ipad stories

Apple loosens in-app subscription rules to appease publishers

Thursday, June 9, 2011 - 9:15am
 
It turns out that if you try to take a 30% cut from publishers, publishers will not want to work with you. That's what Apple found out after most major publishers balked at their draconic rules for how the could sign up subscribers on the iPad. But Apple's changed it's ways.

Could Apple use OLED screens in the iPad 3?

Friday, May 27, 2011 - 11:01am
 
The iPad 2 was an upgrade from the original on virtually all fronts but one: the screen. It still uses the same screen, which feels low-res compared to the iPhone 4s retina display. Could that be changing with the iPad 3?

Why iPad 2 really dominates the tablet world

Stewart Wolpin
Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - 11:14am
 
To the surprise of no one, Apple continues to sell more tablets than anyone else — by some estimates, three of every four tablets sold is an iPad 2. We all think we know why. Apple had a nearly year-long head start, an acolyte user base drawn like lemmings to whatever the company produces, great PR and marketing, a worshipful media, a dominant retail presence — and, okay, it's a pretty good product. But from an objective standpoint, Apple has some potent competitors. Samsung, Motorola and RIM aren't exactly technology or marketing shirkers. And it can be argued that the Galaxy Tab, the Motorola Xoom and the BlackBerry PlayBook are technically superior tablets and offer myriad functional advantages over iPad 2. So why does Apple dominate? One word: Commercials.

Why an old-school Whiz Kid wants a 'toy' like the iPad

Hal Rappaport
Friday, May 20, 2011 - 1:02pm
 
In the early 1980s I attended a BASIC programming contest in Philadelphia with some fellow "whiz kid" friends. For those of you who came up after that era, it was a colloquial term for computer geeks in the '80s. Our coding for the contest was on Apple IIe machines, which I remember fondly. At the end of the contest, we gathered in the lecture hall auditorium for the awards ceremony. In the forefront, set out on display podiums like queen's jewels were something we had never seen before: Macintosh computers. Unlike today, there had been no websites with leaked photos and we had only vague news of what this was from the magazines of the period. One thing was certain, we were in awe. Three of these "gems" (Mac 128s, pictured above) were for us to try, at the end of the awards presentation we were each allowed to briefly give one of them a test drive. I opened up Mac Paint, I dragged and dropped, and I clicked on things for the very first time. I was in love.

Microsoft's Courier project will be unofficially revived on iPad

Raymond Wong
Monday, May 2, 2011 - 6:54am
 
Microsoft's two-screen Courier concept tablet had a lot of promise. Hailed as a "digital journal" — a device with an unlimited amount of digital pages built for keeping note scraps, doodles — anything really. Regrettably, the concept never made it into production, canned in light of the iPad's runaway success. The Taposé project wants to revive the ideas from the Courier and bring them to the iPad.

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