Apple may have chosen AT&T as its partner for iPad’s 3G model, but Verizon is not giving up on it as yet. 

A leaked memo that the company has circulated among its staff members calls upon the iPad as an “opportunity” for Verizon to reach more customers.

Read more…

9to5Mac is reporting that a couple of new gestures have been uncovered in the the iPhone SDK 3.2 Beta 4. There seems to be a triple tap gesture and a long press gesture revealed. In the gestures folder, a couple of new plist files have been discovered: “3Tap.plist” and “LongPress.plist”.

Read more…

Though the iPhone and iPad run on a common operating system, the version of OS installed on iPad will not be compatible with an iPhone. The reasons are evident: With a different screen size and variant features that the iPad will come with, the OS on iPhone will require a significant overhaul to match the capabilities presently available on the iPad. 

While there is no doubt that future versions of the iPhone OS will be compatible on both the iPhone and iPad, the question is if this will happen with the upcoming launch of iPhone 4G later this summer. According to John Gruber from Daring Fireball, this is most likely. In his blog post yesterday, Gruber says apps like Stocks and Weather, which have been removed from the iPad could be relaunched with iPhone OS 4.0 when both the devices will see a unified operating system.

Read more…

Los Angeles, CA – Since PixelMags launched in December, 60+ titles for iPhone and iPod touch have been sold in 77 countries through the iTunes App Store. New magazine titles are releasing every day. As the launch date of iPad nears, anticipation is reaching a fever pitch.

“Disney CEO Bob Iger and Wired Magazine Editor-In-Chief Chris Anderson have called the iPad a ‘game-changer’. We couldn’t agree more. When iPad launches, we will have more magazine titles optimized for iPad than any other vendor.” -Ryan Marquis, Founder & COO, PixelMags

Read more…

Ever since the iPad’s introduction a month and a half ago, the internet has been awash in criticism of the as-yet-unreleased device. “It’s just a big iPod touch,” many have said. “No Flash, no multitasking, no sale,” others bemoaned. And a few have gone so far as to say, “It doesn’t do a lot of things that a netbook that costs half as much will do.” For these reasons and many more, many of the pundits and forum dwellers have but one prediction: the iPad is going to crash and burn.

Don’t you believe it, because the critics have been wrong before. Several times, actually, according to The Week, which provides a list of five Apple products the critics thought would fail. Out of those five, only one, the Newton, failed to find mainstream success. The other four were industry-defining products which went on to sell millions of units each.

Read more…

We got to sit down with Australian developer Firemint here at the Game Developers Conference 2010 in San Francisco — it’s a mobile game developer who hit it big last year with the very popular iPhone game Flight Control, and while it used to make mobile games for just a handful of larger game publishers like EA, the company is now trying to cement a reputation for making a smaller stable of high quality App Store games. “We like to joke that we went from ten customers to ten million,” community manager Alexandra Peters told us.

Read more…

Read more…

Apple has seeded developers of its iPhone Developer Program with the fourth beta version of iPhone OS 3.2 SDK (build 10M2144).

Based on initial reports it looks like the latest beta version of iPhone OS 3.2 SDK includes many bug fixes, including a fix for Safari’s bookmark feature within the simulator.

Read more…

Early last month, Kevin Fox from Fury.com had noted that native iPhone apps such as Stocks, Calculator and Weather were conspicuously absent from the iPad HomeScreen and wondered if this was a pointer towards the availability of an OS X-like Dashboard that could possibly house all these “minor apps“. Kevin’s claims found further support from sources Apple Insider spoke to who discovered evidences in the iPhone OS 3.2 SDK for iPad that hinted at the possibility of dashboard widgets. 

It now appears that these speculations could be wrong. John Gruber from Daring Fireball has quoted sources as having revealed that these apps have in fact been removed from the iPad since Apple could not create “bigger versions” of these apps to fit the iPad’s larger screen. Gruber writes:

Read more…

Apple has just rolled out another update to iPhone OS 3.2 SDK for iPad. This Beta 4 of iPhone OS 3.2 SDK for iPad brings new API improvements and bug fixes to make sure it is all set before Apple officially releases the final firmware in shipping device come this April.

Read more…

Should Adobe Flash be made available on touch screen devices like the iPad? This is one question to which we will never receive a definitive answer. While there is obviously a case for incorporating a ubiquitous software platform like Flash on the iPad, issues such as the high resources consumption and other inherent flaws of the platform has meant that there are plenty of arguments against Flash as well.

This debate could also probably be the “flashpoint” in the fight for market share in the nascent tablet segment. A case in point is a recent demo video for HP Slate, which is scheduled to launch in the market later this year. In this video, Alex Tam from the Adobe Flash product marketing team demonstrates the capabilities of HP Slate in rendering Flash based content.

Read more…

Wired’s Brian X. Chen noticed that Apple’s iPad press release touts “12 new innovative apps designed especially for the iPad.” Take a look at the screenshot at right and you’ll see twelve apps: Videos, iPod, Maps, Photos, Mail, Safari, App Store, iTunes, YouTube, Contacts, Calendar and Notes. That means a few apps that ship with the iPhone — Stocks, Calculator, Clock, Weather and Voice Memos — are missing.

Thus, the mystery begins. Where are The Final Five? Chen suggests that they’ll be released as free apps in the App Store. John Gruber believes that design problems caused the team (specifically, Steve Jobs) to withhold the apps. I agree with John and Brian.

Read more…

iPhone Games are among the most popular applications on the App Store. Close to 20% of iPhone applications available today are gaming apps. This is no surprise considering the rich experience that the platform offers to casual gamers thanks to features like multi-touch controls, accelerometer based motion-sensor control, social gaming capabilities that spruce up role playing games, in-app purchasing, etc. 

Despite the growth of gaming on iPhone and iPod touch, this could still be just the beginning for Apple as a gaming platform manufacturer. According to a recent article published on the Silicon Alley Insider, the iPad could be the ideal platform for third party gaming app developers to offer an even richer gaming experience for their users. The potential is not hard to see. With a much bigger screen, the iPad offers a much improved visual experience for gamers compared to the iPhone. Also, the extra pixels on the iPad could bring in the opportunity for a whole lot of additional gaming controls and options that were hitherto unavailable on the iPhone OS games. 

Read more…

The Loop is reporting that it is possible the iPhone and iPad firmware will not unify until fall of this year. iPad will be released with OS 3.2, but the folks over at The Loop are suggesting the iPhone OS will not be updated until the summer, with the release of new hardware.

The iPad OS, firmware 3.2, has been designed specifically for the iPad, with many new UI changes, and the addition of “pop-overs”. It doesn’t really make sense for Apple to release this firmware for the iPhone and iPod touch. Instead, we will most likely not see an update for the iPhone until the summer, when the next iPhone, and probably iPhone OS 4.0 are released.

Read more…