Apple iPad review

The Best way to stay connected

                                                      

      Once again, Steve Jobs has managed to dazzle the audiences with the new Apple iPad. When you look at the iPad, it may seem very familiar to you. That's because it's almost like an enlarged iPod Touch. Now iPad is actually meant to fit in a category between smartphones and laptops and to some extent it does fit, although iPhone has the upper hand (camera, video recording and other things). But iPad is meant specifically to surf the web and it does it's job quite well. Now, coming to the specs :-

Design and Hardware

       Now, the design as you see it is very simplistic, or let's say very Apple-ish. You can see that the back is a bit bulged, which is a good thing because you can lift it easily if you place it on a table or any other flat surface. It's only 0.5 inch thick and weighs in at 1.5 pounds (0.68 kg) for the Wi-fi model and 1.6 pounds (0.73 kg) for Wi-fi +3G model. On the top, there's an On/Off, Sleep/wake button and a microphone. At the right, there's the screen rotation lock (which is useful if you're watching movies), and the volume rocker. At the bottom is the 30-pin connector and the speakers.
       Coming to the display, it has a 9.7-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen Multi-Touch display with IPS technology and has a resolution of 1024-by-768 at 132 pixels per inch (ppi). Although it would've been great if Apple had incorporated the Retina display to the iPad, but that's not a major concern. The display is just great! . There is a bit of reflection, but it's okay.
        Under the hood, there lies a 1GHz Apple A4 custom-designed, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip and the RAM is supposedly 256 MB. Now the RAM isn't quite enough for multi-tasking which comes with iOS 4, but we'll have to see later.
         There's the usual accelerometer and the ambient light sensor as well.
         Coming to the battery, it supports 10 hours of web browsing on Wi-Fi, listening to music OR watching video, and upto 9 hours on 3G. It's pretty good! There's also a TV-out options as well. Ofcourse you have to get a dock connector to VGA adapter for that. But anyways it's good to know that it supports.

Browsing

       Web surfing on the iPad is remarkable. You cannot expect any better experience than that on the iPad. Flipping through webpages on the 9.7 inch screen is just amazing. If you've used the iPhone or iPod touch, then this isn't anything different than that (except the screen and the keyboard). BUT, the browser has it's limitations too. It still doesn't support Flash !!, which means you can't play videos on youtube.com in your iPad web browser, and don't even expect Steve Jobs to "fix" that. He really wants HTML5 to be pushed forward, which is a very nice initiative, but it's still a long way ahead. So, other than Flash, there seems to be no problem with the browser.

Mail

       There are practically no complaints about the Mail. It's pretty straight-forward. Just go to Mail App, open a mail and voila !. Pretty simple. And when you turn your iPad sideways, you get a split screen view of your mail and the inbox. You can easily compose a new e-mail just by a tap with your finger, and with the large QWERTY keyboard, it's even easier. As usual, you can add multimedia content to your mail.

Photos

          There's also Photos (who didn't expect that) ;-) . Unlike iPhone, iPad makes use of the big screen to arrange the photos into separate stacks or albums, and it's really attractive. You can "quick look" the photos by two finger pinch dragging the album. Plus, if you have a Mac, you also get two options at the top i.e., Faces and Places. You can get all the pictures of a specific person, or you can get the photos taken from a specific trip. But it only works with iPhoto (on the Mac) :-(

Videos

       The large high-resolution screen makes iPad PERFECT for watching HD movies and TV shows, podcasts and more. You can instantly buy a HD movie in the iTunes store. You can browse through your movies by the poster art in grid view. All the videos will be played in landscape mode and it's just a double tap away for widescreen view and full-screen view. What more, you can sync the movies with iTunes on your PC or Mac.


Music

        You can get your music collection thanks to the iPod app. You can browse through the music through album, song, artist, genre or playlist. But no cover flow. Yes, there's no cover flow browsing in the iPad, as in the iPhone. But still i doubt that anyone would use it to browse. The Now playing screen is quite good, displaying the large cover art, and it's a tap away for the on-screen controls. And there's the usual iTunes store for you to buy music. 


iBooks

       The iPad makes a great e-book reader. There's a dedicated app called iBooks, in which you can browse through your e-books collection and read them. The collection is stacked in a neat bookshelf-like design, which displays all of your books by their front covers. You just tap to open them, and it opens up the page where you left off. Switching through pages is just a tap at the far right of the screen, OR you can swipe your finger from the bottom left to the bottom right for a more 'interactive' page turn. Eitherways, there's a neat animation of a real-page turn. While reading, you can turn the iPad sideways, for both the pages to be displayed, so get an experience of reading a real book. You can also add notes, bookmarks on the page itself. There's also a iBook store in which you can buy books. Oh, it also supports PDFs now. So you get Books and your PDF's in the iBooks store.

Others

         Ok, other than all of those mentioned above, there's also the App store where you can download apps specifically made for the iPad as well as the apps for the iPhone. As for the iPhone apps, you get a small display of it in the iPad when you run it (for obvious reasons). You can enlarge it to fit your screen, by taping the button which appears at the bottom right of the screen.
         There's also the Notes app, Maps app, Calendar app and finally the contacts app which are pretty self-explanatory. You can check the pictures below of how it looks.

"Cellular" Future

The Japanese have always been cutting edge, sporting technology we will probably use years later. Now, a Japanese communication giant shares its vision of the future where everything from socialising to shopping will be done using cellphone...

(An employee of NTT DoCoMo demonstrates how to buy a softdrink from a vending machine with a mobile phone at the company's headquarters in Tokyo)

The Japanese have always been the first in cutting edge, sporting technology we will probably use years later. Now, a Japanese communication giant shares its vision of the future where everything from socialising to shopping will be done using cellphone...


In the Japan of 2020, a stressed-out salaryman may unwind from his hectic lifestyle by time-travelling back a few centuries and taking a virtual stroll through medieval Tokyo. As he walks over arched wooden bridges, he will chat with the avatars of his real world friends, admire pollution-free views of Mount Fuji and perhaps do some cash-free shopping for a digital download of a woodblock print.
He will navigate through the city once called Edo from the comfort of his intelligent living room, wearing 3D glasses and moving about by waving a super-networked mobile phone that is attached to his wrist like a watch. This is Nihonbashi in virtual Edo, an invisible tour guide will say in an upbeat if slightly tinny voice.
Its a virtual community that is popular worldwide. A lot of people have logged on today already! Welcome to the future as imagined by NTT DoCoMo, a leading force for innovation in the high-tech paradise that is Japan. Its Shangri-La is the Future Station, located in a skyscraper in Tokyo, where visitors are taken on tours of the companys mobile phone marvels , and treated to a glimpse of whats to come.
Such as the wearable phone of 2020 that it envisions will be the users constant companion , fitted with a small flip-out screen and capable of projecting images onto a wall or into thin air in the form of a hologram.
Made from recyclable materials and partially charged kinetically through body movements , the device will be equipped with translation software to connect the user to everyone else, anywhere, anytime.
The vision is bold, but in Japan that doesnt make it unrealistic. 

A prototype of mobile phone (right) and smart phone (left) that have an ecofriendly body made of thinned wood 

FUTURES ALREADY IN JAPAN 

In many ways the mobile phone future has already arrived in Japan, where the evolution of the devices has taken a separate path to the rest of the world.
On Tokyos crowded subway trains, newspapers are a rare sight as most commuters plug themselves into their phones or other devices surfing, mailing, gaming or watching TV. Japanese cellphones started sending email 10 years ago, have had terrestrial TV for years and long boasted video cameras, barcode readers and an i-concierge assistant that gives hints on a late train or a traffic jam.
DoCoMos phones since 2007 feature a cashless payment system, which allows users to buy a soft drink from a vending machine or lunch at a hamburger chain, simply by swiping their phone over an electronic pad.
By having a phone you can do almost everything, said Takeshi Natsuno, known as the father of i-mode , the popular Internet service DoCoMo launched a decade ago, and now a professor at Tokyos Keio University.
All stores and 60 per cent of Tokyo taxis are equipped with readers so you can pay by phone, he said. 

CUSTOMISED JAPANESE PHONES 

DoCoMo co-develops phones with manufacturers such as NEC, Fujitsu and Panasonic, who then custom-make the handsets for it. Among recent offerings is the bright-yellow Kids Phone F05A by Fujitsu, which features a pull-string alarm that emits a shrill noise and sends an email with the childs location to the parents. In another new model, the two halves of the phone are held together magnetically and can be easily separated, allowing users to talk and Web-surf at the same time, or to split the device into a TV and a remote control . Other newcomers include a range of waterproof ones to use in the bathtub.
Despite, or perhaps because of, their sophistication , Japans mobile marvels are rarely seen outside the archipelago. Natsuno said in future he expects mobiles to boast advances such as basic AI, biometrics and batteries that last a week but he says it may not be the Japanese who make them first. Now the leaders of the industry are IT players, and telecom players are following, he said. AFP 

Happy B'day, Internet !

Four decades after its birth, the Internet is seen by some to have encountered some kind of middle-age crisis while others argue that it is just the beginning

                                                                                                   Internet Map

San Francisco: The 40th anniversary of the birth of the Internet was celebrated in the US with events being organised at the University of California and the Computer History Museum in Los Angeles to mark the occasion.

Industry leaders, researchers and analysts, among others, attended the function at the California University on Thursday, Xinhua reported.

Computer science professor of the university, Leonard Kleinrock, who on Oct 29, 1969 headed a team to send the first message over the ARPANET, which later came to be known as Internet, also attended the event.

“The moment the Internet was born, ushered in a technological revolution that has transformed communications, education, culture, business and entertainment across the globe, leading to dramatic change in our social, political and economic lives,” the university said in a statement.

Activities were also planned at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, to mark the occasion.

“The 1969 connection was not just a symbolic milestone in the project that led to the Internet, it connected computers and eventually billions of people to each other,” Marc Weber, founding curator of the museum’s Internet History Programme, said in a statement.

“In the 1960s, a few hundred users could have accounts on a single large computer using terminals, and exchange messages and files between them. But each of those little communities was an island, isolated from others,” Weber noted.
“By reliably connecting different kinds of computers to each other, the ARPANET took a crucial step toward the online world that links nearly a third of the world’s population today,” he said.

Four decades after its birth, the Internet is seen by some to have encountered some kind of middle-age crisis. But others argue that it is still in the early stage of innovations.

At a symposium hosted this month by market research firm Gartner, Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Internet search giant Google, said he envisions a radically changed Internet five years from now.

In the next five years, the Internet is expected to be dominated by social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time, he predicted.

“It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank is the great challenge of the age,” Schmidt said.

THE FIRST MESSAGE

   Internet pioneer Len Kleinrock poses for a portrait next to an Interface Message Processor. The Interface Message Processor was used to develop the Internet.


At 21:00, on 29 October 1969, engineers 400 miles apart at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and Stanford Research Institute (SRI) prepared to send data between the first nodes of what was then known as Arpanet.

It got the name because it was commissioned by the US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa).

The fledgling network was to be tested by Charley Kline attempting to remotely log in to a Scientific Data Systems computer that resided at SRI.

Kline typed an “L” and then asked his colleague Bill Duvall at SRI via a telephone headset if the letter had arrived.

It had.

Kline typed an “O”. Duvall said that arrived too.

Kline typed a “G”. Duvall could only report that the system had crashed.

They got it working again by 22:30 and everything went fine. After that first misstep, the network almost never put a foot wrong. The rest has made history.

39 Days to Mars

Breakthrough in plasma rocket engine technology drastically cuts transit times to the Red Planet from six months to less than six weeks

A new breakthrough in space propulsion technology could one day power spacecrafts to reach Mars in just 39 days, instead of the gruelling six months it takes to reach the Red Planet. Scientists have tested a powerful new ion engine that works with plasma at temperatures close to the interior of the Sun.

On Wednesday, Ad Astra, a US-based corporation ran its VX-200 engine with a superconducting magnet, which helps the engine process large amounts of plasma power. The company’s founder Chang Diaz claims that the engine is the most powerful plasma rocket in the world, and that it could transport payloads in space far more efficiently and economically than today’s chemical rockets.

The company had signed an agreement on Wednesday to commence testing the VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket) engine in 2013 on the International Space Station (ISS). The 200 kilowatt ion engine could by used by NASA to maintain the ISS’s altitude and orbit.

Conventional thrusters aboard the ISS consume 7.5 tonnes of fuel ever year, Chang said that the VASIMR rocket would require only 0.3 tonnes of fuel, saving millions of dollars in operational costs.

100 TIMES MORE POWERFUL

While chemical rockets are effective in giving the initial thrust to push the rocket off the Earth’s surface, trip times and payload mass are major limitations of conventional rockets.

Ion engines provide much less thrust, but once in space, they can give a continuous push for years, accelerating gradually, eventually  moving faster than normal rockets.

VASIMR works something like a steam engine, with the first stage performing a duty analogous to boiling water to create steam. In the second phase,  it uses a radio frequency generator to reach power levels a hundred times as higher than conventional ion engines.

“Preliminary data indications point to operation well within the design specifications.” said Dr Jared P Squire, leader of the experimental team conducting the tests. The company envisions the technology to reduce maintenance costs of space stations, satellites, lunar outposts and fuel depots. The engines could also reduce transit times for robotic and human missions to Mars and beyond.

AS HOT AS THE SUN
The VASIMR engine works with plasma, electrically charged fluids that can be heated to temperatures close to the interior of the Sun. Plasmas can be controlled and guided by strong magnetic fields, which can be used to insulate the structure. Temperatures well beyond the melting point of materials can be achieved while maintaining safely of the aircraft.

Why 'bomb' the moon?

Find out all you need to know of why US space agency NASA plans to crash two spacecraft into Moon

Scientists hope to make a splash by “bombing” the Moon with two spacecraft on Thursday. The plan is to slam the projectiles into a dark crater at the lunar south pole, kicking up a six-mile high dust cloud that may contain water.

British researchers helped Nasa pick the spot for the drama, which will be broadcast live on the American space agency’s website.

The Cabeus south polar region was identified by the University of Durham team as a site with high concentrations of hydrogen - a key component of water.

Search of water ice

It is believed water ice could lie at the bottom of dark craters at the Moon’s poles, where temperatures are lower than minus 170C.

The crashing spacecraft consist of an orbiter, LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite), which is now mapping the lunar surface, and its 2.2 tonne empty Centaur launch rocket.

Both are currently on collision course with the Moon and still attached together.

In the early hours, British time, the probe and rocket will separate. Then at 12.31pm the larger rocket will smash into the crater at 5,600 mph, blasting out 350 tonnes of debris in a 6.2 mile high plume. Following close behind, the LCROSS satellite beaming live pictures back to Earth will fly through the material and four minutes later plunge into the crater itself. LCROSS will trigger its own dust cloud a third of the size of the first one.

As the debris is propelled into sunlight, scientists on Earth will study its composition with ground-based telescopes.

Amateur astronomers in dark parts of the world will be able to view the spectacle through their own instruments. But daylight will make this impossible in the UK.

Dr Vincent Eke, from the Institute for Computational Cosmology at the University of Durham, said: “Water ice could be stable for billions of years on the Moon provided that it is cold enough.

“If ice is present in the permanently shaded lunar craters of the Moon then it could potentially provide a water source for the eventual establishment of a manned base on the Moon.

“Such a base could be used as a platform for exploration into the further reaches of our Solar System.”

The TNT impact

The energy generated by the rocket hitting the Moon will be equivalent to exploding about two tonnes of TNT, he said. He added: “While this sounds dramatic, the impact of this will simply create one more dimple on the moonscape.

“The cratered surface of the Moon shows it has a history of violent collisions with asteroids and comets.”

Dr Eke led a study of data from Nasa’s 1998 Lunar Prospector mission which showed that hydrogen was concentrated in permanently shaded craters at the Moon’s polar regions.

If the hydrogen really is a sign of ice, it implies that the craters could hold a total of 200,000 million litres of water.

Last month new findings from three spacecraft, including India’s Chandrayaan-1 probe, showed that small amounts of water might be chemically bound up with the Moon’s soil.

The smaller probe carrying cameras and other scientific instruments separated from the rocket as planned.

It is now trailing behind ready to measure the debris kicked up by the rocket before hitting the moon’s surface four minutes later.

Windows 7

Windows 7, Microsoft’s upcoming operating system (OS) will be available on October 22. Unlike Windows Vista, Windows 7 is designed to be a more robust operating system with lots of improvements. It will also have all the hardware and application software compatibility that Vista has. In Windows 7, you will notice the overall responsiveness while performing common tasks such as startup/shutdown. If you are switching from Windows XP, you will be amazed to see the overall design with significant level of improvements. Clean installation of Windows 7 on a new computer takes less than 20 minutes. You can directly upgrade Windows Vista to Windows 7, but there is no direct upgrade supported from Windows XP to Windows 7 due to many architectural changes in Windows 7. Users will have to use Windows Easy Transfer or USMT.

USER INTERFACE

Windows 7 Desktop will have a new Windows Taskbar. You can ‘pin’ favourite programs anywhere on the taskbar for easy access. Point to a taskbar icon to see a thumbnail preview of open files or programs. You can close windows from the thumbnail previews. Management of System Tray icons has become easier with the improvements in the Notification Area Icons. Jump Lists take you right to the documents, pictures, songs, or websites you turn to each day. This OS is the first to fully embrace Multi-Touch Technology and Biometric devices.

NETWORKING AND SECURITY

Enhanced Network and Sharing Center makes it easy to manage wired and wireless net works. The new feature Home-Group makes it easy to share your libraries and printers on a home network. Windows 7 is bundled with Internet Explorer 8. Windows 7 has a re-designed User Account Control. There is a new BitLocker to Go feature for encrypting removable storage devices. Windows Security Center is now Action Center.

EDITIONS AND PRICING

                                                                                                  (Click for bigger image)


Windows 7 will be available in six different editions — Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate. Enterprise edition will be only available through Volume Licensing. Pricing is available on Microsoft’s website.

FINAL VERDICT

Overall, Windows 7 is the most stable release in the history of Microsoft Corporation. Windows 7 has been improved a lot, overcoming all the issues raised in Vista. It has a rich user interface and rock-solid security. Windows 7 is the next big thing that will rule the PC market. It also faces a tough competition against "already-released" Mac OS X Snow Leopard. So will it beat the Leopard or get eaten by it!? Wait till Oct 22nd !!

Porsche’s sailing in new waters

German carmaker creates new mega yacht, in association with Singapore-based yacht builder

Not one to be told to stick to its core business, Porsche’s design arm has teamed up with a Singapore shipyard to design a state-of-the-art catamaran megayacht, reports autoblog.com. The Porsche Design Group and megayacht manufacturer Royal Falcon Fleet have begun releasing details and images of their first joint project. The RFF135 is a massive twin-hull design measuring 135 feet in length with a 41-foot beam. That’s enough space to accommodate 10 guests and 10 crew members below decks in 472 square metres of area, with another 208 square metres of deck space up top. 

That’s unfathomably large, and to propel the vessel up 35 knots (about 64.82 kmph), the catamaran will be equipped with twin V16 turbodiesel engines from German manufacturer MTU, each producing a massive 4,600 horsepower. This beauty will drink down 750 litres of diesel every hour though.