Neil Curtis has a lot of time on his hands. Rather than just accepting the wool being pulled over our eyes by the Man, he decided to get totally Zapruder on the new iPad commercial and found all sorts of problems with the video, including a number of messy little transitions (the main actor, for example, turns from female to male) and UI interactions (items still moving after they’ve been released).
If Apple expects us to accept the world as it appears to their sinister ad team, they have another thing coming. Neil and others like him will crack their lies wide open, whether they want it or not. Good thing Apple didn’t try a moon landing or we’d have their heads.
Apple just announced that its tablet device, the iPad, will be available in the U.S. on April 3. See announcement below.
When Apple unveiled the device a few months ago, we were told it would be available by March. Rumors began to swirl recently that shipment of the devices was delayed until April. According to the release, the Wi-Fi models of the iPad will be available starting April 3, with the Wi-Fi and 3G models rolled out by late April. Starting on March 12, U.S. customers can pre-order the device either online or at their local Apple retail store. The device will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April. 
There’s been some unfounded rumors swirling around the Internet water cooler the last few days that Apple’s initial shipment of iPads will only be around 300,000. That’s far less than the expected numbers of 600,000-700,000, which would no doubt cause fanboy riots and shenanigans at Apple Stores nationwide. John called BS on these rumors a few days back and now Foxconn’s suppliers has done the same.
There has never been a shortage or rumors that Netflix streaming is coming to the iPhone. It just makes sense that eventually, the hot device and the hot service will meet. And that may be happening sooner rather than later if a survey being sent out by Netflix is any indication.
As the site Hacking Netflix reports tonight, Netflix is asking certain users about their interest in streaming movies and television shows to the iPhone. Notably, this would apparently only work over WiFi, which is hardly surprising given AT&T’s reluctance to let stream-heavy fare on its network.
Last August, we wrote about Y Combinator’s latest idea: RFS, or, Requests for Startups. Basically, this allows the incubator to lead entrepreneurs in a certain direction based on trends they think will be hot. Y Combinator then selects the best ideas based around these guidelines to fund. The latest RFS (number 6), throws down a gauntlet, of sorts.
“We think the iPad is meant to be a Windows killer.”
It begins: Canaccord Adams analyst Peter Misek is harshing on all our buzzes by announcing that according to an unidentified source at Hon Hai Precision, a CE manufacturer, the iPad could be delated until April. The source said that there were only 300K units available for a March launch, which may put a damper on what we’re calling iPad Awareness Month.
He expects Apple to sell about 1.2 million units in 2010 and 3.5 million in 2011. 
What the deuce? It seems that the new iPad SDK 3.2 Beta 3 has some very interesting bits of code and UI components that point to a front facing camera – a boolean called hasFrontCamera – and a boolean for a flash LED (not Adobe Flash) called hasFlash. There are also two buttons in the interface for accepting and declining video chats.
Now remember: the iPad has a little spot for a front-facing camera in it already but all signs point to the fact that it won’t be implemented in this first version. Unless there’s some amazing October surprise that pops up when they ship final hardware, don’t expect to be comm-screening with J.F. Sebastian using your futuristic videophone this time around.
I feel like I should come to Flash’s defense, partially because I gave it one between the ribs last night, and partially because, in the words of Sherlock Holmes, “to see justice done is every man’s business.” Now here we have Steve Jobs saying in a WSJ interview that using Flash for video would reduce battery life from 10 hours to 1 hour, and suggests H.264 as an alternative. Let’s just take a moment to evaluate these plainly inflammatory statements.
Although the iPad was a disappointment to us as far as what we were expecting, I’m still excited to try one out because I know it will be one of the devices that really helps introduce and popularize the tablet computer. And one consequence of this is the kind of app Wired is making, an alternative to print and perhaps a superior one. There are issues that will have to be worked out, but I can definitely see myself reading a periodical or paper on this thing.
Whether the iPad uptake rate will justify the R&D and the enormous amount of designer hours that goes into every issue — well, that’s still up in the air. But the truth is that most magazines were going to have to make this shift at some point anyway, so they may as well do it right, which Wired appears to have done. Video follows.
In 2008, I attended a meeting in Madrid, Spain that featured the coolest demonstration I had ever seen. The problem was that I wasn’t allowed to talk about what I had seen because the company was still in stealth-mode. More importantly, several governments, including the U.S. government were still exploring various parts of the technology for next-generation computing systems, so parts of this were very confidential. By the end of that year, Oblong Industries had revealed itself, but still little was said about its project. Finally, people are starting to talk about it.
While we may not have been at this year’s TED conference, apparently, Oblong was. And apparently, it wowed the crowd. And it should have. If you’ve seen the movie Minority Report, you’ve seen the system they’re building.
