Reviews - page 127

When Apple first announced the new third-generation iPad, there were people — and, I suppose, still are people — who were disappointed. Why they were disappointed is inexplicable; what they envisioned is hard to imagine. The flying car of tablets, one supposes: they called the new iPad an “incremental update” when what Apple had just handed them may as well have come spiraling through a time vortex from the future. It’s that good.

Let’s face facts. In the last year, Android makers haven’t even been able to ship a viable competitor to the iPad 2. The new iPad, with its Retina Display and LTE technology, is unlike anything else on the market. No one is even close to making a tablet as fast, as beautiful, as vivid, as thin or as long-lasting as this, and if history is any guide, when the fourth-generation iPad comes out, they’ll still be trying to catch up.

Make no mistake. If the new iPad isn’t a “beefy” enough upgrade for you, you’re not just spoiled. You’re not just completely out of touch with the state of the tech landscape today. No, you’re bonkers. This is the most advanced piece of consumer mobile electronics tech available today.

We’ve all seen news reports on the TV when stock markets take a nosedive. The footage is always the same: traders looking in despair at screens full of red rectangles, each one representing a falling stock.

Those magical digital rectangles are no longer for traders only. Now you can play with them yourself, in a $4.99 iOS app called StockTouch.

On first sight, the Yaro digital audio system looks unpromising. It’s an amplifier/speaker set from Kanto AV Systems that’s small, black and looks like something Spinal Tap might use on a farewell tour.

But it turned out to be about the loudest, most responsive, richest, most faithful sound-media player I’ve heard.

There are a number of half-baked third-party email clients for the iPhone, but until now, there hasn’t been a real replacement for the iPhone’s built-in Mail app. Sparrow for iPhone finally changes that. It’s crammed full of terrific features that make Apple’s solution look pretty amateur, and yet it’s still incredibly easy to use. In fact, I think it’s just as spectacular as Sparrow for the Mac.

Vocre (pronounced voh-creee) is a translation app that’s not new on the App Store, but has one important new feature: it’s free.

Earbuds are a compromise. Bang for the buck, you’ll always get better sound and bass from over-the-ear headphones, and probably better comfort as well. Notoriously fragile, you’ll likely get more longevity with headphones than earbuds, too. But these are all the sorts of drawback you live with if you want to listen to your music on the go without carrying around a big pair of cans with you, and all of the technology of earbuds are largely extended towards minimizing their deficits when compared to their bigger, richer brothers.

Enter Sony’s XBA range of earbuds. Spanning four models, each defined by its number of drivers — the Sony XBA-1iP, the Sont XBA-2iP, the Sony XBA-3iP and the Sony XBA-4iP — Sony’s making a concerted effort to deliver high-end over-the-ear sound in a slim, light and portable package. But how well did they do?

The LensBaby Composer Pro with Sweet 35 lens ($400) can create beautiful mixes of blur and focus in your images, but beginner photographers beware — this optic pair is not for the faint of heart.

Camera+ is one of the best photography apps available, period. And today sees the release of Camera+ 3, a major update with lots of new features.

Virtual school The Khan Academy just released an official iPad app today, and if you have kids in school you might just want to grab a copy, because it’s excellent.

Newly launched at SXSW this week is Picle, a free iOS photography app with a twist: the aim is to make something that sounds like Instagram. It’s a lovely idea but the initial release suffers a few disappointing problems.

I’ll come out and say this right at the beginning: I don’t like to put my Apple gear into cases. I went for years with an iPod Touch bareback in my jeans pocket, but with the iPad there was just too much easy-to-scratch screen on there. All the cases I tried were bulky or inelegant or just plain junk. I settled on Apple’s case, although that was a little like putting a supermodel in a wetsuit.

With the iPad 2, I have used the Smart Cover exclusively, with a rear skin sometimes. But now, I’m totally gaga over this hot little number from Skech. And here’s why.

Along with everything else in iLife for iOS (and iWork too), iMovie got an update at the new iPad announcement on Wednesday. The big new feature is trailers, which you may have used before on the desktop. Now you can make them on iPhones (4 or later) and iPads (2 or later).

We wanted to put the new iMovie through its paces, so here’s a trailer we made.

Over the last couple of years, I have developed an obsession with traveling light that has been wonderfully encouraged and cultivated by Mssrs. Cook, Ive & Co. When I go out of the house and need to work remotely, my bag is as light as I can possibly make it: an 11-inch MacBook Air, an iPad 2, my iPhone 4S, a couple pens and a steno-pad for notes. Despite the sheer amount of silicon and tech stuffed into my shoulder bag, it’s always light, always svelte, always uncluttered. As they have done with so many other things when it comes to consumer electronics design, they have turned making gadgets thin into a cutting-edge art.

Well, except for one thing. The chargers.

The standard Apple MacBook  Charger is easily two to three times thicker than my MacBook Air. The same can be said about the Apple 10W USB charger, which is just a brick compared to the thin slate it powers. Between the bricks and the cords, Apple’s chargers add an extreme amount of thickness and ungainliness to a streamlined gadget bag… and since my MacBook Air, at least, doesn’t have 10W USB ports, I can’t piggy back charging my iPad off of just the one charger.

Well, not without TwelveSouth’s ingenious, button-cute accessory, the <a href=”https://twelvesouth.com/products/plugbug/”>PlugBug</a>, that is.

One of Apple’s biggest announcements yesterday — apart from something about some new iPad — was iPhoto for iOS. We’d suspected that Apple would fill in the hole in its iLife suite, and we were right. What we weren’t expecting was something as fully featured as iPhoto turned out to be. That said, it seems the app was really built with the iPad 3 in mind: It works great on the iPad 2, but it’s a little glitchy in places: just like its desktop cousin.

Here is the new Pages for iOS, as announced by Apple last night.

Not a huge amount has changed here, to be honest, but there are one or two nice additions, stuff that help Pages retain its top spot in the small world of word processing on iOS.

I have been using Photoshop Touch almost obsessively for the past week, despite being holed up in the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona for much of that time. At first look, I thought it was yet another photo-editing app, and in many ways it is. But as I dig in more and more, its clear that — while this is no substitute for desktop Photoshop — its an amazing app in itself. And all the more so as it runs in just 512KB RAM.

First, what Photoshop Touch for? That’s not as dumb a question as it might seem.

Fans of Monty Python, gather your dead parrots and your stuffed John Cleese plushies: today is your day to celebrate the official launch of Monty Python: The Holy Book of Days for iPad, an app that gives faithful Python followers everything they could ever wish for on a plate, with strawberries on top. The rest of us might be left wondering what the fuss is about, though.

With the number of MIDI controllers on the market, the search for a great portable controller can be daunting.

Let me introduce you to the Korg microKEY, my favorite mobile MIDI controller.

So the 25 billionth download from the iOS App Store was none other than Where’s My Water? Free. It brought its owner a shiny $10,000 iTunes gift card and worldwide fame for 15 minutes. But will it bring you anything? The short answer is probably: no.

The IDAPT i1 Eco Universal Charger ($25) aims to be your charge-every-device portable charger. But this is one instance where bigger is indeed not better.

Fuzel is another one-dollar photo collage maker for iOS. There are dozens of others, so what marks this one out?

Well actually it’s rather impressive. To start with, it has a lovely natural interface that begins with the faux-textured front cover of a photo album, with your most recent creation poking through a hole. Swipe this aside, and keep swiping through your creations, just as you would with a real album.

This simple image has become a cliché in the UK in recent years, and is now much parodied and remixed everywhere you look. Now you can remix it yourself, thanks to a variety of (very similar-looking) apps for iOS.

Yesterday we showed you how to make your own gorgeous pixel art with The Grix. Today we’re looking at pixels again, this time with a clever new photo toy for iOS called pxl, by Rainer Kohlberger.

First things first: Pentax calls this “the smallest, lightest interchangeable lens camera in the world,” and they’re dead right. This camera is small. You thought your micro four-thirds camera was small, but it’s huge compared to the Pentax Q. It’s hard to appreciate just how small it is, until you put it next to something else that’s really small. Like an iPhone.

As you can see, the Q sits neatly atop the iPhone’s screen, not even touching the edges of its case. It’s tiny.

Camera Awesome is a new all-singing, all-dancing photo app on the iOS Store this week. But just how awesome is it?

Brought to you by photo sharing site SmugMug, the first noticeable thing about this app is the price: it’s free. There are no adverts inside it, you’ll be pleased to hear. But there are quite a lot of extras that can only be unlocked with in-app purchases.