David Hockney "Van Gogh would have loved it"∞
The iPad gets praise from artist and royal academician David Hockney. Here´s another article from Bloomberg dated April, 25th.
Hockney has been drawing on his iPhone for some time using the brushes app and and has now moved to the iPad’s bigger screen.
The quote sticking out most reads: “It can be anything you want it to be. This is the nearest we have got to seeing what I would call a universal machine.”
iPad will arrive in 9 countries on May 28th
Apple anounced shipping dates for the iPad in a press release today. The tablet will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK on Friday, May 28. Both the WiFi-only and the WiFi+3G models will be on sale the same day. Preorders start monday May, 10th.
According to the spanish outlet of techblog Engadget the pricing in Spain will start at 479 € for the 16GB WiFi model and will add 100 € for each increment of memory and an aditional 100€ premium for 3G, thus pricing the 64GB WiFi+3G top model at 779€. Italian prices will start at 499 € with the same 100€ increments iLounge reports.
The Engdget article also reveals UK pricing at £429, £499 and £599 for the WiFi-only models and £529, £599 and £699 for the 3G enabled devices.
An additional nine countries will get the iPad in the July timeframe, including Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore.
AppleInsider | Apple announces iPad sales top 1 million in less than a month∞
1 million in 28 days equals about 35700 units per day.The 3G Version was only just released on friday. Taking into account that Apple is only serving the US market at the time that´s quite a lot.
I´m curious about the figures when the iPad goes on sale in most of europe later this month.
Apple To Shut Down Lala On May 31, iTunes.com Launch Impending?∞
Lala the online music service which was aquired by Apple in late 2009 will shut down on May 31st. Read more over on techcrunch.
Thoughts on Flash∞
Steve Jobs publishes his thoughts on Flash. He closes by saying Adobe should focus on making tools for open web standards such as HTML5 instead of “criticizing Apple for leaveing the past behind”.
German T-Mobile tariffs for iPad surface ∞
fscklog.com reports on internal documents of T-Mobile, germanies exclusive iPhone partner, which reveal the upcoming data tariffs for iPad.
Apparently all tariffs are bound to an existing iPhone contract. T-Mobile will only offer one daily prepaid tariff at €2.95 ($3,95) which expires at 12:00am.
A T-Mobile spokesperson confirmed the authenticity of the document adding that the tariffs are not finalized as of now and changes could be made before the official anouncement.
How many iPads can I buy in one lifetime ?∞
Aparently there´s a lifetime limit on the amount of iPads one can buy. As usual with Apple they´re very secretive on the rules applying to this limit.
The Gizmodo/iPhone fiasco
Word (and pictures) on the future of iPhone are out in the streets thanks to an Apple engineer who supposedly left the device in a Redwood, Ca. Bar and Gizmodo the notorious gadget blog subsidiary of Gawker Media who paid $5000 to get their hands on the prototype device.
For an in depth write up on the legal implications read John Grubers article over at Daring Fireball.
As to the outcome of this whole fiasco I asume Apple is quite happy about that the device ending up with someone who obvoiusly had no idea of how to handle the situation and whom to offer the gadget to. The super secret device could have easily ended up in the labs of Apples competitors. Google, HTC, Motorola or Palm come to mind. I´m pretty confident one of those would have paid tenfold the amount the alleged “finder” received from gawker media.
The way it played out, the public who is always longing for rumours and peeks at new Apple devices, got no new information regarding the technology inside the next generation iPhone whatsoever. Front facing camera, higher resolution display and camera flash all of those features had been discussed earlier on the web and were, to a certain extend, the expected evolution in a future iteration of Apples cellphone.
Ther was no information regarding the CPU which is to power the device or the amount of memory it´s going to have. 80GB doesn´t sound like a proper figure as flash memory normaly increases by power of two which means the next step after todays 64GB would be 128GB.
The only thing left is the design of the device, which had been published on twitter back in february and noone can say if the photos on Gizmodo do actually show the device as it will sell later this year.
