Posts tagged iPad
Hulu making videos available to Cocoa Touch
Feb 17th
We already have a YouTube app that makes our lack of Flash a little less painful, but many of us are getting a lot of video content from Hulu lately. We don’t rely on it to serve up all of our videos — we find ourselves navigating the TV networks’ websites on a semi-frequent basis — but having the option to play shows directly from Hulu would definitely be nice.
The fine folks over at TechCrunch have supposedly spoken with people deep in the business who claim that Hulu is already working on a non-Flash version of their website for the iPad… but it should easily work with the iPhone and iPod touch too. We see no reason to believe that this compatibility upgrade would be limited to a large screen. In fact, we’re seriously doubting the fact that this is an iPad-inspired move at all.
Hulu’s CEO specifically said that they’re “big believers” in the mobile industry and they’re not pushing out updates for a single device. It’s a smart move, especially since all of their video is already encoded in H.264. The only Flash on the site is the actual player and ads… but we’re not really worried about converting the ads. 
If they can wrap the player in something besides Flash, their site would be compatible with nearly every mobile device with a full browser. This would be a great move for Flash independence as other sites would be forced to do the same with their content in order to compete. We’re not saying that this is the end of Flash-based video; it’s the beginning of the mobile video revolution.
In the end, we’d really love to see a dedicated app with a great user interface, but website access would make us extremely happy. Not everything needs an app in the App Store.
Microsoft may compete with iWork on the iPad
Feb 17th
With the latest browser developments, we’d be surprised if Apple allowed Microsoft to sell Office for the iPad… but we’ll leave the predictions for the analysts who get paid too much to say too little.
We want to stress that Mike Tedesco, Microsoft Senior Product Manager of the Macintosh Business Unit, only mentioned this in passing. He didn’t make a formal announcement, and we fully expect Microsoft to play the waiting game before investing any resources into an iPad build of the Office suite.
We have yet to see the public’s reaction to the iPad… from a sales standpoint. We could see strong sales that would spur even more Cocoa Touch development, or we could possibly see the iPad crash and burn like the Newton. We absolutely don’t expect the latter, but we can’t blame Microsoft or any other major developers for conserving their resources.
Paper iPad, because you can’t wait
Feb 7th
A graphic designer from the iPhone development firm behind Boxee Remote, and many other apps, has given us a cut-out template that makes our paper iPads look a little more convincing.
We’ve been hearing about people creating mockups to fool their friends but this is one step beyond far. The design was initially created to help the Revolutionary Concepts development team visualize exactly what their products will look like on a 9.7 inch LCD at 1024 by 768. It’s a really cool concept, and you could pretty much throw whatever picture on the screen you’d like… or just use the default image and get yourself a paper iPad!
If you’d like to grab the images to create one, we have the front and the back images to get you started. It’s not complicated… if you can cut paper and use a glue stick, you can have a fake iPad for real.
Guess what? The iPad is pretty cheap to build
Feb 5th
According to recent analysis of the parts Apple’s using in the iPad… it could cost them as little as $270 to build the base model of the iPad. There are also manufacturing costs and warranty costs estimated at $10 and $20 respectively. That’s still pretty darn good. They’ll make a lot of profit off of me when I buy the 64GB version. In fact, each level you go up, Apple’s making exponentially more profit. There’s a cost difference of $75 between the 16GB and 64GB Flash chips, but Apple’s making an additional $125 from us making that jump. They make even more money if I opt for the 3G version: the 3G addition costs Apple $16, but we’re passed a heavy markup in the company’s extra charge of $130. Apple typically sets the price increments as $100 each level, but this is just asking us to question the price of the device itself.
Think of it this way… if I buy the default 16GB iPad WiFi, Apple’s profit is $200. If I go for the fully-loaded 64GB iPad 3G, Apple actually profits $440.
Wall street will love this device. Apple’s stock price has been slowly but surely increasing since this information was released. If this device takes off, we expect to see ridiculous amounts of profit from Apple. Ridiculous.
Apple patent could add Multi-Touch to the bezel of the iPad
Feb 3rd
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“It’s so big!” “I don’t know if I really want something that big.” “Did it need to be that large?” “Woah.” Those are all very common reactions to the size of my… iPad bezel. Here, let us explain why it’s so big (wait for it):
- We want some place to touch on the front that’s not going to cause everything to open.
- No seriously, I’ve called way too many people on accident… some heard things they really shouldn’t hear.
- Believe it or not, it’s also added protection against damage. Having that extra space around the edge has saved several MacBook LCDs from complete torment. The glass still breaks, but the LCDs are usually fine.
- There’s no way to avoid something that large if you’re going to make it so thin at the edge.
That’s what she saidl! All jokes aside, let’s get to the patent…
It’s nothing new (circa 2006), but it’s something that has gained popularity due to the announcement of the iPad. To us, it actually seems a little Microsoft, not Apple. Basically, a menu bubble would show you where to touch the bezel for certain tasks. We imagine that this technology will never arrive in its initial specifications, but we could easily see it used for additional game controls, exposé for possible multitasking or just better use of the real estate without sacrificing visuals. We really don’t see Apple putting an overlay of buttons at this point, but no one can resist some that cool, that big.
Right? Guys? Come on! … Guys?
Textbooks are definitely coming to the iPad
Feb 3rd
In fact, they’ve broken through the flood barrier. According to the Wall Street Journal, McGraw-Hill Education, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt K-12, Pearson Education, and Kaplan have all reached iBook deals with Apple this week. Some are also in negotiations with ScrollMotion to develop their interactive textbooks. We predicted that the introduction of the iPad could change how we see digital textbooks and the education industry as a whole. We also think that education has the most potential for this product.
If you think about it, the average college student spends $400+ on textbooks every semester. Going digital would help save money across the board and make the hippies a little happier, too. No, really, the environmental effects could be masterful, and depending on what kind of deals we’re looking at here, college students might actually have a little more money for beer. Just imagine the headlines: “Apple’s iPad allows students to remain drunk longer,” “The iPad is why I flunked out freshman year,” “I don’t need a girlfriend; I have my iPad!” Hopefully that last one is a little extreme… hopefully.
High school, junior high, elementary school (maybe): a one-time $499 investment for each child is less than what a school would typically spend each year in textbooks and supplemental materials. Obviously, we have to factor in the cost of the digital textbooks, but each device could theoretically be re-used the next year with a different set of students… that would leave only the cost of digital textbooks. You always have to allow for maintenance and upkeep, but wrap that up with some sort of local insurance plan and you’re set to go. I’m sure local repair shops would be happy to replace the glass for a school if a student happened to drop it. Think of how many jobs that would create. 
All in all, we find the iPad a wonderful concept for education — we can also guarantee that the government won’t get it. Our education system is so messed up and underfunded that buying a piece-of-crap Dell laptop scares them. Did you detect the irony in that statement? That’s a topic for a different blog…
iPad Analysis Part Three: The Conclusion
Feb 1st
We hope that you’ve read both part one and part two so you understand the current software and hardware that will be available in the iPad. In this final installment of the iPad trilogy, we’ll take everything we’ve learned from those articles and define how revolutionary the iPad will truly be.
We learned about some pretty incredible revisions of software for the iPad as Steve made the announcement. The fact that Apple finally put iWork (Keynote, Pages and Numbers) on the Cocoa Touch platform is great for people looking to use the device for business. The iBooks application will definitely begin to dominate the eReader market. Mobile Safari will truly take over as iPad users’ browser of choice. The Calendar and Address Book apps are beautiful: it looks like Apple invested a lot of time into their development. We also can’t forget that we’ll have the advantage of the App Store with the iPad, while other devices have little to no software expandability.
Even though the iPad software is somewhat expandable (it’s still limited by the app approval process), it doesn’t have a whole lot to offer in hardware features. We’re seeing too many accessories to even take them seriously: the fact that Apple has more than 5 accessories tells you that something is a little off. Using the dock connector as the sole connection is very limiting… I would have loved to use video out and plug in an external device like a camera or USB jump drive at the same time. Currently, it appears that — even with the USB port accessory — we won’t be able to use external USB devices, with the exception of cameras. The video out only converts to component, composite or VGA: aren’t we living in the digital age? Couldn’t we have DVI, HDMI or even MiniDisplay Port? Okay fine, the port situation is bad; what about the rest of the hardware? We don’t know as much information as we’d like because there aren’t many iPads in the wild just yet… but we know that it has “custom-built” SOC that uses a Cortex-A9 MPCore processor and a Mali GPU. We also know that it will only have 16GB, 32GB and 64GB capacities: will still find this strange due to the new chip capabilities Toshiba announced in early December.
CTA Presents: The State of the Jailbreak Address
Feb 1st
We follow the Jailbreak/Unlock scene very closely here at CTA… not because our iPhones are necessarily running on T-Mobile (we want 3G not EDGE) but because we don’t want to be restricted in the Applications we install on our Apple mobile devices. Unfortunately for us and for you, there hasn’t been any new iPhone unlocking news for nearly three months. This is partially due to the fact that Apple hasn’t released new firmware in that amount of time… one of the longest periods we’ve seen so far. In the remainder of this post, we’ll cover the Cydia Store, the Rock Your Phone app store, the Dev-Team, Geohot, the redsn0w 0.9.2 released just hours ago, and how Jailbreaking could affect the iPad. Check back soon for The Ultimate 2010 Jailbreak Guide brought to you by Cocoa Touch Apps.
Saurik (Jay Freeman) has been doing everything possible to make time for his Cydia Store in order to keep it attractive to the Jailbreakers out there. We’re seeing things from Cydia that we never expected and have to give him a tremendous amount of thanks. He’s also devoting some of his efforts to the WebOS (Palm) and Android (Google). For those who don’t know, Cydia is an installer app — predating the App Store — that allows you to put “unauthorized” software onto your Apple mobile devices. While Jailbreak software was once a wide range of applications, most of the current software focuses on the features that Apple has “left out” of the iPhone OS. For instance, you can purchase apps that will let you instantly share your iPhone’s data connection with your laptop… at least for those of us who still don’t have tethering on our service providers.
Apple removes fake Flash ads from the iPad promotional video
Jan 31st
Remember the speculative post we wrote about the fact that the iPad is showing Flash content in Apple’s promotional video? Well, it’s been replaced with a non-Flash version that shows the infamous blue lego. It appears as though we’re never going to see Flash on the iPad, iPhone or iPod touch… especially with Steve’s comments from the Apple town hall meeting.
We’re not terribly disappointed with Apple’s decision to avoid Flash… we’re more disappointed with the fact that most sites are using it to display their content. Flash is notoriously buggy and a resource hog. Why watch low-quality hosted content instead of high-quality local content? The mere fact that we have instant access to thousands of TV episodes and movies will create a demand for hosted content: no one has a collection as large as the internet. We really hope to see services like Hulu, the TV networks, and even YouTube move away from Flash sooner rather than later. From a technical standpoint, Apple is completely correct: Flash sucks. But they also shouldn’t ignore the fact that it’s the current standard… they should be aggressively moving a different direction, working with companies to support different media playback: we all know they have the money to do it.
Before and after shots of the iPad promotional video:
iPad Analysis Part Two: The Hardware
Jan 31st
Welcome to the second part of our iPad analysis trilogy. Please make sure you have read the first post about the iPad’s software. We’ll be following this article up with our conclusion, which will combine everything we’ve learned about the software, hardware and hopefully formulate a verdict. Here’s everything that we know and you want to know about the hardware: things may change as we find out more about the iPad, but for now, what you see is what you get… and don’t forget to click the iPad to the right for an “exclusive story.” Warning: some parts have extreme technical content that we tried to break down into readable information.
Dimensions
The device itself is only 0.5 inches thick in the center and tapers off to the edges just like every other Apple mobile device currently on the market. It’s 9.56 inches tall and 7.47 inches wide… it weighs 1.5 pounds without the 3G assembly and 1.6 pounds with it (roughly five times the weight of an iPhone).
These dimensions are the root cause of all of our complaints with the hardware in this device. If Apple made it just a little bit thicker, they could have actually included useful connectors like a couple USB ports, a Mini DisplayPort or even a MagSafe connector for easier charging. We honestly love the fact that this device is so small, but we wouldn’t typically give up the expandability of a product in order to achieve something so thin.
