Hasta La Gadget!

Back to schoolers just got another great reason to convince Mom and Dad to buy them an iPad: CourseSmart, the e-textbook provider, just released an iPad app. Now, you can carry all your textbooks with you on the tablet instead of schlepping a backpack full of dead trees round the campus.

If any device was right for taking to lectures, its the iPad. Unlike a laptop, it doesn’t put a barrier between you and the teacher. It also doesn’t clatter when you type (meaning you can sneak in some YouTubing instead of paying attention) and the battery lasts, like forever. Now, with CourseSmart, it looks pretty perfect.

CourseSmart sells e-textbooks which can already be used on your laptop or your iPhone. The texts are typically cheaper than their paper counterparts and CourseSmart claims to have 90% of “core textbooks” in its catalog. The iPad app adds a bookshelf (the thumbnail view used by most e-readers), sticky-notes for scrawling onto pages, and a neat thumbnail navigator for quickly finding the right place.

Best of all, the application is free, although you will of course have to buy the books. And if you do lose the iPad Mom and Dad are going to buy you, you’re just a login away from all your texts and notes when you get a replacement. Try that with a book-bag.

CourseSmart for iPad [CourseSmart. Thanks, Jennifer!]

CourseSmart [iTunes]

See Also:

• Dual-Screen Tablet Maker Hopes to Reinvent the Textbook
• Is the iPad Driving E-Book Piracy, and Does It Matter?
• Colleges Dream of Paperless, iPad-centric Education
• Why E-Books Are Stuck in a Black-and-White World

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Photoshop and the iPad, a pairing as natural as Bert sharing a bed with Ernie. As of today, you can use Adobe’s legendary image-editing app on your tablet. Or maybe not.

Photoshop Express is a reworking of the rather more awkwardly-named Photoshop.com Mobile for the iPhone. It is now a universal app, running on both devices, but there are some iPad-specific features. But before we get to those, we’ll note one giant problem. For many users, Photoshop just won’t launch.

Tap the icon and you get a splash screen, and then you see a dialog box swirl across the iPad’s display. Then the app closes and, somewhat confusingly, launches another picture-editing app. In my case, this is Photogene. This appears to be a common problem, and some people say a reboot will fix it, although that didn’t work for me. And that dialog box? I grabbed a screenshot: It’s a request to send anonymous usage data back to the mother-ship, titled “Help Us Improve”. Oh Adobe. The fix, now posted on the iTunes store page, is to start up the app in portrait orientation.

If you can fire it up, you can now work in both landscape and portrait modes, work on a sequence of photos at the same time and carry out basic editing. Cropping, rotating, flipping and adjustment of exposure, color and contrast are all easily done. From there, you can upload to photoshop.com and Facebook, or just save the files locally.

It’s nowhere near as powerful as the desktop version or even (somewhat ironically) as full-featured as iPad apps like Photogene. It is free, however. It’s also pretty cool to be able to tell your friends that you have Photoshop on your iPad. Available now.

Photoshop Express [iTunes]
Photoshop Express [Adobe]

See Also:

• Best Camera: 'Like Photoshop for The iPhone'
• Wired.com Readers' Favorite iPhone Apps of 2009
• Photoshop for Android Phones Now Available

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Don’t type when you can talk, says Google. The search giant has strengthened its existing voice-command feature on Android and introduced a new application called Chrome-to-Phone, for syncing with Chrome browsers.

Voice Search, despite its name, now lets you do more than just search: It will let users send texts, compose e-mails, call businesses, navigate, jot notes, and set the alarm on their phone by just speaking into the device.

The voice commands, called “voice actions,” are part of Google’s effort to improve the user interface on Android and let consumers go beyond the traditional keyboard and touchscreen interface on their phones.

The Voice Search application is currently available only for phones running version 2.2 of the Android OS — which means HTC Evo, Nexus One and Droid 2 users can get it on their phones immediately.

Google also launched a mobile sync app to link its Chrome browser to Android 2.2 devices. The tool lets users on Google’s Chrome browser click an icon to send a webpage or a map to their phone. The page or map is then almost immediately available on the phone.

“This is a low-latency, super-fast app for pushing data to the phone,” says Dave Burke, engineering manager for Google.

Google debuted voice search for Android phones in the United States about two years ago. But voice recognition built as a feature into the operating system was limited. Still one out of every four queries, or 25 percent of queries, on devices running Android 2.0 OS and higher comes through the voice interface, says Google.

That earlier version of the voice command allowed users to do just three things: web search, call a specific contact and navigate to an address.

The new voice search app goes beyond that. For instance, you can speak the name of a song or a band into the phone and the app will go online, find the music and show a list of apps such as Pandora and last.fm that can play the music you want. About 12 voice commands are now available to Android 2.2 users.

For more details, check out Google’s list of voice commands available through the app.

But when it comes to the Chrome-to-Phone app, the service is more limited. It is currently available to only Chrome users, though some Firefox users are also using it. The sync feature is also only available for Android devices, though Google says it will work to bring the feature to iPhone users as an app.

To get a more detailed look at Google’s Voice Search app, check out their video:

See Also:

• Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web
• Bloatware Creeps Into Android Phones
• Independent App Stores Take On Google’s Android Market
• Google Maps Finally Adds Bike Routes

Image: Screenshots of Voice Search courtesy Google.

According to an Engadget source—the same one that said the next AppleTV would be a $99 unit with iPhone guts—Apple’s next TV device will be rebranded iTV. And it will have apps, but it won’t play 1080p video. More »

A new application will let you play AVI and XVID movies on your iPad. Unlike several other option in the App Store, CineXPlayer actually works and better, it is free.

The iPad Video app plays just one movie format: H.264-encoded videos in an MP4-wrapper. Anything else will need to be converted, a process that takes time, heats up your computer and results in a lower-quality file. The problem is that most movies and TV downloaded from non-official sources are AVI files.

CineXPlayer is about as simple as it could be. First, install it. Second, drag any AVI files you have into the app’s file-sharing section in iTunes, just like you do with comics, Pages documents and the like. That’s it. To play a movie, just open CineXPlayer and tap on the filename. You get Play/Pause, volume and skip-to-beginning buttons, along with a zoom button, and that’s it. The video just work and the sound is way louder than what you get in the too-quiet built-in player.

What you don’t get is fancy artwork or metadata (although you can swipe-to-delete files), but who really needs that? The only possible advantage I can see of re-encoding the files for the native player is that the iPad has hardware support for decoding H.264. This is one of the reasons for its phenomenal battery life. I haven’t done any extended testing yet, but I expect that decoding in software will be a bigger power-drain. A rail-trip this afternoon along with some Mad Men episodes will reveal any trouble, I’m sure.

A quick note on video formats. Most downloaded shows are AVI files, as I said, but inside that “wrapper” is the actual movie file. This will almost always be an XVID or an H.264 file. If it is XVID, you use this new app, CineXPlayer. If it is H.264, then all you need to do is re-wrap that file as an MP4 that the iPad can play natively. For that, you use a computer application called AVIDemux, which we already talked about here (an entire movie takes just three or four minutes). Between these two, you can pretty much wave goodbye to video conversion.

CineXPlayer [iTunes]

CineXPlayer product page [CineXPlayer]

See Also:

• How To: Watch Any Video on iPad, No Conversion Required
• Hands-On with Air Video, Stream Video to iPad, iPhone

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.