Simple Gamer

The new iPad

You may well have heard about Apple’s latest announcement – the new iPad. It was formerly unveiled in San Francisco last night by new Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook, at 6.15pm GMT.

The iPad announcement brings the end to the traditional long series of rumours regarding the screen size, the screen quality, buttons (or no buttons), and a whole load more.

Running an A5X processor, the 3rd Generation iPad is running a dual-core processor with quad-core graphics. This leaves is slightly lagging behind some of its competitors when it comes to processor speed, although the retail price of £390 should keep it more than just highly competitive.

The whopping 2048 x 1536 resolution, retina display is by far the biggest unique selling point of the new iPad, making it the highest quality tablet screen on the market – it is much higher than the resolution to be defined as HD.

Also new to the iPad is a 5-megapixel camera which is almost the best around when it comes to tablets, although is beaten by that of the Asus Transformer Prime. It can record video in 1080p HD and has a unique stabilisation feature where a shaky hand won’t lead to shaky videos.

A great new feature on the iPad is the microphone, tying in with the Siri release on the iPhone 4S, which allows you to dictate rather than type – with a microphone button now taking its place on the iPad keyboard.

One thing that didn’t change as much as was expected is the size and shape, with an almost identical shape that is just slightly thicker (0.6mm) and also a little bit heavier. This makes room for the ever-so-slightly-larger new parts inside the new iPad.

Also announced on the night, prior to the new iPad, was a new Apple TV which keeps its price at $99.

As always, you can expect to find new iPad accessories such as a new iPad case range at GearZap.com.

iOS Notifications

I’ve had one major gripe with iOS since a while back – the handling of notifications. There are various concepts floating about and there are even implemented solutions, provided your device is jailbroken. I still wonder, why haven’t Apple addressed this yet? I wouldn’t be surprised if they have something being worked on in the background – as always, Apple are all about trying to release something once they feel it’s ready and done correctly (cut, copy and paste anyone?). It’s just a real shame that it’s been this long and this far into iOS’s life that we still don’t have any real way of managing notifications.

A designer has made a pretty nice mock up of how they’d love to see notifications. I’d urge you to follow the link and watch the video, since it does look pretty cool. Apple, pretty please?

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/05/03/designer-pitches-concept-for-usable-ios-notifications-in-video/

No more VLC for iOS

VLC Media Player is arguably the best media player out there thanks to its compatibility with a variety of different media files. It’s also available across all operating systems – Windows, Mac and Linux. An iOS version was released a while ago and there was some debate about the legitimacy of it, considering it allowed users to play any file type. Today, finally, it has been pulled from the App Store, which is sad news in my opinion. Luckily, I did download the app and have it, so I can continue using it, however if anyone now wants to get it they’ll be unable to do so. It’s a sad day, VLC Media Player allowed any media file to be transferred to the iPhone and played.

iPad – Apple’s Latest Creation

iPad, the name of Apple’s latest creation, is a tablet. A touchscreen device, which is essentially a large iPod. There are plenty of websites out there with the specifications of the product, so I won’t bother going into detail regarding that. Instead, I’ll give my views on it.

The iPad is a 10″ tablet screen. Steve Jobs described it as something “magical” when he was introducing this new product. He also said that he wanted to address the gap between iPods and MacBooks, and felt netbooks did not really address it. Hence, we have the iPad.

Quite frankly, the iPad is a heap of disappointment. When I say it’s a large iPod, it really is just that. It does not contain Mac OS X, but rather the same interface as the iPhone or iPod Touch. Therefore, you can only run one application at a time, and you’re extremely limited with what you can do. That means no plugging USB devices in and multi-tasking. There’s also a lack of webcam or any camera on the device.

So what exactly are Apple aiming for with the iPad? They feel they can appeal to people who read eBooks a lot. And also to people who want to be able to browse the Internet on the go, as some models have a 3G modem built-in. The price plan for these in the USA seem somewhat baffling, $15 for 250MB bandwidth? 250MB bandwidth is miniscule, although it’s $30 for unlimited. I’m sure there is some fair usage policy with that.

So on the whole, no multi-tasking, same iPhone/iPod Touch interface, a few new applications (office suite available, but for purchase through App Store), native support for all existing applications, mobile Internet. That’s the iPad.

I just hope in the future they can put Mac OS X onto it.