Apple's iPad 2 sales for tablets

Apple's iPad 2 sales for tablets -  Apple's iPad 2  Turning lead into gold may be little more than a dream, but Apple seems to have mastered the alchemy of turning an iPad containing components reportedly worth a little more than $300 into gold. With the release of the iPad 2, consumers lined up outside of Apple Stores waiting to get their hands on the company's newest tablet.

Apple Inc sold close to 1 million units of its next-generation tablet computer during its debut weekend, analysts estimated. By comparison, the original version of the iPad, which launched in April of 2010, crossed the one-million mark 28 days after its launch. Apple shares rose 0.6 percent to $354.20 in morning trade on the Nasdaq, even as shares of many other technology companies slumped. The Nasdaq was down 0.7 percent. The iPad 2 went on sale in the United States on Friday evening at Apple stores, AT&T and Verizon Wireless outlets, as well as Target, Wal-Mart and Best Buy stores, greeted by thousands of eager customers.

Apple's continued ability to move iPads is nothing short of impressive. Although it's easy to forget, prior to the iPad being released, skeptics questioned whether there was a need for tablet computing devices altogether. Even many who are less skeptical wondered where tablets would fit in.

But the iPad 2 number worth looking at most may not be total sales. More important, perhaps, is the number of sales to new iPad owners. Global Equities Research sees 60% of the new iPads being sold to owners of the original device, yet a 236-person survey conducted by Piper Jaffray found that 70% of the buyers polled were new iPad owners.

Clearly, only one of these figures is accurate, and which one is incredibly important. Despite the phenomenal adoption of the iPad, which is currently 'the' tablet, the overall market for the devices is still relatively small in the overall scheme of things.

With billions of computers/laptops and mobile phones in circulation, one has to ask: just how big can and will the tablet market grow?

If the iPad 2 is being snapped up primarily by existing iPad owners, the pie of tablet owners may not be growing as rapidly as one might expect given the media hoopla. On the other hand, if Apple's breakneck sales of the newest version are driven by strong demand from first-time owners, it would appear that the tablet pie is growing nicely.

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Acer’s Liquid E Ferrari Special Edition

Acer’s Liquid E Ferrari Special Edition - Acer has officially announced the special edition of its Liquid E Android smartphone in celebration of Ferrari's 800th Formula 1 race. The Liquid E Ferrari is not the first project that the two companies collaborated on, the Taiwanese company having also given Ferrari makeovers to some of its notebooks. 

The Acer Liquid E Ferrari Special Edition will feature the traditional color of the Italian supercar manufacturer, with Acer and Ferrari logos fitted on its glossy, chrome, trimmed back cover.

The device will come with an official Ferrari wallpaper, an interesting microphone designed to look like a Formula 1 air-intake inlet and, of course, ringtones that resemble the sound of a Ferrari engine. Apart from the carbon-fiber, black, prancing-horse logo on the back, the device also comes with a noise-cancellation Bluetooth headset bearing the Ferrari emblem and a Ferrari case designed to protect the device from dust and shocks.

“A Ferrari is not just about speed. It is an expression of beauty, power, excitement, pleasure and natural excellence,” Gianpiero Morbello, Acer vice president, Marketing and Brand, comments. “From the original concept to the finished product the new smartphone was conceived down to the finest details with the idea of giving a stronger sense of belonging to all Ferrari fans.”

Apart from its red color, logos and wallpapers, the smartphone has the same specifications as the standard Acer Liquid E. The device sports a 3.5-inch capacitive touchscreen display, GPS support, Wi-Fi connectivity, a 5-megapixel autofocus camera and a Snapdragon 1GHz processor, powered by Android 2.1.

Compared with the Ferrari supercar itself, the device will not be out of reach for most people, but, since Acer has not announced its price or availability, we can expect this special edition to have a price tag higher than that of the standard Liquid E version.

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Best Apps for Snow Junkies Review

Best Apps for Snow Junkies Review - Carrying a phone

on the slopes isn't just a good way to make sure you don't freeze to death after careening off an unseen ledge. With the right apps, it can be helpful in non-emergency-related ways, too!

Ignoring occasional glitchiness—particularly with remembering favorite resorts through updates—it's hard to fault North Face's Snow Report app. Its feature list reads like the results of a brainstorm session titled, "Why the hell would anyone want to bring a smartphone skiing with them?" which is actually, probably, pretty much this app's origin story. This means: quick weather updates for virtually any resort, trail maps for quite a few; on-the-ground details, like ski lift running times and snow totals; and a basic route tracking function. Free, iPhone.

An all-in-one personal GPS app that you should probably have anyway, MotionX GPS excels at one broad function: tracking where you've been. Which is pretty important for a skier, I think! By keeping this app running all day, or at least during runs, you'll end up with a full readout of distance skied, elevation gained and lost, top and average speeds, etcetera. It's just as fun to pull out at the top of a run, too, to get a birds-eye topological view of what you're about to tumble down, complete with altitude data. 3, iPhone.

Snow Report does a decent job of providing relevant weather stats, but if you need deeper data—and any skier planning a long-needed, all-too-rare trip really does—then you'll need to go with a dedicated app. I find Weatherbug to have the most complete and accessible data among the free apps. It's certainly powerful enough to give you a sense of how your next day, or ten days, on the slope are going to feel—not just how deep the snow will be. Free, iPhone

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Explosive Dell Venue

Explosive Dell Venue - It's the Dell Venue, and no, you still can't buy one outside Hong Kong or South Korea just yet. All we can speculate is that this Android phone is facing the same manufacturing issues as its WP7 cousin, but hopefully we're wrong. Anyhow, what matters is that we've finally gotten our hands on a retail unit of the Snapdragon-packing Venue. So is it worth the wait for Androiders distanced from the Far East? And will this handset be the answer for our love-hate relationship with the Streak? Head on right past the break to find out.

Hardware

It's hard to deny that Dell's come a long way with the styling of its mobile devices, evolving from the cheap-looking Axim Windows Mobile PDAs (although the X50 series received much love from the community) to the now eye-catching Venue duo. Like the Streak, we've had people inquiring us about or at least eyeing at our Venue -- we're guessing it's mostly to do with the rounded chrome sides contrasting the black body, and the vibrant 4.1-inch AMOLED screen certainly helps as well despite its low visibility under strong daylight. Upon closer inspection, you'll also notice the subtly curved "Shear Design" Gorilla Glass -- which is also featured on the Venue Pro -- that covers practically the entire face of the phone, thus contributing towards the Venue's premium look no matter what angle you look at it from. Funnily enough, Dell didn't place much emphasis on the Shear Design's ergonomic benefits, but some of us feel that the curvature makes our thumb-swiping gesture slightly more comfortable. Maybe it's just us.

On a related note, the Venue's rounded sides and curved back also provide better grip, although there have been a few occasions when our naughty fingertips slipped around the back far enough to interfere with our touch input, especially when we're lying in bed. Looking back at our other phones for a sanity check, we realised that their sharper edges along the screen are actually pretty effective at stopping our fingertips from accidentally touching the screen; whereas the Venue lacks such "feature" to warn our fingers. Ah well, guess we have to sacrifice a little for the looks.

Going back to the glass: despite our careful handling and short ownership so far, our Venue's screen has somehow managed to accumulate a couple of light scratches. It sure was a surprise given the Gorilla Glass' impressive performance in our previous torture test -- perhaps our travel through the different climates of Hong Kong, Las Vegas and London made the material more vulnerable. We've written to Corning to see whether this is a possibility, so watch this space for an update.

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Notion Ink Adams arrive to eager unboxers

Notion Ink Adams arrive to eager unboxers, first OTA brings new meaning to DOA - Would you look at that? Oh yes, that's a real life Notion Ink Adam on some lucky guy's table after being pulled from its fresh packaging. Sure, that's to be expected considering the 10-inch, Android 2.2 tablets were boxed up and shipped out last week, but after the numerous delays, we've got to say it's a true milestone for the India-based company. However, while the unboxing videos and pictures are flowing in -- there are two right after the break for ya -- there's sadly some rain pouring down on the company's parade today. According to the chaps at Android Police, a few people have encountered serious issues with an over-the-air update that was pushed to these new tablets. Apparently, hitting the update button and installing the software has caused the Tegra 2 Adam to stop booting (picture of that sad sight at the second source link). That's surely a FOF situation (frown on face, for those that haven't listened to the recent Engadget podcast), but word is that Notion Ink has stopped pushing out those updates for the time being and emailed customers about the issue. We'll be keeping an ear to the ground on this one, but in the meantime we'll be here waiting for our review unit to arrive so we can show those amateur, wobbly-cam unboxers how it's really done.

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PlayBook battery life will be equal or greater than the iPad

PlayBook battery life will be equal or greater than the iPad with smaller battery size - can everyone please stop talking about the iPad? RIM's been skirting around Apple's tablet, saying only that its upcoming PlayBook slate would have "comparable" battery life, but now it's dropped all pretense and called the iPad out by name. Specifically, the Canadian company's senior business marketing VP Jeff McDowell has promised that the PlayBook will offer "equal or greater" battery endurance to Apple's device, while using a smaller cell size. The latter part isn't hard to achieve, considering Apple filled most of its slate's innards with Li-Pol juice packs, but the promise of matching its autonomy from the wall socket is a big claim to make. Many people consider that to be among the iPad's foremost strengths, so RIM is surely aiming high by pledging to not only match it, but potentially better it. The PlayBook we saw in person wasn't quite up to that level yet, but there's still time until that March launch for RIM to turn bold words into a beautiful reality.

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Apple App Store Hits 10 Billion Downloads Times

Apple App Store Hits 10 Billion Downloads Times - As of today, 10 billion apps, thats ten BILLION individual apps have been downloaded from the Apple App Store. The person who fired off the ten billionth download will be receiving a $10,000 USD iTunes Gift Card that can be redeemed for anything in the iTunes store or the App Store including apps, music, audiobooks, television shows, and movies. Supposing the 10 billionth person was a person buying up every app in the world in order to be the magic number last, can you imagine them even having anything left to buy, much less $10,000 worth of digital downloads?

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Why iPhone's is plastic back?

Why iPhone's is plastic back? - The plastic back is the most obvious of the design choices. The iPad, with its all aluminum back, has seen its Wi-Fi reception radius reduced. The 3G version comes with a large patch on the top, probably big enough to provide with good reception. But the new tiny iPhone doesn't have the luxury of space: It needs to provide as much signal as possible using a very small surface. I'm sure Jon Ive is dying to get rid of the plastic back, and go iPad-style all the way, but the wireless reception is the most important thing in a cellphone. A necessary aesthetical-functional trade-off.

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New Industrial Design of iPhone's

New Industrial Design of iPhone's - At first sight, this new iPhone's industrial design seems so different from the previous two generations that it could be discarded as just a provisional case. Even while the finish is so perfect that it feels right out of the factory, some of the design language elements that are common to all Apple products are not there. Gone is the flushed screen glass against the metal rim. Gone is the single volume button, replaced by two separate ones. Gone is the seamless rim, and gone are the tapered, curved surfaces.

Despite that, however, this design is not a departure. Not when you frame it with the rest of the Apple product line. It's all the contrary: This new iPhone gets back to the simplicity of the iMac and the iPad. In fact, you can argue that the current iPhone 3GS—with its shiny chrome rim and excessively curved back—is out of place compared to the hard edges and Dieter-Ramish utilitarianism of the iMac and the iPad. Next to the iPad, for example, the new iPhone makes sense. It has the same feeling, the same functional simplicity.

But why the black plastic back, instead of going with an unibody aluminum design? Why the two audio volume buttons? Why the seams? And why doesn't the back have any curvature at all?

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Apple's Is Next iPhone

Apple's Is Next iPhone - It was found lost in a bar in Redwood City, camouflaged to look like an iPhone 3GS. We got it. We disassembled it. It's the real thing, and here are all the details.

While Apple may tinker with the final packaging and design of the final phone, it's clear that the features in this lost-and-found next-generation iPhone are drastically new and drastically different from what came before. Here's the detailed list of our findings:

What's new

• Front-facing video chat camera
• Improved regular back-camera (the lens is quite noticeably larger than the iPhone 3GS)
• Camera flash
• Micro-SIM instead of standard SIM (like the iPad)
• Improved display. It's unclear if it's the 960x640 display thrown around before—it certainly looks like it, with the "Connect to iTunes" screen displaying much higher resolution than on a 3GS.
• What looks to be a secondary mic for noise cancellation, at the top, next to the headphone jack
• Split buttons for volume
• Power, mute, and volume buttons are all metallic

What's changed

• The back is entirely flat, made of either glass (more likely) or ceramic or shiny plastic in order for the cell signal to poke through. Tapping on the back makes a more hollow and higher pitched sound compared to tapping on the glass on the front/screen, but that could just be the orientation of components inside making for a different sound
• An aluminum border going completely around the outside
• Slightly smaller screen than the 3GS (but seemingly higher resolution)
• Everything is more squared off
• 3 grams heavier
• 16% Larger battery
• Internals components are shrunken, miniaturized and reduced to make room for the larger battery

It is recognized as an iPhone
This iPhone behaves exactly like an iPhone does when connected to a computer, with the proper boot sequence and "connect to iTunes" restore functionality. Xcode and iTunes both see this as an iPhone. Mac OS X's System Profiler also reports this as an iPhone in restore mode, which is a natural consequence of remotely wiping the phone, but report different product identifiers (both CPID and CPRV) than either the 3G or the 3GS.


It uses micro-sim
The fact that it uses a micro-sim is a clear indicator that this is a next-generation iPhone. No other cellphone uses this standard at this point in the US.

The camouflage case
The case it came inside was a fully developed plastic case to house this phone to disguise it like a 3GS. This wasn't just a normal case; it had all the proper new holes cut out for the new switches and ports and camera holes and camera flash. But it looks like something from Belkin or Case-Mate. It's a perfect disguise.

The fact that it's in the wild right now
Logic can also narrow down why this phone is this year's iPhone, rather than next year's model or one from the previous year's, just because it was found in the wild right now. It makes no sense for Apple to be testing 2011's model right now, in super finished form—they wouldn't be nearly finished with it. The phone also can't be last year's test model, because last year's model (based on the iPhone 3GS teardowns) components were way different. No micro-sim, much bigger logic board, no flash, no front camera, smaller battery and an inferior camera. That only leaves the 2010 model.

The guts, the definitive proof
And finally, when we opened it up, we saw multiple components that were clearly labeled APPLE. And, because the components were fit extremely well and extremely conformed inside the case (obvious that it was designed FOR this case), it was evident that it was not just a 3G or a 3GS transplanted into another body. That probably wouldn't even be possible, with the size constraints of the thinner device and larger battery.

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The future of the iPad 2, iPhone 5, and Apple TV

The future of the iPad 2, iPhone 5, and Apple TV, and why Apple is shifting its mobile line to Qualcomm chipsets - We've been hearing a ton of rumors about what direction Apple's next set of products will take and when they'll be available -- but now we've got some concrete information from reliable sources which should make the path a little clearer. And that includes info on the next iPad, the iPhone 5, the second iteration of the new Apple TV, and a big change coming for all of the company's mobile products. Want to know the scoop? Read along after the break to get the goods. 

Right now, everyone is obviously buzzing about the Verizon iPhone 4. What people aren't talking about (yet) is the fact the device will be using a Qualcomm chipset for its CDMA radio (with no GSM capabilities) as opposed to the Infineon versions seen in the GSM iPhone 4. This isn't much of a surprise by itself, but it paves the way for a major shift from Apple. But first, a little bit of a timeline.

Just before the Verizon iPhone 4 launch, we'd heard from multiple sources -- sources like the ones which gave us all that extremely accurate Apple TV info last time around -- that the iPad 2 isn't nearly as close to launch as some have speculated. Apparently, those case and hardware mockups we've seen are rather early versions, which means we're still months out from a proper introduction. It seems likely that the device will land around April (perfectly timed with the 12-month product cycle Apple enjoys). And what about that device? From what we've been told, the thinner, sleeker tablet will sport a new screen technology that is akin to (though not the same as) the iPhone 4's Retina Display and will be "super high resolution" (unlike reports to the contrary). The device will remain at 10 inches but will now feature both front and rear cameras (not a huge surprise), and... there's an SD slot. That's right -- our sources say with near certainty that the device will have a dedicated SD slot built in (with no traditional USB slot). In fact, see that weird notch in the photo below? That's where the SD part will be located. What's most interesting, however, is what's happening under the hood.

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