Over the past couple of weeks lots of baseless and sometimes conflicting rumors seem to have floated around regarding Apple’s plans for the iPad and the iPhone.  A lot of this is probably related to the total lack of official information about the next iPad generation in a moment in time in which everyone is expecting it to come next week. Everyone expects Apple to announce a second generation iPad either in February or in March and the large number of announcements from all the companies trying to get a piece of the pie is just making everyone everyone even more anxious for some information. ...

Update: The original title of this post might have been interpreted as if the publication was being discontinued.  This is not the case.  I’m sorry for the possible confusion. Since the ipad-only newspaper “The Daily” came out, I have done my best to check out every issue.  Sometimes I wasn’t able to because the app just wasn’t working and other times I simply missed the window of opportunity as there seems to be no way for you to get an issue that came out during the interval between your activation of the app. When I was able to get an issue, I went through it and...

Just yesterday I had a quick chat with Fabiano Teixeira,  a good friend and colleague, about HP’s Touchpad, Although brief it provided me with substantial food for thought.   It started with my friend asking me about a link that he had just received on Skype when he logged on in his iPhone.  In general the conversation went a bit like this… Fabiano asks me what is the link for and I reply that it will take him to pictures of the Touchpad.  As he’s been involved with a several complex issues in both his professional and personal life I knew he hadn’t had the time to catch up...

Following all the live blogs coming out of HP’s webOS event one thing seems clear: the Apple integrated software+hardware model crushes the Google/Microsoft generic OS model.  HP’s tablet shows unique features such as integration with webOS phones by proximity which will set it apart from all the iPad-wannabes running Android. HP clearly did the right thing in deciding to acquire Palm to take the same approach to tablets that Apple takes with all its products.  In the TouchPad and Pre 3 devices shown today HP scored points for its platform and helped Apple drive another nail in the coffin...

The latest effort in producing an iPad competitor to gain attention is that of Motorola and its Xoom tablet.  Motorola did a great job with its teaser campaign which featured a video on the history of tablets, which showed the last step as something covered in cloth.  The device seems to have pretty decent hardware specs, but as I have made the point once or twice in the past, the hardware is secondary.  What really maters is the software. It’s time for another competitor’s reality check. Apart from having a significant disadvantage in available software, essentially zero to over 60,000...

My recent comments on News Corp.’s recently launched The Daily weren’t the most flattering I’ve written about an iPad App, but they mainly concerned how the usability could be improved.  Now, after trying to read a couple more issues of The Daily, it seems to me that the only way to really improve the experience is not to attempt to open the app. It doesn’t open anyway, while leaving you forever with a black screen and the a loading message which precedes a crash which dumps you back to the iOS home screen. In essence, it just doesn’t work.  I’ve seen others...

This week saw the debut of News Corporation’s iPad-specific newspaper.  As just about everyone else that uses an iPad or that has an interest in publication I was eager to get a look at what they had come up with and was quick to download the App. At first I was quite impressed with the App, as its graphical presentation is quite stunning.  The Daily starts out with a brief splash animation and drops you into a carousel of beautiful pages which spins by itself every few seconds. A deeper look into the publication, however, revealed that most articles are actually quite shallow, ending just as I...

Exactly one year ago, Steve Jobs introduced the iPad to the world. There were a lot of skeptics back then, telling everyone how the iPad would be a flop as it had no USB ports, camera or SD card reader.  Well, during the past year Apple sold almost 15 million iPads taking the world of mobile computing by storm. In this single year over 60,000 Apps designed specifically for the iPad have been made available on the App Store, making the iPad not only a great hardware product but one which is very, very expandable.  These third party applications range from business oriented to gaming and mostly are...

James Murdoch, head of News Corp.’s operations in Europe and Asia, confirmed that the iPad based digital newspaper should be available sometime in February.   A lot of rumors and speculation have been going around this subject over the past two months but it seems that it is now official. The newspaper will be available in subscription form for 99 cents per week. It will be interesting to see just how well iPad users will receive this initiative.  In order for the Daily to succeed it will depend heavily not only on having good content but on having a good app implementation which makes it...

I just ran into the most intriguing post on Mac Observer: What if Apple continues iPad 1 sales after April.  When you stop to think about it, it might just make a lot of sense for Apple to do so.  There seems to be no lack of people interested in buying the current generation iPad and making it available as the low cost entry point into the iPad ecosystem might just help to bury all those competitors lining up for their shot at the iPad. After a year it can probably be argued that it costs a lot less to make the current model iPad than it did when it was introduced and it might take on the role of...

It seems that a number of people have come to the conclusion that the much talked about HiRes display (2048×1536) might make it into the third generation of the iPad, but probably not the iPad 2.  Just recently we published a post which argued this point, though coming at it with a different angle than MacRumors and PC World. Both of these sites have posts which comment on analyst opinions on the feasibility of Apple getting manufacturers to produce such a high resolution display, of such small size and in enough quantities.  That is certainly a valid point.  On the other hand, even considering...

Almost a year after the iPad was first unveiled, it is impossible to deny just how successful a product it is.  Apple’s latest quarterly numbers should be proof enough for all but the most self delusional.  Recently, however, I’ve been more and more impressed with the number of such self delusional people that have shifted from saying that the iPad isn’t going to be all that successful to saying that as soon as there is competition, other companies will be sharing in all the interest it generated in tablets. Excuse me… Reality check time!  The iPad didn’t really...

A lot of speculation has been going on around the screen resolution of the second generation iPad.  There is mounting evidence that Apple is preparing for a future, higher resolution, version of the iPad but is it version 2? Developer’s dug up higher resolution images of several resources in the built-in and freely downloadable applications from Apple.  These images seem to follow the same naming convention used by Apple to provide two different resolutions for the resources used in iPhone and iPod Touch applications. While it should be obvious that Apple is laying down the groundwork for a...

Perhaps it might be best to be asking what Apple holds in store for 2011…   Coming out of an exceptionally strong year, Apple seems well on its way to repel the assault of Android onto the smartphone market and to consolidating a very strong lead in the tablet market it created with the iPad. The new CDMA version of the iPhone 4 will probably play a big role in helping to restrain the growth of Android competitors in the US as consumers will no longer be forced to use AT&T’s network in order to be able to use the device.  Apple has been consistently delivering a new iPhone model a...

Even though everyone already expected the iPad 2 to come equipped with one or more cameras, it is interesting to have this confirmed.  Images found in beta 2 of iOS 4.3 show the screen of the iPad with three new icons which seem to be fore FaceTime, Camera an Photo Booth applications. This image is used as an overlay to give the user a preview of how the device will look with a new wallpaper. MacRumors has a blowup of the image. While confirming the presence of cameras is interesting in itself, it is very interesting to see that Apple is not only bringing in the camera related functions of the iPhone...