Articles about iPad

"Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo."

That's some of the text from Apple's famous "Think Different" marketing campaign from 1997 to 2002. The promotional likened Apple and Mac users to legendary individuals who stepped outside the mainstream, who expressed their independence and defied convention. Today, iPad is the status quo for tablets. What irony. Buyers of 1.2 million non-iPad tablets, sold at US retail, are the individualists -- the rebels who dared buy something else.

Continue reading →

US Thanksgiving is this Thursday, and their friends across the ocean have something for the Apple Fanclub of bloggers and journalists to be grateful for: Canalys predictions that the Mac maker will be the No. 1 PC vendor next year -- gasp, possibly during holiday 2011. "HP and Apple will fight for top position in Q4, but Apple may have to wait for the release of iPad 3 before it passes HP", Canalys analyst Tim Coulling says.

It's an amazing proclamation, considering that IDC put Mac global share at a puny 5.2 percent in third quarter. You'll read lots of gleeful headlines today about how Apple is going to strip HP's britches, then leap to the top spot. Canalys' magical prediction is all about counting. Is a tablet a PC? The UK-based analysis firm says yes, and adding iPad to the mix pulls Apple up from the doldrums to the stratosphere.

Continue reading →

What? You expected something more reasonably priced, given the recession? Bwhahaha. You're gonna be Grinch if you give anything less. Today, Nielsen released its holiday wish survey for kids ages 6 to 12. It's what they want to buy in the next six months, but Santa comes sooner.

Holiday shopping for school-aged pre-teens isn't what it used to be. Bicycles, train sets, Barbies, Hello Kitty goodies aren't good enough for the youngest Millennials. Forty-four percent want iPads, up from 31 percent last holiday. I guess not enough six-to-twelves got Apple tablets last year.

Continue reading →

But you knew that already, right?

Today, DisplaySearch issued the most unusual of tablet forecasts -- one that looks at the totality of the market and takes Windows into consideration. Gartner and IDC use a separate "media tablet" category for Android tablets and iPad, based on the operating system, choosing to classify "Tablet PCs" running Windows as personal computers. DisplaySearch has more sensibly made the designation around processors -- ARM and x86 -- which better defines the market for the future, and isn't the future what a forecast is all about?

Continue reading →

It's no secret iPad owners love their devices. The American Customer Satisfaction Index and NPD both report unusually high satisfaction rates for iPad. Just in second quarter, Apple sold more than 9 million tablets, generating $6 billion in revenue. Despite the best efforts of competitors, most of which offer tablets running Android OS, nothing has yet put a dent in iPad’s dominance among consumers. The fact of the matter is that, if you own a tablet right now, it most likely is iPad.

There’s  another group equally smitten by iPad: higher education. I’m not talking about students, faculty or university administrators that own the tablets (I would lump these people in with the consumer category), but rather the growing number of  higher-ed institutions around the country that currently issue iPads to their students.

Continue reading →

Amazon's unveiling of the Kindle Fire on Wednesday took the eReader ever closer to becoming a full-fledged tablet device. With the move, Amazon will now have its devices ever-more increasingly compared to tablets rather than other e-readers in its class.

The most obvious comparison is price. At $199, Amazon is clearly aiming to get as many Fires in the hands of consumers as possible. It could see the device as a loss leader, hoping to make up any lost margins on the sales of content from its music and entertainment services.

Continue reading →

In late August, software developers MoboTap released Dolphin, the popular browser formerly exclusive to the Android platform, on iOS. Today, the tablet-specific version called Dolphin Browser HD is available for free in the iTunes App store.

Though Dolphin has a number of useful browser features such as tabs, sidebars, speed dial, desktop mode, and auto-completing URLS, there are two features that make this browser remarkable: Gesture browsing and Webzine mode, which launched on Android back in July.

Continue reading →

Fifty Betanews readers and I were among the very first people to test a content discovery engine called Zite last year. It was a solid idea --harvesting keywords from your Twitter feed and Delicious bookmarks to learn the things you might be interested in, and subsequently finding and suggesting news articles to you-- but it still had a long way to go.

That service eventually grew into an iPad magazine in the vein of Flipboard, but with the underlying content recommendation engine that we saw very early on in the Zite beta. After the positive reception it received as a standalone iPad app, CNN Worldwide president Jim Walton today announced that CNN has acquired Zite.

Continue reading →

A German court ruled on Thursday that the earlier issued injunction barring the sales of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1-inch tablet in Germany will be allowed to stand. The ruling remains in effect until at least September 9, when the court plans to issue a final verdict.

The ruling means that Samsung will be barred from showing off the device at IFA 2011, Europe's biggest consumer electronics show slated to take place next week in Berlin.

Continue reading →