I tried Oil Tycoon 2 tonight, but it didn’t much impress. Rather a waste of iPad screen when for example looking at the help tutorial: No animation in the graphics either, all disappointingly static: And a screen icon / name that just looks strange! Yes, it’s free … but it’s still disappointing, not up to [...]
We spent this weekend in the White Mountains region of New Hampshire, and AT&T basically has zero coverage there – just a little service in some towns, but nothing at all in many areas. So navigating with MotionX GPS Drive HD was challenging, at the least … The App knew exactly where we were, thanks [...]
With the new iPhone 4 “Retina Display” showing almost the same resolution as iPad (960×640 compared with 1024×768), I had a hope that running iPhone Apps on the iPad would replace the 2x scaling with some sort of “display at retina resolution” that would give the same screen coverage, but with no pixel-doubling. Sadly, that’s [...]
Desktop is curiously named, as it basically divides your iPad screen in two and lets you load a different (or the same) function in to each half – most usefully perhaps, two browsers looking at two different web pages, or a browser and a notepad … The App offers a number of choices to load [...]
Google Earth is now available for the iPad, and it’s very nice! Although, since the Google Maps App is so good, there’s some less need for Google Earth … You can search and zoom in with Google Earth to the same level of detail as with Google Maps, but there are some nice extra features [...]
Catch a few iPhone games from Electronic Arts, reduced to $0.99 for a short while; I decided to try Game of Life, and it’s an amusing way to pass the time … Sadly, EA is not putting any iPad games on sale – and Game of Life would not switch to “2x” display so I [...]
Less than a month since two million, and Apple reaches sales of three million! “People are loving iPad as it becomes a part of their daily lives,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We’re working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more people around the world, including those in nine more [...]
If you’re interested in current and recent movies, check out the excellent Flixster; this App provides easy access to recent movie info including synposis, trailer, reviews, still pictures, and quick links to external review sites like Rotten Tomatoes! Of course all the movie info is quite easily available online, but Flixster pulls it all together [...]
Recently I purchased and reviewed MotionX GPS Drive HD, concluding that it was excellent. Paying $3 for the App is quite preferable to paying $15-$50+ for one of the “true” navigation Apps from Navigon, TomTom, etc; but there’s one significant downside to the MotionX App – it does not include maps, instead they are downloaded [...]
There’s a few traffic Apps around, both free and paid for; a few weeks ago I tried Beat The Traffic, but I didn’t much like it: The problem is that Beat The Traffic shows road speed in red/yellow/green, so when you look at the map above, traffic looks bad – only a little green, lots [...]
How long before this is true for iPad owners? … from The Oatmeal – visit to see the rest of the story!
Watching a video about Google TV, I once again had issues with the YouTube feed stuttering as the data does not arrive at my iPad fast enough (this on a fast Comcast cable internet), and I wondered what it would be like to watch via AT&T 3G (which at home here is quite good). Here [...]
The Twins is a breakout style block busting game with a twist, that turns out to be a big negative! The $0.99 App looks good enough initially with a nice loading screen that animates if you wait a while: As you see, the game offers a two player mode – each player has their own [...]
Of course you can run most of the 200,000+ iPhone Apps in the App store (like Skype), but it’s better to have the App configured to run full-size on the iPad – PadGadget announces there are now more than 10,000 iPad or iPad+iPhone Apps to choose from, with the chart suggesting more coming all the [...]
It turns out that you CAN use your iPad as a “voice communications device” – a Phone. Skype works fine on the iPad, even though it’s an iPhone App (it’s just a bit pixely at 2x, and a bit small at 1x – but you’re talking rather than reading!): After successfully using Skype’s test call [...]
Well, sort of … There’s a few Apps available that allow use of your iPhone to take a photo and then transfer it to the iPad: CAMERA-A, Wireless Camera, Coolibah CoolCam, etc. While CAMERA-A seems top-rated, CoolCam is free so that’s a big incentive to try it out! This type of App can be complicated; [...]
If you know Stephen Fry, you’ll know that he is hilarious, and that he loves technology (see his iPad launch article in Time Magazine. Stephen Fry has a “bloggy” website, and now has an iPad App which repeats his website content in, perhaps, a more iPad friendly form: His article “No Comment” is an entertaining [...]
On my original WiFi-only iPad, I’d sometimes get WiFi connection issues (here and here); sometimes the App store throws up a strange “can’t” error message when trying to download an App, and sometimes Safari displays a “Connecting” error, even though it was connected perfectly well. I had not seen this issue on the 3G iPad, [...]
After trying Google Maps on the way to work on my iPad yesterday, I looked around for any other iPad ready navigation Apps, and discovered there aren’t very many. But I did find MotionX GPS Drive HD (from MotionX), and at the price of just $2.99 I decided to try it – and wow am [...]
On my drive to work this morning, I kept the 3G iPad running, displaying the Maps App, zoomed in quite tight – through the whole drive, GPS navigation was perfect as far as I could tell, always showing my precise location relative to turns, side roads, etc; much better than my iPhone 3GS! Here for [...]
To compare 3G against my home cable internet speeds, I downloaded Speedtest X; it’s not a great program, but it did give some comparison data. First, a couple of runs on my WiFi iPad – already see there’s some variation from run to run. My cable internet is provided by Comcast and is generally quite [...]
I have plans to drive coast-to-coast in August, and I’d like to be able to use my iPad on the road, including navigation features – so I finally convinced myself to upgrade to a 3G iPad; and by luck I was able to get one today from my local Apple store! Moving from one iPad [...]
I had wondered about buying the full App, and then Robber Bomber HD Lite became available so I tried it today – and saved myself some money: this game is awful! You will see this tutorial screen a lot, since it displays it at every start! The tutorial is not even much use, it could [...]
When I discussed WordPress posting, I found that the App is useful for getting pictures up to the website, and editing text – but editing in the browser is the best way to post pictures into the entry, and for such as pasting in links. However, there is no way to scroll the text box [...]
Atomic Web Browser remains my favorite App browser, but last night I purchased Perfect Web Browser after reading it’s claim Perfect Browser can spoof user agent string and render web pages like the target browser of your choice: Chrome, Opera, Firefox or IE, with a startling 1:1 level of similarity; I contacted the author to [...]
Beware AT&T’s new data rate plans, coming next week: (image from TUAW) Just a short couple of months ago, Apple announced amazing 3G data plans for the iPad: Now, AT&T are about to eliminate the unlimited option – I do think that “bait & switch” is the correct term here, with blame falling on Apple [...]
When I got my iPad back in early April, I was amazed that it was unusable until it was connected to a computer running iTunes! Today on Gizmodo Matt Buchanan discusses the same issue: A minute after I pull any Android phone out of the box for the very first time, it’s loaded with all [...]
I’m not sure how much the “concept tablet” would have been like today’s iPad, if the iPhone hadn’t already existed (the App store, for example, is critical to the success of the iPad) – but it’s interesting to read Steve Job’s comments: “I’ll tell you a secret. It actually started with the tablet first,” Jobs [...]
