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.”
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.
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.”
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.
Perched like Olympians upon the penthouse patios of the gleaming skyscrapers that perforate the very sky of the home of the brave, you Americans are noble and blessed creatures who almost always get the latest Apple products long before the rest of us unfortunate indigents of the Earth’s farther flung butthole shores.
This Saturday, for example, you will be unwrapping the gold leaf from Apple’s latest magic slab of aluminum, the iPad; meanwhile, here in Berlin, Germany, I will be spending my day hiding from the desiccating European sun in my ramshackle bamboo hut, my only past time listening to staticky iPad news over the wireless radio once given to me by a missionary I later ate, all the while compulsively blinking to keep the flies from laying eggs in the jelly of my eyes.
Still, hope is on the horizon for the strangely chattering aborigines of exotic foreign climes like Canada, Australia, Asia and Europe. Apple has promised an international iPad rollout in late April, and now it looks like we might have a date: April 24th.
The rumor comes from unknown site iPad In Canada. Their source has said that Apple employees have been told that April 24th has been marked as a “black out period” for staff, meaning that they can’t take leave on that date. If true, it strongly implies that at least Canadians can expect to get an iPad on April 24th…. and may be able to pre-order the iPad as early as this week.
The rumor should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt, but the date certainly aligns with what Apple’s been hinting. As for me, I guess I should begin collecting bartering my beads and pelts with the traders so I have the scratch to buy one by April 24th.
Let’s face it: if there’s one thing Apple is really not known for, it’s making great headphones. The white buds that ship with every iPod and iPhone deliver mediocre-at-best sound (while constantly falling out of your ears), and the microphones built into the phone models tend to pick up nothing but wind.
I was converted a few years ago to Shure headphones, beginning with an old pair of Shure EC2’s. At the time, they were the undisputed champs of portable audio. With the right fit, they could literally block out all external sound, deliver clear bass, mid and treble, and all without breaking the bank.
Since my initial Ec2’s met an untimely demise (Severed Cord. Slamming Car Door.), I’ve used successive models of their replacement, the SE110 and SE115. And I’ve been singularly unimpressed. The sound isn’t as good, the fit isn’t as as good, and, if you can believe it, the build quality is less. Every pair I’ve had has shorted out in one ear or the other, at first temporarily before going away permanently. Though it was my first love, Shure has let me down.
Reluctantly, I’ve left behind Shure. And thank goodness. Because Ultimate Ears has delivered in the SuperFi 5vi a headset near-perfectly matched to the iPhone. I don’t know how I got along for so long without them.
Sachin Agarwal is one of the founders of hip email blogging service Posterous – but he used to work for Apple, and like a lot of us, he has opinions about OS X.
