Reviews and Articles

Photo Editing  Apps range from fully featured to simplistic, from innovative to prosaic. Fortunately, so do the needs of their users. If you crave every feature imaginable? Check. Want a fun new intuitive touchy-feely experience? That’s available too. Technically deep pro photo touchup, hold the kid stuff? No problem.  Photo Editing  apps on the iPad are six kinds of awesome, as illustrated – no pun intended – below. Photogene for iPad  ( $3.99, Omer Shoor) Photogene does the expected (professional) stuff effortlessly, and adds a level of “play” appropriate to mobile photo editing. Edit photo files, or edit directly on your clipboard, then output to e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, or your iPad photo library. You can crop, straighten, sharpen, adjust saturation and curves, resize, apply a variety of effects, and set macros to apply a combination of commands. Multiple undo/redo levels keep the experience fluid. Photogene even throws in cartoon text bubbles. Amat...

Someone either much wiser or just much snottier than me once said, “Painting is easy. Art is hard.” These apps can get you painting on your iPad. Is it art? It depends who you ask – just don’t ask that guy. Brushes – iPad edition  ($7.99. Steve Sprang) I know, I know, “stop right there.” For years, Brushes has been the gold standard of painting apps for the iPhone, and the iPad edition was re-engineered to take advantage of the new platform. Work in up to 6 layers, and blend them in various modes. Select from a full desktop-worthy  color picker , save your favorites as swatches, and undo and redo to your heart’s content. The kicker: a replay of every brushstroke, in-app. That means you can work on a smallish file on your iPad, and replay the work you did on a higher-resolution file on your desktop computer. No wonder national magazine covers have been painted with this app. (Also, read our  Brushes for iPhone  review.) Layers – Pro Edition for iPad ...

A recent survey by  Tableau Software  has concluded that iPad users in the US are lucky enough to pay for the fifth most expensive iPad data plans in the world—“lucky” meaning, at $12.50 per gigabyte, we’re not paying the rates of the top four. Users in France pay the local telco, Orange, the most for their iPad data plans. At $25.47 per GB, their rates are over twice that of AT&T in the US. Users in Belgium and Luxembourg pay Mobistar $21.77 per GB and users in the Netherlands pay an average of $19.58 per GB to either Vodafone or T-Mobile. The cheapest rates are available in Singapore, where users may pay as little as $.51 per GB. Users in Hong Kong, Germany, Japan, Italy and Austria all pay less than $1.50 per GB. This may be due to the fact that, in many of these countries, iPad users have more than one option for their data carrier. Of course, that didn’t help the Netherlands. The global average is around $7 per GB.

Once Apple’s premiere iPad tablet hit the shelves, it was only a matter of time before luxury gadgeteers got their hands on a few and set to work on creating the most expensive iPads in the world. Mervis Diamond Importers’ Diamond iPad – $19,999 Mervis Diamond Importers bills their offering as “the world’s first diamond iPad.” Available on June 1st, 2010, this elite iPad is bedecked with 11.43 carats of diamonds in a micro-pave setting. With stones graded G/H (near colorless) and VS2/SI1 (slightly or very slightly included), this diamond device is sure to make you the envy of your peers. iPad Supreme Gold Edition – $192,000 The iPad Supreme Gold Edition, similarly to Stuart Hughes’s other “Supreme” devices, boasts a 22k gold shell weighing 2,100 grams and encrusted with 53 flawless diamonds totaling 25.5 carats and individually set in the shape of the familiar Apple logo. Of course, all of this customization would be next to worthless if Hughes hadn’t used Apple’s top-...

When  iOS 5  was launched, the iPhone and iPod touch users still had the camera lockscreen button feature available to them when they updated. However, iPad 2 users didn’t get this feature and just got the slideshow button in its place. There have been rumors to why the feature was excluded from the iPad 2. Some said the camera was mostly used for making FaceTime calls and didn’t match up to the quality of iPhone and iPod touch cameras. While some users even confused the Picture Frame icon as the camera lockscreen button on the iPad 2 reporting that they also got the feature when they updated to iOS 5. However, they were wrong and the exact reason why the feature was excluded from the iPad 2. But iPad users need not to worry. A new tweak known as CamSlideShow  has been released which replaces the slideshow button on the lockscreen and places a function to launch the Camera app. After installation, the image of the icon is the same as before but it redirects...

Click on the wallpapers to view the source and download.