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Posts tagged with "iPad"

Rovio Announces “Angry Birds Rio”, Coming This March

There is a new Angry Birds game on the horizon, and this time it’ll be the result of an exclusive partnership between Rovio, the makers of the original game, and Hollywood studio 20th Century Fox. The game, named “Angry Birds Rio”, will be a crossover of Rovio’s series with the upcoming animated film Rio, which – guess what – tells the story of two birds, Blu and Jewel, that have to fight animal smugglers in Rio de Janeiro.

The new Angry Birds game will follow a plot similar to the movie: the original Angry Birds are kidnapped and taken to Rio de Janeiro, but they manage to escape and set out to save Blu and Jewel, the characters of the movie. Sounds like Rovio and 20th Century Fox really collaborated to make the series fit together – how couldn’t they, considering we’re talking about a blockbuster game and a new film from the creators of the Ice Age trilogy?

Angry Birds Rio will launch in March 2011 with 45 initial levels, and more will be added with software updates. The app will be released for “smartphone and tablets” – we guess iPhone and iPad support is pretty much obvious. No word on pricing yet, but we think $4.99 is the usual sweet spot. Full press release available here, and trailers of the movie and game embedded below. Read more

We Reviewed Berokyo For iPad: Now We’re Giving It Away

Berokyo is an app you never knew you needed until you actually get your hands on it: presenting a one of a kind management system that organizes your contacts, photos, documents, and media onto an array of bookshelves, you always have access to your most used content. We were especially excited by its capabilities with Dropbox, and now we have ten promocodes to giveaway thanks to the awesome developers at Think, Code, Release. Click past the break below for the full rundown of contest rules.

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Did Pixar Tease The iPad With “The Incredibles” In 2004?→

Did Pixar Tease The iPad In “The Incredibles” In 2004?

During a session at Macworld Expo, Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff told the audience that Steve Jobs might have tested people’s reception to a tablet computer in Pixar’s 2004 movie “The Incredibles”:

If a device works on a movie audience, it’ll also work as a real-world product. That’s the “meta lesson” fromChris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff who study how sci-fi interfaces in movies make it off the silver screen and vice versa.

We know the tablet project had been in the works for years before Apple decided to release the iPhone first, in 2007. We also know, however, that similar tablet devices were used in sci-fi movies before Pixar’s The Incredibles, because people have always wondered what the future might look like. For example, in today’s movies we’re predicting Minority report-style controls and brain-based human-machine interactions.

The fact that a tablet computer with touch controls was used by Jobs’ Pixar in 2004 is, anyway, fascinating. And perfect discussion material for geeks.

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Adobe Packager To Support iPad Apps Soon?

According to a rumor posted on Japanese blog Macotakara, Adobe is planning to update its Packager software for the iPhone to add support for iPad apps development. Adobe Packager, in fact, as part of the Flash Professional CS5 suite allows developers to re-use existing code to build native applications for iPhone. Since Apple lifted its restrictions on third-party development tools used to build iOS apps, many developers have relied on Packger to ship cross-platform software across a variety of devices and operating systems.

Macotakara also reports the updated Packager will include support for gestures in iPad apps, like pinch to zoom. Android and other “large LCD devices” should be supported as well. [via 9to5mac]

What’s Better Than $1.8 Billion Revenue? Giving Away 5,400 iPads

What happens when a successful and large company like semiconductor maker KLA-Tencor decides to give away iPads to all its employees? Well, it means the IT department is in trouble. After posting revenue of $1.8 billion, the CEO of the company gave each employee an iPad as a reward for the hard work; and not only did he gave people iPads, he also made sure the CIO of KLA-Tencor and IT folks would help everyone with the setup process. That leads to iTunes account creation, email setup, apps installation, secure VPN connections. For 5,400 iPads, that’s a bit of work.

CIO.com reports:

KLA-Tencor’s Ballal didn’t have a choice about the speed and timing of an iPad rollout. The CEO had made a promise to give iPads to employees as a form of appreciation; when you promise someone an iPad, you can’t wait six months to deliver one.

So why couldn’t KLA-Tencor just ship the iPads to employees? Employees wanted the gadgets right away, even though half lived outside the United States. “The big thing was the logistics of getting these devices to different parts of the world,” Ballal says. “It was all the nightmare of shipping. The iPad wasn’t yet released in the different countries when we rolled this thing out. We learned a lot about logistics.

At its Q1 2011 earnings call, Apple announced over 80% of Fortune 500 are deploying or piloting iPads, and 88 of Fortune 100, 60% of Financial Times Europe testing or deploying iPhones. In the past we’ve seen school adopting iPads with special educational programs and corporate America “falling in love” with the device in a matter of months. [via TUAW]

Cloud Connect Pro: A Finder for iPad

iOS devices don’t have a Finder, and in many ways that’s a good thing. Apple simplified the approach to file management by making the filesystem virtually invisible to the users and delegating “database functionalities” to apps, which are nothing but containers of files, data and information. Apps like Pages, PlainText or the Photos app itself keep actual files together, it’s just that on iOS users aren’t forced to manage, organize, clean and sort them like on the desktop. It’s a simpler and more intuitive approach. For many, though, file management sometimes is necessary. Either because of an app that doesn’t support sharing (thus documents can’t get out) or working needs that require access to a specific file in a specific location, several users over the years have lamented the impossibility to have a Finder-like system on their iPhones and iPads. We have also seen apps like Berokyo trying to bring folders and files together on iOS by making compromises with iOS’ default interface style and features.

Cloud Connect Pro, a new app by Antacea I’ve been testing for the past week, aims at bringing true Finder-like options and file management capabilities to the iPad with deep cloud integration. This app can connect to any computer, Dropbox or iDisk instance and WebDAV / SFTP / FTP server to access folder structures, files and media. It can stream music and videos, double as a lightweight but useful VNC client, open and preview document and much more. Read more

iPad Now Available in India→

iPad Now Available in India

A year after the official announcement, the iPad is now finally available in India, although I guess people who really wanted one in 2010 didn’t wait for Apple to make up its mind and release it. About pricing: a 16 GB standard WiFi model will cost you Rs 27,900, which is around $610, including taxes.  It’s curious that today Samsung slashed the price of the Galaxy Tab in India, too.

Product page available here. What’s up with the website? [via Smoking Apples]

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