Along with a glimpse of Apple CEO Steve Jobs attending Sunday’s Oscars, viewers may also have seen the first public shots fired in the ebook pricing wars between the Cupertino, Calif. company and online retail goliath Amazon. The 30-second commercial included several best-sellers appearing on the iPad’s iBookstore and at prices spanning $7.99 to $14.99.

Sen. Edward Kennedy’s “True Compass: A Memoir” had a $14.99 iBookstore price, lower than the $19.25 Amazon charges Kindle e-book readers. However, both the $12.99 price for the iBookstore version of James Patterson’s “I, Alex Cross” and $7.99 iBookstore version of “Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Journey to Change the World…One Child at a Time” by Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin were higher than Amazon: $9.99 and $7.19, respectively.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGEcYtVBxGc&feature=player_embedded

On Friday, we mused about what would happen if Old Spice’s “I’m On A Horse” campaign was applied to Apple’s products… which seemed ridiculous enough a suggestion at the time, but if the recent Oscar Night iPad spot is anything to go by, maybe Apple decided to go just that route.

After all, slowed down by 15% and annotated by Neil Curtis, the iPad spot is just as surreal as the Old Spice ad. In fact, it is rife with goofs, most notably multitouch interactions that have little to no bearing to what the model is doing on screen. As for that iPad model, s/he is practically the Orlando of Apple spots, transmutating from female to male to female again over the course of the ad… all the while magically warping in and out of different pairs of pants.

It’s a bit strange to see a company as detail-obsessed as Apple make so many careless little mistakes… but you’d be hard pressed to catch any of these gaffes at regular speed. It just goes to show that as nitpicky as Jobs can be, the collected Internet will always one-up him.

[via Crunchgear]

A few short months ago, the Kindle seemed completely unassailable. While Amazon’s e-reader was hardly a tech revelation, before the iPad, it didn’t need to be: Amazon’s gigantic e-book store engorged with millions of $9.99 titles and free online connectivity through Whispernet was a huge wager that other companies struggled to meet.

In the wake of the iPad, though, the Kindle’s prospects look bleak. Before they’ve even released it, the iPad has managed to slaughter the Kindle in the eyes of the gadget-buying product. Case in point: ChangeWave Research has surveyed 3,171 consumers about their e-readers, and 27% say they’d rather have picked up an iPad… if it had been available at the time they picked up their original e-reader.

It’s a hypothetical exercise, of course: — despite the headlines on some blogs, those surveyed aren’t saying they would have waited for the iPad — but it’s still impressive that Apple has managed to impress so many existing Kindle owners with a device that costs more in both initial expenditure and e-reading upkeep in every way. But it’s also unsurprising: just like the iPod made all other MP3 players on the market look like antediluvian crapgets, the iPad’s done the same to e-readers.

We close out another week with a trio of hardware deals. In the spotlight is a deal on 3.06GHz 22-inch iMacs from ExperCom. The desktop computers are outfitted with 8GB of RAM and AppleCare for $1,399. (There are other iMacs available in today’s deals.) Also on tap: MacBook Pro laptops, starting at $849. We round out our top trio with deals on Mac Pro Xeon workstations starting at $2,149 for a 2.66GHz model.

Along the way, we check out a new crop of App Store freebies, including the game “Scoops – Ice Cream Fun for Everyone.” In addition, we take a look at some storage options and new bargains on Mac software.

As always, details on these and many other items, are available on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Although I generally find a reason to pick them up anyway, I was particularly enamored with MacHeist’s last nanoBundle, which offered some really fantastic Mac apps (including my all-time favorite, distraction-free text editor, WriteRoom) for, well, nothing.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to beat free, which makes MacHeist’s sequel to the nanoBundle a little harder to recommend: it costs $20. Still, complaining about a few fins is just greedy when you’re looking at this amount of cheap quality software, including MacJournal, RipIt, Clips, CoverScout and Flow.

As usual, there’s further incentive to buy: once 50,000 people purchase the bundle, Tales of Monkey Island will be unlocked, with Rapidweaver to be unlocked at an unspecified point thereafter. I don’t believe MacHeist has ever failed to unlock every title in their bundles, regardless of sales, so you can probably consider it a sure-thing that you’ll get these two titles as well.

These are some great apps, each one of which normally costs more than the $20 asking price of the bundle. Even if you’re only interested in one or two of these titles, this is an impulse buy you can feel good about.

The potential for Apple’s iPad to be wildly successful is a concern for more than direct rivals of the Cupertino, Calif. company. If the iPad becomes yet another hot product, expect flash memory to be even more expensive and don’t hold your breath for solid state drives to replace traditional hard drives on PCs, warns a Friday report.

“With the iPad likely to grab most memory supplies, prices may increase causing higher prices for SSDs,” writes industry publication Digitimes, citing an unnamed source. Apple currently consumes nearly one-third of the total flash (or NAND) memory supplies, the report says.

Ahh, bless ’em. The hacks at The Sun aren’t famous for hard-hitting investigative journalism, but at least you’d expect them to know an iPhone app when they see one.

A couple of weeks ago a builder fooled them (and the Daily Mail) into believing that he’d taken a photo of a ghostly boy on a building site in Hull.

But as the internet pointed out shortly afterwards, anyone can make the exact same ghostly figure appear pretty much anywhere they like, thanks to the Ghost Capture app for iPhone.

Even funnier are some of the comments posted under the stories. On the Daily Mail’s version, for example, Mel from Stroud says:

“i am mildly psychic and i snese this boy was evacualted from the war,his father died,his mother died of old age,he lives with an old couple and this used to be his school,hopes this helps everyone”

(To be honest, I don’t think for a minute that the journalists at either paper actually believed that the photo was real, and they probably did instantly work out where it came from. But The Sun’s purpose is to entertain as much as it is to inform – so they wrote it up in all innocent seriousness, knowing that readers with a clue would be in on the joke. And that some readers would fall for it.)

(Via Macenstein, Know Your Mobile, Tabloid Watch, and half the rest of the internet.)

Oh. My. God.

Forget the iPad, kids, just forget it forever. You don’t need one anymore. Because the guys at E4 have created… ePad. It’s more than amazing. It’s amazinger.

Don’t just take my word for it. Watch this video for the full details.

The chief supplier for Apple’s iPad tablet is denying there will be any delay to the previously announced March shipment date. Foxconn Electronics told a trade publication Wednesday supplies for the tablet device “are on schedule.”

The China-based company also told DigiTimes 600,000-700,000 iPads will be ready in March and 1 million of the devices will ship in April. The iPad’s launch is unlikely to be delayed, unnamed sources told the publication.

The world’s most advanced music AI runs on a rickety old Power Mac 7500.

Called Emily Howell by its creator, music professor David Cope, the program just released “her” first album, From Darkness, Light, in January.