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The iPad 2 has beaten off competition to earn the top tablet rating in a recent Consumer Reports test. Devices tested along with the iPad 2 included tablets from Archos, Dell, Motorola, Samsung and ViewSonic. In a press release issued on Tuesday, electronics editor Paul Reynolds said that Apple’s device is ahead of its competitors on both quality and price:

So far, Apple is leading the tablet market in both quality and price, which is unusual for a company whose products are usually premium priced.

Each tablet was evaluated in 17 criteria, which included touch screen responsiveness, versatility, portability, screen flare, and ease of use. The iPad 2 topped the ratings, scoring ‘excellent’ in nearly every category.

Apple’s chief competition for the time being is the Motorola Xoom – which boasts the same 10-inch screen as the iPad but adds a built-in memory card reader and support for Adobe Flash. However, the Xoom’s $800 price tag doesn’t do it any favors.

The biggest difference between the 10 tablets tested was battery life. Obviously the iPad 2 came top with an impressive 12.2 hours of use, while the Archos 70 Internet Tablet could only manage an embarrassing 3.8 hours.

The first generation iPad was also part of the test, beating many of the other tablets but drawing equal with the Xoom.

So, it’s official – right now the iPad 2 is the best tablet available. But you already knew that.

A lawsuit filed by Mirror Worlds LLC related to patents which they claim Apple infringes in Cover Flow has been successfully appealed. On Monday a federal judge overturned a jury’s verdict and ruled that Apple was not guilty of patent infringement, which could have cost the Cupertino company $625.5 million.

U.S District Judge Leonard Davis said that the evidence wasn’t enough to support the damage award:

“Mirror Worlds may have painted an appealing picture for the jury, but it failed to lay a solid foundation sufficient to support important elements it was required to establish under the law. The evidentiary record is insufficient to support the jury’s damage awards.”

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One of the big questions everyone’s asking about the iPhone at the moment is whether or not a fifth generation device will launch this summer. According to a new report from Korean site ETNews.co.kr, Apple is planning to release the iPhone 5 during the 4th week of June, with Korean carriers SK Telecom and KT among the first providers to offer the device:

iPhone 5, the next model of iPhone 4, will be released on the coming 4th week of June. In the midst of the iPhone 5 postponement rumors, Apple has confirmed that iPhone 5 will be released as planned and it will be released simultaneously in Korea through SK Telecom and KT.

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Since its refresh in October 2010, the popularity of Apple’s MacBook Air has been rapidly increasing according to new research by J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz. Sales of the device have seen a 333% year-over-year rise, with a projected annual revenue of a whopping $2.2 billion.

Moskowitz said in his research note:

“We believe that the growth rate of the MacBook Air stands to moderate, but we expect the product to exhibit increasing contribution to the overall Mac business,” Moskowitz wrote. “(The fourth quarter of calendar 2010) was the first quarter in which the MacBook Air accounted for greater than 10% of total Apple Mac units. More importantly, the MacBook Air accounted for 15% of total notebook sales during the quarter, versus 5% in the prior year.”

The latest refresh to the MacBook Air line introduced an ultraportable 11.6-inch model – a perfect alternative to users looking for the portability of a netbook but with the stability of a Mac. When the device first launched back in January of 2008, a 13-inch machine was the only option, with a starting price of $1,799. Now there are two machines to choose from, both of which come equipped with SSD hard drives as standard, starting at just $999.

It’s believed that the lower starting price and a choice of two notebooks are the main reasons behind the growth in popularity of the MacBook Air.

[via MacRumors]

Earlier today, two men and a woman tried to rob the Apple Store in Otay Ranch Town Center, Chula Vista, San Diego. They failed, and after a shootout with a security guard on duty, one of the men is dead.

Shipping times for the iPad 2 from the Apple online store have dropped today, with new orders now facing a wait of 2-3 weeks down from the previous 3-4 weeks. The new shipping times aren’t just U.S. specific either – they apply to every country in which the iPad 2 is currently available.

A reduction in the shipping delay of the second generation iPad is a sign Apple is clearly dealing with the overwhelming demand of the device’s international launch.

On Sunday an untethered jailbreak for devices running iOS 4.3.1 was finally released by the Dev-Team in the shape of PwnageTool and redsn0w. However, early jailbreakers are reporting that the exploit is causing issues with Wi-Fi on their devices.

I0n1c – aka Stefan Esser – is the brains behind the jailbreak, and confirmed the problem in a tweet earlier today. However, it seems users are only experiencing the issue with certain routers.

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.

By not bother sweating about the contracts with the labels until after the service was live and leveraging their massive Amazon S2 cloud server cluster for quick rollout, Amazon was able to leap-frog Apple and Google into the cloud with Cloud Locker, a stream-anywhere digital locker for multimedia files.

Now it looks like Amazon wants to try to do it again, this time with mobile payments, and while they may not beat Google and Apple to the punch on NFC, they’ve already got all the rest of the infrastructure in place to use the competition’s NFC chips when they finally start rolling out to handsets.

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.

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.

It’s hard to recall now, but the number-one complaint about the iPhone when it first came out was the on-screen keyboard.

Engadget’s Ryan Block asked: “Will the iPhone be undone by its keyboard?” People talked about how on-screen typing would destroy the iPhone in the same way that the hand-writing recognition system helped kill the Newton.

Even more incredibly, one of the main iPad criticisms when it first came out was the visibility of finger smudges on the screen when you turn the power off.

These concerns seem quaint now, textbook examples of the limited human-ape mind trying to grapple with novelty. It’s like people complaining about their new “motor car” a hundred years ago by saying the infernal contraption fails to slow down when they say, “whoa, Nellie!” and won’t speed up when they whip the fender with a riding crop. “It’ll never catch on!”

Many annoying tech pundits (including and especially Yours Truly) bitched and moaned about Apple’s global ban on the sale of third-party physical keyboard and refusal to create one of their own.

I believe Apple deliberately used its red-hot iPhone product to force the world to accept and learn to appreciate on-screen keyboards, and break them of their physical keyboard habit. When Apple released the iPad a year ago, it was usable with two Apple keyboards (the standard Bluetooth keyboard and a new cradle keyboard). But no matter. The on-screen keyboard idea had already been accepted by a critical mass of users.

Despite widespread acceptance, people are still divided on whether on-screen keyboards are good or bad, and most still prefer a physical keyboard. But let’s look at the big picture.

Concerned citizens in Kentucky can report “suspicious activity” to their state branch of Homeland Security through an iPhone app.

Called Eyes and Ears of Kentucky, the app is offered gratis on iTunes. The handiwork of developers NICUSA, it has been in the store since March 7. So far, it has not received enough reviews to reach an average rating. Through the app, you can report a suspicious incident or activity along with details about the alleged subjects and their vehicles.

Unlike iFixIt’s gag, this Playmobil Apple Store Playset isn’t a real product, but if enough people are interested and Apple’s lawyers look the other way, maybe it could be.

From the description:

A quick peek at the miniature Genius Bar and we were feeling a bit woozy. Then we saw the tiny Steve Jobs presenting in the Keynote Theater on the top floor and that was it. Our wallets popped out faster than you can say Jonathan Ive and we plunked down whatever money was needed to own this amazing playset.

Of course, once we had the playset, we had to get the optional Line Pack to simulate our own exciting Apple product launches. Since it comes with a tiny Woz on a tiny Segway, it was a no-brainer. We decided that Apple & PLAYMOBIL™ together is the most unlikely and awesome collaboration ever. It changes everything.

Think Geek’s brought its April Fool’s Day products to market before, so it’s possible this could become real someday.

When you bring in your iPhone for repair, Apple has a nasty habit of replacing your iPhone’s standard Phillip’s Head screws with proprietary pentalobular torx screws, which require a very special driver to remove. The result? It becomes all the much harder to repair your iPhone yourself.

iFixIt‘s April Fool’s Day joke this year may be a gag, and a good one, but it’s also a real product: an iPhone Oppression Kit that allows you to replace normal phillips screws with pentalobular ones, or vice versa. $10.

The formula for transforming a stock Apple product into something worthy to be sold for a boatload of money to the most garish of Beverly Hills Frankensteins and gaudiest of Middle Eastern Oil Barons is as old as time: buy something from the Apple Store, drizzle it in glue, then roll it in crushed glass and gold foil and voila: a luxury iProduct.

Here’s the latest: the ZShock Lunatik iPod nano watch case, a product with its audience clearly identified in the title. Diamond-encrustations, white gold, Apple’s second-cheapest iPod, all yours for just $18,000.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFJxt8lZQjg

Jason Bradbury, the self-proclaimed Apple Expert, has discovered a simple hack that allows owners of the iPad 2 to take X-Ray style photographs through clothes. By applying a filter after blasting a subject with infrared light, the iPad 2’s camera can see through clothing. The best part of the hack is that you don’t need any type of training in radiology as it is incredibly simple and utilizes everyday household objects (infrared light and cellophane) to make it work.

The steps are quite simple:

1: Flood a subject with infrared light. Bradbury recommends using a digital camera with a night vision mode, or a children’s toy that uses infrared light. The infrared light penetrates the clothing and will be able to be picked up with the right filter.

2: Cover the camera on your iPad 2 with two layers of cellophane. The cellophane acts filters out the natural light enough to wear the infrared light comes in stronger and is picked up by the iPad 2’s camera lens.

3. Start snapping pictures. With your infrared source in place and your filter setup you are now ready to start taking some amazingly cool photos.

Signs are everywhere that Apple’s iDevices are gaining business cred. Apperian, a development firm making software that allows business to create and manage their own apps, just won $9.5 million in venture capital funding, according to a press release.

Apperian’s star iOS product is a cloud-based platform called EASE they claim is the first to allow large-scale creation and management of apps in a business environment — pretty key if you’ve got, say, 150 salespeople all needing access to the same sales app and whining for support every 15 minutes.

That Apperian managed to net the funding means that investors think EASE will increasingly allow iPads and iPhone’s to elbow their way into the enterprise world — traditionally the domain of RIM and the Blackberry. Apperian is also working on an Android-based version of EASE.

Over at his official Twitter account, iPhone hacker Comex is airing some heady suspicions about Apple’s latest strategy in the cat-and-mouse jailbreak game. The talented hacker behind the Spirit and JailbreakMe 2.0 exploits is suggesting that Apple might have a spy within the iPhone Dev Team itself, allowing Cupertino to close exploits in their iOS software before the Dev Team can release a working jailbreak with them.

Yesterday, Apple opened up registrations for 2011’s WWDC, and within ten hours had already sold out of tickets. The more interesting rumor from yesterday, though, was that Apple would refrain from unveiling the iPhone 5 at this year’s WWDC, instead focusing entirely on software. That would mean that instead of the iPhone 5 shipping in June, as it has historically done, the iPhone 5’s launch would be pushed back until later in the year.

After the initial shock, the rumor sounds extremely likely. The report came from Jim Dalrymple over at The Loop, whose sources are solid. Moreover, the early year launch of the Verizon iPhone and Apple’s continued delay in shipping the white iPhone 4 (while repeatedly promising it’s still coming) all imply that Apple’s not planning the iPhone 5 in June, but will push it until later in the year, to debut before the holiday shopping season.

Over at Slashgear, Chris Davies brings up one interesting point: a late 2011 debut might give Apple more flexibility in making the iPhone 5 4G compatible. Qualcomm’s next LTE chipsets are due out at that point, and will allegedly boast improved power efficiency… the very issue that led Apple to leave LTE support out of the Verizon iPhone earlier this year.

If Apple does delay the iPhone 5 until later in the year, it’s all the more likely we’ll see a sizable update boasting 4G capability. For Verizon users, that means LTE; unfortunately, on AT&T, their HSPA+ “4G” smartphones are actually throttled to be slower than their regular 3G phones. If the iPhone does go 4G later this year, the Verizon iPhone 5 is going to be the clear winner: AT&T’s 4G network is a disgrace, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get substantially better anytime soon.

Late tonight, Amazon took the wraps off of Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, free services for network storage and playback of MP3s and DRM-free iTunes audio files. Just as Ed predicted. Anyone with an Amazon account can sign up for 5 GB of space, and then you just upload your music library for access through any Flash-based browser or a brand-new Android app. From now forward, any Amazon MP3 store purchase will automatically be added to your Cloud Drive and won’t count against your storage quota. Larger capacities are available at $1 per GB per year starting at 20 GB.

In almost every regard, it’s exactly like Lala, the totally amazing cloud music service that Apple bought almost a year and a half ago and then promptly shut down. The only difference is that Lala also offered 10-cent song purchases for cloud-only use (as opposed to downloaded for offline use). This makes it all the more ridiculous that Apple still doesn’t have a cloud music service released. We’ve been hearing for some time that the iTunes Locker will arrive any day to offer something comparable, but Amazon’s move shows just how much Apple has slow-played its move toward streaming.

It would actually be fascinating to see Amazon release an iOS client for Cloud Player to really hold Apple’s feet to the fire. My over-riding concern with what I’ve heard about iTunes Locker is that Apple wouldn’t even match Lala’s old ability to offer songs from your entire music library and would instead offer access only to iTunes purchases. With Amazon offering something this simple and successful, Apple will have to go all out. This is why real competition is a very good thing for Apple users — it forces the company to leap over its own bar, not just hit it. Moreover, it will mean pushing ahead even if terms with record labels aren’t perfectly favorable.

— Sent in by everyone in my Twitter feed.

UPDATE: I’ve just discovered that if you visit your Cloud Drive through Mobile Safari, it is possible to play back audio on an iPhone, but only one track at a time through downloads. Hardly a useable solution, but an interesting trick nonetheless.

Now, far more useful is that you can also play back video loaded into the Cloud Drive on an iPhone, so long as it’s in a format Safari supports (preferably H.264). Amazon isn’t making a big deal out of video yet, but there is definite potential here. Especially if the geniuses at VLC or Plex figure out how to pull down a stream from your Cloud Drive…

Apple Insider is reporting that a bomb threat has been made against Apple’s Elk Grove, California distribution center, with three builds evacuated as the threat is assessed.

As he seems to do every year, Apple CEO Steve Jobs not only made Barron’s list of the world’s most valuable CEOs… he was declared “without a doubt” the most valuable one.

Taking his place amongst bigwigs like Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathwawy), Reed Hastings (Netflix) and more, Steve Jobs is cited for racking up 100 million iPhones sold, the release of the iPad and Apple’s incredible golden touch overall.

Barron’s list of most valuable CEOs isn’t a popularity contest: it’s based on the objective metric of stock performance, which has been on such an upward trajectory for the past few years that seemingly the only thing that can sink it is Jobs’ retirement (and even then, given the talent and culture Jobs has put together over at Apple, only temporarily).

This isn’t the first distinction Barron’s has awarded Apple this year: back in February, Barron’s handed Apple its second Most Respected Company award in as many years.

Apple has been using Liquid Contact Indicators(LCI) in practically all of their devices for as long as I can remember, but it looks like with the iPad 2 they’ve stopped using them.

This makes sense because these sensors have not been all that reliable and subject to a lot of false positives from something as mundane as sweat. In 2009 this was a big news topic that I covered for CNET and I spoke to local Channel 2 news in Houston, Texas about complaints they had received from iPhone users. Even CNN had something to say about it.

It was so easy to trip these sensors that there was even a lawsuit over it.