APPLE iPAD

[DrunkenMonkey]

I understand that you claimed the iPad had all the functionality of the Macbook, which I was assumed was some sort of joke, as you couldn't possibly have been serious.

That wasn't what I said.

[MIKA27]

I generally agree with Chenman's point about marketing. I also think Apple has been very cagey about forced product integration and limited end-user modification ability (without a full-on jailbreak and crack).

My iPhone has been 'jail broken/cracked' for almost 8 months now via Installus/Cidia and I can get all apps for free.

iPads can now also be 'cracked/jail broken'

[OZCUBAN]

iPad invades the corporate world

Despite all claims by PC purists that the iPad is a toy that has no real purpose — especially in the corporate world, there are large enterprises embracing the tablet device. It may be designed as a portable media consumption device for consumers, but the iPad also provides a unique mobile computing platform for business as well.

Bloomberg reports that Wells Fargo has approved the iPad for business use, and that SAP AG, Tellabs Inc., and Daimler AG's Mercedes-Benz unit are all using the Apple iPad for various tasks ranging from email access to empowering the mobile sales force with the tools to approve shipping orders or verify auto financing options.

Apple has sold more than three million iPads already, and analysts estimate that it is on track to continue selling roughly two million more tablets per month. It's a lot of estimates and speculation, but if the statistic that four in ten iPhones are purchased for business use carries over to iPads, that would mean that 1.2 million of the iPads are currently being used for business purposes — and that 800k more are being added each month.

A recent survey found that eight in ten business professionals rely on their smartphone as the primary business communication platform, and would rather give up coffee than surrender the smartphone. The survey also indicated that 34 percent of respondents use on the smartphone more than a PC for business computing, and that seven percent leave the laptop at home and rely purely on the smartphone when travelling.

The reason that business professionals rely on the smartphone so heavily is not that it's a superior communication or computing platform. It comes down to portability and convenience. The desk phone and PC are only functional while you are sitting at your desk, while the smartphone is usually within arm's reach 24/7.

The iPad — or other upcoming tablets like those from HP, Cisco, or LG — provides almost the same degree of portability and convenience, but on a significantly larger display adding more functionality than the smartphone is capable of.

Notebooks are certainly more portable than their desktop PC predecessors, but are very cumbersome and bulky compared to a smartphone. Netbooks provide a smaller, lighter platform with longer battery life in exchange for things like processing power and storage capacity.

Most mobile computing comes down to web surfing, email access, reviewing spreadsheets or business documents, and maybe watching a movie on a long flight. Tablet devices like the iPad offer a hybrid approach combining the advantages of the smartphone with the advantages of a netbook to provide mobile business professionals with a device that is more than adequate for those needs.

The iPhone has already broken down the walls and been embraced by many IT departments. As evidenced with Wells Fargo, the iPad — which runs on the same iOS (although the iPad is still on iOS 3.2 and won't receive iOS 4.0 until later this year) — is making the transition from consumer gadget to business tool much faster.

I think Steve Jobs declaration that the PC is dead is a tad premature, but it is not any more ludicrous than the denial by PC purists that the tablet is a capable platform that can transform the definition of mobile computing.

[MIKA27]

A good friend of mine works for an IT department here in Melbourne and they are all using the iPads as of last week for alot of their work presentations etc.

[OZCUBAN]

Artist shows iPad potential with Beyonce portrait

Cheshire, UK-based digital artist Kyle Lambert has created a striking portrait of Beyonce to showcase the potential of Apple’s iPad as a drawing and painting tool.

Utilising Brushes, the same app used by David Hockney and David Kassan, Lambert used his fingers to create the portrait of the singer and performer.

“My artwork combines traditional painting techniques with cutting edge technology to produce rich, realistic portraits and character based concepts and designs,” Lambert told Macworld. “The iPad expands the possibilities for artists like myself to take digital artwork creation away from the computer and out into the world.”

You can see more of Kyle Lambert's work at www.kylelambert.co.uk, while a time lapse video of the iPad painting can be found at www.kylelambert.co.uk/ipad/beyonce.

Oz Wow this to me shows that with the right tools and imagination the power of this little device

[DrunkenMonkey]

Artist shows iPad potential with Beyonce portrait

Cheshire, UK-based digital artist Kyle Lambert has created a striking portrait of Beyonce to showcase the potential of Apple’s iPad as a drawing and painting tool.

Utilising Brushes, the same app used by David Hockney and David Kassan, Lambert used his fingers to create the portrait of the singer and performer.

“My artwork combines traditional painting techniques with cutting edge technology to produce rich, realistic portraits and character based concepts and designs,” Lambert told Macworld. “The iPad expands the possibilities for artists like myself to take digital artwork creation away from the computer and out into the world.”

You can see more of Kyle Lambert's work at www.kylelambert.co.uk, while a time lapse video of the iPad painting can be found at www.kylelambert.co.uk/ipad/beyonce.

Oz Wow this to me shows that with the right tools and imagination the power of this little device

It's just too bad that the iPad is only suitable for consuming media, and not creating it.

[OZCUBAN]

Give it time DM, things are created from software,and software is created from software ,give it time

[MIKA27]

Give it time DM, things are created from software,and software is created from software ,give it time

Well said master Yoda.

[OZCUBAN]

Well said master Yoda.

Thank you my young padawan

[MIKA27]

Yahoo asks: So just who are iPad users?

Source: usatoday.com

Yahoo decided to find out for itself what kind of folks are buying Apple's new iPad during the first nine days that the popular Apple device was sold.

The online giant observed the viewing habits of the first wave of iPad users on Yahoo sites like Flickr, sports, news, finance, shopping and groups. What Yahoo found in its iPad study was an extremely affluent, predominately male crowd in the 30- to 54-year-old age group. (Since then, Yahoo researchers have noticed a shift to an even split among men and women.)

"We looked at where they went online, and what they did," says Joe Shantz, director of marketing insights at Yahoo. "We felt (iPad) would be a big seller, based on forecasts. And we want to be wherever people are using the Internet."

About 3 million iPads have been sold, according the most recent figures released by Apple.

Yahoo likes what it has seen so far. It observed a huge increase in the number of users visiting Yahoo services from iPads since the tablet PC was introduced.

Another new study, by Resolve Market Research, examines the iPad's impact on competing products like e-readers, gaming systems and netbooks. E-readers, for one, should be worried, according to Mashable's take on the study.

[OZCUBAN]

5.6-Inch and 7-Inch OLED iPad Models Coming in Q4 2010?

DigiTimes today reports on rumors that Apple is looking to launch its second-generation iPad as soon as the fourth quarter of this year, adding OLED-based 5.6-inch and 7-inch models to its existing 9.7-inch LED display model.

The sources noted that Apple has recently placed new iPad orders to Taiwan-based component makers for the fourth quarter of 2010 and the first quarter of 2011 with 9.7-inch, 5.6-inch and 7-inch models all included.

The 9.7-inch model will see some minor changes, while Apple will add Chimei Innolux (CMI) as one of its panel suppliers.

The new 5.6- and 7-inch iPads will mainly target the e-book reader market, separating them from the 9.7-inch model, which mainly targets multimedia entertainment, the sources stated.

The report also suggests that Taiwanese manufacturer Compal will be producing the new iPads, a surprise given earlier expectations that Pegatron would be the manufacturer brought on board to supplement Apple's existing production for iOS devices through Foxconn.

DigiTimes' own research analyst , Mingchi Kuo, casts some doubt on the rumors, however, claiming that Samsung, the world's dominant OLED manufacturer, can't even keep up with demand from its own product lines, and even with new investments in production there appears to be no way the company could ramp up production to the levels needed by Apple within the timeframe indicated.

Kuo also claims that Compal would be unlikely to be interested in producing the new iPad models given the scant profit margins available on the device in relation to its current profitable work assembling netbooks.

While claims of OLED displays for a number of Apple products have been around for many years without coming to fruition, DigiTimes in April specifically floated the idea of an OLED display for the second-generation iPad, but noted that pricing and production volume issues were likely to preclude the possibility. DigiTimes has also reported in April that Apple was looking to launch a smaller iPad in the 5- to 7-inch range as soon as the first quarter of next year.

OZ

Thats when i will pull the trigger shouldn't have to wait to long

[thechenman]

Hope the new iPADs turn out better than the iPHONE 4...

[MIKA27]

Hope the new iPADs turn out better than the iPHONE 4...

The iPhone 4 is doomed in its present state.

[OZCUBAN]

Thief Temporarily Makes Off With iPhone During GPS Tracking Demo

San Francisco's unluckiest thief

There are unlucky thieves, and then there is Horatio Toure.

According to San Francisco police, the 31-year-old city resident rode a bicycle up to a woman Monday afternoon in the South of Market neighborhood, snatched an iPhone out of her hands, and then pedaled away.

Problem was, the woman was carrying the phone as part of a company's demonstration of a real-time GPS tracking program. If the bandit would have taken a peek at the screen, he would have seen himself traveling across a map of San Francisco.

Toure was captured a half-mile away about 10 minutes later, at 4:01 p.m., said police Sgt. Troy Dangerfield. He was booked into jail on suspicion of grand theft and possession of stolen property.

"This reminds me of the bank robber who arrives during the security test," said the phone's owner, David Kahn.

Kahn is the chief executive of Covia Labs of Mountain View. He was in San Francisco on Monday demonstrating a product called Alert & Respond to his public relations folks at their South of Market office.

Geared for police and the military, the program allows for real-time tracking of the location of officers and other people and resources. It also allows for the integration of phones, computers and other devices and communication between them.

Kahn said he had asked an assistant, Jordan Sturm, to take his phone out on the sidewalk so he could track her location on his laptop. Seconds after she left, though, a curious thing happened. She appeared -- according to Alert & Respond -- to be running at high speed down the street.

But Sturm no longer had the phone. After she hurried back into the office, she called police and the company relayed the phone's ever-changing location to officers.

Kahn said he had considered using some of the program's other features during the episode -- turning on a microphone to hear the thief, or remotely snapping a picture. But he didn't want to clue in his adversary.

"What are the odds," Kahn asked, "that you would grab someone's cell phone during a demonstration of the ability to track the phone's location in real time? That's what this unfortunate thief did."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/crime/...8#ixzz0uO4JNtV4

OZ

What a loser

[MIKA27]

Thief Temporarily Makes Off With iPhone During GPS Tracking Demo

Toure was captured a half-mile away about 10 minutes later, at 4:01 p.m., said police Sgt. Troy Dangerfield. He was booked into jail on suspicion of grand theft and possession of stolen property.

OZ

What a loser

He certainly is!

There are alot of very stupid people out there.

What I find funny is the Sargeants name: 'Dangerfield'.

[BigGuns]

He certainly is!

There are alot of very stupid people out there.

What I find funny is the Sargeants name: 'Dangerfield'.

kinda sounds like it may have been a setup? what better way to demonstrate how good your product is?

[MIKA27]

kinda sounds like it may have been a setup? what better way to demonstrate how good your product is?

Do you think Steve Jobs was riding the bike?

[BigGuns]

Do you think Steve Jobs was riding the bike?

I was referring to Kahn, the Covina Labs guy, but sure, I guess Stevie could pull it off!

[Guibou]

Just got one for my Bday ...

And I'm HAPPY !

Guibou

[MIKA27]

Just got one for my Bday ...

And I'm HAPPY !

Guibou

Happy birthday firstly and enjoy the iPad. Let us know how it is in a week or so.

Any cool apps so far?

[MIKA27]

Flipboard turns Facebook updates, tweets into digital magazine

Source: usatoday.com

PALO ALTO, Calif. — It is a quiet morning here, and Silicon Valley veteran Mike McCue can finally sit down on a big red couch and talk about his latest product — Flipboard, an app for Apple's iPad that turns your Facebook, Twitter and other social content into a digital magazine.

Flipboard launched in July to glowing reviews. So many people wanted to download the free app that the company had to move to a reservation system, holding back new customers until its servers could handle the load.

The doors are now wide open.

"Everybody who wants to use the app immediately now can," says McCue, former CEO of voice-search pioneer Tellme Networks, which was sold to Microsoft for $800 million in 2007.

He got the idea for Flipboard while on a flight with a stack of magazines.

"A magazine is so much more beautiful than what's online," says McCue, Flipboard's CEO. "Content online still lives as if it's the mid-1990s."

How Flipboard works: After you register with your Twitter and Facebook credentials, it takes tweets and updates from your friends and lays them out as if they were being presented in a magazine. Interesting Internet link suggestions show up as article snippets interspersed with photos and comments from friends.

Your iPad has to be online to use Flipboard. A new version, which will be available by next week, will save the information from your last visit, making it possible to read offline.

To create Flipboard, McCue teamed with Evan Doll, a former Apple (AAPL) engineer. They first conceived of it for the Web but shifted gears to target the iPad, because it "perfectly matches what you would expect a social magazine to be in, the kind of thing you can hold in your hand and flip through pages," McCue says.

McCue raised $10.5 million from venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, actor Ashton Kutcher, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Peter Chernin, former president of News Corp.

"An algorithm that delivers content based on your social graph seemed really smart," says Chernin, founder of Chernin Entertainment. "It's really complicated for people to keep track of everything and curate the vast amounts of information being thrown at them."

Make your own magazine

There are nine categories on Flipboard. You can customize based on your interests (tech, entertainment, world news, etc.). The content is picked up from Twitter feeds published by media companies.

Dorsey, chairman of Twitter, says that most Internet links posted in Twitter tweets don't get opened because they take you away from the Twitter page. But on Flipboard, they're part of the experience. "Suddenly you have a real-time magazine, which I'd never seen pulled off before," he says.

TALKING TECH VIDEO: Flipboard app creates digital, "social" magazine

The idea eventually is to run ads in between pages. When implemented, that will make Flipboard a "really interesting advertising platform," Chernin says.

For now, Flipboard is ad-free. McCue wants to get a big base of users first. He says he is meeting with publishers. "My goal is to create a new kind of medium that allows publishers to make more money from advertising online than they do today," he says.

McCue won't say how many folks have downloaded the app beyond that it is a "significant percentage" of iPad owners. Apple has sold more than 3 million iPads. On Apple's chart of most-downloaded free iPad apps, Flipboard is No. 19.

Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at the Altimeter Group, says the challenge for Flipboard is to quickly evolve.

"Beyond flipping for content, how can they bring people back again and again," he says. Gartenberg thinks that to be a long-term success, Flipboard needs more than Twitter feeds. (McCue says he's looking to add additional feeds.)

It was Twitter, though, that put Flipboard on the map. Ahead of the launch, McCue and company reached out to prominent bloggers including Robert Scoble and actor Kutcher, along with Twitter co-founder Dorsey. They tweeted so much about Flipboard that once the rush came, "It was like nothing I'd ever experienced," McCue says.

Scoble called it "the best start-up" of the year and "revolutionary" and got heat for his hype from Internet users who were turned away when they clicked to see what the fuss was about.

"We live in an instant world now," Scoble says. "It's not that everybody shows up. It's that they all show up in the first hour."

When the server issues arose, fellow Silicon Valley neighbors chipped in to help. Photo-sharing site SmugMug sent over pizzas. AOL dropped by with coffee and doughnuts. Scoble says the moral of the story for start-ups is to open the door slowly, preferably with an invitation system. Still, he says, "I don't know that you can plan for this kind of attention."

MIKA: I myself hate Facebook and Twitter so this app is useless for me. BUT.... for the millions that do love Facebook and Twitter, this is an amazing app indeed.