Articles about iPad

If Surface is the hit Microsoft hopes it will be, there’s the possibility that Apple might follow suit with an OS X powered MacPad at some point in the future (well, we can hope, can’t we?). The good news is you don’t actually have to wait for Apple, before trying out OS X on a tablet, you just need OS X Pad HD.

The advanced theme from Fnet Designs transforms your iPad into a Mac tablet with a fully functional Finder bar, and lets you add apps to the dock and change its style to match any of the 70 available wallpapers (or your own), create sidebar folders for Finder windows, and access settings and customization options through the System Preferences Menu. All software updates are applied directly through the theme.

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Some people don’t like tablets, while others defend them. I’ve often wondered why people seem so crazy about them, but that is mostly because what I do requires me to run Windows, and Windows-based tablets (aka slates in the Microsoft Store) are neither popular nor cheap, especially with the hardware configuration that I need.

I say need, not want, because it is mission-critical that I finish the task at hand in a decent amount of time, and to do that requires powerful hardware. But there’s another reason as well, and it involves the size of the display. In one of my previous articles, I wrote that real work can’t be done on a tablet and I gave five reasons as to why it’s (still) true. Today, I’d like to add the sixth reason to that list: Most tablet displays are too small.

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Answer: One-hundred percent of all profits gained from Sammy's smartphones and injunction barring sales of future models. Is that clear enough for you? Because it might not be from the stilted news stories about the Apple-Samsung trial under way here in California. Apple feels entitled to everything. That's how highly the company's top-brass thinks about their intellectual property and how little they do about Samsung's.

Instead of reading about how much Apple demands, blogs and news reports focus on the puny 2.4 percent per phone Samsung asks Apple for so-called essential patents or the extent of copying as told by the fruit-logo company. The story you read everyday about the Apple-Samsung trial is a good yarn, but there's enough urban legend to warrant a Snopes.com entry.

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Nine people have gone on trial in the central province of Hunan, China, accused of illegal organ trading and intentional injury after a 17-year old high school student sold one of his kidneys to buy an iPad and iPhone. The teenager, identified in a report by the state-run China Daily as Wang Shangkun from the Anhui province, was allegedly recruited through a chat room by one of the defendants, and paid 22,000 Yuan ($3,456) for the organ, which was removed in an illegal transplant operation by a team from a local hospital. The kidney was sold by the gang behind the trade to an unknown buyer for 150,000 Yuan ($23,566) and a further $10,000 in cash, netting them a profit of around $30,000.

While to Westerners $3,458 seems a shockingly low price to sell a kidney for (especially considering how much the recipient was willing to pay), it’s important to put that figure into context. The average wage paid to workers assembling Apple products at Foxconn is around 2,200 Yuan ($346) a month, so the figure Wang received would have equated to nearly ten months’ salary for someone working at the plant -- a colossal amount of money to a young man still in full-time education.

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We’re only into the second week of the "patent trial of the century" but we’ve already been granted an unprecedented peek behind the curtain into the notoriously secretive world of Apple Inc. Here, in no particular order, are ten of the most fascinating reveals from the trial to date.

Steve Jobs was open to the idea of a seven inch iPad

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While the focus on Apple's next big thing has surrounded the likely release of the iPhone 5 next month, the Cupertino, Calif. company's decision to change the dock connector may affect its entire product line, a new report claims.

Rene Ritchie at iMore says sources told the publication that the entire iOS device lineup will receive a refresh when the iPhone 5 launches, rumored to occur on September 12. The report claims that date will see a refreshed iPad, new iPod nano and iPod touches, the iPhone 5, and even the debut of the 7-inch iPad.

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To understand why Google subsidized the Nexus 7, you have to first understand what makes the tablet market unique from all other forms of personal computing. All personal computing devices fall into three major categories: PC, cellphone, and tablet (with possibilities for more in the future such as “smartglasses”, which Google and others are developing).

The PC market is mature, there have been very few changes since the nineties; functionality has steadily improved and the only big change was the advent of the laptop, which changed the form, although, it didn’t change the two main players: Apple and Microsoft, with Microsoft’s hardware manufacturers also playing an important role. The players in the PC market have changed little (sure HP bought Compaq and IBM sold out to Lenovo). It would take a truly revolutionary product to change anything even though there have been attempts -- the constant presence of Linux, and the recent (relatively) introduction of Chromebooks for example -- none have have managed to have any impact.

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Amazon Instant Video, the little video service that could, has now moved into Apple territory. Starting August 1st, Amazon will be releasing an iOS iPad app for its Amazon Instant video service. The new app allows iPad users who are also Amazon Prime account members to access the 20,000+ title collection of videos available to them.

The new iPad app also allows viewing of Amazing Instant Videos not in the "free" Amazon Prime video section as well. The Amazon Instant Video App for iPad also offers access to "Your Watchlist," a list of all the movies and TV episodes Amazon members want to watch in the future, regardless of if they own the video or not. Also, the app provides access to a "Your Video Library" feature that gives iPad customers access to their previous purchases and rentals from Amazon Instant Video. Another nice feature is the option to either watch over a Wi-Fi connection or download the video for offline viewing mode.

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After attracting attention with news about its upcoming gaming tablet, Wikipad has made available the most important specs for their Wikipad tablet. According to a press release, it will be released at the end of the 3rd quarter of 2012 and it will be made available through worldwide major retailers.

Even though the Wikipad debuted last January at the Consumer Electronics Show 2012, not much was known about it. Most of the specs were unknown until today. The tablet is powered by an nVidia Tegra 3 1.4GHz quad-core processor paired with 1GB of DDR2 RAM and a 520MHz GPU, while the internal storage capacity will be at least 16GB. It has a 10.1-inch IPS display with a 16:10, 1280x800 resolution. It weighs 560 grams, and the thickness is 8.6 mm. Power comes from a 23.56Wh battery, which supposedly offers 8 hours of video playback and 6 hours of gaming time. An 8 megapixel rear-facing camera along with a 2 megapixel forward-facing camera are also included. To back up the "gaming" claim, the Wikipad tablet will come with a gaming controller add-on, which attaches itself to the Wikipad at the bottom through a proprietary connector. It will ship with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean out of the box.

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Ah! Life in paradise. As the literal incarnation of the mythical "guy who ran away to a tropical island", I've had the joy of returning to my once primary (and now mostly vacation) home in the United States only to discover all of the things that can go wrong with an empty house in the Florida heat (this time, it was a failed A/C compressor -- ugh!).

However, I've also had the opportunity to revisit many of my core IT beliefs from the perspective of a relative outsider living in the slower-paced world of coconuts, litches and 2Mbps ADSL connections. Basically, my geographic isolation has forced me to take the long view on new technology trends. Which is why I'm so excited about the potential of BYOD: I see the emergence of the Post-PC phenomenon as a truly disruptive force that will forever change how people view "computers".

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Apple is one of the most important companies in the world of consumer technology and one that has changed the destiny of the smartphone and the tablet. It came as a big surprise when the Cupertino, California-based company announced the iPad more than two years ago. In 2010, Apple made waves with its first tablet generating $9.566 billion in revenue from the iPad alone, and in 2012 it's making headlines again with a smaller, seven inch tablet it hasn’t even announced yet.

In 2010 Apple had the market all to itself, with the iPad dominating 83 percent of the tablet market. Why? The iPad wasn't designed to have the most cutting edge software or hardware in terms of features or speed, but it was conceived to offer easy-to-use software with hardware to match it, wrapped in a good looking package. It sold 14.789 million units in 2010 alone, so it's clear the idea caught on. The original iPad was released in a time when tablets weren't as popular as they are today, and despite previous efforts by Microsoft with the TabletPC, they never caught up. So what's changed?

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Uncertainty hung over Apple's fiscal third quarter coming into today's earnings announcement. Gulfs widened among analysts for overall revenue estimates and about how many iPads or iPhones were sold. No one expected poor performance, there was just more uncertainty about what and where than more recent quarters. Fiscal Q3 will be remembered as sea change coming, as Apple missed Street consensus for the first time in years and iPad sales surged against iPhone.

For fiscal third quarter, Apple reported $35 billion revenue and net profits of $8.8 billion, or $9.32 a share. A year earlier, the company reported revenue of $28.57 billion and $7.31 billion net quarterly profit, or $7.79 per share. Apple announced fiscal Q3 results after the market closed today.

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Ever since the release of the Nexus 7, analysts have wondered what impact, if any, it would have on Android tablets' market share battle with the iPad. The possible release of the iPad Mini, later this year, could throw another wrench into the works. Fortunately, we have already seen an Android vs. Apple battle in the smartphone market. Let's take a look at the parallels we can draw between the smartphone and tablet market and project the possible market share trends in the tablet market.

Before we begin, we need to understand the global smartphone market share trends over the past couple of years. It is important to understand that ever since the iPhone and Android were launched, the market segmented into legacy smartphone platforms (BlackBerry, Symbian & Windows Mobile) and modern smartphone platforms (iOS, Android & Windows Phone).

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Whenever I think about tablets v. PCs, I remember a bold prediction of old: “Son, 10 years from now everyone will drive an electric car!” When was that, 20 years ago? We’ve all read something like that from someone believing to be clairvoyant.

I read similar articles almost every day where the writer plays the same old broken record: tablets are the death of PCs, or some other flamboyant thing that’s bound to get interest -- with the hope that the reader will agree with the author. It's like almost everyone is set on sending the PC down to the gates of Hell. But why should I agree with their assertions when I actually need a PC?

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For just about three years, we've had Microsoft's browser-based suite of free Office tools alongside the desktop Office software. In that time, we've composed and edited loads of Word documents, created Powerpoint presentations, and manipulated Excel spreadsheets. But when these types of Web apps debuted, there were three great islands: the standalone desktop software, the Web-based service, and the mobile application. Each was meant to be used in a different context, and each was equipped with different capabilities to suit those contexts.

For Microsoft in 2010, the PC was still the reigning king, so the Office Web apps were meant to get Office documents off the hard drive and out where they could be easily shared and passed between PCs.

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