Web surfing on the iPad 3G using its cell connection is really pretty good, especially if you get away from congested urban areas.
Using the iPad over the weekend, I’ve been pretty impressed by the speed of the iPad 3G for routine Web surfing. Video, however, is another matter — it’s a disappointment.
Apple sold 300,000 iPad 3G devices during the first weekend the device was available, one analyst estimates. Nearly all stores surveyed – 49 out of 50 – had run out of stock, according to Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster.
Munster’s comments about lack of availability of the 3G models coincides with Monday remarks by Apple CEO Steve Jobs that the Cupertino, Calif. company was trying to keep up with demand. More than 1 million iPads were sold in the first 27 days, the company announced.
If you are looking for a way to check your hair surreptitiously at the upcoming WWDC, behold the “MocBook” pocket mirror and card holder.
It comes from Japan, where locals love mignon tech, and is available in versions that mimic the MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.
It’s just a matter of course for any new Apple product to be vivisected down to its very bolts and each part catalogued by the Internet’s gadget coroners, but no one does a better job at it than the boys over at iFixIt, who have already torn down the iPad 3G.
Over 1 million iPads have been sold since it first came out almost a month ago, and we’re guessing that many of our readers have one, am I right? If you don’t, sorry to rub it in your face, but we’ll be giving away 4 iPad apps today as part of our ongoing Monday Giveaway series. We want to thank Brian from Appular for putting this app bundle together. If you’re an iPhone or iPad app developer, make sure you consider Appular for all of your marketing efforts. First, let’s go through how to enter to win the apps:
We’ve done the status tagging thing in the past, and some of you have had issues with it. So, I’ve taken the precious time out of my day to put together a short demonstration on how to do it. Remember, the privacy settings of the status message must be set to “Everyone” or else the status tag won’t show up on our page, and we’ll have no idea that you tagged us.
Take out the trusty old ex-acto knife and whittle down your T-Mobile SIM cart just right and you can cram it right into your iPad 3G’s medulla oblongata. Jailbreak with Spirit and you can then use your iPad to send SMSes, provided you’ve got some command line skill. Who said there was no reason to jailbreak your iPad?
[via 9to5Mac]
Blue Microphone’s Yeti – a versatile $150 USB device from the company behind the legendary Snowball and the must-have Mikey – would be an absolute steal at twice the price.
In applications from podcasting to studio recording the Yeti delivers intimacy and clarity rivaling the output of some of the best microphones from better known companies such as Shure and AKG – all from a single package with setting versatility neither can touch for such little money.
The Yeti has been loose in the wild for a while now so the info and conclusions in the following review may be old news to some. But the quality and value of such a well-made, high performing product deserves an encore.
In part 12 of Macworld founder David Bunnell’s story of the early Mac, Bill Gates is the only developer to actually deliver on his promises of software for the Mac. Microsoft’s Excel literally saves the Mac just when sales drop to nil, but at the same time Gates’ engineers are reverse engineering the GUI for the first version of Windows.
In Part 11 of Macworld founder David Bunnell’s memoirs, Steve Jobs triumphantly introduces the Mac to the world. “It sang to us. It performed mathematical calculations with the blinding speed of a Cray mainframe. It drew beautiful pictures. It communicated with other computers. It bounced rays off satellites and sent a subversive message to the Soviet Union.”
Here’s a couple of screenshots from the iPad’s YouTube app showing the dramatic difference in quality between Wi-Fi and 3G.
The screenshot above is from video streaming over WiFi. And below is the same YouTube video playing over 3G.
I paused the video before taking the screenshots and tried to take them at about the same point.
The difference is clear. Over Wi-Fi, video quality is near high-def. Over 3G, it looks like a bad QuickTime movie from the mid-1990s.
Of course, this isn’t new — it’s just much more noticeable on the iPad’s big beautiful screen. This has been the case on the iPhone for some time, but on the smaller screen, the difference in quality isn’t as dramatic.
Meanwhile, our readers are reporting that Verizon’s MiFi delivers: there’s no difference in quality between Wi-Fi and 3G on Verizon’s network.
UPDATE: As our friend Chris Foresman of Ars Technica fame points out in the comments, 3G tops out at a paltry 64Kbps. ” It looks like crap on the iPhone,” says Chris, “so it shouldn’t be a surprise that it looks like crap 4x as big?”
Foresman says the 64Kbps number isn’t generally known, but is reported in Apple’s developer docs. AT&T had said there would be a limit, but didn’t say what it was.
64Kbps is pathetic for 3G. According to the International Telecommunication Union standards body, 3G specifies a minimum data rate of 144Kbps in high-mobility (vehicular) applications, 384Kbps for pedestrian applications, and 2Mbps (that megabits per second) for indoor (stationary) applications.
And here are the screenshots full size: