web, and in Jobs’ view, H. 264 is an integral part of that formula. Google and Microsoft agree: they’ve committed to MPEG LA’s video codec as the new standard for online video. That puts the three biggest players all in the same corner when it comes to H. 264.
But Opera and Firefox aren’t fans of the standard. Instead, they back a codec called Ogg Theora, which is royalty free and open source, while H. 264 is closed source and only royalty free until 2015. Their fear is that mass adoption of H. 264 will cause MPEG LA to “flip the switch” on royalties five years down the line, leaving companies no choice but to pay exorbitant licensing fees.
So why isn’t Apple on board with Ogg Theora? Apple fan Hugo Roy wrote Steve Jobs over the weekend, asking him about Apple’s backing of the H. 264 standard. Jobs informative and surprisingly length reply follows:
Cult of Mac reader Ian Chan was inspired by our recent story of a football player getting grounded after listening to his iPod during landing to pen the above comic on airplane safety.
Chan — along with everyone else who has forgotten to turn off a device on board — says:
“I might be overreacting, but perhaps you (the FAA) should worry more about your pilots making $17,000 a year and being on food stamps [warning, link to Michael Moore] than me listening to Miley Cyrus on my flight home.”
Word.
Via Ian Chan
It’s just a matter of course for any new Apple product to be vivisected down to its very bolts and each part catalogued by the Internet’s gadget coroners, but no one does a better job at it than the boys over at iFixIt, who have already torn down the iPad 3G.
Over 1 million iPads have been sold since it first came out almost a month ago, and we’re guessing that many of our readers have one, am I right? If you don’t, sorry to rub it in your face, but we’ll be giving away 4 iPad apps today as part of our ongoing Monday Giveaway series. We want to thank Brian from Appular for putting this app bundle together. If you’re an iPhone or iPad app developer, make sure you consider Appular for all of your marketing efforts. First, let’s go through how to enter to win the apps:
We’ve done the status tagging thing in the past, and some of you have had issues with it. So, I’ve taken the precious time out of my day to put together a short demonstration on how to do it. Remember, the privacy settings of the status message must be set to “Everyone” or else the status tag won’t show up on our page, and we’ll have no idea that you tagged us.
Take out the trusty old ex-acto knife and whittle down your T-Mobile SIM cart just right and you can cram it right into your iPad 3G’s medulla oblongata. Jailbreak with Spirit and you can then use your iPad to send SMSes, provided you’ve got some command line skill. Who said there was no reason to jailbreak your iPad?
[via 9to5Mac]
Federal regulators apparently have taken note of the ongoing spat between Apple and Adobe, and the iPhone maker’s decision to prohibit developers from submitting apps originally created for Flash. The U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission are “days away” from deciding which agency will launch an antitrust probe into Apple’s developer agreement banning Flash from apps, according to the New York Post.
The probe “will focus on whether the policy, which took effect last month, kill competition by forcing programmers to choose between developing apps that can only run on Apple gizmos or come up with apps that are platform neutral, and can be on a variety of operating systems, such as those from rivals Google, Mikcrosoft and Research in Motion,” the report said, citing persons in the know.
Spirit by comex allows you to jailbreak your device, to get complete control over it (see why you should jailbreak here). Currently, spirit allows you to jailbreak any device that has already been upgraded to firmware 3.1.2, 3.1.3 or even an iPad on version 3.2. However, it will NOT unlock the device, enabling it to be used with different GSM carriers worldwide.
One million iPads have sold in under 30 days, Apple announced Monday. It took twice as long for the iPhone to reach the same figure.
“One million iPads in 28 days — that’s less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with the iPhone,” CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement. Demand for the tablet device continues to outstrip supply, but the Cupertino, Calif. company is “working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers,” Jobs added.
Blue Microphone’s Yeti – a versatile $150 USB device from the company behind the legendary Snowball and the must-have Mikey – would be an absolute steal at twice the price.
In applications from podcasting to studio recording the Yeti delivers intimacy and clarity rivaling the output of some of the best microphones from better known companies such as Shure and AKG – all from a single package with setting versatility neither can touch for such little money.
The Yeti has been loose in the wild for a while now so the info and conclusions in the following review may be old news to some. But the quality and value of such a well-made, high performing product deserves an encore.
In part 12 of Macworld founder David Bunnell’s story of the early Mac, Bill Gates is the only developer to actually deliver on his promises of software for the Mac. Microsoft’s Excel literally saves the Mac just when sales drop to nil, but at the same time Gates’ engineers are reverse engineering the GUI for the first version of Windows.
The “Spirit” iPad/iPhone jailbreak is available for download from the Dev Team. You can download Spirit here.
The free, untethered jailbreak is available for Mac and Windows, and works with any iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch on firmware 3.1.2, 3.1.3, or 3.2. It’s a quick, easy, one-click process, according to QuickPwn, although the Cydia app is buggy. Just download the jailbreak software, plug in your device, and your iPad or iPhone is instantly recognized. Hit the “Jailbreak” button and you’re done.
Note: Before performing a jailbreaking make absolutely sure you’ve got a backup of your SHSH blobs so that if anything goes wrong you can restore to 3.1.2. You can find a step-by-step guide from Redmond Pie here.
Spirit is not a carrier unlock (which allows you to use unauthorized wireless carriers like T-Mobile).
The Dev Team highly recommend syncing with iTunes before trying this jailbreak. If anything goes wrong, you will have to restore the device. It’s especially iffy on the iPad.
Note: On iPad, all this is still sort of beta. Some packages in Cydia, not designed for iPad, might screw up your system and require you to restore. Be careful. (And no, Cydia’s appearance is not final.)
Dev Team: Spirit Freed.
I just noticed something about surfing the web on an iPad. Here’s a hint: look at the red circle in the New York Times screenshot above.
It was hard to spot because it’s actually noticing something that’s not there: the blue Legos where the Flash plugin should be.
In January, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, he wasn’t able to load the NYT‘s front-page videos (remember the Lego bricks visible during his debut event?) The absence of Flash seemed like a major problem. Video, games, rich-media — none of these would work, pundits said, and the iPad would be a crippled device.
But that hasn’t proven to be the case. Not at all. During the past month I’ve been using the iPad, I’ve rarely encountered problems with the lack of Flash. All the sites I visit regularly – the BBC, NYT and Wall Street Journal — all of them have quickly made video and rich-media available in iPad-friendly formats.
YouTube is especially iPad-friendly. I’ve yet to encounter a YouTube video the iPad wouldn’t play. And because so many sites use YouTube to embed video, it seems like a lot of the web is iPad-friendly.
The only problems is streaming music from MixRiot (which I use a lot but isn’t exactly mainstream) and playing Farmville and thousands of other Flash games. But given how much time I waste fertilizing my kids’ crops and sending them gifts, that’s actually a blessing.
And it’s only going to get worse for Flash. Look at the chart below from Encoding.com, which does a lot of video encoding for sites like MTV and MySpace. In the last four quarters, Flash video (represented by FLV and Flash VP6) dropped from 69 percent to only 26 percent of all videos. Meanwhile, the H.264 format went from 31 percent to 66 percent, and is now the most popular format by a long shot.
In Part 11 of Macworld founder David Bunnell’s memoirs, Steve Jobs triumphantly introduces the Mac to the world. “It sang to us. It performed mathematical calculations with the blinding speed of a Cray mainframe. It drew beautiful pictures. It communicated with other computers. It bounced rays off satellites and sent a subversive message to the Soviet Union.”
Here’s a couple of screenshots from the iPad’s YouTube app showing the dramatic difference in quality between Wi-Fi and 3G.
The screenshot above is from video streaming over WiFi. And below is the same YouTube video playing over 3G.
I paused the video before taking the screenshots and tried to take them at about the same point.
The difference is clear. Over Wi-Fi, video quality is near high-def. Over 3G, it looks like a bad QuickTime movie from the mid-1990s.
Of course, this isn’t new — it’s just much more noticeable on the iPad’s big beautiful screen. This has been the case on the iPhone for some time, but on the smaller screen, the difference in quality isn’t as dramatic.
Meanwhile, our readers are reporting that Verizon’s MiFi delivers: there’s no difference in quality between Wi-Fi and 3G on Verizon’s network.
UPDATE: As our friend Chris Foresman of Ars Technica fame points out in the comments, 3G tops out at a paltry 64Kbps. ” It looks like crap on the iPhone,” says Chris, “so it shouldn’t be a surprise that it looks like crap 4x as big?”
Foresman says the 64Kbps number isn’t generally known, but is reported in Apple’s developer docs. AT&T had said there would be a limit, but didn’t say what it was.
64Kbps is pathetic for 3G. According to the International Telecommunication Union standards body, 3G specifies a minimum data rate of 144Kbps in high-mobility (vehicular) applications, 384Kbps for pedestrian applications, and 2Mbps (that megabits per second) for indoor (stationary) applications.
And here are the screenshots full size:
The honeymoon is over. I’ve discovered my first major disappointment with the iPad 3G, and I’ve only just started playing with it. Video over 3G on the iPad totally and utterly sucks.
The picture is noticeably downgraded on a 3G connection. The built-in YouTube app delivers video that’s very low-res compared to the video it delivers on a Wi-Fi connection. It’s barely watcheable.
And apps like the ABC app and Netflix won’t work on 3G at all. They both The ABC app launches a pop up that says: “Please connect to a Wi-Fi network to use this application. Cellular networks are not supported at this time.”
It may be better to get a Wi-Fi only iPad and invest in a MiFi, which appears to work flawlessly for delivering high-def video, according to reader reports on iLounge.
UPDATE: My mistake. Netflix does work over 3G. The video quality is clearly lower resolution however.
Here’s a couple of screenshots showing the difference:
The iPad 3G is the iPad everyone’s been waiting for. Let’s face it: the 3G data connection and GPS makes this the iPad you don’t want to to leave at home.
Here is what the iPad looks like close up:
As expected, the iPad 3G has already been jailbroken — only a few hours after its launch.
MuscleNerd of iPhone Dev Team posted pictures and a video to YouTube showing a jailbroken iPad 3G running Cydia.
MuscleNerd used the “Spirit” jailbreak, an software tool that promises untethered unlocking of Apple’s recent devices (iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch 3G, and iPads). The Dev Team has promised to release Spirit to the public soon. In preparation, be sure to backup your SHSH Blobs. You can find a step-by-step guide from Redmond Pie here.
Here is MuscleNerd’s video showing Cydia running on an iPad 3G.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFmy1rolqpw&feature=player_embedded
Via Redmond Pie. Thanks Taimur.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PG-uYQxTpbA
When HootSuite’s iPhone app landed late last year, it had already set itself apart with a unique stat-tracking feature.
Now, it’s leapt even further away from the pack with a slew of new tricks, including the ability to translate tweets from 50 different languages and a supercool feature that lets users bump the iPhone of users they’d like to follow. The developers have also upgraded HootSuite’s Facebook integration, given it geolocation functionality and generally tweaked the hell out of it.
The video above has evidently been shoved through a simplification transmogrifier a few times too many, but I’ve included it because owls in stereotypically French costume are remarkably entertaining.
New York Jets wide receiver Santonio Holmes created a flap on a flight from Newark to Pittsburgh by using his iPod during landing.
Authorities filed an “incident report” on Holmes — he was not formally charged with violating FAA regulations on the use of personal electronic devices (PEDs) during flight.
Holmes got off easy, one unlucky iPhone user was detained after keeping the device in airplane mode.
Less than a month since its release, there are nearly 5,000 apps available for the iPad, most are games but there are some important early sellers in the medical and finance titles.
Distimo, a start-up that analyzes app stats, tallied some 4,870 applications for Apple’s magical tablet to date. (You can download the full report here.)
Games dominate iPad apps, with 32% of the total at 1,577 titles so far, Entertainment and books trail far behind, together they total about half as many apps with 455 and 396 titles, respectively.
