iPad - page 300

The Apple store is back online, US customers can pre-order up to two iPads each for April 3 delivery.

Updates on what else is new on the store to come.

Update 2: Apple is sending out emails confirming the 5.30 AM PST/8.30 AM EST time, according to TidBits and others. Emails were sent to customers who signed up for pre-order info (I signed up but didn’t get the message for some reason).

Update: Reader Bob Penn says the staff at his local Apple store insists that pre-orders begin at midnight. I for one will be staying up until the witching hour just to see.

Pre-oders for the iPad start at 5.30 AM PST on Friday March 12, Apple PR told TUAW. That’s 8.30 AM for East Coasters.

Better set your alarm clocks.

All models of the iPad will be available for pre-order, but only the Wi-Fi model will ship on April 3. The 3G model won’t be available until late April.

As the first example of what will likely be a growing trend, Google — always a progressive front runner in getting their products on Apple’s devices as soon as humanly possible — have just revealed an iPad-friendly version of Google Reader called Google Reader Play.

Google Reader Play makes RSS feeds more accessible to tablet users by treating each news feed like a Flickr slideshow. Only one news item is shown at a time: each is recommended based on what a subscriber has previously liked. It also pulls items and shared articles from a subscriber’s own Google Reader account.

It’s not quite iPad ready just yet — load Google Reader Play up on your iPhone and you’ll quickly discover you can’t swipe to flip to the next item, which is an obligatory interface feature for the iPhone OS — but I’d expect all of these tablet-specific problems to be resolved by April 3rd.

[via Gadget Lab]

With just a few weeks to go before the iPad hits stores, here’s the best way to ensure you’re at the head of the line to get one (or three).

If history is any indication, the iPad will be in short supply when it goes on sale April 3. Plus there are rumors of production delays that may further constrain supply.

The best way to get one is to place an advance order on Apple’s online store the minute Apple starts accepting them on Friday March 12.

Trouble is, no one knows what time Apple will update its online store. But there’s a way to get alerted.

Thanks to a bunch of nerds in Berlin, you can be pinged the minute the store is taken offline and, more importantly, when it comes back up.

AppleStoreCheck.com constantly monitors Apple’s online store for changes. Sign up, and the service will alert you by email, RSS or Twitter the minute Apple starts taking iPad pre-orders.

As AppleStoreCheck says: “We’ll check the Apple Store for new products and changes – so you don’t have to.”

iPad pre-orders will initially be limited to US customers, but includes both iPad Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi+3G models, which will ship later. The iPad will be available to pick up from the Apple Retail stores on April 3, or delivery through the mail.

Digital Americana has just popped up out of nowhere, claiming to be “the first literary & culture magazine developed especially for the interactive tablet experience.”

Or to put it another way, it will be “a new interactive magazine made exclusively for the Apple iPad”. And anyone can contribute.

Back in January, we reported on the blurry images of some ancient Apple Newton prototypes that were doing the rounds on the internets.

Since then, Grant Hutchinson, who was mentioned in that article, has taken a fantastic set of photos of the Newton “Cadillac” prototype. We asked him if we could show you some of those photos here, and he kindly said yes.

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]

You’re probably already familiar with Vers’ signature line of wooden cases for the iPhone and iPod Touch. No surprise in the wake of the iPad’s announcement, then, that they have just announced a new wooden iPad Case, which (for $80) will ensconce your tablet in dead cedar flesh.

It looks pretty good, and I like the built-in kickstand, but personally, I’ve never quite understood the appeal of wooden casesl, but that might have more to do with my hysterical phobia of slicing a splinter through the fleshy web between my thumb and forefinger than any real failure of the concept.

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.

In his emails to Apple customers who take the time to write him and ask him questions, Steve Jobs usually comes across as a really busy guy who, despite his workload, is really trying his best to maintain a human, one-on-one connection to his customers.

On some other occasions, though, Jobs will occasionally comes across as a devastating master of pith, capable of infusing a few matter-of-fact words with a palpably scornful undercurrent, as if — if he wasn’t just so darn busy all the time — he might instead muse for a few hundred words on just what it must be like to be as stupid as the quivering, moronic biomass to which he must deign to pander… and of which his correspondent is just one molecularly small part.

Whether the specific email from Jobs that is the subject of this post comes across as the former type of Jobsian communiqué or the latter is up to you. Either way, it contains at least one new bit of information about the iPad: you won’t be able to tether it to your iPhone.

Apple just premiered the very first iPad commercial during the first ad break of tonight’s Academy Awards. It was very good, just a rock song and demoing every imaginable feature while continually rotating from portrait to landscape. We’ll post as soon as Apple or Youtube does. Embed from Engadget now in post. Real Apple version here.

Thanks for the finds, Mitchell and Paolo!

Edit: And CNET caught Steve Jobs on the red carpet.

It’s official! After a month and a half of eager anticipation, Apple has announced the U.S. launch date of the iPad.

You’ll be able to pick up the iPad WiFi on April 3rd, with the iPad 3G coming later in the month.

Pre-orders start next Friday on March 12th through Apple’s online store.

International roll-out in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK of both the iPad WiFi and iPad 3G will happen in late April.

Hurrah! The end is in sight! So much for those rumored delays: this puts the iPad launch exactly within the 60-90 day launch window Steve Jobs promised on January 27th.

Who else will be compulsively refreshing Apple.com on March 12th along with me?

Press release after the fold.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdExukJVUGI

We’ve already got a good handle on how periodical publishers intend on using the iPad to revitalize their businesses, but what about book publishers? Outside of just having another e-book platform to publish for, how can the iPad’s incredible multimedia and interactive capabilities be leveraged to transform the way we experience literature?

On Tuesday, Penguin Books’ CEO John Makinson tried to answer just those questions, demonstrating some upcoming books that will be coming to the iPad. Perhaps the most impressive demo was for the iPad version of the beloved children’s book, Where’s Spot? which has been transformed into an adorable interactive learning app. Penguin’s not stopping there: their Vampire Academy e-book is “an online community for vampire lovers” that features live chat between readers (a nice touch, but parents might get their heckles up at the idea of a real-life Edward Cullen prowling for pre-teens in the pages of their cildren’s book) , while a Paris travel guide switches to street map view when it’s put on a table.

Just a shade over nine years ago, Apple launched iTunes, a fairly late, fairly average MP3 player with CD burning built in. And though it lacked many of the features of Audion, then the best music player for Mac, it not only became the market leader, but it set the stage for the iPod, widespread legal music downloads, legal TV, the iPhone, and soon the iPad. It would be no exaggeration to say that iTunes saved Apple. It would be no exaggeration to say that iTunes is now Apple’s most successful piece of software ever in terms of users.

But it would also be no exaggeration to call it the worst piece of software Apple makes and the one thing that could disrupt Apple’s current march to mobile device dominance. It has bloated into a crashy kludge that the rest of the Apple universe depends upon. Despite a lot of good intentions from amazing software developers, iTunes has become Apple’s Internet Explorer 6 — an unmitigated disaster.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzhFiC9vsZQ

It was bound to happen: every new Apple product announcement inevitably becomes the lure for some unscrupulous scumbucket’s latest scam, and the iPad certainly wasn’t going to be any different. But the latest online scam to prominently feature an Apple product seems a bit more dastardly than most. According to security firm Sophos, a new iPad scam has hit Facebook, and far from giving you a free iPad, it could cost you a pretty penny.

The scam starts innocently enough: you are directed to a Facebook page which reads “iPad Researchers Wanted — Want to beta test Apple’s latest product?” The page then goes on to encourage you to become a fan and to recruit your friends, claiming propagation of the scam will increase your chances of being accepted into the beta.

But here’s the insidious part: go to the page brings up a pop-up window, claiming to be a quiz that you need to fill out to be eligible for the beta… and the quiz asks for your permission to get your date of birth and cellphone number from Facebook.

“That’s where the scam happens,” says Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. The hackers who created this page are trying to sign you up for a premium rate cellphone service, that will charge you something like $10 a week until you unsubscribe.”

The good news here is Sophos alerted Facebook, who quickly pulled the scam… but the bad news is, it’s doubtlessly going to pop right back up again.

The lesson here, of course, is if it’s too good to be true, it always is… and Apple’s never going to let a schmuck like you or me beta test its new products.

For hardcore users, the iPad’s WiFi-only SKUs may seem like “why bother” affairs… especially given the $30 month-by-month data plan AT&T is offering to customers who pick up the marginally more expensive 3G version.

But AT&T doesn’t see it that way at all: in fact, speaking in a financial conference call this week, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has flat-out warned Ma Bell investors that they shouldn’t expect a huge upswing in new subscribers when the iPad launches.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb73TtAB3Dw

There’s enough left over bits of iPhone-specific functions diffused through the iPad SDK to be skeptical of any claims of unannounced telephony “features” in Apple’s forthcoming tablet, but this one’s getting a bit of bit of press: enable passcode lock on your iPad, enter your code wrong five times in a row, and you suddenly have the functionality to slide for an emergency call, just like on the iPhone.

It seems just like residual iPhone functionality crawling around the iPad SDK, but 9to5Mac thinks it could be something more: they point out that FCC regulations mandate that all cellphones must be able to place emergency calls even without a contract.

I seriously doubt that’s what is going on here. 3G is not the same as voice, and the FCC doesn’t enforce the “emergency call” functionality on 3G-only devices. If they did, your 3G netbook or Kindle would have to be able to make emergency 911 calls. This is just residual code… but hey, it makes for a good headline.

Axiotron, makers of the thing that was closest to being an iPad before the iPad was announced – the Modbook – are not going to give in without a fight. No sir.

They’ve sent out a press release today, announcing a new promotion for buyers of all new Modbooks. Something they hope will make customers think twice before buying an iPad.

Even before Apple unveiled the iPad, I was curious if their tablet-device would be able to function as a small secondary display to desktop Macs. I’ve long liked the idea Mimo’s miniature displays: a ten-inch secondary display isn’t enough screen real estate to add to productivity, but they are great places to corral widgets, contact lists and the like. I would never buy one specifically for that functionality, though, which is what made the notion of the iPad doubling as one so appealing.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the iPad will functionally work as a secondary desktop display out of the box, but David Klein over at The Apple Blog still thinks that the iPad could function as a peripheral, widget-based display through App Store offerings.

Over at Ars Technica, Jon Stokes ponders why a company as prone to chest-thumping as Apple has been so curiously mum about the iPad’s A4 processor and ultimately comes to an interesting conclusion: Apple hasn’t talked much about the A4 CPU because it’s not really anything special.

In fact, according to Stokes’ sources, Apple’s A4 appears to be nothing fancier than a single core ARM Cortex A8 CPU clocked at 1GHz coupled with a PowerVR SGX GPU. The iPad gets its performance gains largely from stripping away the I/O hardware from the jack-of-all-trades A8 that it doesn’t need.

The best point of the piece, though, is that Apple’s never really been about the hardware: they’ve been about the total experience. As Stokes points out:

[T]he iPad is actually a lot like the Mac. The Mac combines commodity hardware with great industrial design and a superior user experience. The iPad aims to do the same, but under a new compute paradigm that replaces the venerable keyboard-and-monitor combo with a slate form factor, and the decades-old WIMP-based UI (Windows Icons Menus Pointer) with multitouch.

In other words, the iPad is no different than any other Apple product: a fusion of existing hardware, perfectly realized software and world-class design. Getting hung up on the CPU is beside the point.

A joke so obvious that the humor-bereft Mad TV joke-writing bullpen thought it up two years ago? Sure. Moreover, there’s better reasons to think Apple’s choice of the iPad moniker is a terrible branding mistake.

Even so, you might consider dropping $40 on this iMaxi Apple iPad Case being sold by the Atwoodian Etsy outfit Hip Handmaids… if only because, as a device touched by God, it may very well suffer from the occasional stigmata.

The iPad’s hardware keyboard dock is the best hope for users looking to do serious writing on Apple’s latest device, but if a picture posted by MacRumors forum-goer macduke is anything to go by, it might also reveal some of the tablet’s still unannounced software capabilities.

Although the iPad keyboard dock is mostly similar to the Apple aluminum keyboard, the function keys have been replaced by various shortcut buttons. From left to right, these keys are: Home, Search, Brightness Down, Brightness Up, Photo Album, Keyboard Toggle, Blank, Skip Back, Play / Pause, Skip Forward, Mute, Volume Up, Volume Down and Lock Screen.

That all seems straight-forward enough, but it’s that Blank key above the 6 that is causing a flurry of speculation. Apple doesn’t leave blank function keys on its laptop keyboards, which the iPad’s keyboard dock is most similar to. Therefore, it seems hard to believe that Apple couldn’t think of a perfectly good use for that key.

Now, the image itself was initially posted over at iLounge, snapped at the January 27th iPad announcement. Is it possible that key is blank so as not to leak some yet-announced feature of the iPad? Say, a dashboard, or perhaps (even better) a multitasking app switch screen? No word from Apple yet… but we should know within a month.

Update: Reader Seth points out that there’s a lot of commentary on this exact same issue over at 9to5Mac.

Ladies, gentlemen, please stifle the gasps and shrieks of surprise that the following announcement may well startle out of you. I recommend pushing your first into your mouth until your lips are elastically wrapped around your wrist.

Ready? Good. Prepare for a shock. According to Apple’s latest iPad SDK Beta 3 documantation, the iPad uses Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR SGX Graphics Hardware for its GPU, just like the iPhone and iPod Touch.

I can see by your expressions that you didn’t find his revelation quite as heart-stopping as I thought you might. A steely nerved bunch, I see.

I suppose you’re right, though: iPhone and iPod Touch Apps have been confirmed as being fully backwards compatible with the iPad, despite the latter device’s significantly larger touchscreen display. That implies similar guts. It was probably to be taken as read that Apple, an investor in Imagination Technologies, wasn’t going to go too far afield of the iPhone’s architectural pairing of an ARM-based CPU and a PowerVR SGX GPU.

So not, perhaps, a revelation at all, but this should at least comfort existing app developers, who now know for certain they are working mostly with hardware elements they are familiar with. Even so, Apple warns: “[B]ecause the processor, memory architecture, and screen dimensions are different for iPad, you should always test your code on an iPad device before shipping to ensure performance meets your requirements.”

[via MacRumors]

Danish newspaper Information‘s latest cover was a delightfully dead pulp fake of the iPad’s touchscreen display.

The cover story is the same “print is dead” piece we’ve seen countless times before, prophesying that the only future of publishing is digital, with the iPad as one of many Messiah-like devices that must be embraced by the public in order to save the traditional print industry.

Well, the iPad certainly isn’t going to hurt the chances of print, but if the recent reports that the New York Times is considering charging its subscribers $30 a month for the iPad version is anything to go by, the biggest hurdle is going to be getting old media to run their businesses more intelligently and efficiently in the digital age… and nothing Steve Jobs can do is going to help them with that.

[via TUAW]

A potentially revolutionary way to stream next-gen video games to hardware technically too underpowered to run those titles natively, thin client OnLive might be the best thing to happen to gaming since, well, the Internet.

Essentially, the technology works by making a game into an interactive, streaming video, rendering all the gameplay on a beefy server, compressing the video and shooting it off to you as you play. Imagine, for example, playing a shooter like Crysis — which can cripple even a top-of-the-line PC — on your iPhone. Actually, scratch that, because you don’t really have to: at this year’s DICE Summit in Las Vegas, OnLive CEO Steve Perlman gave a brief demonstration of Crysis running on Apple’s handheld.

If the idea of playing full-featured, next-gen games on your iPhone doesn’t get you excited, it gets better: Perlman has also confirmed that OnLive will support tablets, clearly giving a wink and a nod to the iPad.

The only question is: will OnLive be able to solve the latency issues inherent in the thin client gaming approach? Perlman swears it’s feasible, as long as each OnLive user is within 100 miles of a server, but a high ping’s a deadly thing in an FPS. OnLive could very well be a revolution… but at the end of the day, I think we’ll be more likely to be playing slower-paced games like Civilization V through our iPad OnLive client than Crysis.