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Posts in iPad

Is This Toshiba’s Answer to the iPad?

Just as we predicted months ago, everyone wants to release its own tablet now. Apple has created a new market with the iPad (some say it has reinvented an already existing market that only needed a kickstart) and now we’re seeing tablets popping up from anywhere in the industry.

Now, Toshiba wants to release a tablet computer as well, to fight the incredible success of the iPad. They have this prototype, and they call it “Libretto” - which stands for “small book” in Italian. It doesn’t look exactly like a tablet computer, but more like a touch-enhanced netbook. It’s an interesting prototype, so let’s take a look at the specs.

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Canabalt, Now Native on iPad

Canabalt, one of the most popular games available for the iPhone, has just been updated and it’s now a universal application that can run natively on the iPad.

The update comes with iOS 4 bug fixes and a new soundtrack by Danny Baranowsky. For those unfamiliar with Canabalt, it’s a very addictive game which features retro-pixel graphics, and you just have to run avoiding obstacles and jumping from one building to another. It’s one of my favorite games in the App Store.

Available at $2.99, free update for previous customers.

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Folio Case for iPad, A Beautiful PDF Reader. Review and Giveaway!

Folio Case received a ton of buzz yesterday as it launched on the iTunes App Store, garnering the attention of thousands of iPad owners looking to download the perfect PDF reader. While the timing is unfortunate as an updated iBooks will offer native PDF viewing in iOS 4, Folio Case should be fairly acclaimed as the iPad’s most elegant solution for displaying PDF files yet. It doesn’t offer functionality pursued by power users such as highlighting, searching, or even bookmarking, but it does present a minimal reading experience, characterized by the page metaphor.

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Life Web Browser: Yet Another Alternative to Safari?

So many developers have tried to build alternative browsers for the iPhone on top of Webkit. See, Apple gives you the tools to create your own customized browser, and I’m not blaming them for the attempt. I’m blaming them for the experience they failed to achieve, developing alternatives just for the sake of it. And people, the average App Store users, seem to appreciate this trend, perhaps because they’re willing to accept every single alternative some devs give them. Look at the success of Opera Mini for iPhone, and look at how bad it is when you compare it to Apple’s MobileSafari.

What I’m trying to say is, you don’t mess with MobileSafari. Sure you can try to add thousands of features, and you can also promote your app by saying that it does whatever MobileSafari doesn’t. Seriously, it’s fine. But you can’t really think someone won’t notice and eventually talk about your crap. That’s why we usually avoid to talk about these “alternative browsers” on MacStories.

Developers are now realizing that, with 2 million iPads out there, the tablet might indeed be a profitable market for “alternatives”. I won’t go into all the details, but just so you know - this thing has been the top paid iPad app for days. Is it possible to develop a decent alternative to Safari for iPad?

Let’s look for the answer in Life.

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vBookz is iBooks for Text-to-Speech

While authors are agreeable when it comes to audio playback of their creative works, books published or listed in the public domain under Project Gutenburg have the freedom to be used however the reader wishes. vBookz for the iPad gives readers a mechanical (though well) sounding text-to-speech playback of their favorite open books, yet as Kyle VanHermet from Gizmodo writes,

“But if you’re not already text-to-speech inclined, vBookz probably won’t leave you a convert. I still found that it took more effort to listen to the books than to read them myself, and where I might, in some instance, listen to an audiobook, I don’t think I’d ever be able to make it through a novel’s full text-to-speech recital.”

Designed to be an aid for the visually impaired, vBooks is $5 from the iTunes App Store.

OnLive Games Running on the iPad [Video]

We’ve talked about OnLive before. A revolutionary service that will allow you to stream videogames to your computer / TV / mobile device using a simple set-top box or a browser plugin. You’ll be able to play Crysis on 2004 PC. Now you get it, it could change the way we think about videogames forever.

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