I don’t know whether to go to an Apple store or the feminine care aisle to purchase an iPad. Oh, don’t groan! You cracked similar jokes. And let’s face it: They’re all kinda lame and won’t bother Steve whatsoever.
You forget, but they made fun of iPod name when it came out. What matters is the product and what it means to consumers.
So yes, Steve Jobs won’t care about our jokes, nor will they affect the iPad’s chance of being a success. Might as well get them out of our systems now.
We’re excited that the iPad’s data plans won’t lock you down in a 2-year contract and that the device’s 3G modem isn’t carrier-locked. But you still won’t get 3G speeds on an iPad if you decide to use T-Mobile.
Why? The iPad’s 3G modem supports UMTS/HSDPA (850, 1900, 2100 MHz) and GSM/EDGE (850, 900,1800, 1900 MHz). T-Mobile’s 3G runs on 1700 Mhz. See the trouble? You could of course still get EDGE data service using T-Mobile, but that’s just not as great as the theoretically blazing 3G speeds, is it?
Some of you are remarking that T-Mobile also runs on 2100 MHz, but here’s what our friend and wise man Richard Baguley says:
UMTS2100 is the european version, not the US one. I don’t think they are compatible. So, the iPad would just not see the T-Mobile 3G on either frequency
We’ve had an iTunes store and now we’ve got an iBook store with content from Penguin, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette book group. We’ll browse this content on a bookshelf-like page and add to it using a purchase system similar to the App store’s. This interface looks clean, organized, and like you could really snuggle up with your iPad and a book—though I do wonder about eyestrain from a display like this.
The pricing we’re seeing for actual books during the presentation resembles what we’ve heard before with a price point of $14.99. Update: Some eagle-eyed readers noticed that there are several books with price points as low as $4.99 in the iBook store. While Apple uses the ePub format, we don’t have confirmation about whether you can import your own books into the iBook library—though odds are in favor of that freedom.
Newspapers and Magazines With an Upgrade
We figured that a New York Time’s iPad application was coming, and while it allows for playback of video clips and other enhanced content, we’re not really getting anything that we couldn’t get on the NYT website. The point is that now there’s not only motivation for publishers to push online or app-based subscription models, present more enhanced content, put out their own apps—just as they did for the iPhone—but now there’s an device which screams that it’s ideal for the job.
Sure there are plenty of movies in the iTunes store, but watching them in widescreen landscape format on the iPad leaves half the device’s screen unused as. Bit tacky, but somehow I think we might overlook that considering that the iPad’s battery lets us keep watching videos for ten straight hours.
What’s So Great About It All?
Movies, books, music, magazine and newspaper apps. The iPad combines Apple’s solid content delivery system and a device which is almost ideal for all that media. We’ll listen to our iTunes collection while reading out iBook collection and squinting at the grease marks left from a popcorn-powered ten-hour movie marathon.
What’s Missing?
Comic books. I desperately wanted to see the ideal comic book reader today, but that’s certainly something an app could help with. There were also expectations of some kind of subscription model for some magazine and newspaper content, but it appears that we’ll have to wait for the apps and see how that works out. Oh, and international users will be a bit left out with any iBook content based on the fine print explaining that “iBooks [are] available in the U.S. only,” but that’s probably due to Apple needing to work things out with publishers.
I love it when a designer adds a dash of humor to what seems like a clever idea. Security risks would be minimal as contact lists could be limited and managed and a system like this could improve quality of life for prisoners.
Of course, you might not feel that prisoners deserve and improvement in their quality of life or simpler ways of communicating with the outside world, so let’s all just agree that the design mockups are funny. [Yanko Design]
Daguerreotype cameras are the great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfathers of the devices we use for snapshots today. Recently the earliest—and with an expected price of 700,000 euro, the most expensive—examples of such a camera was rediscovered in a private collection.
If you’ve got between 200,000 euro, the auction’s starting price, and 700,000 euro, the expected final price, and a weakness for old, wooden sliding-box cameras then this one’s for you. It’s got the signature of its name sake, Jacques Mande Daguerre, and was actually built by his brother-in-law.
This is a neat piece of shutterbug history and I truly hope that it ends up in a museum collection where it can be viewed by the public rather than disappearing into another private basement museum. [Slashgear]
Before being sentenced to life in prison for first-degree homicide, Kevin Singer was an avid fan of tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons. His appeal to unban the game in prison failed though, so he won’t be rolling anymore d10s.
Apparently officials at Wisconsin Waupun prison feel that D&D “promoted gang-related activity and was a threat to security.” They originally banned the game back in 2004—after another inmate expressed “concern about Singer and three other inmates forming a “gang” focused around playing the game.”
Singer has since then attempted to appeal that decision on the grounds that it “violated his free speech and due process rights.” He lost his lawsuit in federal court and all of his D&D-related materials—including a 96-page scenario manuscript—were confiscated. [Oakland Tribune via Boing Boing]
In 1951, a biopsy was performed on Henrietta Lacks as part of her treatment for cervical cancer. Henrietta died a few months later, but cells collected during the biopsy are being used for research study today.
Click on the image for a closer look.
Wired put together this graphic tracing the history of the HeLa cell line—Henrietta’s cells- to show how it has nudged along biological research through the years. The cell line is known as an “immortal line” due to its ability to survive and proliferate indefinitely, and this is exactly why it is so significant for research. I only wish this woman could’ve known that part of her would live on to make a such a difference. [Wired and Wikipedia]
There were complaints that the first firmware update fix for flickering iMac screens made no difference, but now there are whispers that a “combination software and driver patch” will come in “roughly three weeks.”
The timeline for this fix is based on what customers are reporting they’ve heard from Apple Care specialists, but let’s just hope that it’s not only true, but that the fix makes a difference. [Apple Insider]
Android 2.1 helps you avoid awkward situations by censoring foul language when you use the voice transcription feature. #### that! Here’s a quick and dirty work around courtesy of author Neil Gaiman: Add “dot com” after your string of filth.
According to a statement by a Google spokesperson, the original word filtering is “less about sanitizing users’ speech and more about making sure curse words don’t accidentally appear in transcriptions erroneously.” Fair enough, but an option to turn the function off would be nice. In the meantime, you can cheat the system a little by adding a “dot com’ as Jason did when he text messaged me earlier. It looks messy, but a bit amusing, too. [Mashable via Neil Gaiman]
It most definitely takes longer than two minutes to take apart a PSP Go and figure out how to piece it back together, but this neat stop-motion video makes it look like it’s a quick and easy task.
I wish every gadget teardown were done like this. Sound effects and all. [Engadget]
You can read more about Snyder in the NY Times article and I recommend that you do, because the man sounds even more fantastic than his poem:
Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh
By Gary Snyder
Because it broods under its hood like a perched falcon,
Because it jumps like a skittish horse and sometimes throws me,
Because it is poky when cold,
Because plastic is a sad, strong material that is charming to rodents,
Because it is flighty,
Because my mind flies into it through my fingers,
Because it leaps forward and backward, is an endless sniffer and searcher,
Because its keys click like hail on a boulder,
And it winks when it goes out,
And puts word-heaps in hoards for me, dozens of pockets of gold under boulders in streambeds, identical seedpods strong on a vine, or it stores bins of bolts;
And I lose them and find them,
Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly laid out and then highlighted and vanish in a flash at “delete,” so it teaches of impermanence and pain;
And because my computer and me are both brief in this world, both foolish, and we have earthly fates,
Because I have let it move in with me right inside the tent,
And it goes with me out every morning;
We fill up our baskets, get back home,
Feel rich, relax, I throw it a scrap and it hums.
Between this poem and the old-school gadgets, I’m getting lost in a nostalgic daze today. And absolutely loving it. [NY Times]
Meet Bashful, an older brother of the upcoming Apple tablet. Unlike the Newton, this tablet didn’t go past prototypes whipped up by an industrial design firm, but at least we have some pictures to sate our curiosity about the device.
Frog Design, the company who created these prototypes along with some for an Apple phone on Steve Jobs’ request back in the 1980s, has shared a few images to give us a peek of what could’ve been an Apple tablet—attachable keyboard, floppy drive, stylus and all:
Despite only being 27 years old, this gadget almost feels like an archeological find in comparison to what we think we might see in the upcoming tablet. Yet for some reason I still can’t stop smiling over this look into the past. [Frog Design]
Activated display phones in AT&T stores are fun. You can send dirty text messages to strangers or make long-long-long distance calls. What this individual did is far better than any prank though: He donated money to Haiti on AT&T’s behalf.
I’m assuming that this person donated $10 at a time by texting HAITI to 90999. Whether AT&T will actually release the funds is uncertain, but kudos on the effort. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna take after a few Redditors and visit my local cellphone stores to send a few text messages.
In the meantime, please keep in mind that there are many ways to donate to Haiti aid and that Lifehacker has a great guide on avoiding scams along with plenty of links to help you make sure that your money goes to someone in need. [Reddit—Thanks, Marc!]
Augmented reality’s used in pointless ways, but here’s finally something decent: A rock-paper-scissors shirt. Just plop down by a computer and play with the creepy hand jumping out from your chest like the fun people in this demo video.
T-Post, which appears to be a monthly magazine that brings a shirt with every issue, is the source of this fantastic find. All you have to do is put on one of the shirts, sit in front of a computer with a webcam, run T-Post’s webapp and well…just watch:
Is it weird? Yes. Do I desperately want to try it out? Heck yes. [T-Post via Core 77]
We’ve heard of electromagnetic pulses cutting steel in milliseconds, but apparently they can also be used to stop moving cars just as fast. The cannon demonstrated in the video here is still a prototype, but it definitely seems to work.
The idea is that an electromagnetic pulse would be used to disable a car’s microprocessors, chips, and whatever other electronics are keeping it running. The final “cannon” system, built by Eureka Aerospace, will apparently a bit smaller and lighter than what we see in the video—it’ll be suitcase-sized and about 50 pounds—and it will “stop cars in their tracks up to 656 feet (200 m) away.”
I wish they tested that cannon on a moving car, but it does just what it should by disabling the car’s electrical system. Only trouble is that even once the system is perfected and in use it can still be foiled easily: By using a pre-1970s car which doesn’t “rely on microprocessors.” Whoops. [Flight Global via Pop Sci]
Apparently those cars are powered by energy “generated by using enzymes to break down glucose found in sugary drinks” such as sodas, energy drinks, or fruit juice. One 8cc dose of such a liquid will keep a toy car running for 60 minutes and the higher the sugar content, the faster the cars will run.
This leaves two questions: When can I play with one of these and which soda will make it go the fastest? [CrunchGear]
Yesterday Amazon surprised us a bit with news of a Kindle app store, but there’s a change they haven’t mentioned: Publishers are now being allowed to skip adding DRM to Kindle books. Updated.
According to Nieman Lab, several publishers noticed the change around January 15th when a “new option gave [them] the choice to “not enable digital rights management” in Amazon’s Digital Text Platform. There was no formal announcement, but this is the explanation from Amazon itself:
You may choose, on a per title basis, to have us apply DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology which is intended to inhibit unauthorized access to or copying of digital content files for titles. Once your title is published, this setting cannot be changed.
It’s doubtful that major publishers would be quick to take advantage of this change, but we’ll see. Kudos to Amazon for finally letting the people putting out the content decide how to present it to ebook shoppers. [Nieman Lab]
Update: Amazon wrote in to say that they’ve “always given publishers the choice [to skip DRM], [they] just added new functionality to make it easier.” I guess it must’ve been pretty difficult to choose to skip DRM in the past since many publishers didn’t seem to be aware of the option, but let’s not dwell on it and just be happy that it’s easy now and we all know about it.
It’s neat that the POSTCN01 mailbox counts letters and notifies you how much mail is waiting, but what gets me excited is that it looks like a bomb and detonator from an old movie. It’ll make my mailman pee himself.
This sick and twisted habit of scaring mailmen will set me back about $55, which is a bargain in my book. [Amazon via Oh Gizmo! via Akihabarana via Nerd Approved]
Meet David Fermin, a pro MMA fighter who apparently forgets that he has an iPhone in his pocket when he swings from pipes, eight feet off the ground. Yeah, his iPhone takes a fall. No, there’s no gadget gore.
Whether this clip is staged or not, I just plain want to know why David didn’t choose something safer-looking than those pipes for his exercises. They look ready to join the iPhone and its case in clattering to the ground.
Daguerreotype cameras are the great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfathers of the devices we use for snapshots today. Recently the earliest—and with an expected price of 700,000 euro, the most expensive—examples of such a camera was rediscovered in a private collection.
Before being sentenced to life in prison for first-degree homicide, Kevin Singer was an avid fan of tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons. His appeal to unban the game in prison failed though, so he won’t be rolling anymore d10s.
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Yesterday Amazon surprised us a bit with news of 
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