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.
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.
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.
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.
Just a week after we got Photoshop on the iPad, along comes an app that looks like we all expected Photoshop on the iPad to look. It’s called Laminar, and the best way to describe it is as Lightroom lite.
MiniUsage is a clever little menu bar app for Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later. It allows users to see what’s going on within their system, from memory to CPU to disk access, right from the OS X menu bar. It’s also compatible with AppleScript, so savvy users can geek out a bit and customize the behavior of the app.
Several reports that surfaced during the days preceding Apple’s latest iPad event suggested that while the U.S. would get LTE connectivity in the new device, it would be stripped out for those in Europe, where LTE networks are yet to launch.
To everyone’s surprise, Apple left the LTE chip in for us Europeans. But the problem is it won’t support European LTE networks.
I’m amazed at how well Apple is managing to meet demand for the new iPad so far: 16 hours after the pre-order page went live, you can still order an iPad for March 16th delivery. That’s a herculean feat, given how many people want one, but Tim Cook’s been complaining for the last year that they would “sell more iPads if they could build more”… obviously he’s since gotten his house in order.
Never the less, it looks like Apple is finally starting to run out of pre-order units. Specifcally, as of writing, delivery estimates for the white iPad LTE on AT&T have slipped to March 19th, although you can still get any of the models on March 16th in black, and Verizon and WiFi-only models are still unaffected.
The moral? If you want a new iPad, it’s time to pre-order now. My guess is that before the day has passed, the delivery estimates are going to start slipping across the board.
You just can’t keep the Dev Team down. Just hours after Apple officially released iOS 5.1, it’s already been jailbroken. But as usual with these 0-day jailbreaks, there are some caveats.