“The internet . . . is that the one with the email?” (For Your Consideration)

It’s a hard pill to swallow to have to pay for internet on yet another device, especially if you are paying for a second time to the same company. For the majority of iPad users they are already paying for internet at home and on their smartphone so the iPad 3G will represent a 3rd internet bill. Ouch.

Since Apple (and AT&T) won’t give us tethering . . . continue reading

As beta testers have more and more time to play with OS 4.0 they are discovering a myriad of little difference between 3.0 and 4.0. And of course many of these will likely apply to the forthcoming iPad update. Gizmodo is building a great collection of these “hidden secrets”.

The team over at TiPb did a run down on what is still missing from the platform. Many of the features and functions they highlight are available on Android and Palm devices so why not Apple? While it is important to note that by the time 4.0 launches some or all of these could be included, for now they were not highlighted in Steve Job’s keynote.

Still missing:

• No new Home Screen/SpringBoard. We understand that Apple has 85,000,000 legacy users now trained on the iPhone Home Screen system (aka the same app launcher metaphor going back to the days of PalmOS). We knew when Apple said as much during the iPad announcements that they weren’t going to confuse that “already trained” customer base. It’s the price of being an established OS, after all. So Apple didn’t radically re-invent the Home Screen. They did make it layered — it can lift up to show you multitasking apps and slit open to show you apps inside folders — but that’s it. And part of “that’s it” means…
• No themes. You get wallpaper and that’s where your customization ends. You still can’t remove built-in apps (though you can hide them in a folder so they take less space). You can’t chance the look of icons. There’s no animated backgrounds to be had. More disappointingly, however…
• No widgets. Want to know the latest weather, Facebook or Twitter updates, or stick a big clock on the screen? There’s an app for all of that, sure, but you have to go into and out of each individual app and the Home Page remains a giant grid of uninformative icons. Android and Nokia have had widgets for a while now, webOS lets you flick between live Cards, and Windows Phone 7 will have live tiles. iPhone… will be waiting on 5.0?To read the rest of the article you can go here.

Apple’s announcement of the iPhone OS 4.0 brought some much needed updates to the iPhone operating system, a few surprises and some disappointments. 4.0 is available right now in a beta form for developers, it will be available for iPhones and iPod Touches in June and for the iPad in the fall.

While we won’t know every single update and enhancement until OS 4.0 is ready Apple did announce the highlights and the 7 “tentpoles”:

• Multitasking
• Folders
• Unified Mailbox
• iBooks (for iPhone)
• Increased enterprise support
• Game Center Social Network
• iAd

“Eve would ask Abott to give her Costello” – Bette Davis (All About Eve)

I have to say the soap opera unfolding on the internet these days around the iPad is highly entertaining.  On one side you have the Apple fanatics, “The iPad is magical and revolutionary because . . . because Steve Jobs said so!” On the other side you have the Apple haters, “What do you mean the iPad can’t host video chats, fold my laundry and walk my dog. This is an OUTRAGE!” And in between you have the rest of us. Including those of us writing this blog.

The iPad conversations these days seem to be heavily weighted to discussing what the iPad doesn’t have/do vs. what it does have/do. Let’s take a trip in the Wayback Machine to when the iPhone came out. Remember when people said that no one would want an iPhone because it didn’t do MMS, copy/paste or record video. Millions and millions of iPhone’s later it’s clear that the iPhone has been a massive success because what it does do, it does really, really well. And what Apple has proven . . . continue reading

Apple will be previewing the highly anticipated iPhone OS 4.0 on April 8th and likely releasing it sometime in June. Of course the assumption is that any OS enhancements would make their way onto the iPad as well. While, the timing of this announcement seems odd as it lands just days after the launch of the iPad, it is exciting. There are a myriad of predictions, but we won’t know for sure until Thursday. In the meantime lets take a look at two of the serious possibilities:

Multi-tasking: Or at the very last allowing third party apps to run in the background. This is a key missing feature that is already present in the Palm Pre and the Droid.

iTunes streaming: iTunes recent partnership with Lala made this look like a distinct possibility. This would allow us access to our full iTunes library over the internet without eating up precious memory on our actual devices.

What else do we expect/hope to see?

By midnight Saturday night Apple had sold 300,000 iPad’s. Smashing success or lukewarm reception? Depends on who you ask.

Many analysts were predicting sales of 700,000 so when faced with those numbers the iPad did less than half of expectations. Compared to the launch of the previous two versions of the iPhone which each did over a million sales day one, the iPad seems to have underperformed.

Or maybe it really was a huge success. We have to remember . . . continue reading

“my iPhone just auto-corrected drink to drnknghhg” – texts from last night

You’ve heard of the iPad , I’ve heard of the iPad, just about everyone has heard of the iPad . . . except the iPhone.

In this screen shot from my iPhone you can see that the iPhone is autocorrecting “iPad” as “upas”. And I’ll save you the google search, here is the definition:

Upas: a tropical Asian tree, the milky sap of which has been used as arrow poison and for ritual purposes.

Huh.

The movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we shouldn’t go at all.” – Pauline Kael

Final Draft is the most widely used software for screenwriters and a visit to the Final Draft website reveals that an iPad app is in the works. This is fantastic news for writers and readers of screenplays everywhere.

Laptops are great for writing screenplays but terrible for reading them. So to have an app for reading screenplays that also has the ability to make edits would be a fantastic tool for writers. While I don’t see many screenwriters writing an entire screenplay on their iPad, I definitely see reading, updating, editing and tweaking all taking place on the iPad. As a writer, I often find myself away from home and wishing I had my laptop with me to write. And I’ve used the iPhone to quickly type shorthand notes that I later transcribe when I get home. However, the iPad is sized right to go almost everywhere with me. Which means when the creative bug strikes I can take full advantage of it or when I’m caught with downtime I’d like to spend productively I can have all the tools at my disposal to write.

For script readers, I sincerely hope this app will have the ability to highlight and make notes and then it could absolutely do away with all need for printing out scripts.

I will definitely be downloading this app the day it’s available.

You can request to be notified when the app is available here.

ABC has developed an app  that will allow all of their shows and content to played on the iPad. This app will be launched along with the iPad app store on April 3rd. This is particularly interesting to note since ABC is one of the partners behind Hulu and the rumor has been that Hulu is also preparing for the iPad but would be providing content with a subscription based model.

CBS has reportedly been working on an HTML5 version of it’s site to make all of its videos viewable on the iPad. As it stands CBS, like most sites with video is built with Flash and as we all know the iPad (and the iPhone and iPod Touch) can not view Flash.  CBS is, of course, the . . . continue reading