Spring has sprung and like Persephone loosed from Hades’ bonds, our iPad app is now available to all and sundry. This app is literally years in the making and we have been back and forth and up and down regarding functionality, design, and look and feel for most of this month. I’m pleased to report, however, that it is ready to go, free, and fabulous.
The app connects our blog content with live Internet reactions as well as some amazing functionality centered around CrunchBase data. You can also just view Gadgets and Mobile content with one click and an offline mode will cache content for the road. It is retina-ready and looks pretty darn good.
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Remember Jitterbug, the big-buttoned phones for seniors that made using those confusing, new-fangled cellphone thingies so much easier to handle? Well it looks like someone has gone out and built the equivalent for the iPad. Which literally made me laugh out loud when I read the news, because the iPad is the first computer I’ve ever seen seniors adopt in droves. But hello anyway, Family Ribbon.
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The iPad has, quite quickly, become the tablet of choice for enterprises, with some 97 percent of all tablet activations in Q1 of 2012 attributable to Apple’s tablet, according to Good Technology. So it comes as no surprise that apps are rushing into the wake of those purchases to make the iPad more work-friendly.
The latest in that story is a release of some social software from harmon.ie that will make SharePoint, the collaboration software from Microsoft, usable on the iPad, as well as the iPhone. Harmon.ie’s CEO, Yakov Cohen, says this marks the first time that business users can access SharePoint from both the iPad and desktop with the same user experience.
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iPad guilt? There needs to be a technical term for that feeling in the pit of a parent’s stomach that arises from handing over the iPad to their kids, only to watch them play brain rotting Outfit7 games or level after level of Angry Birds. Fortunately, some startups are focusing on developing more educational content for the iPad to help parents assuage some of their guilt over their kids’ ever-increasing screen time.
One such company is Daily Interactive, which is now launching Happly for iPad, a collection of original and curated content for kids, including online videos, games, and stories. And while the content may be deemed educational, the kids might not realize it, given the app’s focus on topics kids love to explore, like dinosaurs, space, sports, animals, how to’s and more. → Read More
We met Joe Hill in Norfolk, Virginia last week. He had a story to tell us. He has two autistic sons who have had trouble communicating and he noticed that the world of tools for autism often overlooked a few things – aesthetics, usability, and customization, to name three. Instead of relying on ready-made utilities, Joe wanted to make something fun and cool.
He created Aeir Talk. It’s an app that allows parents to create and record their own content for use in a very simple but effective method for communications. The parents record a set of verbs and nouns and add pictures of themselves or of familiar objects. When the kids need to communicate, they select a noun and a verb and press a button. The app creates a simple sentence. “I want to go outside, please” or “I want a carrot, please.”
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Apple took to the wires this morning to announce that the new iPad will hit 12 countries later this week. Along with South Korea, this coming Friday the new iPad launches in Brunei, Croatia, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Malaysia, Panama, St Maarten, Uruguay and Venezuela. Then, the following Friday, it hits Colombia, Estonia, India, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, South Africa and Thailand.
For better or worse, the new iPad will carry the suggested retail price of $499 USD and up. The iPad 2 will also be available at its new $399 price and might be the best bet in the majority of the markets just now getting the new iPad; only the North American markets have LTE data capabilities anyway. → Read More
Looks like we may see another development today in Apple’s ongoing iPad/4G controversy in Australia. The country’s Competition and Consumer Commission is meeting with Apple in court again today to try to get Apple to officially change the name of the device when it is sold in Australia.
Although many people know it as “the new iPad” since launching the product in March, Apple has also been marketing the product as the new iPad with ‘Wi-Fi +4G’ in the country. But Apple quickly ran into trouble when the ACCC said Apple was misleading consumers: in fact, the tablet is not actually compatible with Australia’s 4G network.
Since then, Apple has agreed to refund consumers who bought the device thinking they were getting 4G; and the company has also been putting up notices wherever the iPad is sold warning them that it didn’t work with Australia’s 4G. But the ACCC, it seems, does not think that this goes far enough. → Read More
“Grumpy Cat! Grumpy Cat! More Grumpy Cat, please!” – That’s basically my two-year-old’s review of FarFaria, a new subscription-based children’s storybook app for the iPad. (To translate: she loves it, and especially that story about the grumpy cat.) The app, to be clear, doesn’t just offer the one story – not that my kid seems to care right now – it’s a collection of nearly one hundred stories with more added all the time. And despite being independently sourced and illustrated (or perhaps because of it), the stories are actually really good. → Read More
The new iPad from Apple has so far smashed all of its own sales records for previous tablet models, selling 3 million units in its opening weekend, with total sales projections for 2012 at up to 66 million.
But according to some early (possibly too early?) figures from the mobile ad network Jumptap, that is not yet translating into a surge of traffic from the devices.
On the opening day, the iPad represented 0.52 percent of total iPad network traffic. That figure peaked at 2.28 percent on day three, and then declined to 1.92 percent of traffic by day six. In contrast, the iPad and iPad 2 each had 45 percent or more of total iPad traffic, Jumptap says in its latest MobileSTAT Report. → Read More
Topps, the company best known for its Bazooka bubble gum and for essentially inventing and popularizing trading cards in the 1950s, is today releasing its first-ever mobile apps in conjunction with the start of the 2012 Major League Baseball season. That’s right. People of all ages may remember collecting and trading their favorite players’ cards as youngsters, and though trading cards don’t quite enjoy the same level of ubiquity as they did in decades past, Topps’ cards remain iconic for most sports fans. → Read More
Will Apple make a 7 inch iPad? That’s the question being batted around yet again today. The true answer right now is easy: I don’t know. No one does. Most likely not even Apple. They’re undoubtedly thinking about it. And may even have to make a call soon. But it has probably not been decided just yet. But that’s a lame answer. Let’s sexy it up using history, logic, and common sense.
Will Apple make a 7 inch iPad?
Yes. → Read More
A little bit of news from Nielsen that flew under the radar a few days ago hints at big things ahead for the measurement firm and its goals of understanding user behavior across all platforms. The company said it was teaming up with Disney/ABC Television Group to measure video consumption trends on the iPad.
In the study, participants will download a special “metering” app to their devices, which will analyze the reach, duration frequency and pageviews associated with both their apps and web usage in an effort to provide better insight into actual trends associated with user behavior, as opposed to self-reported data. → Read More
Facebook rolled out an update this morning that adds support for the new iPad’s Retina display to its iPad application. According to the release notes in iTunes, users with the new iPad will now see “a crisp, high resolution interface.” The update (version 4.1.1) brings other bug fixes, too, as well as support for additional languages.
The Retina-ready version of the app was hinted at last week, when someone spotted a teaser for the upcoming app in the iTunes App Store’s “New and Noteworthy” section. The message displayed at the time read “Enhanced for the New iPad,” presumably meaning it would soon add support Retina graphics.
As sure enough, that’s just what it did. → Read More
Consumer Reports, clearly moving on from whoring pageviews over heatgate, just planted the new iPad at the top of its recommended tablet chart. Citing the great screen, 5MP camera, and fast, dependable 4G Verizon data connectivity, the iPad is the best of the bunch, says Consumer Reports. But what about the new iPad’s excessive heat? Clearly people still need to, as a Consumer Reports’ spokesman said, “exercise caution”, right? Nope. → Read More
Apple has yet to make any statements about where and when we might ever see an Apple TV product to match the impact it has had in the smartphone and tablet markets. But news of an investment by its key manufacturing partner, Foxconn, could point to the confidence others have of what might be coming soon.
Foxconn is investing a combined 133 billion yen ($1.6 billion) in TV maker Sharp Corporation and a flat-panel JV it has with Sony — and it has added a commitment to buy up to 50 percent of all of Sharp’s LCD panel output. The deal is the largest-ever by a Taiwanese manufacturer in a Japanese supplier and could be all the more bold, considering that just yesterday there was a report from iSuppli on how sales of flat-panel TVs were in decline and flattening out. → Read More
There has been some anecodotal evidence about how WiFi is by far the most popular way to connect on a tablet, but some numbers out from Localytics spell out just how little traffic is coming from 3G (and now 4G) networks on the most popular tablet of all, the iPad from Apple.
Using data from apps that run on its mobile analytics platform, Localytics says that in the last week, since the introduction of the new iPad, only six percent of all sessions on iPads were coming from cellular networks, with the rest coming from WiFi. That’s a testament to how consumers by and large don’t seem to be particularly interested in having 3G or 4G on their devices: not great news for carriers that were hoping for more traffic and purchases of data plans on their cellular networks.
However, Localytics also found those tablets that do have cellular chips are seeing a very even amount of use between WiFi and cellular networks. → Read More
iPad, iPad, iPad.
What else is there to say? You already know the Retina display is amazing. You know the camera’s been improved and that that little A5X chip is super snappy. You know that the latest version of iOS supports Japanese Siri and voice transcription. You know three million iPads were sold in the first three days they were available, and that Apple is expected to sell 66 million before the end of 2012.
What you don’t know, however, is what John and I think of the new iPad. → Read More
Attention George Foreman: report to an Apple Store near you immediately. There’s a hot (literally) product, you simply must buy the entire inventory of to keep your grilling empire alive: the new iPad.
Or at least, that’s what the latest nonsense from Consumer Reports would have you believe.
We’ve seen this ridiculousness from Consumer Reports before. In June 2010, at the height of “Antennagate”, Consumer Reports figured out the art of click-bait. If you say something outlandish, even if it directly contradicts something you previously said (and sometimes that’s even better!), you must harp on a story to keep those precious pageviews flowing in. And so harp they did. → Read More
Initial teardowns of the new iPad whetted many a chip nerd’s appetite when they revealed that the A5X chip inside was truly gigantic. At nearly 13x13mm, it is significantly larger than the A5, which was itself already kind of a hefty bugger.
Now some clear images (from Chipworks) have been taken of the die itself (some rather rough ones with initial “floorplans” showed up earlier over the weekend) and it’s becoming more and more clear that the A5X is a stopgap measure: a last-generation product that’s overcompensating, if you will, with a jumbo-sized GPU. → Read More
Following Apple’s announcement yesterday of the new iPad’s record weekend, which saw 3 million devices sold in three days, analysts are upping their predictions for the tablet’s market share growth over the course of the year. In a note to investors, Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray says the firm is now forecasting as many as 66 million sales of the new device in 2012, up from the earlier prediction of 60 million. Meanwhile, Shaw Wu of Sterne Agee is now predicting 60 million, up from 55 million.
Regardless of the final outcome, the bottom line impact the device will have on the market was summed up in Munster’s bullish note: ”we believe the unprecedented ramp of the iPad over the past year is evidence that the tablet market will be measurably larger than the PC market,” he said. → Read More
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