The iPad is Apple’s strongest answer to the Android platform. That’s the word from a firm looking over the web analytics results of some 4 million online users. Although the Google platform has a sharp lead over the iPhone 4, “iPad is outgrowing the entire Android ecosystem so significantly [that] it more than makes up for the iPhone deficiency plus some,” a search engine expert reports.

As for Android’s lead over the iPhone, it is slight and requires the full resources of the Google mobile operating system – both smartphones and tablets – to pull ahead of just one Apple iOS product. “Android has never come close to passing iOS as a whole,” according to Jeff Trimble of ROI365.

During the annual Qingming Festival, Chinese residents honor their dead ancestors by burning fake luxury items and money, sending them into the beyond for the spirits to enjoy.

In Malaysia, there’s an entire cottage industry of fake items that springs up during the festival, allowing Confucian practitioners to buy all sorts of simulated luxuries expressly for burning.

This year, what’s the hottest fake gadget being burned during Qingming? Fake papercraft models of Apple’s iPad 2, of course.

While GarageBand for iPad is a neat little acoustic sandbox for even we tone deaf plebs, it was of particular interest to musicians who were already heavily invested in GarageBand for Mac. With the iPad version, these musicians hoped they’d be able to put together a few bars of a ditty on the subway or during a flight, flesh it out a bit, then import it into their Mac at home for a polish; alternatively, they hoped they could take their current GarageBand projects on the road with them.

Unfortunately, when GarageBand for iPad actually ended up hitting, it actually was quite difficult to do any of the above. That wasn’t intentional, though, and over the weekend, Apple pushed the 6.0.2 update of GarageBand for Mac out through the usual channels, bringing support for opening projects imported from GarageBand for iPad.

If you love your music, you’ve probably encountered this situation: you’re streaming songs from the web via one of your favorite sites, and the phone rings, so you need to hit pause. Or your Most Hated Song Ever comes on, and you just want to skip it as fast as possible.

But wait, you have 67 tabs open. And that’s just in the browser window that’s visible. There’s two more windows full of tabs minimised in your Dock. Where’s the music, the pause button, the skip controls? Gah.

Factotum is a tiny utility that solves the problem. It works in Safari and Chrome, and lets you attach your Mac’s built-in media control keys (aka F7, F8 and F9) to a long list of web streaming services (the full list is Rdio, Grooveshark, Hype Machine, Pandora, Last.fm, Napster, Playlist.com, Live365, BBC iPlayer, Songza, Jango, We Are Hunted, Deezer, thesixtyone, and Blip).

Want it? Go here. It’s four bucks in the Mac App Store.

(Via OneThingWell)

Finally! Possibly the most anticipated jailbreak has finally been released. The iPhone-Dev Team came through once again, and has released updated version of both redsn0w (version 0.9.6rc9 for both Windows & Mac OS X) as well as PwnageTool 4.3 for Mac OS X. While it doesn’t work for the iPad 2 (no jailbreak is available for it yet), it still works for every other device. Download links and more information after the break!

The Apple iPad turns one year old today. The first day the iPad was available was April 3, 2010. That was the day that I had  the Wi-Fi only model in my hands. It wasn’t until near the end of April 2010 that I finally got a hold of the Wi-Fi + 3G model. My life and the life of countless others hasn’t been the same since.

The iPad was met with some skepticism when it was announced in early 2010. The “magical and revolutionary” device was ridiculed, laughed about, and even mocked. People cried about it and the impact it would have on their businesses and Adobe cried about it. However, all that ended when people and developers got one in their hands.

Initial reviews like the one from Cult of Mac’s very own Leander Kahney were very positive and even first impressions were good. People loved it so much one of them even wrapped it in chocolate — only to give it away again to someone they loved.

The iPad proved itself again and again finding niche and mainstream applications for it at home and at work. The iPad may very well be the most popular Apple computing device in this decade. Although the iPhone may give it a run for its money. We’ll see. Maybe there will be a tie for that title.

The introduction of the iPad 2 last month will keep the iPad juggernaut moving along well into the 21st century. Frankly I cannot wait to see what Apple comes up with next!

Happy Birthday iPad! Congrats Apple.

With an estimated 2.5 million users, MapMyFitness is almost certainly one of the top fitness-tracking services on the web and the iPhone;  which means last week’s announcement that their apps now fully integrate with the Wahoo Fisica dongle should make a lot of people happy.

The MMF website and apps, most of which are free, are already chock-full of features like a deep library of user-generated maps, mapping functions (like route elevation profile generation) and their new nutrition-tracking feature; adding the ability to record sensor data should catapult the system to the top of the heap. The integration with the ANT+ Fisica sensor dongle doesn’t quite extend across MapMyFitness’s whole suite of apps, but hits the major ones, like MapMyRun, MapMyRide and MapMyFitness (all three of which are really almost identical).

Skobbler, makers of Forever Map, a cool 99¢ navigation app for iOS devices is giving away an iPad2 on Monday so you have a small window of time to squeek through and snag your chance.

All you have to do is “Like” Skobbler’s Facebook page and “Like” one of its daily status updates between March 29 and April 4 to be entered in their drawing.

The rules are unclear whether that means you have to “Like” a daily status update for each day between 3/29-4/4 or if it’s OK to “Like” just a single status update during that timeframe, but it couldn’t hurt to get happy with the “Like” buttons. The folks at Facebook seem to enjoy and how else are you going to get an iPad2 these days?

A part purported to be destined for a forthcoming iPod nano suggests that the seventh generation device could bring back a camera and video recording capabilities to the second smallest iPod, whilst retaining its current tiny form factor.

The picture above was sent to Apple.pro two days ago, and on previous occasions the Tiawanese site has been relatively accurate with its leaks of upcoming parts and devices. The site recently leaked plans of the revised iPhone 4 built for CDMA and Verizon before its launch, and prior to that it published pictures of a miniature touch screen that later arrived in the current iPod nano.

We received these cryptic press releases from two fairly well-known developers today, and we just thought we’d share them with you — especially since one of them was marked confidential and requested we not reveal anything till Monday; as if! We’re revealing it NOW! (Yes, we’re horribly easy to manipulate).