News tagged ‘iPad’

Site 9to5mac posted several interesting screenshots with iPad's Network System Preferences. These settings even  include Tethering via Bluetooth or USB. Do you think AT&T will allow this?

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Penguin, one of the biggest publishers, gave a very interesting presentation in London. Penguin CEO John Makinson spoke about eBooks, iPad Books and Apps.

Penguin is not using the ePub format for books, rather building the applications in html according to Makinson:

"We will be embedding audio, video and streaming in to everything we do. The .epub format, which is the standard for ebooks at the present, is designed to support traditional narrative text, but not this cool stuff that we’re now talking about".

"So for the time being at least we’ll be creating a lot of our content as applications, for sale on app stores and HTML, rather than in ebooks. The definition of the book itself is up for grabs".

"We don’t know whether a video introduction will be valuable to a consumer. We will only find answers to these questions by trial and error."

Makinson sees ebooks hitting 10% of book sales next year (up from 4%). Take a look at the video:

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Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently traveled to meet with executives at The Wall Street Journal and other publications. Today The Wall Street Journal reports that Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of parent company News Corp., confirmed that the newspaper will be present on the iPad. He also mentioned that Apple gave access to one of the tablet devices.

Mr. Murdoch said the Journal planned to be on Apple Inc.'s iPad tablet computer. "In fact, we've been allowed to work on one, and it's under padlock and key. The key is turned by Apple every night," he said in response to a question. "But we will be on that with The Wall Street Journal." Mr. Murdoch said he believed in a year or so there will be a half dozen or more devices on which consumers will be able to receive newspapers and other media.

Here is the top 5 worst product names according to CNet. Guess who's got first place? Let's watch:

One of the developers enabled a passcode lock in iPad SDK and then decided to type it incorrectly for a few times. After 5th try iPad proposed to make an emergency call.

This option looks pretty obscure but can be explained as a following to FCC regulations, that demand wireless phones to be able to make emergency calls (even in the cases when the device isn't currently active or assigned a number).

Jobs claimed at the iPad's keynote that it has a built-in speaker and mic, so does it really can make normal calls in addition to emergency calls?

The Examiner reporter Daryl Reino claimed yesterday the March 26 for iPad's release date is "very likely". He said he has information from some unnamed Apple store manager in Southern California.

Daryl also reported Apple employees will start training March 10, and the official commercials will begin to air on TV starting March 15. It will be emphasizing the e-book capabilities of the device. Those who camp out for the new device will receive some "special gift".

As we wrote before, some manufacturing bottleneck has been lengthening the production terms, but Daryl said it will not delay the launch of iPad (though the number of devices will be much more limited).

As you remember, Steve Jobs clearly said at the iPad's presentation that the device will have a 1 GHz A4 Chip. But after that event there was no information given about this secret two-letter name "A4". And this isn't usual, as almost every company reports the specification of every announced device before it'll come to market.

Later it was rumored that the chip is based on Cortex A9 with dual cores. But finally Arstechnica author Jon Stokes revealed that A4 is a 1 GHz custom system-on-chip with a single Cortex A8 Core and a PowerVR SGX GPU. Though the information is not announced publicly, the author is sure it is true.

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Analyst Peter Misek from Canaccord Adams had issued a report about Apple. It says that iPhones sales are better than expected, but the iPad production has some "manufacturing bottleneck", that can cause a delay of the sales start.

"An unspecified production problem at the iPad’s manufacturer, Hon Hai Precision, will likely limit the launch region to the US and the number of units available to roughly 300K in the month of March, far lower than the company’s initial estimate of 1,000K units. The delay in production ramp will likely impact Apple’s April unit estimate of 800K as well. It is also possible that, given the limited number of units available in March, the launch will be delayed for a month".

He also thinks such a delay won't affect iPad sales in 2010 and 2011 (approximately 1,2 million and 3.5 million units respectively).

After the unveiling of iPad in January most of us understood that it looks like enlarged iPod Touch. French web-resourse Begeek.fr decided to think about what should we expect from Apple in the next years,  so look what they concocted:

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Yesterday the Associated Press announced plans to create a new unit named "AP Gateway". It will focus on creating an application for mobile platforms and particularly for iPad tablet device.

It is likely that their app will require a paid subscription, but at first it may appear as free, according to AP senior vice president Jane Seagrave.

AP Gateway will work with local news affiliates to create package of their own content.

Other publishers are still expressing concern over the profit that will be shared with Apple and the latter's unwillingness to report information about subscribers (which is important for marketing and tailoring publisher's content).

Since only one month remains to iPad's launch, such hardware manufacturers as SDI Technologies, Gelaskins Inc., Sanho Corp. and Griffin Technology gear up their production of chargers, sticker covers and other accessories for a new device. And it is not surprising - according to Poper Jaffray & Co, overall sales of iPod and iPhone accessories in 2009 were about $3.7 billion.

But while these companies want to release their products as soon as possible, some other accessory manufacturers are taking a wait-and-see approach. Jonathan von Rentzell, a representative for Blue Microphones commented on this:

"If you're making it for a product, you want to make sure there's a market."

Steve Jobs already showed 2 key accessories for the iPad - a case and a keyboard dock with charging function. Both of them are created by Apple and will be sold separately with iPad.

The Wall St. Journal published a small article about Adobe Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen's talk at the Goldman Sachs technology conference this week. Adobe's CEO spoke on his view of why the iPad wasn't equipped to play Flash:

Narayen said Apple's decision likely had everything to do with its business model as it tries to keep a proprietary, closed system so everything goes through its iTunes store, and has nothing to do with the Flash technology. He said about 85 of the top 100 Web sites in the world use Flash, and 75% of the video on the Web today is in Flash, including Google Inc.'s (GOOG) YouTube, News Corp.'s (NWS) Hulu and broadcasters such as ABC and Fox.

Flash will be on every Android device sold at the end of the year. It will also be on Nokias, Palm Pres, Windows Mobile, Blackberries and just about anything else with an ARM Cortex processor. Not to mention 98% of all the Macs and PCs (and Windows/ChomeOS Tablets) throughout the world. It looks like Apple has it's own vision of what is good and bad for the business.

Though iPad will be launched only in March, some geeks are already creating interesting accessories for it. Designer Hiphandmaids is among them - he created the wildly risqué quilted cotton sleeve and named it iMaxi. It snugly wraps around the iPad and keeps it dry and clean, while you're feeling embarrassing every time you open it. The author said about it:

"It shields your iPad from all those unsightly data leaks that would make any motherboard worry!"

Macrumors found interesting information in the latest Beta 3 iPad SDK. Apple's private framework which controls the camera, has 3 additional camera characteristics that are not found in the iPhone 3.x SDK:

It looks like Apple built in API support to test if your iPad had a Front Facing Camera, Zoom and a Camera Flash. The front facing camera could be used for video chat, while Zoom and Camera Flash are often requested features for the iPhone's back camera.

9to5Mac made further investigation and found the following icons which clearly show an interface to accept or decline a video chat:

The size of these buttons show that they will be used on the the iPad's screen rather than the iPhone.

It is still unknown, if these new features will be available in the first version of iPad. We hope to see them in future versions of the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

Apple has added the ability to set the wallpaper for iPad Home Screen in the latest beta 3 of the iPhone OS 3.2 SDK. Such functionality is not currently available for iPhones and iPod Touches.

On iPad in the Photos app when you select an image, you can choose to set it as the "Lock Screen" or "Home Screen" wallpaper (or both). It is also possible to have different images as the lock screen and home screen wallpapers. Here are the screenshots: