Virtual Aviation, which runs full-motion flight simulators in the UK, is using iPads as high-tech teacher’s assistants to train pilots.
Instead of instructors lugging around heavy cases filled with maps, charts, manuals, weather reports, flight plans and checklists every time they go into the simulator — they use iPads instead.
Using the iPad leaves busy instructors with an almost hands-free way to show would-be Airbus and Boeing pilots the ropes at Heathrow and Gatwick.
If you’re on the look out for a high quality and great performing compact digicam that plays nice with iPhoto, Canon’s new IXUS 300HS looks about as good as it gets.
Even though the iPad will go on sale in Canada at the end of the month (May 28), our friends north of the border are buying them by the boatload on the grey market.
It’s not hard to smuggle an iPad across the border, but Canadians have to jump through a couple of hoops to download apps from the U.S. App Store.
Reader Tyler Hojberg emailed us with the details.
HyperMac already has a great range of MacBook battery juicers which can power your Apple laptop for up to 34 hours through an adapter attached to your default Apple power brick, but now they are getting into the iPad game with a range of batteries featuring 10 Watt USB ports that can power your tablet for more than four days.
Buy the most expensive HyperMac — a four-and-a-half pound, 222 watt hour monster battery costing $500 — and you’ll get up to 99 extra hours of battery life from your iPad. Of course, that battery costs about as much as the iPad itself, but for just $169 $200, you can get a smaller 60 watt hour battery that will still keep you going for another 34 hours.
Hot on the heels of reports that Verizon might very well get a CDMA iPhone by September comes word from Mobilecrunch that AT&T has been tweaking its upgrade eligibility dates for the next iPhone.
Most people who purchased an iPhone 3Gs at launch were due for upgrade eligibility this November 21st, but now AT&T is pushing that date up to June 21st, 2010. Since Jobs is likely to formally announced the new iPhone at WWDC at the beginning of June, AT&T’s revised upgrade eligibility date seems like a pretty good bet for the next-gen iPhone’s official release date.
If Verizon is getting a CDMA iPhone in September, AT&T trying to get as many people to extend their contracts in the three month window after the new iPhone’s June release makes a lot of sense. They want to lock in as many existing customers as possible, before their subscribers actually have a choice. If you’re sick of AT&T’s lackluster service, you might well want to wait on taking them up on their “generous” offer to upgrade you early.
[via TUAW]
Swallow a mouthful of salt before you believe this one, but John Biggs over at Crunchgear is reporting a doozy of a rumor today: Verizon will be getting the fourth generation iPhone at the end of the summer.
According to Crunch’s tipster, advertising firm Landor Associates is working on a branding campaign for Verizon for the launch of the upcoming iPhone. Landor and Verizon have been working together since 2007, and since they primarily work in branding, whatever they’re working on is not another of Verizon’s anti-iPhone ad campaigns.
If true, this is huge news for American iPhone owners, who might finally be able to abandon AT&T for Verizon, a far more reliable (although not quite as fast) provider. Still, let’s not get our hopes up until Steve Jobs hits the stage and holds up a new, CDMA handset. We’ve all been burned too many times on this Verizon rumor before.
Apple just can’t seem to keep its hands on a prototype these days. Less than a month after Gizmodo released the first full teardown of the fourth generation iPhone, new teardown pictures of a different handset have been posted to Vietnamese forum Taoviet (link includes breakdown images, which are also mirrored at MacRumors)
The NPD claims that Android is outselling the iPhone and commands seven percent more of the US smartphone market than Apple, but now Cupertino, in a rare response, is saying “Not so fast.”
So you’re busy chugging away on your computer, downloading loads of video as you do, and suddenly there’s a problem. Your computer says it’s running out of disk space. WTF?
The sad truth is that as fast as hard disk capacity increases, we come up with new ways to fill up our hard disks with digital stuff. Video, in particular, swallows up huge amounts of disk in the blink of an eye. How do you keep track of the state of your hard disk? GrandPerspective is one way to do it.
You know, even if you’re a naysayer, you have to admit: Apple data makes for some of the most compelling infographics around, and this infographic from Mashable explaining the rise of Apple as the hegemon of the digital music industry is one of the best we’ve ever seen. Well, at least, one of the best we’ve ever seen that doesn’t involve Mega Sharks.
The full infographic, after the jump.
One thing a lot of Windows users miss is the Start Menu. How do you find your way around a Mac without a Start Menu to help?
If you stop to think about it, the Start button is a visual aide-memoire; you click on it to start the process of figuring out where to go next. If you’re looking for a particular file, you can navigate to it using the default locations listed in it. And if you want to open a particular piece of software, the likelihood is that you’ll find it there too. The Start button is there for you to click on when you don’t know where else to begin. No matter what you want, you can find it (eventually) from the Start button.
Unfortunately for switchers, Mac OS X doesn’t really have a single button that completely replaces Start. But I can suggest a couple of alternatives.
Veteran pop artist David Hockney, who has been fingerpainting daily on his iPhone, has now started sketching on an iPad.
It seems he may be ready to ditch the phone for the digital sketch pad:
“The iPad is far more subtle, in fact it really is like a drawing pad. They will sell by the million,” Hockney told The Standard. “It can be anything you want it to be. This is the nearest we have got to seeing what I would call a universal machine.
Hockney, 72, has been using Apple devices to create art since 2009, favoring the Brushes app, which is what he uses on the iPad, too.
“What makes the iPad better than the iPhone is its larger size. The iPhone was more about the relationship between the hand and the ear whereas this is all about the hand and the eye and makes for far better co-ordination.”
We’ve done a few stories on iPhone art, if you’re ready to trade the iPhone for the iPad — or not — we’d like to hear from you.
We start out with another deal on iPod touch – an 8GB iPod touch kit from Walmart. Also on tap are a 24-inch Cinema HD Widescreen LED display and the latest App Store price drops, including “Spike’s Deadliest Warrior: Defend and Conquer” game.
As always, details on these and many other Mac-related bargains are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page, which starts right after this jump.
One year after his liver transplant, Steve Jobs is back to his old self. While he still struggles with low weight as a result of health issues, insiders and analysts say he’s “invigorated,” and “fully operational” partially as a result of the iPad launch.
“Except for the fact that he’s lost a lot of weight, he’s the Steve Jobs of old,” said Tim Bajarin, who has followed Apple for more than two decades as founder of technology consulting firm Creative Strategies in Campbell, California told Bloomberg.
“At the visionary level, technology and design level, he seems to be working at the same level as he was before he was sick. If I was an investor, I’d be thrilled.”
The recent update of Apple’s line of MacBook Pro computers will help the Cupertino, Calif. computer maker have its third consecutive 20 percent gain in quarterly Mac sales, an analyst told investors Tuesday.
“Mac momentum is strong, helped by a recent significant refresh of the MacBook Pro to new Intel Arrandale processors,” Shaw Wu of Kaufman Bros. wrote. Along with a better price, Wu cited “an industry best 8-10 hours of battery life.”
AT&T may not be too concerned about chatter Verizon could be added to the list of U.S. carriers offering Apple’s iPhone. The Dallas-based carrier may have an insurance policy of sorts in the form of a deal with Apple hammered out in 2007, making AT&T the sole U.S. iPhone carrier through 2012, according to a report by Engadget.
Although much of an antimonopoly lawsuit against AT&T and Apple remains sealed, the gadget blog uncovered testimony from the Cupertino, Calif. company agreeing with a 2007 USA Today report saying the consumer device giant and carrier had signed a five-year exclusivity arrangement amid the unveiling of the first iPhone. Verizon, now in the news as a potential addition to AT&T, rejected the original deal, according to the newspaper.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za8V2IiGCfY&feature=player_embedded
The iPad’s amazing display can handle eleven simultaneous touch events, or enough probing digits to comfortably handle all but polydactylic concert pianists. Just to prove it, though, Instinctive Code developer Matt Gemmell wrote an open-source program to test it all out.
Yup. It goes up to 11. Not a bad little program, but personally, I still prefer the Plants vs. Zombies proof:
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP6lIcScVh0&feature=player_embedded
[via 9to5Mac]
MobileMe may be the one Apple product I’ve never been tempted enough to at least consider pulling the trigger on. Although it’s got a number of useful features — cloud storage, email, photo galleries, syncing of contacts across all devices, and the super useful “Find My iPhone” feature — a lot of the functionality is achievable through free, third-party applications. Given that, MobileMe’s $99 annual fee has always seemed a bit steep.
According to a MacDailyNews rumor, though, MobileMe might be posed to become a lot more tempting. According to their source, MobileMe will become free of charge “sooner rather than later” depending on “certain facilities going operational…” a clear reference to Apple’s new North Carolina server farm.
That’s great news if true, although frankly, Apple doesn’t need to entirely drop the fee to get me to finally bite the bullet: even if they only cut it by $50, they’d have my credit card number in a flash.
The horse race between the iPhone and Android just gets muddier. The latest spec on the lens is a new study from retail sales analysts at NPD Group. In the U.S., Google’s mobile phone software is ahead of Apple’s iconic handset, NPD announced Monday. Android led Apple 28 percent to 21 percent, with RIM’s BlackBerry still leading with 36 percent, according to the research firm.
But didn’t comScore announce recently the exact opposite: Apple had 25 percent of the market and Android was still in single-digits with 9 percent of U.S. smartphones? How can Apple both lead and trail Google? “It’s entirely reasonable,” comScore’s Andrew Lipsman told the Wall Street Journal.
Responding to a number of iPad WiFi issues including weak signal reception, forgotten passwords, dropped connections and other network problems, Apple tech support has promised a patch for a “very small number” of beleaguered iPad owners.
According to a recently published note on Apple’s tech support site, iPad owners having problems connecting to WiFi networks should first consider updating their router firmware, using WPA or WPA2 wireless security, renewing your IP address, switching channels and (bizarrely) “adjusting screen brightness.”
If none of that works, hold out for a patch. According to the note, ” Apple will address remaining Wi-Fi connectivity issues with a future iPad software update.” Hopefully sooner rather than later.
Say hello to Goober, the next in a long line of applications aimed at becoming the unified communications solution to bridge your highest aspirations for chat, SMS, VoIP and videoconferencing.
A far-flung diaspora of those disenchanted with legacy voice providers has been champing at the bit promised long ago when engineers at Cisco perfected devices for turning voice into 1s and 0s — and Goober offers a promising stab at something close to 21st Century communication’s reach for the Holy Grail.
Close. But no cigar.
Adium is an all-purpose instant messenger application for OS X, and a very useful app to have around.
Remember how, back on Windows, you used to use the Win key and the Control key quite often? Well, on OS X, the Command key is your best friend.
There are two Command keys, one each side of the spacebar. You should find them easy to reach with your thumbs while typing.
President Obama knows how to get a laugh: say you are all thumbs when it comes to iPods, iPads and the like.
His quip — that he doesn’t know how to use iDevices or gaming platforms — got laughs at what otherwise might have been a ho-hum commencement address at Hampton University on Saturday.
“And meanwhile, you’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank that high on the truth meter.
And with iPods and iPads; and Xboxes and PlayStations — none of which I know how to work — (laughter) — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it’s putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy.”
We’ve got some GREAT iPhone apps to give away, but we’re keeping it a surprise as to which ones they are! Let’s just put it this way, we’ve got games, utilities, GPS apps, and much more. Here’s how it will work:
**We don’t have time to go through every code and verify that it’s still good, so if they are expired, just let us know. There are numerous reasons why they expire. Some just expire after 30 days, and others expire if a new version of the app has come out. Codes are good only for those that have access to the U.S. iTunes store. Keep following us throughout the day, so you don’t miss out!
These apps are brought to you by a great PR and Marketing firm for iPhone app developers:
