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Posts tagged with "iPad"

iPad Dominates The Competition In US Tablet Market

A Nielsen survey released today reveals the iPad has a commanding lead in the US tablet market, controlling a staggering 82%. This is despite the recent entrance to the market by Android tablets from Motorola, Samsung and others, which have comparatively trivial share of the tablet market.

In fact following Apple is Samsung with just 4% of the market despite its strong push late last year with the Galaxy Tab, and then there is Dell and Motorola with just 3% and 2% of the market. Yet all are overshadowed by the ‘Other’ category, this mishmash of various relatively unknown companies staggeringly has the same share of the market that Samsung, Dell and Motorola have combined.

The survey didn’t differentiate between the iPad 2 and original iPad but it did find that there is a fairly even split between WiFi-only models (43%) and WiFi+3G (39%) models. Also fascinating was that the survey found large proportions of tablet users would change their usage of other devices. In particular 35% of desktop computer and 32% of laptop users would use their computers less often or not at all after purchasing their tablet. E-readers and portable music players would also be used less or not at all following a tablet purchase by 27% of those surveyed.

Furthermore, the most frequently given reasons for using their computer less is mostly because the tablet is “easy to carry/take with you”, “ease of interface/OS” and the “fast start up/off” it provides to users. A final interesting note is that 43% of correspondents said that more than 1 person in their family/household is a user of the tablet device.

[Via Fortune]

The Telegraph Updates iPad App, Enables Subscriptions

The Telegraph has agreed to Apple’s terms and has enabled subscriptions in its updated iPad app, available today on the App Store for free. The app can be downloaded free of charge, but the publication decided to allow users to buy daily issues or monthly access for a fee, which in case of single issues is slightly higher than the print edition, but sports a nice discount if you opt for the monthly subscription. As noted by PaidContent, The Telegraph’s subscriptions come at £1.19 each or £9.99 per month; weekday printed issues of the newspaper are cheaper at £1, but the monthly edition will cost you £26.40. Clearly The Telegraph is aiming at selling monthly digital subscriptions in volume, which are an attractive option due to the price point and access to regular content. In terms of US dollar prices, the in-app subscriptions come at $16.99  for 1 month access, or $1.99 for the daily edition.

The publisher’s upgraded app, out today and built by The Times’ app builder TigerSpike, is free to download but requires “editions” be bought inside at £1.19 each or £9.99 per month, paid and auto-renewing via Apple’s in-app payments.

The app functions much like its free predecessor, so the main new feature is the fee introduction. TMG is rumoured to be considering the introduction of charges to its website, too. If so, this iPad model could give it a springboard to do so.

The app comes with a dedicated settings panel for subscription management, and also allows existing print subscribers to enter their personal code to download iPad issues for free. The Telegraph 2.0 features details instructions to obtain your subscriber code, and places a link back to the iTunes Store to configure your App Store subscriptions. As for other changes in this update, the app includes “video, picture galleries, graphics and cartoon archives”, alongside a night-reading mode and crosswords.

Download The Telegraph 2.0 for iPad here.

“On the way to Woodstock” for iPad Takes You Back To 1969

From the same creators of The History of Jazz, an interactive timeline about jazz music that was featured multiple times by Apple in the past, comes a new “book” for the iPad called On the way to Woodstock that takes where the previous digital experience left off to offer over 100 hours of video, audio, and editorial content related to the 1950’s, 1960’s and each of the artists that performed at the 1969 Woodstock Art & Music Fair. The History of Jazz was incredibly successful in the way it transcended the meaning of “digital book” to offer an experience that was closer to what Push Pop Press is doing now with Our Choice for iPhone and iPad: more than a simple book and closer to an interactive media gallery packed with content of all kinds, On the way to Woodstock is a digital, multitouch-based homage to the culture, politics and style of the 50’s and 60’s, as well as the historic bands and artists that performed at the legendary Woodstock festival.

I have downloaded the app a few minutes ago, and there’s so much stuff to do with its it’s difficult to get the hang of it in a short amount of time. You can look at photos and read descriptions; browse the timeline at the bottom by tapping on the colored bars and check out every single moment of the Woodstock fair with videos, bios, articles and exclusive photographs; you can even enter a special “screensaver mode” to turn your iPad into the perfect Woodstock-themed coffee table book. The app is full of content, information, and media. It’s definitely a rich experience that will engage you in reading and watching for hours, and perhaps even coming back a few times after you’re done consuming everything the app has to offer. Like I said I’ve been playing with On the way to Woodstock for less than an hour, but the attention to detail, the animations, the options and the selection of songs and videos are amazing. The app also packs related content from iTunes, YoutTube and Wikipedia and lets you check out the original Woodstock set lists as well.

On the way to Woodstock is the perfect app to showcase the versatility of the iPad, something Apple would be proud of. You can get the app here at $6.99, and watch the demo video after the break. Read more

Deflect the Damage with the G-Form MacBook Sleeve

Let’s say you’re traveling amongst the lions of Africa, nose-diving off a cliff in Australia, or out-backing in the great wilds of New Zealand. Packing your MacBook, catastrophe strikes and your backpack goes tumbling down a vertical rocky hill even the greatest mountain bikers wouldn’t cross. Not to worry, however, because your Mac is straddled by G-Form’s Extreme Sleeve, offering the same durability that battle-hardened kneepads offer extreme sports enthusiasts. Reactive Protection Technology (a fancy way of saving impact resistance) suppresses hard falls by stiffening upon impact and rippling the shockwaves of the fall evenly through the structure of the case. Crack-ready glass displays and scratch-easy aluminum frames are firmly protected. Thanks to the G-Form’s water resistant, damage deflecting padding, it’s the sleeve that’s ready for everything from the urban jungle to the great outdoors. I can’t vouch for the Superman-like armor, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t believe the home-movie after the break. Available for $69.95 at g-form.com for laptops and $59.95 for iPads, the same people who bring bone protecting gear have taken their technologies to the metal logic-boxes you clank on each day.

Read more

Penultimate 3.0 Comes With A Paper Shop For Notebook Templates

Penultimate, the popular handwriting app for iPad that’s been sitting in top-selling App Store productivity list for months, was updated earlier today to version 3.0, a major new version that extends the app’s notebook capabilities by embedding a completely new Paper Shop that, through in-app purchases, allows you to customize the look of Penultimate’s pages to your needs.

After playing around with the Paper Shop for a bit, it seems obvious to me that this was the next step for the Cocoa Box Design developers: as they saw people using Penultimate in the most variegate ways (a blank page and an iPad opens to a world of possibilities), they decided to offer alternative page designs that can turn Penultimate into a music annotation tool (staff papers, tablatures, chord charts), a task manager, a game board (tic-tac-toe papers, hangman, dots and boxes) or a professional writing utility. All these papers are available at different prices in the Paper Shop, which is also powered by a delicious design and attention to detail.

On top of that, Penultimate 3.0 can also import your own custom image for a personalized page design. For instance, I imported some of David Seah’s productivity tools as .png files and they were correctly recognized and converted by Penultimate to native app pages, retaining the original structure of the documents. The importing process works with storyboards, language learning grid papers, design docs – you name it. As long as the image is clear and in high-res, Penultimate will turn it into a custom page file that you can sketch and draw on. Terrific.

Penultimate 3.0 is a great update to the most popular and powerful handwriting app for iPad. Get it here.

Planetary: Your iPad’s Music Library Becomes A Galaxy

In what might be the coolest music experiment that has landed on the iPad to date, company Bloom Studio released earlier today Planetary, a new way to explore your iPad’s music library. Bloom Studio promises to deliver “playful, explorable, visually compelling views on personally relevant information from services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and iTunes”, and Planetary is the realization of this mission statement: not only it’s based on the crazy concept of turning your iPad music library into a galaxy, it also works exceptionally well. Since I got my eyes on the teaser website a few days ago, I was looking forward to trying the actual product and see whether it could really bring a different way of exploring music to the tablet: now that I’m using the app, available for free, I have to say Planetary is one of those apps you have to try for yourself, rather than watching in some YouTube demo videos.

So here’s the gist: your music is a galaxy, artists are stars, albums are planets. In the 3D view of Planetary, no two planets are the same as the graphics are generated automatically off an album cover from the iPod app. Similarly, songs are moons: the more you listen to a song, the bigger the moon grows. And there’s more: each moon orbits at a speed related to the song’s length. Indeed, crazy stuff that doesn’t really make any sense until you try it. But on the other hand, it’s clear Bloom Studio set out to create an interesting experiment based on data visualization that merges files synced to your iPad, music, and space. I’m sure Buzz Aldrin would be proud.

While Planetary features some standard music controls like play / pause and back / forward, the key area of the app is support for multitouch gestures: you can pinch the galaxy to zoom on a star, pan and rotate a planet to check out all moons and orbits – overall, do all sorts of zooming and viewing to enjoy the pleasure of having your music available in the form of a galaxy. Like I said above, you just have to try it and see how it works with your music.

At the price of free, Planetary needs to be downloaded now and experienced with a rich iPod library synced to your iPad. Personal recommendation: for greater results, try to sync some Explosions In The Sky.

Company Promises To Automate Your Home Using iPads

How great would it be to control everything in our homes using only iOS devices? I’ve always dreamed to fire up my Espresso machine remotely using an iPhone app, or being able to close all my windows from an iPad with live webcam feeds. I know, crazy futuristic stuff that current home automation techniques haven’t fully addressed yet, especially when it comes to security concerns and reliability. But ask Solstice Multimedia about it: the Denver-based company with a decade-long experience in telecommunications and residential services thinks that turning your house into a full-featured iPad-controlled system is totally possible. They even promote a 3,400-square- foot model home with two iPads built-in at $718,000. Okay.

Price of the model home itself aside, the iOS-based system relies on a dual-iPad setup that will cost you roughly $5,000. Optional audio, video and security equipment will take the cost to $60,000 – that’s a whole lot of equipment, right? I assume so. Apparently the system’s “brain” is built into the home’s “mechanical room” with WiFi connection to the 2 iPads, but a third device can be used to control everything without having to touch a screen on your wall. So, basically, the iPad is the engine, and mechanical parts take care of lights, motorized blinds, cameras, and other stuff. The Denver Post reports:

A model home in the Overlook neighborhood in Lone Tree’s Heritage Hills is equipped with two built- in iPads that can control all of the electronic systems in the home, including lights, motorized shades, music and television systems, baby monitors and closed-circuit cameras.

“The iPad has brought the entry-level price point down significantly, because an 8-inch in-wall touch screen before cost upwards of $3,000 or more,” Deatherage said. “Now we can get a $500 iPad and still provide most of the functionality that an in-wall touch panel can give.

I’m pretty sure Apple won’t release an iHome anytime soon, so if you’re willing to automate your living room using iPhones and iPads this might be your best chance yet. Go take a look on Solstice Multimedia’s website. [via Cult of Mac]