Apple could sell 200,000 to 300,000 iPads this weekend, a sign early sales estimates were too conservative, one analyst told investors Thursday. Such volume mirrors that of the iPhone’s launch, when the Cupertino, Calif. company sold 270,000 of the first iPhones. Apple may sell every iPad on hand, the analyst suggests.
Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster now predicts 900,000 of the tablet devices will be sold during the June quarter and 2.7 million iPads for 2010. Munster also pointed to Apple’s recent announcement that new iPad orders won’t ship until April 12 indicate that “initial demand for iPads was stronger than the company expected.”
As the iPad emerges, blinking, into the sunshine after its months of sequestration at 1 Infinite Loop, so the media machine grinds into action. We’ve seen dozens of iPad reviews published over the last 24 hours; now Time scoops them all with Stephen Fry interviewing Steve Jobs.
For those who don’t know, Stephen Fry is well qualified to do this. He’s been using Macs since the early days, and he’s a genuine geek. He just loves gadgets.
And of course, being a world-famous actor and writer, he’s pretty well connected. His people, it seems, know Jobs’ people, and arranged for the two to meet.
Fry doesn’t reveal much from his meeting with Jobs (everything from that encounter is on the final page of the four-page article).
He does have the nerve to ask Jobs if this is “the curtain dropping on your third act”, to which Jobs replies:
“I don’t think of my life as a career. I do stuff. I respond to stuff. That’s not a career — it’s a life!”
Something we should all consider before we think about making any more unboxing videos…
From Think Geek comes the one April Fools joke that I really wish was real: the iCade. Bringing all your 1970s and 80s gaming memories back to life. In theory anyway.
Seen any other good April 1st gags while browsing around this morning?
I didn’t see too many, I was too busy transferring all my files over to my new Windows 7 machine. It’s incredible!
Xeni asked Grey to put into words the magic of the iPad, and he said:
“The Elements on iPad is not a game, not an app, not a TV show. It’s a book. But it’s Harry Potter’s book. This is the version you check out from the Hogwarts library. Everything in it is alive in some way.”
Go read the rest of the review. It’s well worth it.
When the iPad was first unveiled, the single thing use for it that excited me most was reading — but comics, not books. Though various publishers have tried to make digital comics a going concern over the years, it’s never worked out. The problem was simple — no appropriate hardware. Doing a great digital comic just requires a large, portrait-oriented screen nearly the size of a comics page.
Fortunately, Apple’s on this wavelength. And both Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing and Andy Ihnatko from the Chicago Sun-Times report that review iPad units shipped with a brilliant comic book store and reading app from powerhouse publisher Marvel. You can see just a few seconds of the Marvel app in the PC Mag video (hat tip: Dante) we linked previously, but I like Ihnatko’s description, as well:
If you’re a purist who needs to see the whole page at once, you can hold the iPad in portrait mode and flip through the story as you would with a paper comic. You can zoom in and out as you wish, but though the iPad screen is smaller than a standard comic page (I measure it as 7.5”, compared to a comic’s 10”) it’s still crisp and readable when scaled down. Turn the iPad on its side, and a new viewing mode becomes available. In iBooks, tapping the left and right sides of the screen turns pages. In the Marvel app, it “moves the camera position” forward and backwards through the story, snappily zooming in and out through the “units” of the page, highlighting moments of dialogue or action.
The best new comedy of the year, Modern Family, has further cemented itself in my heart with tonight’s episode, which is basically a start-to-finish tribute to the powerful hold that new Apple products have over early adopters. Only watch the above YouTube clip if you’re comfortable with spoilers.
Otherwise, the full episode will appear here at 5 a.m. Eastern.
At first I thought this steel grey Ivolution GT case from Vaja was made from some new space-age material. It is textured but smooth, and has a luxurious silky feel. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize it’s made from a pretty old material — leather.
Commanding a primo price ($100), the Ivolution GT is a primo case. The more I use it, the more I like it.
Hulu is coming to the iPad, and possibly as a subscription app, charging a monthly fee for watching popular TV shows, says the NYT.
Citing “four people briefed on its plans,” the NYT says Hulu’s 200-odd partners are pressuring the site to raise more revenue for online TV, and that a monthly subscription on devices like the iPad has obvious potential.
(Hulu’s CEO) declined to talk about any future Hulu products, but he waxed enthusiastic about the coming wave of ultra-portable tablet computers like the iPad.
“Typically media consumption in the house was confined to the living room or home office,” he said. Tablets, he added, “allow consumers to serendipitously discover and consume media in every room of the house.”
The news is no surprise, really. It’s obvious that Hulu, which has done more than any other company to mainstream online TV, would not pass up a major media-consumption device like the iPad.
Plus, Hulu’s videos are already encoded in H.264, so they should run on the iPad without a problem. The big issue is making sure Hulu’s ads — all of which are in Flash — are iPad ready.
PCMag’s iPad review is a must watch. It’s a quick, breezy tour through the iPad and what it can do (iWork, games and eBooks, etc.). The best I’ve seen so far, including Apple’s guided iPad tours.
The big three tech reviewers — Walt Mossberg, David Pogue and Ed Baig — have all given the iPad pretty enthusiastic reviews. Of course, being pro reviewers, they are obliged to remain cooly professional and criticize shortcomings like the lack of Flash, multitasking and camera. But read between the lines, and these are pretty much double-thumbs-up:
WSJ’s Walt Mossberg: iPad has better than 10 hours battery life, email and other writing is surprisingly easy and productive, and digital newspapers are “gorgeous and highly functional.”
As I got deeper into it, I found the iPad a pleasure to use, and had less and less interest in cracking open my heavier ThinkPad or MacBook.
NYT’s David Pogue: Thinks nerds will be unmoved but technophobes will love it. Says it’s not as good as a laptop for “creating stuff,” but miles better for consuming books, music, video, photos, Web and e-mail.
For most people, manipulating these digital materials directly by touching them is a completely new experience — and a deeply satisfying one.
USA Today’s Ed Baig: Says Apple is “rewriting the rulebook for mainstream computing.”
Apple has delivered another impressive product that largely lives up to the hype.
Rally Up promises to cut social network noise, emphasize privacy.
Rally Up, a new location-based iPhone and iPad app from the innovative Santa Cruz, CA team behind 12seconds apps, made its debut in the iTunes App Store Wednesday, hoping to capture the attention of a growing fanbase for apps that leverage mobile communication technology to let people connect with one another.
For the past year the social networking game has been dominated by two players: New York-based Foursquare and Gowalla, out of Austin, TX. With loyal adherents numbering in the hundreds of thousands each, both companies have raised millions in investment funding and explored media partnerships with the likes of Bravo TV, Zagat and the Travel Channel to position themselves for a future in which everyone owns a smartphone and GPS technology allows their location to be pinpointed on a mythical matrix of Coolness.
Enter now Rally Up, which looks to capitalize on privacy concerns that have led many to remain skeptics of social networking apps. Rally Up touts itself as a unique vehicle for letting “real” friends share their wisdom and discoveries about the places they live and visit. “Foursquare and Gowalla are mainly broadcast apps,” said Rally Up founder Sol Lipman. “You check in somewhere and tell the Facebook and Twitter universes about it and there’s very little interactivity or real communication about the experience.”
Rally Up’s focus is more on combining microblogging with location, providing its users a platform for sharing text, videos and direct messages with one another. With an emphasis on the quality of a user’s friends in the Rally Up network, the app doesn’t support mass ‘Friend’ imports from Twitter or Facebook, rather it draws from the phone’s contact list or address book to populate the app with people a user is more likely to be interested in sharing with.
Within the app, any Rally Up contact can be set with a profile providing that contact with more or less access to a user’s comings and goings with Rally Up. The app also allows a user to choose between broadcasting his or her current location or letting contacts know where they are headed next to facilitate greater interactivity and social planning than other social networking apps allow. With 1.7 million points of interest at launch through integration with Open Street Map, Rally Up also has a look and feel distinctly different from the stylized GUIs of Gowalla and Foursquare, while also supporting many of the features that have made those apps so popular, including push notification, leaderboards and stamp/badge collecting.
With an iPad optimized version of the app also ready to go when the highly anticipated Apple tablet device launches April 3rd, Rally Up may be poised to turn the Check-in Wars into a three-front battle.
Rally Up went live as a free download on the iTunes App Store Wednesday.
Ever wanted to make it look like it was your face on the massive billboard you pass every day on the way yo work? Sure. We all have — and now we can, sorta, thanks to a new app called Mr. Photo from Italian developer Seac02.
Have a look at the English-disadvantaged blurb from the app’s App Store page, and everything will become clear:
“MrPhoto 1.0 is the first genuine Augmented Reality focus with realtime hardness tracking and user generated hardness target. The focus allows to supplement any design from a fire done by a iphone camera, Augmented being algorithm will take caring of a viewpoint of a Augmented being content. Take a print of an outside promotion print and put your design with a single click, no photoediting during all MRphoto and his record will do anything for you. MRPhoto is a initial genuine step to visible tagging, user generated tags for user generated contents.”
Guys, did you forget to call your girlfriend on her iPhone? If so, nothing says “sorry” better than flowers — a flower iPhone case that is, by Agent 18. She may love you — but she loves her iPhone more.
Note: It’s Case Week on CultofMac.com. We’re checking out some of the latest and greatest iPhone cases on the market. Read all the case reviews here.
My sons are constantly stealing my iPhone to play their games, until I got the Pink Lady Mirror iPhone Case, which totally put them off. This iPhone case from USBfever screams girly!
Note: It’s Case Week on CultofMac.com. We’re checking out some of the latest and greatest iPhone cases on the market. Read all the case reviews here.
Do you have $999 burning a hole in your pocket? Well, we have some deals for you. First up is a bevy of iMacs, including a 21-inch LED back-lit model powered by a Core 2 Duo running at 3.06GHz. Your second option might be a unibody MacBook Pro running at 2.26GHz for $999. If you want some hardware with a three-year AppleCare package, how about a 2.26GHz MacBook for $1,249?
Along the way, we’ll check out bargains on an 8GB iPod nano, the latest batch of App Store freebies and a variety of software for your iPhone or iPod touch.
As always, details on these deals and many more items are at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
The iPhone 3GS. Creative Commons-licensed photo by Fr3d: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fr3d/2660915827/
Another analyst has piled onto the growing sentiment that Verizon will not offer a CDMA iPhone by the middle of 2010 – or not until 2011. Citigroup analyst Richard Gardner said Wednesday a 2-month manufacturing delay in a “key component” will push the CDMA handset’s launch back to the fourth quarter of 2010 or the first quarter of 2011.
The hitch is due to “a manufacturing delay of several months in a key component,” Gardner told investors Wednesday.
If you’re wondering whether iPad is just going to be a big iPhone or iPod Touch, look no further than the preview released by iVerse Comics to see the depth and complexity of the iPad’s touchscreen features.
Comics and other traditionally text and image-based reading material have been somewhat less than satisfying to read on iPhones simply due to the size constraints of Apple’s smartphone display. With the impending release of the iPad’s significantly larger form factor all of that is about to change and it’s not too hard to predict the coming boom in digital book, magazine and yes, comic content optimized for the iPad.
“We’d all been waiting for Apple to announce the iPad, and once the specifics were finally known, our team began putting together our plans for the device the same day.” said iVerse Media founder and CEO Michael Murphey. Wanting to create a traditional comic book reading experience on the iPad, iVerse built “a completely new application from scratch, then [married] that to our existing app,” Murphey said. “The end result gives the user the best possible experience on whatever device they’re using.”
iVerse Comics features some of the biggest publishers in the comic book industry including Archie Comics, Ape Entertainment, Archaia, BOOM! Studios, IDW Publishing, titles from Image Comics creators, Marvel Comics, and many more.
Long time users of iVerse Comics will have the ability to download new, high resolution, iPad files of their previously in-app-purchased comics for no additional cost. iVerse Comics is available as a free download in the iTunes App Store now. The app includes 30 free comics with over 100 more available as in-app purchases.
Remember all the talk earlier this year that Apple was developing its own search engine, possibly even picking Microsoft’s Bing to replace Google as the default iPhone search? Well, such speculation has reignited. A popular Apple analyst now believes there’s a 70 percent chance the Cupertino, Calif. company will create a mobile search engine in the next five years.
Why would Apple go to the trouble when Google reportedly is paying $100 million each year to be the iPhone’s search? Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster says the main reason is all about control, a word that gets the attention of Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
If you’ve heard those rumors of Verizon selling the iPhone this summer, don’t hold your breath, suggests an analyst. The talk is just the latest gamesmanship by Apple in an attempt to throw Google’s Android phones off-stride.
Although Verizon’s 90 million customers would allow Apple to directly confront the growth of Android-based phones, there remains some major sticking points before any agreement between the Cupertino, Calif. company and the carrier are signed, Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu told investors Wednesday.
Despite a report Monday suggesting Verizon Wireless could offer an iPhone this summer, some analysts see such a future as unlikely. Instead, if Apple produces a CDMA iPhone, the Cupertino, Calif. company probably has another customer in mind: China.
UBS Investment Research analyst Maynard J. Um calls a report that U.S.-based Verizon would get the CDMA iPhone as “unlikely.” Instead, Um believes the reported CDMA Apple handset could end up in China with China Telecom or Japan’s KDDI.
When you first get your hands on an iPad April 3, there will probably be about 200 apps for sale for the touchscreen device.
The San Jose Mercury news reports that a frantic “land grab” is taking place as software developers race to be among the first apps available. These early settlers may make the most profit.
“It’s definitely going to be important to be first out there,” said Steve Demeter, a San Francisco developer whose puzzle game Trism was among the first apps in the App Store after it launched in July 2008. He says he made $250,000 in the first two months. The instant success enabled him to leave his day job and found app company Demiforce.
quit his job writing software for Wells Fargo and start his own app.
The iPad app competitive terrain is uneven, however. A few lucky developers can test their magic on iPads, others have to use an iPad simulator.
“I would like to say I have one in my hand, but I don’t,” said Jeff Whatcott, senior vice president of marketing at Brightcove, an online video platform that has created the technology to allow Web sites to run video on the iPad using Apple’s required HTML5 standard.
Some early pioneers to iPad territory — hoping to launch with the device on Saturday — may include an app from the crew who created Ocarina and Ngmoco games “We Rule,” “GodFinger” and “Charadium.”
Interested in picking up an iPad but a couple of bills short? The electronics sweatshops of Shenzhen again come to the rescue with their own counterfeit iPads, completete with WiFi, Bluetooth, 4GB of storage and a cute, knock-off operating system skinned like OS X 10.0.
The company who makes them, Shenzhen Huayi, says their iPad looks like a giant iPhone… although I’m guessing he’s never seen one, since this is a big iPod if I ever saw one.
If you’re a collector of Apple knock-offs or just a poor SOB, the “iPad” can be yours for just $290, and it’ll be available on Saturday simultaneously with the release of the iPad proper.
If you’d told me yesterday that I’d be eagerly anticipating a new release by nu metal doofus band Linkin Park, I would have promptly puked up my entire central nervous system… but today, I’m holding my stomach, keeping my mouth closed and my nostrils pinched shut, because Linkin Park’s upcoming iPhone game doesn’t just look good… it looks fantastic.
Perhaps what’s so great about Linkin Park 8-Bit Rebellion is that it somehow manages to cater to both Linkin Park fans (a blight on the species which makes a strong argument for eugenics) and those who find the band’s metal-and-rap-for-fratties musical style nauseating in equal measure. It’s a game with a sense of humor about its subject, not exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from Linkin Park.
The game pits the members of Linkin Park in 16-bit pixel art glory, battling an infection of 8-bit sprites with fun weapons ranging from flamethrowers to super lasers. Even better: Linkin Park’s oeuvre of unlistenable audiophonic vomit is taken and distilled until each song has become a fun, warbling chiptune, which you can choose to listen to instead. Excellent!
Even Linkin Park haters like me should check out the trailer above: this may be the iPhone game I’m looking forward to most right now, god help me.
Although his fingers are always yellow with nicotine and his teeth are always brown with Marmite, Gadget Lab’s Charlie Sorrel is my very favorite of secret boyfriends, and it’s mostly due to that wonderfully sinuous memory of his.
The latest fragment of mnemosyne plucked from the pickled depths of Sorrel’s gin barrel mind? Charlie realized that the iPad Camera Connection Kit — Apple’s suggested method for directly transferring your digicam’s photos to your tablet — looks remarkably similar to 2005’s iPod Camera Connector, which allowed you to do the same thing on your iPod Photo (albeit, without the USB dongle). In fact, they look identical.
What that means is that if you happen to have that old, useless iPod Camera Connector dongle collecting detritus in a drawer, you may well just be be able to slap it into your iPad when it’s delivered. Or you may not, but if you ask us, there’s no real reason for Apple to change the tech here when they can just recycle an old piece of hardware for an entirely new generation of device.
CC-licensed, thanks to Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
The person who sells you the iPad on Saturday will probably be seeing it for the first time, too.
Keeping in line with air-tight secrecy around new product launches, Apple retail store employees have not had any hands-on time with the new touchscreen device.
Reuters reports:
Apple store workers say they have yet to see or touch the iPad, even though the launch is just days away and they are being trained and encouraged to talk about Apple’s newest device with customers.
“We haven’t seen it; we never do” before a product is launched, said one employee, who asked not to be identified because workers are barred from speaking with the media. “Every store employee I know, including the managers, they haven’t seen it.”
If Apple follows the same route for the iPhone launch, store workers may see it an hour before it goes on sale.
And presumably, the iPad blackout doesn’t extend to genius types who will be helping customers set up their just-purchased devices.
Reuters also notes that while Apple store workers get 25% discount on iPods and Macs, they get no discount on iPhones and it’s uncertain whether they’ll get something off the already priced-to-move iPad.
As the iPad emerges, blinking, into the sunshine after its months of sequestration at 1 Infinite Loop, so the media machine grinds into action. We’ve seen dozens of iPad reviews published over the last 24 hours; now Time scoops them all with 
