Government authorities and retailers in China have started removing stocks of iPad from the shelves in the market, in response to a ruling issued in December. According to Hebei Youth Daily, local representatives of the country’s Administrations of Industry and Commerce (AIC) have started confiscating Apple’s tablet from retail outlets, with some merchants are voluntarily removing the device from their storefronts as a pre-emptive measure.
As a part of a local campaign this incident only took place in the city of Shijiazhuang, but vendors weary of the outcome have started to take precautions. Remember this is the same country where people literally give body parts to own iPads.
Looks like its iPad time of the year, several sources are pointing at the 1st week of March announcement of the iPad 3, with stock available soon after. The new Tablet from Apple is supposedly set to use the same form factor as the iPad 2 , but will boast a faster processor , higher resolution display and bigger battery according to rumors. The iPad 3 will also come with improved optics for rear and from cameras and a whole new Speaker system. Knowing Apple, these many changes may not actually be happening to the iPad.
The iPad 2 was announce March 2nd last year, so the dates seem to coincide with last years launch.
Apple is making its employees feel extra special this time around, as those who work for the Cupertino based giant are in for a sweet deal. The company typically offers a 25% discount on its range of products to the employees. But in an Employee meeting at the local Town Hall yesterday, The Apple CEO revealed some new Apple employee benefits, Cook announced that Apple employees will soon be given $500 discounts on purchases of new Macs and $250 discounts on purchases of a new iPad.
The new discount program will officially kickoff at some point during June 2012. Don’t try to use your regular thing and find a relative who can source you macs for cheap , because employees will be only able to call in this favor once every three years. The Employee has to be working for a minim of 90 days for the company to request a discount.
The discount excludes several products including the Mac mini and Displays.
Do you remember when you were younger, there used to be a game called SimTower? Today we bring you another free game for your iDevice called Tiny Tower which is kind of a remake of the older game. Tiny Tower lets you build a tiny tower and manage the businesses and bitizens that inhabit it. The objective is to build the highest most revenue generating tower that you can.
The game starts out very simply. You have a lobby on which you have to construct a new floor. You start with a simple residential floor. It can hold 5 “Bitizens” who pay you rent every day and work for you in your tower. Once your residential floor is completed, you can build your first business!
All businesses require employees. While playing, you’ll come across many different bitizens with a variety of strengths and weaknesses, It is up to you to assign the right bitizen to the right job. Along the way, you may just give a few people their dream jobs.
When you tap a business floor, a new interface pops up that allows you to hire and fire people as well as to produce items for sale. Different businesses produce different items, and each item is prepared in a different quantity and in a different amount of time. Each business can produce three levels of products. The first level sells the cheapest and is produced in the least amount of quantity, time and money, while the third level sells for the highest price and is produced in a higher quantity but is more expensive and takes the maximum amount of time to produce. To produce a level 1 item, you need to have one employee, two employees for level 2 and three employees for level 3. Once items are ready, the business has to be “stocked” by tapping the business again. Once a business is stocked, it will continue to sell products even if you aren’t playing the game while it still has stock remaining. Once it is sold out, the business will close down and you start the whole process again.
A really easy, though low paying, way to make money is to do the job of the elevator attendant. From time to time, different people will walk into the lobby and request to be dropped to a specific floor. While this sounds easy, when your tower reaches 20+ floors, you’ll realize that it starts to take a while for you to get from the lobby to the floor and back.
Sometimes special bitizens with a large VIP label show up. VIPs provide various advantages to your tower. They range from a real estate agent who can instantly fill up a residential floor to a rich tycoon who buys out all of one item from the business that you take him to. When a VIP appears, you can drop them to the floor that you feel will provide you the most advantage. Choose carefully though.
As your tower starts to grow, you can reorganize floors by moving them and you can also customize the look and feel of each floor by repainting it. Has your tower grown too tall? Relax. You can upgrade your elevator too.
As with most free to play games, there are various in-app purchases that allow you to buy various “TowerBux” packages. TowerBux can be spent on speeding everything up in your tower, from construction to item production.
All in all this game isn’t one that you’ll be playing for hours at a stretch, but it is the game that you’re gonna come back to for five minutes every hour.
Apple has released a new version of the iBooks publishing platform yesterday at the Guggenheim museum in New York City. The new iBooks 2 app is available today as a free download from the App Store. It features a lot of new improvements including the ability to share textbooks. The reason for giving iPad’s to students in universities becomes even more useful starting today.
The App allows fullscreen books, interactive 3D objects, diagrams, videos and photos, the iBooks 2 app will let students learn with just a tap or swipe of the finger.
Education is deep in Apple’s DNA and iPad may be our most exciting education product yet. With 1.5 million iPads already in use in education institutions, including over 1,000 one-to-one deployments, iPad is rapidly being adopted by schools across the US and around the world, Now with iBooks 2 for iPad, students have a more dynamic, engaging and truly interactive way to read and learn, using the device they already love.”
-said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing.
Apple Reinvents Textbooks with iBooks 2 for iPad New iBooks Author Lets Anyone Create Stunning iBooks Textbooks
NEW YORK-January 19, 2012-Apple® today announced iBooks® 2 for iPad®, featuring iBooks textbooks, an entirely new kind of textbook that’s dynamic, engaging and truly interactive. iBooks textbooks offer iPad users gorgeous, fullscreen textbooks with interactive animations, diagrams, photos, videos, unrivaled navigation and much more. iBooks textbooks can be kept up to date, don’t weigh down a backpack and never have to be returned. Leading education services companies including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill and Pearson will deliver educational titles on the iBookstore? with most priced at $14.99 or less, and with the new iBooks Author, a free authoring tool available today, anyone with a Mac® can create stunning iBooks textbooks.
“Education is deep in Apple’s DNA and iPad may be our most exciting education product yet. With 1.5 million iPads already in use in education institutions, including over 1,000 one-to-one deployments, iPad is rapidly being adopted by schools across the US and around the world,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Now with iBooks 2 for iPad, students have a more dynamic, engaging and truly interactive way to read and learn, using the device they already love.”
The new iBooks 2 app is available today as a free download from the App Store™. With support for great new features including gorgeous, fullscreen books, interactive 3D objects, diagrams, videos and photos, the iBooks 2 app will let students learn about the solar system or the physics of a skyscraper with amazing new interactive textbooks that come to life with just a tap or swipe of the finger. With its fast, fluid navigation, easy highlighting and note-taking, searching and definitions, plus lesson reviews and study cards, the new iBooks 2 app lets students study and learn in more efficient and effective ways than ever before.
iBooks Author is also available today as a free download from the Mac App Store and lets anyone with a Mac create stunning iBooks textbooks, cookbooks, history books, picture books and more, and publish them to Apple’s iBookstore. Authors and publishers of any size can start creating with Apple-designed templates that feature a wide variety of page layouts. iBooks Author lets you add your own text and images by simply dragging and dropping, and with the Multi-Touch™ widgets you can easily add interactive photo galleries, movies, Keynote® presentations and 3D objects.
Apple today also announced an all-new iTunes® U app giving educators and students everything they need on their iPad, iPhone® and iPod touch® to teach and take entire courses. With the new iTunes U app, students using iPads have access to the world’s largest catalog of free educational content, along with over 20,000 education apps at their fingertips and hundreds of thousands of books in the iBookstore that can be used in their school curriculum, such as novels for English or Social Studies.* The iTunes U app is available today as a free download from the App Store.
*Some content is available only for iPad.
Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.
The Amazon tablet called Kindle Fire is eating into the profits that Apple would have made from iPad sales this holiday season in the United States. The average sales of the Apple iPad dipped from the expected 16 million to 12-13 million during the highly profitable holiday season. This is courtesy the entry level users shifting over to the Amazon Kindle Fire, especially because of all the features it holds and the basic difference in price of the Apple iPad and the Fire.
The Kindle Fire is also based on Android which has already been rooted, therefore that attracts the modders and themers.
While Apple has limited Siri usage to just the iPhone 4S, iOS hackers Grant Paul (aka chpwn), Steven Troughton-Smith and Ryan Petrich have initiated a download of Siri using Spire Installer on any Jailbroken iPads, iPhone 4, iPod touches and the iPhone 3GS considering that the device runs on iOS 5 (Interesting since an untethered jailbreak for iOS 5.0.1 just came out). The Installer legally downloads a 100MB Siri installation directly from Apple and this is all legal mind you.
The Siri port to run however requires a proxy iPhone 4S with instructions available on the link below. The team reports that once iPhone 4S is jailbroken the need for a proxy device may be eliminated altogether.
Have an iOS device but miss the Airplay feature because you didn’t get the Apple TV ? Well Airtight is the answer, considering you got Google TV instead. A simple app that costs only 99 cents allows you to use any Airplay enabled device like an iPad or iPhone to share with a Google TV on the same network. It currently works with only sharing of Non-DRM Movies, and Music and direct mirroring is not yet supported. So a US $ 99 Apple TV seems like a better option if you still haven’t invested in a Google TV.
The iPad 3 Rumors are starting to our in and flaring over what is said to be the next iPad slated for a early 2012 release. Here is what the inter webs are discussing:
Launch Date
The iPad 3 is supposedly set to be launched in around the end of January with sale beginning on 24th Feb 2012 (Steve Jobs’ Birthday)
Processor
If Apple is launching a new iPad we can expect a spec bump, Rumors point to a dual core A6 chipset clocked at 2GHz with enhanced Graphics processing equivalent to gaming consoles.
Display
Apple is also said to be working on a Enhanced retina display for the iPad 3 ( or simply a higher res display than the current version.).
Camera
People complained a lot about poor cameras in the iPad 2 and Apple is said to be fixing that issue with the 5MP snapper from the iPhone 4 being installed in the iPad 3 along with FaceTime HD front camera.
Design
Apple is said to be furthering the slim profile of the iPad 2 by making the iPad 3 even thinner. The form factor will continue to remain the same and the smart covers will still work.
What will actually happen at the launch of the iPad 3, if there is one, will only be known post the launch. But the rumors point in the general direction that any company would head in. The possibilities of these changes is quite high. The only thing that we are unsure of is the shipping date.
Shocker : Gameloft has made Asphalt Adrenaline 6 full version free for 24 hours on the App Store. The game is one of the most played games on both Android and iOS platforms. You can even take on friends in Online and Local Multiplayer mode for up to 6 racers. The game is only free for today so make sure you get it before the offer runs out.
The total download is 515.4 MB so make sure you have a decent connection.
Speaking at Le Web in Paris Google CEO, spoke about why Apps were first written for iOS and then ported over to Android. The response was one that would not surprise any Android user, Schmidt claims ” In about 6 months its going to be the other way round.” He predicts that the new OS Ice Cream Sandwich will remove the device fragmentation and lead people closer to the OS, making it a preferred choice of developers.
Apple has filed a new patent that will enable the use of next-generation cameras and invisible ink to negotiate digital handshakes.
Snap a picture of a cash register with a barcode and your iDevice will generate a unique ID to pair up. but in order to keep the technology secure, the codes would have to be painted on with “invisible” fluorescent coatings. Similarly to share information between 2 iPhones or iDevices, the screen of one will display the information while the camera from the other will simply click to transfer the info.
While the whole world is looking forward to NFC, you can leave it up to Apple to think of a different standard. Remember the whole world was using regular size sim cards before apple managed to make the Micro-sim a standard.
According to The Daily, Microsoft may be preparing a series of apps, or a single suite of Office apps to target the iPad market. These apps would directly take on Keynote, Pages and Numbers from the Apple software arsenal. The company is also reportedly prepping an Office Suite update that will add official support for Lion and may be available from the Mac App Store. Apps for the iPad and Mac App store could cost upto US $ 9.99 (the same Apple Charges for its apps) these apps will support sync with Office 360 and will be available before the end of the year 2011
We already deliver Office on multiple platforms and devices and are committed to expanding in the future, but have nothing further to share today,
A new package for jailbreak friendly iDevices has been released that enables Siri dictation on the iPhone 4 / 3GS and all those that run a Jailbroken iOS 5. The package is available to be downloaded from a repo that uses Siri Api (without permission) to connect to the servers that the speech recognition company hosts for apps instead. This method will allow only dictation on the iPhone and not Siri itself. We have a feeling that the package might be removed soon so get it before it goes.
Apple has started seeding the next beta of iOS 5 to developers, the iOS 5.1 is meant to bring some major fixes to the OS. Many are also hoping for a fix to the major battery drain faced in the current version of the OS.
But thats not the only news surrounding this release, a new product iD has been found in the release dubbed “iPad 2,4”, which is hinting at the next generation of the iPad said to be coming in the next couple months. Rumors have been pointing at Retina/ high res display along with better cameras. The chipset may or may not be bumped up to the next revision. The product iD only increases chances for something like this showing up in the near future.
