Aug 13

Photoshop Crashes onto iPad

Posted in: apps, ipad, photoshop, tablets, Today's Chili

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]

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Aug 11

Dell’s Streak Tablet Is Priced Like a Phone

Posted in: Android, att, availability, phone, sale, streak, tablet, tablets, Today's Chili

Dell’s Android-powered Streak with its 5-inch display is being billed as a tablet. But when it comes to pricing the device, it’s being sold like a phone.

After a false start last month, Dell has announced that the Streak will be available to U.S. consumers starting Thursday. The Streak will cost $300 with a two-year contract on AT&T and $560 without one.

The Streak is targeted at smartphone users who crave a larger display but at the same time need a device that’s portable and could potentially replace their phone. The Streak has a 5-inch display, a 5-megapixel camera, phone, browser and access to Android apps. (Read Wired.com’s review of the Dell Streak.)

But does the Streak deserve the ‘tablet’ tag attached to it?

With its 9.7-inch display and a monthly data plan that requires no contract, Apple iPad doesn’t draw direct comparisons against a smartphone.

So far with the Streak, Dell has done everything that it would with a smartphone–including pricing the device on a long-term contract. The only thing that sets the Streak apart from other Android-powered smartphones is that the home screen on the Streak is locked in the landscape mode.

Meanwhile, Android smartphones are getting bigger–the Motorola Droid X and HTC Evo have a 4.3-inch display. The Streak with its 5-inch screen is not a big leap forward.

Dell may be insisting on calling the Streak a tablet because the company is afraid to directly jump into the extremely competitive and crowded Android smartphone market. With devices such as the Evo and Droid X, HTC and Motorola are constantly pushing the hardware specs for a phone.

By positioning the Streak as a tablet, Dell can avoid being directly compared to these other devices. At the same time, it can tap into the consumer demand for tablets. After all, Apple sold more than 3 million iPads in just about 80 days of the launch of the product in April and it says it hasn’t seen signs of demand slowing down.

If that’s the case, calling the Streak a tablet is clever marketing wizardry but it may not be enough to convince consumers.

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Photo: Dell Streak (Priya Ganapati/Wired.com)




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Aug 10

Free App Plays AVI Movies on iPad

Posted in: apps, ipad, Movies, Software, tablets, Today's Chili

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]

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Aug 09

BlackBerry Tablet ‘BlackPad’ Readies to Take On the iPad

Posted in: Apple, BlackBerry, ipad, tablet, tablets, Today's Chili

Research In Motion is moving closer to the production of its tablet called the ‘BlackPad’. The company has chosen Taiwanese notebook manufacturer Quanta to produce at least two million tablets this year, says a Chinese language paper Apple Daily.

RIM and Quanta are reportedly targeting a September shipping and a $500 price tag for the BlackPad to make it competitive against Apple’s iPad.

The BlackPad will support Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 3G connectivity through tethering to a Blackberry smartphone, says the paper.

This is not the first time that information about the BlackPad has leaked out. In June, the Wall Street Journal reported that RIM is testing a tablet that could act as a “companion” to its BlackBerry phone. Before that, the Boy Genius Report web site said the BlackBerry tablet is likely to have a 8.9-inch screen.

The BlackPad, when it launches, could be the pill that makes RIM more competitive against other smartphones and gives the company a new product to get potential customers excited about.

RIM has been trying to go beyond its core audience of business users and attract more consumers. Last week, it introduced a new smartphone called Torch that includes a touchscreen and a keyboard in a slider form similar to the Palm Pre.

The Torch is targeted at consumers. But initial reports about the device suggest the Torch won’t be enough to stem the decline in market share that RIM has seen recently. BlackBerry phones have been losing out to Apple’s iPhone and the growing gaggle of Android devices.

A tablet like the BlackPad could help give RIM the edge. The device could help bridge the gap between the BlackBerry keyboard-focused phones and the consumer appetite for larger touchscreen devices. The BlackPad’s strong connection to the BlackBerry phones through tethering could also help RIM sell more BlackBerry phones.

So far, Apple’s iPad is the only tablet available to consumers from a major PC maker. Since its launch in April, Apple has sold more than 3 million iPads. While Dell and HP are working on tablets, the devices are yet to make their debut.

If the reports about the BlackPad are true, RIM is certainly moving fast to fill any void.

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Photo: (seantoyer/Flickr)




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Aug 09

How To: Watch Xvid Videos Natively On Your iPad [Ipadapps]

Posted in: Apple, apps, ipad, tablets, Today's Chili, top

The iPad’s potential as a personal video device is handicapped pretty severely by the limited file formats it supports. CineXPlayer, the latest app to sneak past the App Store approval squad, helpfully plays Xvid videos with zero conversion required. More »

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Aug 09

Screen Grabs: Ari Gold will definitely fire this guy once he notices he’s using an iPad

Posted in: Apple, ipad, slate, tablet, tablets, Television, Today's Chili, TV
Screen Grabs chronicles the uses (and misuses) of real-world gadgets in today’s movies and TV. Send in your sightings (with screen grab!) to screengrabs at engadget dt com.

The latest episode of HBO’s Entourage (if that’s the kind of thing you’re into) might have been a bit of an eye opener if you’re also the kind of person who keeps an eye open for gadgets. Ari Gold’s legal adviser (seen in around the 4th minute of the episode if you need the proof) has an iPad set up, keyboard and all. Now, we know Ari’s character pretty well. He’s the BlackBerry Bold type — and while his wife uses an iPhone, we have a hard time believing Ari’s going to put up with the iPad in the office nonsense for very long. You, young man, are on very thin ice. There’s one more shot after the break.

[Thanks, Pat]

Continue reading Screen Grabs: Ari Gold will definitely fire this guy once he notices he’s using an iPad

Screen Grabs: Ari Gold will definitely fire this guy once he notices he’s using an iPad originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Aug 2010 12:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Aug 09

Hands-On with ComicBookPad for iPad

Posted in: apps, ipad, Software, tablets, Today's Chili

The iPad is almost perfect for viewing comic-books, which is why it’s odd that there still isn’t a perfect comic-book reading app for the tablet. I have tried pretty much all of them, and have settled on the full-featured ComicZeal, despite some shortcomings. A new app from Developica called ComicBookPad is almost good enough to make me switch.

First, the problems with ComicZeal. The biggest is that, despite being on version four, the page turning animations are still terrible. You know how easily you flip between images in the Photos app? ComicZeal is nothing like that. Instead, it requires that you pull a page almost all the way across the screen and then an animation kicks in and jerks the next page in. That this is still an issue means that either the developer likes it this way, or that the app is not pre-rendering the next page in time.

The other problem is the tiny pop-over comic library. It should be full-screen and gorgeous, like iBooks.

ComicBookPad fixes both of these. Browsing the pages is smooth and effortless, just like the Photos app. Zooming via a double-tap or pinch is also fast, although there is a half-second needed to re-render the zoomed page (you see a very slightly blurred version first). One very nice navigational aid is the strip of thumbnails along the bottom of the screen, brought up by single-tapping a page. These are big. Big enough to let you browse as if you were flipping pages in a real comic.

The library is also great to use, with big thumbnails on a full-screen page, and little “ribbon” book-markers which tell you which page you are on inside the comic.

It has its own problems, though. The cute little comments in the info screen and the purple color scheme can be grating (“Help, I need somebody…” in the help-screen? C’mon). Also, importing CBR and CBZ files (done over USB via iTunes) is a little confusing. There is a “Transfers” page, and a “My Library” page. Upon import, the books appear in the transfers section, and you tap to “import” them again. It is possible to import the same book twice.

One place where ComicZeal wins is in zoom position. If you are zoomed in, when you flip to the next page you stay zoomed in to the same level. No other app I have used does this.

The gimmick feature of ComicBookPad is access to iTunes playlists from within the app. It’s neat, but hardly useful, especially with iOS4 for the iPad coming soon. It also adds a lot more purple, which is a Bad Thing (unless you’re Prince, I guess, but he hates the internet anyway).

The app costs $9, which is fine, if a little steep by iTunes standards. To beat ComicZeal it needs to simplify import, lose the purple color-scheme (or at least let me choose another one) and fix-up the zooming. It also needs to report itself to the OS as capable of opening comic-book archive files so you can send comic-book to it from Dropbox, email or the web. Other than that, I like ComicBookPad a lot.

Finally, lose the splash-screen of the girl in the cat-suit. I already look weird enough reading comic-books in public. I don’t need the app to make me look like a hentai-loving pervert every time I fire it up.

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Aug 02

Why Does the New Kindle Have A Microphone?

Posted in: amazon, kindle, Media Players, tablets, Today's Chili

At this point, you probably know a lot about the new Kindle. But it’s this little hardware addition on the underside of the device that’s caught our attention:

What’s that in the middle? Why, yes — it’s a microphone!

According to the new Kindle User’s Guide, “the microphone is not currently enabled but is provided for future use.“ Some folks think it’s for voice navigation, which could give Kindle a major accessibility advantage over its competitors. (E-readers and tablets still remain way behind PCs on this front.) David Rothman thinks Amazon/AT&T might stick a phone in there, which seems pretty unlikely given how intent Bezos and Amazon seem on refining the reading experience rather than competing with Apple and general-purpose tablets on all things multimedia.

But voice annotations and memos don’t seem too far-fetched; and if the apps developed using the Kindle Development Kit get off the ground sometime soon, I suppose the more hardware goodies third-parties have to play with, the better.

Andrys Basten identified the microphone in a short roundup at TeleRead, “Unheralded new features in the Kindle 3,” focusing on subtle but sharp software tweaks. For instance, the web browser now has an “article view” mode, similar to the new Reader function in Safari or the popular iOS app Instapaper.

Likewise, PDF reading has been improved: the viewer now lets you highlight and copy-and-paste text, and adjust the contrast for better readability (a major problem in the past for scanned/photocopied docs). There are even workarounds for avoiding document delivery charges over 3G, by either syncing with your computer or sending your documents to an email address that waits until you’re in wi-fi to send them along. Saving bandwidth is saving money, especially if you’re not using it to buy something from Amazon.

All this points to Amazon trying to strengthen and reposition the Kindle as a general text document reader, not just a portal for e-books. And it makes it pretty unlikely that Amazon/Sprint would just drop a whole new data stream in there, even if they could try to introduce a new monthly fee — something that could make Kindle users, having been promised free 3G for the life of their devices, to totally lose it.

Photo credit: Amazon.com




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Jul 30

Kindle for iOS Brings iPad Search, Dictionary, Fast-Switching

Posted in: e-books, ipad, iPhone, kindle, tablets, Today's Chili

Just days after updating the hardware Kindle with a smaller, cheaper model, Amazon has updated the Kindle app for iOS devices and it remains the same size and the same price (free). This release brings something for everyone in the form of iOS4 compatibility and general improvements.

There are a few dull but worthy additions: fast app-switching on the iPhone 4, improved search on the iPhone and iPod Touch and something has been done to the line-spacing on the iPad to “improve” it. But that’s boring. Much meatier are Google and Wikipedia lookup for words, along with a 250,000-word dictionary. Interestingly, this dictionary isn’t included in the download itself, but is pulled down the first time you highlight a word. Google and Wikipedia lookups whisk you off to Safari. An in-app browser would be nice, but I guess with the fast app-switching, it wouldn’t save much time.

The best news for iPad users is that there is now searching inside books, so buying cook-books from the Kindle store now makes sense. And that’s it. Like the new Kindle, none of the new features is huge in itself, but together they make an already good product better.

Kindle for iPhone and iPad [iTunes]

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Jul 29

RIM Purchases BlackPad.com, Could Introduce BlackBerry Tablet

Posted in: BlackBerry, RIM, tablets, Today's Chili

A move by a major smartphone company to buy an intriguingly named Web site does not go unnoticed by the Web, as Research in Motion learned today. RIM purchased the site BlackPad.com a few days ago, according to MobileCrunch. Today, the Web has been abuzz with speculation about the development.

So what does it mean? It’s anybody’s guess at this point, but many theories suggest that RIM is working on a tablet device that would compete with Apple’s iPad or HP’s rumored webOS tablet.

What do you think of this development? Would you like to see a BlackBerry tablet? What do you think of the BlackPad name? Please leave your comments in the section below.

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