Reviews and Articles

Ipad 2 Vs BlackBerry Playbook On the eve of the iPad 2 launch, RIM previewed a feature-complete version of the PlayBook tablet to the press, and it looks smart and extremely powerful. But will their efforts be nearly enough? It was certainly an odd and auspicious evening. On the eve of Apple launching their iPad 2 to the fawning masses, Research In Motion invited a group of select journalists to have a up close and personal look at a near-feature complete version of the  BlackBerry PlayBook , their 7″ tablet that is sure to be the subject of a great deal of comparison with Apple’s latest offering in the coming year. Indeed, it was a weird scene. RIM held its press event at a club lounge named “Provocateur” in downtown Chelsea in New York City, which is only a block away from Apple’s 14th street retail location and Google’s East Coast offices. It was if all the energy in the tablet world was being concentrated in one place, at one time. The tension was so thick you could cut it wit...

Apple’s third generation version of the iPad, presumably due in early 2012, will have to make substantial improvements in  order to follow a strong but incremental second act. In July of 2010, I wrote  “The next generation iPad and what Apple needs to deliver.”  Based on information gleaned from updates in iOS and information coming out of the semiconductor industry at the time, I updated that article in November and polished the crystal ball — in my usual purely speculative way — of what I thought that iPad 2 might look like or the features it should contain. The iPad 2 is now here. For the most part, much of what I thought would be in the new model did actually come to fruition, but I got a number of surprises and also some dissapointments as well. The iPad 2 is clearly a strong second act following the first device, but the improvements are still more or less incremental. In the third version, Apple is going to have to up the ante considerably, because its competi...

According to an Apple insider, the second-generation iPad is merely a pit stop on the path to our ultimate destination: The iPad 3. With today’s  big iPad 2 event  only hours away, an unnamed Apple staffer has revealed to  CultofMac  that the second-generation tablet is totally lame — it’s the iPad 3 we should all be getting excited about, and it will be out later this year. The person didn’t give too many details about what we could expect from the iPad 2, just that it isn’t that big of a deal. “For the iPad 2 don’t get your hopes up too high. That’s all I’m going to say,” said Apple staffer. “They’ve had a number of problems along the way, and the third-generation iPad is the one to make a song and a dance about.” In addition to smothering all our iPad 2 dreams, the Apple staffer also revealed that  MobileMe , Apple’s cloud storage service, would take center stage at today’s event. MobileMe rumors have been flooding out for weeks, including talk that A...

You’re no doubt reading this article because you’ve got a shiny new Android phone, but there’s just one problem: you’re  so  addicted that the battery runs out on a daily basis. Instead of putting the phone down, let’s maximize the battery life. Saving your battery life isn’t rocket science—the general principle is to get rid of the things that are draining the battery the most, and trim down other things that you need to use, but maybe can tweak a little. Keep reading for the full explanation. Use Android’s Built-in Battery Usage Screen There’s a screen built into Android that most casual users probably don’t even know about, and it can tell you exactly what is killing your battery. Head into Settings –> About Phone –> Battery use to see what has been killing your battery life. From this screen, you can usually see what apps are the worst offenders, and you will probably notice that the biggest problem—at least, the biggest one that we can fix—is actually the backlight...

Any idiot can use an iPad at a basic level. It's designed that way. But even still, there are things that you're just supposed to magically know—things no one ever necessarily tells you. So we're here to help. The Soft Reset The single most common thing people don't realize about the iPhone OS (from my experience) is how to perform a soft reset—which you'll find extremely useful in cases when the system freezes. Just hold the top (power) and bottom front (home) button for a few seconds. Your iPad will restart. To force quit an application, just hold the home button by itself in a similar fashion. Cut, Copy and Paste for Experts Copying text is as easy as double tapping a word. But when you want to copy a whole paragraph, like for an address, you have to stretch those annoying little blue knobs...or do you? Tap any editable text four times. You'll highlight the whole paragraph. Import Your Own (Free) Books Apple's iBooks app is your portal to reading and b...