Before launch, we spent a lot of time thinking about how you might be able to type on the iPad, seeing as plain onscreen keyboards one 10-inch tablets are just, well, awkward. But apparently, Apple doesn’t think so.
The above left image was a crude mockup, and it was supposed to illustrate a problem, not a solution. The above right image is what Apple actually released. Here’s what we had to say about it in our hands-on:
Typing in portrait is better than anticipated but still quite a stretch for our average-sized hands, which means that letters like F G and H will take a moderate conditioning for some. What about in landscape mode, sitting flat on the table? Well this is problematic too, as the iPad sort of wobbles. The back is not perfectly flat, meaning your typing surface is never perfectly flat, so the virtual keyboard becomes that much more difficult to use.
Sounds passable for a media consumption device, but seriously, this thing’s got its own version of iWork—you’re supposed to type on it. That explains the giant hardware keyboard attachment, I guess!
From the realm of sci-fi to Steve Jobs’ stage: The iPad is official. What is it? What can it do? How does it work? Here’s everything you need to know about Apple’s newest creation, all in one place. UPDATE: Video!
It’s almost impossible to overstate the buzz leading up to this device. Immediately after the death of the Newton, rumors began trickling out about a followup from Apple; in the last five years, speculation and scraps of evidence about an Apple tablet have been a fixture in the tech media; in the last year, the rumors reached crisis levels. Today, Apple’s tablet has finally arrived, and we’ve got the full rundown, from specs, features, content and price to what it’s like to actually use one.
The Hardware
• Size and shape: The screen’s aspect ratio makes it seem a bit squat, but this is intended to be a bi-directional tabl—err, Pad. The bezel is a little fat, but otherwise, this thing is basically a clean slab of pure display. It’s just .5 inches thick, which is a hair thicker than the iPhone 3GS, and measures 9.56 x 7.47 inches. Final weigh-in is 1.5 pounds without 3G, and 1.6 with.
• The Screen: The tablet’s multitouch screen measures in at 9.7 inches, meaning that it’s got a significantly smaller footprint than the smallest MacBook, but a much larger screen than the iPhone. (That’s 9.7 inches diagonal, from screen corner to screen corner.) The screen’s resolution is a dense 1024 x 768.
Here‘s what it looks like in photos, and on video:
• The guts: It’s a half-inch thick—just a hair thicker than the iPhone, for reference—and weighs 1.5 pounds. It’s powered by a 1GHz Apple A4 chip, and has 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of flash storage. From the looks of it, Apple finally got some use out of that PA Semi purchase, and built their own mobile processor, but that’s no totally clear yet. It’s also loaded with 802.11 n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, a 30-pin iPod connector, a speaker, a microphone, an accelerometer and a compass. Video output runs through and iPhone-type composite adapter at up to 576p and through a dock-to-VGA adapter at up to 1024 x 768. No HDMI, no DVI—not even a Mini DisplayPort.
3G is optional, and costs more, not less. (More on that below)
Oh, and there isn’t a rear-facing camera, nor is there a front-facing camera. This tablet is totally camera-less, which seems a bit odd.
• The battery: Apple’s making some INCREDIBLE claims about battery life: ten hours for constant use, with a one-month standby rating. Ten hours of constant use includes video viewing, so you could conceivable watch about six feature films before this thing dies.
• How you hold it: You can hold it two different ways, and the software will adapt to both. Portrait mode seems like the primay mode, a la the iPhone while landscape mode—better for movies and perhaps magazine content—is a secondary mode. The Apple decal is oriented for portrait mode, so basically, just get ready for a whole bunch of HEY IT’S A GIANT IPHONE!! jokes.
Connectivity
Some models have Wi-Fi exclusively, while some have 3G as well. It’s with AT&T, and costs either $15 a month for 250MB of data, or $30 for unlimited data. With the plan, you get access to AT&T’s Wi-Fi hotspots as well. Best of all, it’s a prepaid service—no contract. You can activate it from the iPad any time, and cancel whenever you want. This sounds like a fantastic deal, until you consider how it’s probably going to brutalize AT&T’s already terrible 3G coverage.
The iPad itself is unlocked, so you can conceivably use it with any microSIM. But what’s a microSIM? For one, it’s not the same kind of SIM that’s in your iPhone, so don’t expect to just pop that in and surf for free. It’s a totally different standard.
The Software
• The OS: The operating system on the tablet is based on iPhone OS, which is in turn loosely based on OS X. In other words, it’s got the same guts as the iPhone, as well as a somewhat similar interface. What this means in practical terms is that the UI is modal; you can only display one app at a time, and there aren’t windows, per se.
• The homescreen: It’s like a mixture between the iPhone and OS X: it uses the iPhone launcher/apps metaphor, but has an OS X-style shiny dock. It feels very spread out compared to the iPhone’s homescreen, though I suspect this is necessary to keep things from getting too overwhelming. For our full walkthrough of the new OS, check here.
• The keyboard: Input comes by way of an onscreen keyboard, almost exactly like the iPhone’s. Typing on it is apparently a “dream,” and “almost lifesize,” by which he means the size of a full hard keyboard. Steve wasn’t typing with his thumbs, but with his fingers, as if it were an actual laptop keyboard. Navigation throughout the rest of the OS is optimized for one hand, though.
• The browser: The browser is essential an upscaled version of Safari Mobile, with a familiar, finger-friendly title bar and not much else. It rotates by command of the accelerometer. From the looks of it, it doesn’t have Flash support, but we’ll have to confirm. UPDATE: Yup, none at all. You can get away with that kind of thing on the iPhone, sort of, but on a 10-inch tablet it’s a glaring omission.
• Email: Mail again takes its visual cues from the iPhone, but with a lot more decoration: you can preview your mailbox from any message with a pull-down menu, and preview any message from within the mailbox, with a pop-up window.
• Music: The music player is even more hybirdized, styled like a mix between the iPhone’s iPod interface and full-fledged desktop iTunes. Interestingly, Cover Flow seems to have more or less died off.
• Video: YouTube is available by way of an app, iPhone-style, which can play videos in HD. iTunes content plays back in a dedicated app, just like on the iPhone, and can also play back in HD.
• Calendar and contacts: The calendar app is desktop-like, until you open organizer mode, where it looks like a literal organizer. It’s beautiful, and dare I say a bit Courier-like.
Apps
• iPhone apps: This thing runs them! The iPad runs iPhone apps right out of the App Store, with no modification, but they’re either relegated to the center of the screen or in “pixel double” mode, which just blows them up crudely. Any apps you’ve purchased for your iPhone can be synced, for free, to your iPad.
• New apps: The iPhone app SDK has already been expanded for tablet development, including a whole new set of UI elements and expanded resolution support. The raw iPhone app compatibility is just a temporary measure, it seems—any developer who wants their app to run on the tablet will develop for the tablet. Some of the early examples of adapted apps, like Brushes, are spectacular. More on the SDK here. Apple’s pushing gaming on this thing right out of the box, demoing everything from FPS N.O.V.A to Need for Speed. It’s presumably running these games at HD, so the rendering power in this thing is no joke.
• Ebooks: Apple’s also opened an ebook store to accompany the iPad, in the mold of iTunes. It’s called iBooks. It offers books in ePub format, and makes reading on a Kindle seem about as stodgy as, you know, paper.
• iWork: Apple’ also designed a whole new iWork suite just for the tablet, which implies that this thing is as much for media creation as it is for consumption. There’s a new version of Keynote designed just for the iPad, as well as new version of Pages, (word processor), and Numbers, which is the spreadsheet app. Here’s what Keynote looks like:
The interfaces are obviously designed strictly for touch input, but from the looks of it can handle every function that the old, mouse-centric version could, plus a few more. And man, they’re so much prettier. Each app costs $10, and you can get them all for $30.
Accessories
Right away, Apple’s offering two main official accessories: a book-style case, and a keyboard dock. (Ha!) The keyboard dock hooks up with the iPad when it’s in portrait mode, so you can type longer documents, charge, or both.
The iPad’s only really got one accessory port, and it takes an iPod dock connector. Apple’s solution for this? Adapters! So many adapters. There’s a Dock Connector to VGA adapter, a USB camera adapter (which gives you one plain USB connection, though it apparently only works for importing photos) and a USB power adapter, which lets you charge by AC or USB, not unlike the iPhone charger.
What It’s Like to Use
It’s hefty. Substantial. Easy to grip. Fast. Beautiful. Rigid. Starkly designed. The glass is a little rubbery but it could be my sweaty hands. And it’s fasssstttt.
Brian’s detailed impressions in our hands on, right here.
Price and Release Date
The iPad ships worldwide in 60 days, but only in Wi-Fi versions. The 3G version will be another 30 days after that. Here are the prices:
Without 3G:
• $499: 16GB
• $599: 32GB
• $699: 64GB
With 3G:
• $629: 16GB
• $729: 32GB
• $829: 64GB
Apple will ship all the iPads in 60 days—the end of March—to America, and just the Wi-Fi models internationally. It’ll be another 30 days beyond that for 3G models to be available outside our shores; Apple says they’re still working on carrier deals.
3G comes by way of AT&T, who’s offering the service without contract, for $15 a month (250MB of data) or $30 a month (unlimited). That’s why, unlike the iPhone, the iPad is actually cheaper off-contract.
Here’s Apple’s full press release:
Apple Launches iPad
A Magical & Revolutionary Device at an Unbelievable Price
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 27 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple® today introduced iPad, a revolutionary device for browsing the web, reading and sending email, enjoying photos, watching videos, listening to music, playing games, reading e-books and much more. iPad’s responsive high-resolution Multi-Touch™ display lets users physically interact with applications and content. iPad is just 0.5 inches thick and weighs just 1.5 pounds- thinner and lighter than any laptop or netbook. iPad includes 12 new innovative apps designed especially for the iPad, and will run almost all of the over 140,000 apps in the App Store. iPad will be available in late March starting at the breakthrough price of just $499.
“iPad is our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iPad creates and defines an entirely new category of devices that will connect users with their apps and content in a much more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before.”
iPad features 12 next-generation Multi-Touch applications. Every app works in both portrait and landscape, automatically animating between views as the user rotates iPad in any direction. The precise Multi-Touch interface makes surfing the web on iPad an entirely new experience, dramatically more interactive and intimate than on a computer. Reading and sending email is fun and easy on iPad’s large screen and almost full-size “soft” keyboard. Import photos from a Mac®, PC or digital camera, see them organized as albums, and enjoy and share them using iPad’s elegant slideshows. Watch movies, TV shows and YouTube, all in HD or flip through pages of an e-book you downloaded from Apple’s new iBookstore while listening to your music collection.
iPad runs almost all of the over 140,000 apps on the App Store, including apps already purchased for your iPhone® or iPod touch®. The iTunes® Store gives you access to the world’s most popular online music, TV and movie store with a catalog of over 11 million songs, over 50,000 TV episodes and over 8,000 films including over 2,000 in stunning high definition video. Apple also announced the new iBooks app for iPad, which includes Apple’s new iBookstore, the best way to browse, buy and read books on a mobile device. The iBookstore will feature books from major and independent publishers.
Apple also introduced a new version of iWork® for iPad, the first desktop-class productivity suite designed specifically for Multi-Touch. With Pages®, Keynote® and Numbers® you can create beautifully formatted documents, stunning presentations with animations and transitions, and spreadsheets with charts, functions and formulas. The three apps will be available separately through the App Store for $9.99 each.
iPad syncs with iTunes just like the iPhone and iPod touch, using the standard Apple 30-pin to USB cable, so you can sync all of your contacts, photos, music, movies, TV shows, applications and more from your Mac or PC. All the apps and content you download on iPad from the App Store, iTunes Store and iBookstore will be automatically synced to your iTunes library the next time you connect with your computer.
iPad’s brilliant 9.7-inch, LED-backlit display features IPS technology to deliver crisp, clear images and consistent color with an ultra-wide 178 degree viewing angle. The highly precise, capacitive Multi-Touch display is amazingly accurate and responsive whether scrolling web pages or playing games. The intelligent soft keyboard pioneered on iPhone takes advantage of iPad’s larger display to offer an almost full-size soft keyboard. iPad also connects to the new iPad Keyboard Dock with a full-size traditional keyboard.
iPad is powered by A4, Apple’s next-generation system-on-a-chip. Designed by Apple, the new A4 chip provides exceptional processor and graphics performance along with long battery life of up to 10 hours.* Apple’s advanced chemistry and Adaptive Charging technology deliver up to 1,000 charge cycles without a significant decrease in battery capacity over a typical five year lifespan.**
iPad comes in two versions-one with Wi-Fi and the other with both Wi-Fi and 3G. iPad includes the latest 802.11n Wi-Fi, and the 3G versions support speeds up to 7.2 Mbps on HSDPA networks. Apple and AT&T announced breakthrough 3G pre-paid data plans for iPad with easy, on-device activation and management.
Continuing Apple’s dedication to designing and creating environmentally responsible products, each iPad enclosure is made of highly recyclable aluminum and comes standard with energy-efficient LED-backlit displays that are mercury-free and made with arsenic-free glass. iPad contains no brominated flame retardants and is completely PVC-free.
Apple today released a new Software Development Kit (SDK) for iPad, so developers can create amazing new applications designed to take advantage of iPad’s capabilities. The SDK includes a simulator that lets developers test and debug their iPad apps on a Mac, and also lets developers create Universal Applications that run on iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.
Pricing & Availability
iPad will be available in late March worldwide for a suggested retail price of $499 (US) for the 16GB model, $599 (US) for the 32GB model, $699 (US) for the 64GB model. The Wi-Fi + 3G models of iPad will be available in April in the US and selected countries for a suggested retail price of $629 (US) for the 16GB model, $729 (US) for the 32GB model and $829 (US) for the 64GB model. iPad will be sold in the US through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores and select Apple Authorized Resellers. International pricing and worldwide availability will be announced at a later date. iBookstore will be available in the US at launch.
*Apple tested wireless battery life by browsing web pages and receiving email over an AirPort® network, never letting the system go to sleep during the test, and keeping the display at half brightness. This is a typical scenario of use on the go, resulting in a battery performance number that is very relevant to mobile users.
**A properly maintained iPad battery is designed to retain 80 percent or more of its original capacity during a lifespan of up to 1,000 recharge cycles. Battery life and charge cycles vary by use and settings.
As far as hardware goes, the size, the look, and the configuration of the apparent unibody-ish backside of the tablet all make sense. The original photos were yanked almost immediately—very interesting—but not before we saved them.
The photos showed up on a message board on Chinese website Weiphone, and give a clear view of the rear of the device. These look like leaks from a component manufacturer (or as one commenter suspects, a radiation testing facility. UPDATE: Reader Hector confirms that’s it’s “an optical measuring system, a so-called 3D digitizer,” and that the test setup looks “absolutely authentic.”), so we’re not seeing the whole product here, just one of its constituent parts—remember, Apple doesn’t actually manufacture hardware, so plenty of people outside of the company have seen bits and pieces of this thing. Anyway, this may be our tablet:
We’ve probably seen the screen and one piece of software, and now we’ve just as probably seen what the exterior looks like. That is, one part iPhone, three parts Unibody MacBook, eight parts new. There’s almost certain a spot for a rocker switch, one for a headphone jack, and another for what could be either a power button or (!!!) an HDMI or USB port. There doesn’t appear to be a rear-facing camera, but that’d have been a little weird anyway.
If you’re not there already, jump onto our liveblog for up-to-the-microsecond tablet updates, and live keynote coverage.
Droid draggin’? Apps crawlin’? Android creepin’? Then maybe you should overclock your Droid to 1.1GHz, like this guy! But really no, don’t.
The boys at AllDroid have figured out how to overclock the Droid’s ARM Cortex A8, normally clocked at 550 MHz, to 1.1GHz. That’s twice the frequency, in case you’re comically terrible at math, which can’t be safe on a processor with no active cooling, stuffed into a metal phone. But whatever, it’s the joy of the hunt, right? Or something? Here‘s how you can try it; it’s a fairly involved process, so don’t even try unless you’re already familiar with rooting, overclocking, and bricking the shit out of phones for questionable reasons.
The AllDroid guys seem to have settled on 800MHz as a safe, cool, stable frequency, and 1.1GHz as a rough top end; past that, I imagine things get too crashy to be fun. [AllDroid via MobileCrunch]
Well, this had to happen eventually: someone from an Apple tablet partner—McGraw-Hill’s Harold McGraw III—has confirmed the tablet’s coming tomorrow, that it’ll run an iPhone-style OS, that it’s “terrific”, and that he’ll probably never work with Apple again.
MacRumors caught the slip during a CNBC segment, in which the anchor lobs a softball closer question about the—excuse me, a—tablet, from Apple, maybe. Instead of deflecting, Mr. McGraw just started talking about it as if it’d already been announced:
Yeah, Very exciting. Yes, they’ll make their announcement tomorrow on this one. We have worked with Apple for quite a while. And the Tablet is going to be based on the iPhone operating system and so it will be transferable. So what you are going to be able to do now is we have a consortium of e-books. And we have 95% of all our materials that are in e-book format. So now with the tablet you’re going to open up the higher education market, the professional market. The tablet is going to be just really terrific.
Holy hell, guy. So, now we know a few things about the tablet! It’s real, it’s going to have a wide media strategy that at the very least includes textbooks, and it may be exactly what we predicted it will be, and apparently it doesn’t suck, according to this man in a suit who is heavily invested in its success, or at least was, until he barfed up his NDA all over CNBC’s anchor table. We reached out to the company regarding the slip, they’re not calling back.
Don’t worry, McGraw-Hill guy, you’ll still get a Christmas card from Steve this year. Just make sure to have it checked for anthrax. [MacRumors]
These Apple Tablet photos and videos can’t lay claim to authenticity; they were sent to us by a reader, who apparently rendered them over the past few months. But they can lay claim to being absolutely spectacular.
The renders were sent by reader Lex Lareo in response to our Tablet Sutra post, where we asked the most essential question about the whateveritis that we’re expecting to meet tomorrow: How do you hold it? This reader said he’d been thinking about the same thing:
If you look at the tablet concepts everywhere, they reduce the concept exclusively to the body of the tablet. Then the designers place a screen with a more or less Photoshopped version of : a) Mac OSX or b) Iphone OSX. But there is a problem with that approach: the way the UI elements are placed over the screen.
For me the easiest way to grab the tablet is holding it with the two hands (six of your eleven photographs show that you seems to think the same way), so … why not put the controls in the area that your thumbs can reach them effortlessly?. I’ve developed a UI concept that solves that problem.
And develop he has:
The chance that Apple will pull something just like this out if their collective hat tomorrow is very slim, but we can hope: for something that truly conquers the as-of-yet unsolved tablet UI problem; for something that truly changes the way we see UIs; for something that looks this good.—Thanks, Lex!
It may have taken a mob of angry customers and hundred of online support requests, but Google has finally come to terms with the Nexus One‘s glaring 3G reception problems. And they’re going to fix it soon, probably!
Inconspicuously planted in a Nexus One Google forum thread, (is this really how you want to run customer support, guys?) a Google employee promises relief. The issue, as suspected, comes down to software, which explains both why the Nexus One can’t hold a consistent 3G signal in a location where another T-Mobile handset can, and how a company as established as HTC could have released a phone that can’t get signal (the answer: they didn’t).
The fix should come OTA in the next week or so, pending further testing. So, Nexus O(w)ne(r)s: let us know if it starts showing up.
I wanted to post an update to the Nexus One Help Forum to let you know what we’ve been working on to help address the 3G issues some of you have been facing. I also wanted to thank you for being patient as we work to investigate the problem, an effort which has included our hardware partners.
Our engineers have uncovered specific cases for which a software fix should improve connectivity to 3G for some users. We are testing this fix now, initial results are positive, and if everything progresses as planned, we will provide an over-the-air software update to your phone in the next week or so. It may be, however, that users are experiencing problems as a result of being on the edge or outside of 3G coverage, which a product fix cannot address.
Thanks again for your patience and for your feedback, and we will continue to keep you informed.
Feel like revisiting Windows 3.1, but can’t be bothered firing up a time machine, hot tub or otherwise? This web-based OS emulation (simulation?) should do the trick, by which I mean give you crippling flashbacks. [MichaelV via Crunchgear]
“Fire. The wheel. Barbers. The moveable printing press. Whiskey. The automobile. The personal computer. Walt Mossberg. The iPhone. And now, finally, the iSlate.” Walt Mossbergpuppet issues the first and final word on the Apple Tablet. [Mosspuppet]
Unwittingly snapped by a sandwich shop paparazzo, Panera Bread iMac Man took center stage in our corner of the internet for one day in December. More pictures surfaced, but our questions remained unanswered. So we got in touch.
Well, actually, he got in touch with us. Going in, we knew only what we could see: he uses his iMac in Panera Bread; he plays lots of World of Warcraft; he’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma dressed in a plaid shirt. His photos were viewed by over 100,000 people on our site, and countless more elsewhere. He is Panera Bread iMac Man.
We now know that his name is James, he’s a cheery fellow, and he works as an administrator at a large non-profit. Here’s what he had to say, when I talked to him over a sandwich at his local Panera Bread. Ok ok ok, my phone. But still!
Why do you bring your iMac to Panera bread? This could also be phrased as, what do you have against laptops?
I’ve got nothing against laptops! At my age, I appreciate the bigger screen. The same dollars would not have gotten me a laptop with screen that size. I got an iLugger to carry it around; I grew up with the original mac, so I’m used to the weight.
I don’t have an internet connection at home, so I use Panera’s. At that particular Panera, I can drive my car, park it underground, and walk right up without exposing the iMac to any weather.
Do the people at Panera give you a hard time? Did they accept your computing habits right off the bat, or did it take time?
No, no. What [the photos] don’t show, is that all around me are people with computers. There’s usually about 50/50 on Macbooks, iBooks, and PCs. What level is your World of Warcraft character?
I couldn’t see from the screen which one that was, but I have three characters—two level 80s, and an, oh, I guess one level 14.
How’d you get into WoW?
The reason I started playing WoW was because of my niece’s son, who was 9 years old, was playing at the time. I started playing in self-defense.
Are you enjoying your marginal internet celebrity? How did you find out you’d been snapped and posted online?
I was looking though MacSurfer, and saw the title. I sent the link to my buddies, and I was like, “that damn photo makes me look bald!”
It comes as a shock, though. About six months ago, a guy walked over to me, and he had done a sketch. He asked, “is this OK?” Now I have it framed, sitting on top of my counter.
According to the Times (the LA one), the Times (the NY one) has been working on a tablet app in recent weeks. Also: Condé Nast basically admitted to the same in a press release. Familiar? Sure. But intriguing!
In September, we reported through two sources at the paper that the NYT had been approached by Apple to develop content of some sort for the tablet. As the paper of record, they’re the obvious choice for an inaugural app demo—remember the the wave of iPhone commercials, where the floating hands navigate to the NYT homepage?—and they already have tablet-appropriate software available for download. In that sense, the LAT report is just more corroboration; of the NYT‘s involvement with Apple; of the tablet’s penchant for the written word; and obviously, of the tablet’s mere existence.
More interesting, though, is a quote highlighted in the report from a Conde Nastpress release last week, which was supposed to tout the (moderate) success of the GQ iPhone app, but which may have also revealed it to be a not-so-subtle prelude to a tablet app. Quoted directly:
In addition to developing more content for the iPhone and the anticipated tablet from Apple, Conde Nast has formed a strategic partnership with Adobe to collaborate on creating technologies that will allow the company to design and produce a new generation of digital magazines.
Normally it’d be prudent to just ignore this kind of thing, since the Apple Tablet, even as a rumor, has ingratiated itself so far into the media’s consciousness that print ombudsman and PR people can’t seem to squeeze out a public statement or press release without mentioning it, but at this late stage in the game, and from the company most likely in the world to be involved with such a venture if it does exist, these words are worth hanging on.
On another note, I tend to think people are overstating the role that print media text content will play in this device, and vice versa! Discuss.
UPDATE: Peter Kafka at AllThingsD isn’t convinced that Conde Nast will be in the tablet demo lineup. [LAT]
Right, so FM transmitters are generally terrible. Not just because they sound worse than direct line-in connections and even tape adapters, but because they’re a pain to control. Belkin has solved at least one of these problems, for iPhone users.
As promised, the Belkin TuneCast Auto Live transmitter, seen below looking like pretty much every other Belkin FM transmitter ever, has a single, massive trick up its sleeve: an iPhone app that actually controls it. It basically turns your iPhone into a smart remote for your transmitter, which doesn’t just modulate your broadcast frequency but actually finds the best one, and which in concept seems kind of backwards, but makes plenty of sense. It’s digital + analog – car crashes! Got it.
Anyway, the TuneCast transmitter/app combo is available today, with a price of $80. [Belkin]
In 2010, to “use the internet like a normal adult” is to give in to a terrible, emotionless symbiosis from which you can never withdraw, so what’s said here—that the president reads blogs, that he spends a lot of his day online, that he’s the first president to have an internet connection at his desk—is less interesting that what’s left unsaid: Does he laugh at memes? Does he comment? Does he troll?
And as the WaPo‘s anonymous source so obviously wanted the world to ask, or else he/she would have worded things differently: Porntube or xHamster? [Washington Post via Ed Bott]
Speculation and guesswork aside, if Apple’s got a tablet, we need to know how to handle it, physically. So, with two pieces of cardboard, scotch tape and Photoshop, we crudely mocked one up. It was… unusual.
Tablet PCs have been around for years, but they’ve got keyboard, ball-jointed necks and all manner of extraneous fixture and features. Smartphones are sort of like this new slate-like variety of tablet, only they’re too tiny. Buttonless, slick, slab-like tablets do currently exist, but they’re rare, and no one has found the right software pairing to make them particularly versatile. A 10-to-11-inch tablet wouldn’t be totally new, but since none of us are really clear on how you’re supposed to handle it in real-world situations, we built our own.
Here now, in the darkest, dingiest corner of the tech world’s favorite rabbit hole, we’ve performed a hands-on with our cardboard version of Steve Jobs’ mythical product. So, before it exists anywhere outside of our collective imagination, step into Tablet Sutra, the at-times-awkward position-by-position walkthrough of tablet handling:
The hurdles for a tablet like this aren’t just technological. This is a device that’s going to have to convert its usership to a whole new kind of physical experience. We’re used to laptops and smartphones, and we take the things they’re good and bad at for granted. The tablet’s software may be a wonderful mystery box with massive potential, but the tablet form factor, like any other, won’t be for everyone.
If you think we left out any key tablet positions, mention it in comments—feel free to upload photos—or send a note to our tips line with “Tablet Sutra” in the subject line. We’ll be on the lookout.
Google’s desktop syncing strategy for Android has always been clear: there is no desktop syncing strategy. Just drag, drop and be content, people! Now, T-Mobile’s giving their customers what Google won’t, bundling DoubleTwist with new Android phones.
As bundled, DoubleTwist apparently lacks Amazon MP3 store integration, but includes all the rest of the features of the (still) downloadable default version, including multi-device support, library management and photos and movies. As part of the deal, T-Mobile will be hanging DoubleTwist banners in retail stores, and pushing the download on their website. And yeah, DVD Jon’s getting paid, apparently well.
As minor an issue as it sounds, sync—or lack of sync—is actually a serious feature for a smartphone. The iPhone thrived with it, taking a population acclimated to the iTunes sync model and sneakily tricking them into two-year cell contracts, while Windows Mobile and BlackBerry have made it a banner feature for their handsets. Palm listed iTunes syncing prominently on the Pre’s spec sheet, at least until their hacks were thwarted, and Android…well, Android, despite being the most media-savvy smartphone platform behind iPhone OS, had no syncing provision whatsoever.
Dragging and dropping isn’t a big deal by any means, but it can be irritating to manage a large, fluid music and podcast collection one by one. People appreciate syncing. This should be a boon for T-Mobile, but it’d be nice if Google, no stranger to late-stage course-correction, could take a hint here. [TechCrunch]
This generation of Android phones is faster, more powerful and generally awesome-er than anything before. But for whatever reason, they don’t have one thing other smartphones take for granted: multitouch. Here’s how to fix that, and so much more.
Google’s Nexus one and Verizon’s Motorola Droid are, in a sense, miles ahead their competitors in terms of hardware specs, but moreso because they’ve got much newer versions of Android’s software, with 2.1 and 2.0, respectively. In the midst of a slew of new software features and despite base-level hardware and software support, Google, who has always been cagey about the multitouch issue, continues to leave it out of their core apps.
This is especially weird in the cases of the Droid and Nexus One, which don’t just support multitouch on a hardware level, but fully support it on an OS level, too. It’s really just the apps, like the browser, the photo gallery and the maps app, which exclude support for multitouch gestures such as pinch-zooming. Why can’t all Android users have use the same gestures that iPhone, Pre and HTC Hero owners can, if their phones can already accept multi-finger input? Only Google knows. But there’s something you can do about it. Actually, there are two things:
Rooting
Rooting is most intensive method, and can actually do a lot more than add multitouch to your phone. What this does, basically, is give you deep, system-level access to all your phone’s software and parameters, which lets you run unsanctioned tethering apps to writing apps to your SD card (by default, Android phones restrict you to the device’s limited, onboard memory), modify the device’s stock apps, and most importantly, swap your phone’s software out completely, with what’s called a new ROM. To get native multitouch apps on your phone, you can opt for an entire flash ROM, or just a more narrow set of hacks. But you will need to root your device.
So here’s how to get multitouch on your new Android phone, natively:
Now, if the above instructions seem like overkill for a relatively minor feature, don’t have any need for the other goodies that rooting promises, or aren’t satisfied with the current state of Nexus One and Droid homebrew, you have another, easier option:
Downloadable Apps
As I mentioned before, the Droid and Nexus One’s shared dirty secret is that they support multitouch out of the box, but don’t support include the gestures necessary to get any use out of it. This means that unless you’re willing to hack your phones, as seen above, you’re not going to be able to get multitouch in your native browser, or for that matter any of your native apps. The easy solution? Download Dolphin, a browser that include multitouch gestures (and a lot more cool stuff, like swipe gestures, RSS feed subscriptions and a built-in Twitter client.
For photos, try Multi-Touch for Gallery, which is a full photo gallery replacement, or PicSay, which is a combination gallery/photo editor. All you’ve got to do is search for these apps in the Android Market, install them, and designate them as your default web and photo browsers.
There are other mulitouch apps in the App Market, from games to utilities to simple tech demos. Drop your favorites in the comments, and I’ll add them to the post.
That’s pretty much it! If you have any tips to tricks for getting the most out your phone’s hardware, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you’d like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy pinch-zooming, folks!
In this week’s distracted app roundup: Grand Theft Auto, committed! Live video, streamed over 3G! Photos, psycedelicized! Blocks, stacked, smashed, and squeezed through holes! Casual gaming norms, subtly subverted! Spying spouses, caught! Songs, made with magic! Barack, Obama’d! And more…
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Chomp: Following in the footsteps of Chorus, Zensify Apps and Apple’s own Genius, Chomp is an app for finding more apps. If you’re a regular, well-rounded human, this may sound excessive! If you’re reading this column, less so. Chomp brings a slick, consciously simple UI to the table, and has an extremely handy bookmarking feature. Here’s how you should use it: once you find an app you think you might like, or that made you chuckle (see: Fishbate), bookmark it, and just wait 24 hours. Your wallet will thank me.
Crush the Castle: Too often on the iPhone, I see castles being defended. This is incorrect! They should be crushed. With trebuchets, if possible. This little gem’s got decent graphics, a great physics engine and respectably deep gameplay. $2.
Finger Physics: An all-around fantastic stacking game, Finger Physics isn’t the newest app in this roundup, but I’m pretty sure I’ve wasted more time on it this week than all the others combined. It’s a very simple concept built atop a very simple engine: just stack your pieces, some of which have special functions, until you hit your goal. $1, though there’s a meaty free version as well.
GTA: Chinatown Wars: I’m not sure what I was expecting, really, but this game came as a total surprise to me. I mean, I knew it was coming, I just didn’t expect it to be so good. It’s basically the exact same game you get on the PSP or DS—that is, a sprawling Grand Theft Auto title in a hybrid top-down/3D style, which costs around $30 on those platforms—for $10. Ignoring the character animations, this game is one of the most visually impressive I’ve seen on the platform, I’ve barely even explored the city after a few hours of play, and I’ve only scratched the surface of the available missions. $10.
iTrust: Displays a fake, dead homescreen, and records any attempted screen presses, so you can show your would-be phone snooper the evidence of their intrusion. I can’t imagine a situation in which this app actually solves a problem, but I can think of plenty of people who’d use it anyway. So yeah, stick it right to that stupid asshole! person you love! For a dollar!
PhotoTropedelic: Image processing apps are a dime a dozen, so in order to matter, a single-filter app has to be pret-tay, pret-ray, pret-tay cool. The trick here is that PhotoTropedelic doesn’t just run a straight, predictable filter; it interprets sections of photographs and applies different filters to each. Instead of a mishmash of colors, you get stripes, stars, and other designs. Plus you can export to scalable PDF, which you’ll probably want to do after seeing what kind of results you get. At $2, though, the price is a little steep.
Qik: Qik’s video streaming app used to be tethered to Wi-Fi, which chopped its usefulness by about, oh, 99/100ths. Now you can broadcast video over the air, even from non-3GS iPhones. Free.
SkyBox: This is a simple concept, executed sparsely: you guide blocks of varying shapes as they fall through holes in walls of varying but generally accommodating shapes. So why is it so intense? I flinch every time my blocks are about to pass through another plane, even I’m sure they’ll be fine. This potency pays of when you get better, making you feel like a REAL BLOCK HERO in the later stages. $2.
Voice Band: Hey, this doesn’t seem like it should be possible! Sing, hum, or “DUURR” into your iPhone, and Voice Band will approximate your tones into a variety of instrument sounds, and if you have the time, a full track. $3.
White House: Do you love Barack Obama? Would you like to see and hear more of him, even when you’re away from the TV or computer? Alternately, do you hate Barack Obama? Do you absorb his every word, only to spew it back in his general direction, drenched in venom? Or you really not care, but enjoy the occasional candid photo of a Portuguese Water Dog? Whatever, it’s free.
This list is in no way definitive. If you’ve spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory. Have a great weekend, everybody!
YouTube’s got millions of songs on its servers, and now, thanks to Vevo, a hefty slice of them are totally aboveboard. In DIsco, YouTube’s built an official, media-player-like front-end for all this music, with a Pandora-like discovery tool.
Disco’s playlisting functionality is still a bit limited, and it’s hard to tell what metrics are driving the music recommendation service, which isn’t nearly as astute as Last.fm’s or Pandora’s. And since this is YouTube, there’s a very real risk that whatever song you think has been added to your playlist could be the Alp1ne Techno-y0del remixXx of said song. But it’s a minor tradeoff, because good god, YouTube has everything. [YouTube Disco via Sillicon Alley Insider]
It only took graphic designer Anatoly Zenkov a few hours of Photoshop work to log this exhausting, web-like trail with his cursor. Here‘s how he recorded it, and how you can too. [Flickr]
Flash powers almost all the video on the web nowadays, so it’s obviously good enough. But is there a better way? YouTube, and now Vimeo, who’re both giddily jumping into bed with HTML, sure seem to think so.
Vimeo’s new HTML5 system is just like YouTube’s, in both execution and technical details, in that it’ll only work with a few browsers—Safari and Chrome, for now—and that it’s compatible with most, but not all, of the company’s video libraries. It’s something that most people won’t bother to try at this point, and if they do, they’re probably be underwhelmed, since HTML5 video playback is almost indistinguishable from Flash video playback. (Moving pictures!)
But it’s primed to be something that everyone ends up using, and that would be a Very Good Thing. Flash video performs terribly on Mac OS X and Linux, and on the few mobile devices that do support it, playback is uniformly terrible. And generally speaking, it’s a plug-in. We whine about having to install Silverlight to use Bing Maps or watch some kinds of video, but it’s a plugin the same way that Flash is.
HTML5 allows certain types of video to be rendered in the browser natively, like JPEGs or GIFs are now. It’s an objectively simpler, more efficient solution, and disregarding the massive infrastructure built up around Flash video, it would be the obvious choice.
Luckily, YouTube accounts for a hefty chunk of said architecture, their catalog is rendered in HTML5-friendly h.264 format already—that’s how you watch in on the iPhone and Android, by the way—and with help from smaller sites like Vimeo, they could actually get the ball rolling on, you know, murdering Flash video. In a world where everybody’s browser fully supports h.264 HTML5 video—a world that’s a few years away, at least—we wouldn’t have to wait years for Flash support in our new phones, wouldn’t have to settle of chugging video playback on near-new machines, and we wouldn’t have to put up overladen, poorly-designed proprietary Flash players getting in the way of our content. We’d just have…video. [CNET]
Before launch, we spent a lot of time thinking about how you might be able to type on the iPad, seeing as plain onscreen keyboards one 10-inch tablets are just, well, awkward. But apparently, Apple doesn’t think so.
From the realm of sci-fi to Steve Jobs’ stage: The 
• The Screen: The tablet’s multitouch screen measures in at 9.7 inches, meaning that it’s got a significantly smaller footprint than the smallest MacBook, but a much larger screen than the iPhone. (That’s 9.7 inches diagonal, from screen corner to screen corner.) The screen’s resolution is a dense 1024 x 768.
As far as hardware goes, the size, the look, and the configuration of the apparent unibody-ish backside of the tablet all make sense. The 
Droid draggin’? Apps crawlin’? Android creepin’? Then maybe you should overclock your Droid to 1.1GHz, like this guy! But really no, don’t.
Well, this had to happen eventually: someone from an 
It may have taken a mob of angry customers and hundred of online support requests, but Google has finally come to terms with the 
Unwittingly snapped by a sandwich shop paparazzo, 
According to the 
Right, so 
We know he’s a 
This generation of Android phones is faster, more powerful and generally awesome-er than anything before. But for whatever reason, they don’t have one thing other smartphones take for granted: multitouch. Here’s 
For photos, try Multi-Touch for Gallery, which is a full photo gallery replacement, or PicSay, which is a combination gallery/photo editor. All you’ve got to do is search for these apps in the Android Market, install them, and designate them as your default web and photo browsers.
