Party ipad

Purveyors of fine Apple peripherals Griffin have filed a copyright patent for the most ambitious looking iPad / iPhone dock yet – one that turns your iPad or iPhone 4 into a fully fledged game console.

The sleek looking dock contains four joypads and can be connect to a TV. It’s simple to set up and comes with three PartyDock mini-games and one full game. Additional PartyDock games can be downloaded from iTunes – only these games are compatible with it, so there’s no chance of playing Doodle Jump or Angry Birds on your TV just yet.

For details such as price and release date, keep an eye on the official website.

Best Buy jump on iPad bandwagon

US retailer Best Buy are planning to release their own iPad-style tablet under their Rocketfish label. It actually started off as a communication tool to be used between employees but Best Buy had a brainwave and thought it would be ideal to sell to ‘Joe Public’ too.

The images above come from Best Buy’s CTO Ralph Stephens who added the two images to his Twitter account. He had also said about a month ago on Twitter that the tablet has a front facing camera and runs on Android 2.2.

A few people have speculated that it’s simply a rebranded HP Slate, but seeing that the images are of a gutless prototype that’s something hard to believe.

iPad owners are independent geeks, says survey

Personality assessment specialists MyType questioned 20,000 people to find out what the typical iPad owner is like. The results have provoked a massive response, with a blacklash currently occurring on Twitter.

MyType’s Tim Koelkebeck claims that “The typical person who has bought Apple’s latest gadget is unkind and has little empathy for others. They are self-centred workaholics with an overwhelming interest in business and finance who cherish power and achievement and will not cross the street to help others.”

“[The iPad] appeals to people who spend all day working in front of a computer screen and enjoy interacting with new technology. In their free time they are so used to computers they want another screen to ensure continuity in their lives,” he continued to say.

Koelkebeck adds that the iPad gives users “an identity statement that helps them cope with their own failings – as a mainstream, closed-platform device whose major claim to fame is ease of use and sex appeal, the iPad is everything that they are not.”

He then concludes his report by saying “The next time you see someone sitting on a train smugly using theirs, take comfort from the fact they are probably not a nice person.”

I think the backlash is pretty much deserved. Some people though seem to have got the wrong end of the stick and are under the impression that the report was written by the Daily Mail. The British newspaper is only responsible for printing the results of the survey, not writing it.

ASUS get their slate on with the Eee Pad

Clearly everyone is jumping on the tablet PC bandwagon, and ASUS are no exception, with their newly unveiled Eee Pad – an extension of their Eee PC range, rather than just a bad renaming of the iPad.

The specs are quite lustworthy. It’s a 12″ tablet with rather high quality industrial design, running Windows 7. Under the hood there’s a fairly powerful CULV Intel Core 2 Duo processor, which brings this into the realm of laptop horse power, although with much less power consumption (the ULV in CULV means ultra low voltage). Even with the high performance CPU a 10 hour battery life is expected. Not much else has been confirmed not he specs side yet, though there will be a built-in webcam and at least a USB port.

A chirpy little 10″ version of the Eee Pad is also in the works, running a different OS and presumably lower specs.

Sunday Girl

Well, this week’s Sunday Girl takes the form of a random Chinese girl appearing in an iPad advert. Obviously not official Apple marketing by the looks of things.

Jobs wants freedom from porn

Above you can see part of a conversation between Gawker’s Ryan Tate and Apple’s Steve Jobs. If you don’t already know, Gawker are now fairly infamous in the tech world, when the Gawker tech blog Gizmodo got the scoop on the stolen iPhone 4G (and it goes back a bit beyond that too).

Whilst not exactly a news story in itself, it’s rather rare for Steve Jobs to publicly reply to emails, and his conversation with Gawker’s Ryan Tate is fairly candid. It seems Mr Jobs thinks it’s his duty to rid the world of ‘corrupting’ pornography. Let’s just chalk it up on the long list of things Apple want to control.

UK and EU iPad dates and prices announced

Apple have just announced the UK and European pricing and release dates for the iPad, in addition to updating the iPad’s worldwide launch schedule.

The date is May 28th for people in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland (Australia, Canada and Japan will also get the iPad on the same day). Other EU countries such as Austria, Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands will get it some time in July.

For the UK, the 16GB Wi-Fi only base model will cost £429 – which works out at $635, which is about $135 more than the US version. That does include VAT though, so perhaps it’s not a complete rip-off. The 32GB and 64GB Wi-Fi versions will retail for £499 and £599 respectively, whilst the 3G models are an extra £100 (£529 for the 16GB 3G, £599 for the 32GB 3G and £699 for the 64GB 3G). That puts the most expensive iPad at $1,035, not including the monthly data plan (which typically costs from £10-20 per month). The prices in the rest of Europe are pretty much the same, although converted to Euros and varying slightly from country to country due to tax.

The inflated price isn’t terribly unexpected – the Pound and Euro are quite weak at the moment against the dollar – although it is clearly more expensive than the US version.

iPhone OS 4 unveiled

Apple held a brief press conference today to unveil the new features of their iPhone OS 4. Thousands of Apple fans were waiting eagerly in anticipation for Mr Steve Jobs to demonstrate some amazing new features. So, let’s reveal those new features!

There are 7 main updates (“tentpole” features as Jobs described them) in iPhone OS 4, and those are:

• Multitasking (more like saved states and fast app switching though, not true multitasking)
• App folders (to organise the apps on your iPhone’s ‘desktop’)
• Enhanced Mail app
• iBooks (the same as the iPad, with a free copy of Winnie the Pooh!)
• Enterprise support (encrypting emails and other dull stuff)
• Game Center (online game matchmaking and achievements like Xbox Live)
• iAds (adverts in your iPhone apps. Yep. Seriously)

The new OS is due to be released on the iPhone and iPod Touch this summer, with an iPad version following in autumn. Colour us underwhelmed.

The month of many pads

It’s a busy month for tablet computers. As every geek knows, the iPad launched over the weekend, selling over 300,000 systems on the first day. Quite impressive, though below the 700,000 analysts had predicted. We’ll have to wait and see how well the average consumer responds to the iPad.

At the same time time, Fusion Garage started shipping the JooJoo, an iPad-style Intel Atom-powered tablet PC running a custom version of Linux. There’s a bit of a backstory to that one (it was originally a collaboration between tech news website TechCrunch.com and Fusion Garage, going under the name CrunchPad, until there was something of a split between those two companies and other bad allegations). Engadget have just reviewed the JooJoo, and weren’t overly positive about the user interface or crummy 2.5 hour battery life.

Now another sexy pad (or tablet/slate PC) has been announced – ICD’s Gemini (pictured above), an Nvidia Tegra 2 powered 11″ device running Android OS, with Flash support and enough horsepower to decode full 1080p HD video. The spec list should make a lot of nerds giddy: 1Ghz Nvidia Tegra 2, 11.2″ 1366×768 multitouch screen, WiFi, 3G, Bluetooth, FM Radio, GSP, SD card slot, Micro USB, two cameras (5MP back, 2MP front), and hopefully a battery that can cope with all that.

No word on any price or release date yet, though we expect the world will be flooded with tablet PCs by the end of the year.

Better Saturday

Well, it’s the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, which means Jesus is dead but hasn’t quite eaten enough chocolate to resurrect himself yet. It’s also the day of the US iPad launch, although frankly you probably know that already.

A bunch of sites who got their iPad’s early have already started posting their reviews of the giant iPod Touch – Boingboing like it a lot and the NYTimes seem rather fond of it too. We can certainly see the appeal of the iPad, although admit it, it’s really just a giant iPod Touch, isn’t it? This particular reporter’s main gripe with the iPad is lack of Flash support, meaning the one-handed toilet-friendly device has no access to video content from all those porntube sites… kind of defeats the point of a web content ‘consumption’ computer.