Leander Kahney's Blog, page 2248

Bill Gates: Pen-Based Tablets Will Beat the iPad, At Least With Students

Apple's iPad might have sold one million units in just a month, but that's not impressing Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who thinks that the iPad's touch-only input approach will ultimately lose to pen-based tablets… at least with students:
"Microsoft has a lot of different tablet projects that we're pursuing. We think that work with the pen [...:]

Guy Tests "Unlimited" iPad 3G Data Plan, Pumps 31GB Of Data So Far

Unlimited wireless data plans usually have invisible quotes around them. Although you'd be forgiven if, like Noah Webster, you thought that "unlimited" meant "not limited or restricted in terms of number, quantity or extent," mobile carriers usually define it as meaning less than 5GB of data per month. Does AT&T's unlimited iPad 3G data plan [...:]

Dropbox Gets Updated For The iPad

Dropbox, the indispensable document syncing app for the Mac, PC and iPhone, has now come to the iPad, thanks to an update that makes the program universal across all iDevices.
Don't expect anything different: all the core functionality is the same, including the ability to access, edit, sync, download, upload and share files with others through [...:]

China Now Offering Wi-Fi iPhones

China's government has finally approved the sale of iPhones with Wi-Fi, removing one of the last barriers for Apple to fully introduce the handset to one of the world's largest mobile populations. Until now, Apple's exclusive carrier in the country, China Unicom, could only offer the iPhone 3GS with WAPI, a homegrown version of Wi-Fi [...:]

Bloomberg: Apple Competing With Google For Mobile Acquisitions

Reversing their long-embraced policy of buying other companies rarely, Apple's been on a shopping spree the past six months with the acquisition of Quattro Wireless, Lala, Intrinsity and Siri. What's behind it?
Bloomberg has an interesting overview of Apple's evolving acquisition strategy. What it comes down to, at the end of the day? Staying ahead of [...:]

AT&T Charges International iPad 3G Users $200 A Month For Just 200MB

It's not new that international data plans are pecuniary disembowleings, so it's natural that AT&T's official pricing for the iPad would be for the sadomasochistic only. Expect to spend as much as $200 a month for a slice of bandwidth exceeded by many App Store video games, or just a couple of downloaded iTunes albums.

The [...:]

Report: Insiders Say Apple Might Change Section 3.3.1 Rather Than Risk Antitrust Investigation

According to the Wall Street Journal, industry insiders are predicting that Apple will cave on the terms of the iPhone 4.0 SDK rather than be dragged into an antitrust battle over them.

Section 3.3.1 of the SDK famously prevents apps which have been written with third-party tools or interpreters from being distributed on the App Store. [...:]

Let's Get It On: Sex Coaching Comes to the App Store

  
Happy Sex with Maryline, a sexuality coaching and education guide for adults from La Roche Communication hit the iTunes App Store Tuesday, intimating a new, more comfortable, perhaps an even more mature approach to Apple's understanding of the relationship between the iPhone and Sex.
After nearly two years of sophomoric inconsistency regulating which kinds [...:]

Why I Returned My iPad To The Apple Store [Hint: iPhone OS 4.0]

As a contributor to Cult of Mac, you can probably guess that I'm an Apple fanboy. I showed up to the Apple Store at 5:45 AM on April 3rd (iPad Day for you civilians) ready to have my mind blown. Little did I know that I would soon be returning my iPad to that same [...:]

Steve Brings Tina to the Macworld Dinner Party [Recollections]

At a posh dinner party, Steve Jobs eats a plate of raw vegetables with a blonde bombshell sitting on his knee. Instead of going to Macworld and plugging the Mac, he's too busy partying with Tina the nymphette.
Part 13 of Macworld founder David Bunnell's personal history of the first Mac: "My Close Encounters With Steve [...:]