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Posts tagged with "iPad"

Financial Times Still Negotiating with Apple Ahead of June 30 Deadline

PaidContent reports the Financial Times is still negotiating with Apple over the implementation of iTunes subscriptions in its iPad app, which was generating 20% of the publication’s subscribers and over 1 million in revenue a few months ago.

With a month to go until publishers must either fall in with Apple’s new in-app purchasing terms or quit iOS in June, The Financial Times is not yet amongst the small early group to have consented to the new rules.

“We’re still in discussions with them,” FT producer management head Mary Beth Christie told paidContent:UK at World E-reading Congress in London on Tuesday morning. “We’ll see where they go. But we are fixed on the idea of holding on to our consumer data.

Like Time Inc., it appears that the Financial Times can’t agree on Apple’s subscription terms unveiled last February, which require publishers to give a 30% cut off every transaction to Apple and allow users to choose whether or not they want to share their personal information with a publisher. In the past months, in fact, the Financial Times stated multiple times that the iPad app could go somewhere else, perhaps on other platforms and tablets, as they couldn’t give up on subscribers’ data to stay in the App Store. Indeed, after a five-month trial period, Apple will begin pulling publishing apps that haven’t implemented subscriptions on June 30.

Apple managed to ink deals with several magazines, newspapers and publishers over the past two weeks, such as Hearst and Conde Nast, which began selling a subscription-based version of The New Yorker yesterday.

Queen Of England Demands An iPad

The Queen of England has apparently ordered her staff to buy her an iPad after the newly married Prince Will and his brother Prince Harry showed off theirs to her on a recent gathering at Buckingham Palace.

The Princes, the Queen’s grandsons, gave her a demo of how the iPad worked which, as a royal insider told The Sun, led her to be impressed and “particularly taken with how easy it was to use, the large screen and how light it was” The insider also notes that the Queen is fairly “switched on” for an 85 year old woman, saying “It was only a matter of time before she asked someone to go and get her one.”

“The Queen has a mobile phone as well as the iPods, so an iPad is the logical progression. She thinks it will be great to keep her entertained on all the long trips she has to make.”

The same royal insider says that the Princes think her reaction is hilarious, but also “love the fact that their gran wants an iPad and think she’s really cool”. The iPad won’t be the first Apple product that the Queen owns either, she previously bought a £169 silver iPod in 2005 and was given a new iPod by Barack Obama in 2009, which was loaded up with happy snaps from the Queen’s US visit in 2008.

[Via The Sun]

Flipboard Triples Usage and Doubles Users In Two Months

Flipboard, an iPad app that aggregates content from your social networks, has in the last two months seen close to a tripling in daily usage. An average day will now bring between 8 and 9 million “flips” compared to what was 3 to 4 million flips just two months ago – flips roughly equating to page views for a website.

The CEO, Mike McCue, revealed the information in a chat last week and pointed to a number of factors that he believes contributed to the increase in popularity. Foremost in his mind is the release of version 1.2 of Flipboard on March 10th which greatly improved speed and brought other general improvements to the app. Then, of course, was the release of the iPad 2 which not only brought more users but has also made Flipboard even faster with its improved A5 processor.

McCue did also mention that the number of users has doubled – likely for the same reasons, although he declined to comment on how many users they now have in total. Meanwhile, Flipboard is continuing their work on a Flipboard iPhone app which is slated for release sometime this summer. Quizzed on how the iPhone app might work by AllThingsD, McCue said that it is being designed as more of a “weekday tool” catered towards power users that will more directly utilise real-time news and conversations.

[Via AllThingsD]

 

The Pix And Stix Project Will Let You Rock Out On GarageBand “For Real”

GarageBand is an app that everyone who owns an iPad should at least try out, regardless of your musical talent, it’s just a superb example of an app that is brilliantly designed and built for a touch screen. Yet for those that do end up using it for more than just the occasional mess around, you may find that although the iPad’s touchscreen is better than a mouse for playing the drums or guitar, it is still a little bit lacking for what you want.

Well luckily for those of you who do find that, some clever folks have decided to start manufacturing rubberized drumsticks and guitar picks for GarageBand on the iPad. They’ve been designed to work on the iPad’s touchscreen by implementing electro-conductive rubber tips, which will also mean it should be perfectly fine to use without smashing the iPad’s nice glass screen!

The designers of the Pix and Stix are running a Kickstarter-esque funding round, where they are selling a pair of drumsticks and a pick for $14.95 in order to reach a funding goal of around $8000. Just like Kickstarter, if they don’t get the required funding, you can also rest assured you won’t end up paying for them.  At this stage they think they will be selling the drumsticks and picks in the three colors of black, blue or gold metallic paint, although they note that these colors are subject to change.

If you recall the Wallee, which we discussed as one way to elevate your iPad last year, the Pix & Stix project is coming from those same people. So if you’re interested in helping these guys fund their newest project and get your own Pix and Stix, head over to the Pix and Stix website.

[Via Gizmodo]

Conde Nast Will Implement Apple’s Subscriptions Starting Next Week

Over the past weeks, several reports pointed to major publishers and publications starting to use Apple’s in-app subscriptions in their magazine and newspaper apps for iPad, quite possibly ahead of the rumored June 30 deadline that will require developers of existing “publishing apps” to implement subscriptions, or get pulled from the App Store. Following the big names from the last weeks – Hearst confirming subscriptions coming with the July issues of magazines like Popular Mechanics and Oprah Magazine or Time Inc. inking a deal with Apple over free access for print subscribers – The New York Post reports Conde Nast, publishers of dozens of magazines also available on the iPad in digital form, will begin relying on in-app subscriptions starting next week with The New Yorker, available on the iPad since last September. The decision to move forward with subscriptions and The New Yorker apparently came after the death of Osama bin Laden, with Conde Nast looking to “capitalize” on the coverage through subscriptions and digital content for iPad.

Conde Nast is very close to a deal to begin selling digital subscriptions via Apple’s iPad.

The New Yorker will become the first publication from the S.I. Newhouse, Jr., empire to be available via subscription on the popular tablet, and it will happen early next week, said a source familiar with the situation.

Conde Nast is also planning on dramatically slashing the prices of single-issue downloads for other iPad magazines like Wired, Golf Digest, Glamour, Vanity Fair, Self, Allure and GQ: the issues will be sold in-app at $1.99, down from the current $4.99 and $3.99 (Glamour). This will keep the prices in line with the current newsstand print editions, and it will also allow Conde Nast to sell annual iPad subscriptions at $19.99. With developers and publishers expected to implement subscriptions before the end of next month, the amount of magazines and newspapers featuring subscriptions will likely increase, allowing Apple to showcase even more in the App Store’s homepage.

Week Calendar Comes To The iPad

When I first reviewed Week Calendar for iPhone in March, I called it a powerful alternative to Apple’s standard calendar app for iOS devices. It’s not that Apple’s Calendar.app lacks basic functionalities or is utterly broken: in fact, I think Calendar is more than fine for most users. But if you’re willing to get the most out of your MobileMe, Google Calendar, Exchange or CalDAV calendars, UtiliTap’s application is the full-featured alternative to install on an iPhone. And today, you’ll be able to enjoy Week Calendar on the iPad as well, thanks to an “HD” counterpart that’s just been approved and is now available at $2.99 in the App Store.

Week Calendar HD has all the features from the iPhone version, only on a bigger screen and with visual cues from Lion’s calendar app. The difference between the iPad’s native Calendar and Week Calendar HD is very subtle, but Week Calendar implements a leather background and bits of torn paper in a way that’s more reminiscent of Lion than Apple’s own app. Clearly some people are going to hate this choice if they were looking for a cleaner UI as seen on the iPhone, and perhaps the developers will revise their decision. I don’t know, but right now this is what you get. And, more importantly, what matters is that Week Calendar still outpaces Apple’s calendar solution when it comes down to views, gestures, copy & paste support or mere customization of the calendar. Week Calendar’s biggest advantage over Apple’s cal is support for multitouch with copy & paste, possibility to add a new event with tap & hold, easy resizing of events and pinch to personalize the selected view. You can tap and hold an existing event to move it around and change its start and end date; you can “cut” an event and paste it somewhere else; you can access an event’s info panel with a single tap, rather than having to tap the Edit button like in Apple’s calendar. Again, this works like the iPhone version but it’s been ported successfully to the iPad with the use of popovers and bigger real screen estate. From the Event Details panel, like on Week Cal for iPhone, you can set an alert, availability status, custom color, or find your away around four buttons that allow you to share an event, print it, email it or add it to the template list. Week Calendar, in fact, can turn any event into a template to use again in the future. Notes, invitees and local contacts can be attached to an event, too.

The selection of settings is equally impressive. You can turn on time zone support and specify when the week or weekend start,  manage new events’ default preferences and the aforementioned templates (these will save you a lot of time), customize standard colors to assign a color by default to events that meet certain title criteria. There’s more: you can activate TextExpander integration (save even more time), turn off drag & drop entirely, completely overhaul the way the app displays days and weeks. For instance, you can change font sizes, enable out-of-view indicators, tell the app when a day starts and ends. Anything else is just Week Calendar for iPhone, running on the iPad with a new UI: lots of features, yet easy to use.

If you’re a calendar nerd, Week Calendar HD for iPad is a dream come true. It’s got all the customization options you’ve always wanted from the tablet’s calendar app, plus a design consistent with Apple’s recent standards and tons of gestures to simplify navigation. Get it here at $2.99.

Foxconn Now Wants To Start Building iPads In Brazil In July

Last month, we reported Brazilian’s President Dilma Roussef and Hon Hai Precision’s founder Terry Gou discussed during an official meeting in Beijing the possibility for Hon Hai’s subsidiary Foxconn to invest $12 billion to start producing and assembling mobile devices in Brazil throughout the next five years, including Apple’s iPad – currently assembled by Foxconn in its Asian facilities. The investment, result of long-term negotiations between Hon Hai and Brazilian minister of Science and Technology Mercadante, is aimed at targeting Brazil’s growing consumer market, as well as allowing Foxconn and its partner Apple to directly address the distribution issues of devices in Brazil, long affected by import tariffs, inflated prices and poor retail presence.

Whilst the original reports claimed Foxconn was planning to start building iPads in Brazil this November, Reuters reports today the company has moved the estimated date to July, still seeking, however, to obtain tax breaks and other government concessions to ease high labor costs that Hon Hai had to face since they opened three other facilities to build components for Sony, Dell and HP in Brazil years ago. It’s still unknown whether iPad production will be located in an existing facility, or if Foxconn is planning on opening a new one just to build iOS devices. Speculation in the past weeks suggested the second possibility, pointing to the massive investment from Foxconn and the requirements forwarded to the Brazilian government such as training for 200 future employees in China, or the need for 20,000 specialized engineers.

Foxconn has moved up its desired start date for assembling iPads in Brazil to July from November, seeking to tap massive demand for the device in Brazil’s booming consumer market, according to newspapers Estado de S.Paulo and Folha de S.Paulo. Their reports quoted government officials.

“It’s a daring timeline. Whatever is within our reach, we’re going to work on making that viable,” Science and Technology Minister Aloizio Mercadante told Folha.

Reuters also reports Foxconn will initially import components from Asia to assemble devices in Brazil (thus the need for tax incentives on imported materials), shifting the manufacturing chain to local production in the next few years.