VentureBeat |
- Interest in iPad 2 far outstrips interest in rival tablets
- Just how pretty are the graphics in the iPad 2? The Infinity Blade test shows
- Here’s the first movie shot with iOS devices and edited on an iPad 2
- Engadget’s top editors say adios to AOL
- Japan’s Internet holds up despite quake, tsunami
- iMovie app destined to be a big hit on iPad 2 (video)
- GarageBand shows off a killer app for the iPad 2 (video)
- Week in review: Epic Games shows off amazing graphics
- Microsoft’s Bing sees Twitter backlash for Japan quake campaign
| Interest in iPad 2 far outstrips interest in rival tablets Posted: 13 Mar 2011 08:00 AM PDT
If this kind of awareness is a good harbinger of sales, then Apple may be poised to dominate the market for tablets in 2011, as Apple Steve Jobs predicted at the iPad 2 debut event and as we mostly agreed in our own analysis.
As we noted earlier this week, the iPad 2 won praises among key reviewers because it is thinner, lighter, and faster than the original iPad that debuted 11 months ago. Those positive reviews, which started appearing on Thursday, likely helped boost the awareness of the iPad 2. As you can see from the Google Trends chart, iPad 2 awareness rose dramatically on March 2 when Apple fully described the product. We’ll get some concrete information if Apple announces sales results for the weekend, as it usually does after a major launch. It isn’t clear just yet whether the stores are selling out of their supplies or not, but the crowds certainly came out on Friday night for the launch. Analysts are predicting that Apple could sell 600,000 iPad 2s this weekend. The original iPad sold 300,000 in its first 24 hours, but analysts such as Gleacher’s Brian Marshall and Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies think that Apple will blow those numbers away this time. I saw a huge crowd at the Palo Alto, Calif., store on Friday afternoon, but the Los Gatos, Calif., store (pictured at top) was kind of sparse on the chilly Saturday evening tonight. Meanwhile, VentureBeat’s Owen Thomas saw a big crowd (pictured below) lined up to buy iPad 2s at the store on Saturday, in Austin, Texas, where the South By Southwest (SXSW) show was being held. These snippets don’t mean much, as they’re just a tiny sampling of the 10,000 stores — including 236 Apple stores — selling the iPad 2. A year ago, Apple sold the iPad in 221 Apple stores and 1,100 other stores at launch. So it’s understandable that the lines would be smaller at this year’s launch events.
But even after the others draw attention to themselves with launch events, it will be tough to beat Apple. ChangeWave Research said a survey conducted last month in the U.S. showed 82 percent of those planning to buy a tablet in the next three months said they would buy an iPad. The Xoom got just 4 percent of the vote, while the RIM PlayBook and the first-generation Samsung Galaxy Tab got 3 percent each.
So Forrester is predicting that Apple will have at least 80 percent of the U.S. consumer tablet market in 2011. It said Amazon, maker of the Kindle eBook reader, might have a chance to disrupt Apple if it comes out with a clever Android or Linux-based tablet. But Amazon has not yet made its move into the tablet space. Mike Rayfield, general manager of mobile chips for Nvidia, is in the rival camp, as his company’s Tegra 2 is in the Motorola Xoom and other tablets. He said last week that he thinks the market will change as soon as more of the rivals get their products out into the market by the middle of the year. Some of those tablets will have very competitive features. Companies: Amazon, Apple, HP, motorola, RIM, Samsung
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| Just how pretty are the graphics in the iPad 2? The Infinity Blade test shows Posted: 13 Mar 2011 07:00 AM PDT
Now that the results are coming in, it’s clear that the performance is good but it varies widely by application. One of the most demanding apps on the original iPad is Epic Games’ Infinity Blade sword-fighting game (pictured above). The tests show that the revised version of Infinity Blade for the iPad 2 has far more graphics detail than the earlier version, according to AnandTech, a tech gadget site run by uber geek Anand Lal Shimpi.
Other benchmark tests also show that the iPad 2 pretty much blows away the Motorola Xoom. That’s important to people who want to be able to buy a tablet computer that lasts for a while and can run demanding apps. AnandTech said that the A5 processor in the iPad 2 is 50 percent faster than the original iPad’s A4 processor in browsing the web. In other synthetic tests (meaning theoretical benchmarks as opposed to real application benchmarks), AnandTech was able to surpass Apple’s claim of 2x faster CPU (central processing unit) performance.
Based on the GLBenchmark 2.0 test, AnandTech found five times to seven times faster performance on the iPad 2 compared to the iPad on a number of other graphics tests. On one test dubbed Egypt, the Apple chip in the iPad 2 is 3.7 times faster than the Nvidia Tegra 2 in the Xoom. Another tech site, iosnoops, says that the actual clock speed of the A5 isn’t 1 gigahertz as with the A4. Rather, both cores run at about 890 megahertz, though the speed varies based on the app running. Check out the graphics in the original iPad version of Infinity Blade below, and below that is an image from the iPad 2 version. You’ll notice, for instance, there are better lighting effects on the warrior’s shield in the foreground. People: Anand Lal Shimpi
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| Here’s the first movie shot with iOS devices and edited on an iPad 2 Posted: 13 Mar 2011 12:03 AM PST
This movie, which is actually a short episode within a longer story, is professionally shot and edited by Michael Koerbel and Anna Elizabeth James — entirely with iOS devices (iPhone 4 and the iPad 2). It is an episode from the ongoing Goldilocks mobile series films, which are meant to be viewed on mobile devices such as the iPhone 4, and, now, the iPad 2. Check out the film episode on Vimeo or YouTube. The Goldilocks series, about a former secret agent who is forced back into service when an international secret falls into the wrong hands, was started on fall and it is distributed via the Majek app. This is one of the cool things about Apple’s products that tend to make them into cultural phenomena. People get inspired by them to create cool works of art that grab attention. It’s one reason why Apple has such a strong foothold in creative production. This film and the enthusiasm with which it was created distinguishes Apple from all of the other tablet makers. And it’s why Forrester and others are predicting Apple will hold on to 80 percent of the tablet market this year. Koerbel and James got one of the first iPad 2 models in a store and then created this episode entirely on the tablet in the past 24 hours. Nice! First iPad 2 Movie – Goldilocks from Majek Pictures on Vimeo. Companies: Apple, Majek Pictures People: Anna Elizabeth James, Michael Koerbel
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| Engadget’s top editors say adios to AOL Posted: 12 Mar 2011 04:16 PM PST
Both Josh Topolsky (pictured), editor-in-chief of Engadget, and Nilay Patel, managing editor, are resigning, AllThingsD reported. Topolsky confirmed the news with his own goodbye note, entitled, “Hello, I must be going.” The departures occur in the wake of this week’s layoff of 900 AOL employees, including a number of top journalists. The Engadget resignations could hurt, since the site gets more than 14 million unique visitors a month. “I’m not leaving the industry or the news game–in fact, I’ve got a few fantasy projects in mind that hopefully you’ll be hearing about soon,” Topolsky said. AllThingsD said that the departures were a long time coming and are related to a number of problems in working for a big New York-based company. But the sources told AllThingsD that the moves were not precipitated by AOL’s $315 million purchase of the Huffington Post, noting that new content chief Arianna Huffington tried to persuade Topolsky to stay. Two other top Engadget editors, Paul Miller and Ross Miller, both quit the tech site recently. They said they did not like the editorial imperative embodied in the strategy document, The AOL Way, which critics said put traffic concerns above journalistic standards. Topolsky said he had been at the site nearly four years but wanted new challenges. “I didn’t make this decision lightly. The time I’ve spent here has been — without question — the most amazing, rewarding, and just insanely fun period of my life,” Topolsky wrote. [photo credit: Engadget] Companies: aol People: Josh Topolsky, Nilay Patel, Paul Miller, Ross Miller
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| Japan’s Internet holds up despite quake, tsunami Posted: 12 Mar 2011 03:49 PM PST
Renesys reported that the 8.9-magnitude earthquake and its aftershocks have not really affected the Internet’s undersea cables that keep Japan connected to the rest of the world. A small percentage of Japanese internet connections went down and many of those have come back up. That shows that, in a country immersed in technology, the Internet can serve as a critical backbone for people who need to communicate their whereabouts to others. I know that much since two of my cousins, one in Tokyo and another in Hokkaido, both posted messages on their Facebook pages saying that they were doing fine. By contrast, when Taiwan got hit by an earthquake in 2006, several carriers got knock out as undersea cables were broken. Some connections have gone dark, such as the Pacific Crossing cable connection in Ajigaura. Keynote Systems, a mobile and Internet monitoring firm, also said it found very few problems at a macro level for Japan’s internet late Friday afternoon. But some leading Japanese sites struggled to stay up and available. Dave Karow, senior product manager for Internet test and monitoring at the company said, "At a macro level, the Internet did what it's supposed to do. It didn't even blink. Access from Tokyo to major internet properties based on the Keynote Business 40 was not impacted in any meaningful way. Additionally, access between Tokyo and regional hubs including Seoul, Singapore and Taipai, as well as San Francisco, was not impacted either." But on a micro scale, Karow said that a number of top sites had slow downs, rather than site failures, and most lasted less than an hour. The alarms occurred throughout the day, rather than just around the time of the first quake. A small number of alarms lasted longer, averaging 7.5 hours. [photo: Flickr] Companies: Keynote Systems, Renesys People: Dave Karow
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| iMovie app destined to be a big hit on iPad 2 (video) Posted: 12 Mar 2011 12:51 PM PST
Update: Majek Pictures decided to create and edit a movie solely by using an iPad 2 and iMovie. Check it out here. As you can see in the video demo below by Randy Ubillos, chief architect of video applications at Apple, it’s a pretty elegant app that is optimized for the iPad 2’s touchscreen. The iPad 2 comes with a video camera on either side of the screen. The rear-facing camera can shoot high-definition video and record it onto your iPad. You can then use iMovie to turn that video into a movie within minutes. The movie automatically appears inside the iMovie app. You don’t have to transcode it from one video format to another. You can view different video projects easily by swiping across the screen. The videos scroll from side to side as if you were viewing them on a carousel, in portrait mode or landscape. When you open a video, you see the video at the top, thumbnails of different scenes on the left, and a timeline at the bottom. You can tap a video and skim through it with your finger. You can zoom in by pinching your fingers or zoom out. You can quickly patch videos together or go into a more precise editing mode. You can then merge two videos and create a transition between them as part of your movie. To see what you’ve created, you just press play. You can tap the screen to add video segments or photos. You can take a still photo and add a panning effect (dubbed the Ken Burns effect after the style of the famous documentary maker). Using face detection technology, the camera will zoom in on faces in the photos to get a nice sense of motion with the still photos embedded in your movie. You can use your fingers to trim the length of a clip and then preview your project. As with the Mac, you can add eight different themes that give your video a unique look, such as Neon (a bold colorful theme), Simple or CNN iReport. Each theme has a different kind of graphic effect. You can easily add titles to clips, add transitions, or soundtracks.
Once you’re done, you can publish the iMovie film directly from the iPad 2 to YouTube over a Wi-Fi connection. You can also post it to Facebook, Vimeo, or CNN iReport. You can set the viewing access restrictions and also publish it to your MobileMe gallery, attach it to an email, or send it via MMS messaging via an iPhone 4. You can also use AirPlay to stream the movie directly from your iPad 2 to your Apple TV, which can then play it on a big-screen TV in high-definition. You can export movies to Apple’s Camera Roll and then sync them back to a Mac or PC. You can also use Apple’s Digital AV Adapter (sold separately) to play a movie from the iPad 2 to the HDTV. And you can transfer the movie from one Apple device to another. iMovie for the iPad costs $4.99 in the Apple App Store. See Ubillos’ video demo below. Check out our GarageBand for iPad 2 story here. Companies: Apple People: Randy Bubillos
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| GarageBand shows off a killer app for the iPad 2 (video) Posted: 12 Mar 2011 12:09 PM PST
While making music on the Mac is fun, GarageBand for the iPad adds a new dimension with the touchscreen and accelerometer, which measures not only where you touch the screen but also how hard you tap it. As you tap the screen, you can tap harder for louder sounds or softer for quieter sounds. As you can see in the video below by Xander Soren, director of music marketing at Apple, you can play realistic “touch instruments” or “smart instruments” for beginners. When you open the app, you see the “instrument browser” with pictures of the different instruments you can play. If you tap on one, it comes up and occupies the whole screen. You can touch the keys of the grand piano to make piano music. You can play organs, electric pianos, or electronic keyboards known as clavinets.
The virtual drum kit lets you bash hard or soft, with the accelerometer sensing just how hard you tap the screen. You can run your finger in a circle around the screen, hitting cymbals or drums to make a lot of noise. The smart instruments such as the smart guitar, keyboard, base and drums, are set up so that beginners can learn how to play them. You can lay your hand across all of the strings to dampen the sound. An auto-play feature lets you repeat guitar strums and then use your hands to change the keys, allowing you to make great sounds with very little effort. “Our camp fires will never be the same,” Soren said. “These smart instruments are like musical training wheels. You can’t play a bad note.” You can also compose and record your own songs as if your iPad 2 were a music recording studio. If you hit the tracks button, you can bring up a bunch of musical instruments playing sequences. Each instrument can be isolated into a separate track. You can change the intensity of the track, shorten it or otherwise manipulate it. Then you can add as many as eight different tracks to a song and let them all play at once. Soren pointed out that the Beatles could only record four different tracks when they made Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967. You can alter the timing and move the tracks around with your fingers. You can change the volume of instruments and adjust the sound coming out of different speakers. Then you can put it all together as your own original song. GarageBand for the iPad costs $4.99 in the Apple App Store. Checkout our iMovie story here. Companies: Apple People: Xander Soren
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| Week in review: Epic Games shows off amazing graphics Posted: 12 Mar 2011 10:40 AM PST Here’s our roundup of the week’s tech business news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:
RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook tablet demo shows off multitasking with games (video) — Research in Motion is launching its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet soon and our close-up demo of the device shows that it's a pretty good game, video, and multimedia machine. iPad 2 reviews proclaim it king of the tablets, but not an essential upgrade — When it comes to iPad 2 reviews, there aren't many surprises. One lone dude awaits iPad 2 at Apple's SXSW store — Apple probably expected a bigger crowd forming at its South by Southwest 2011 popup store in downtown Austin yesterday. The best place to set up your startup — Venture capitalist John Backus asks: Do you have to be in Silicon Valley to get the contacts, staff, and VC attention you need to build a venture-backed company? And here are five more stories we think are important, thought-provoking, fun, or all of the above:
Not so pretty: Layoffs at e-commerce darling ModCloth — Hot e-commerce startup ModCloth laid off just over a dozen of its 248 employees. Charlie Sheen seeks social media intern — will he pay in tiger blood? — Fresh off one of the most legendary media meltdowns of all time, actor Charlie Sheen is now seeking a social media intern to manage his online shenanigans. Worst idea ever: Sprint in talks to buy T-Mobile — Deutsche Telekom is apparently in talks with Sprint to sell its T-Mobile USA division. Do AOL's layoffs spell doom for quality journalism? — AOL eliminated approximately 900 jobs this week. If you’re interested in receiving the week in review in your inbox, or if you want weekly roundups of the news in mobile, games, or cleantech, consider subscribing to VentureBeat’s email newsletters. Companies: aol, Apple, epic games, ModCloth, Research In Motion, RIM, Rovio, sprint, T Mobile People: Charlie Sheen, John Backus
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| Microsoft’s Bing sees Twitter backlash for Japan quake campaign Posted: 12 Mar 2011 10:39 AM PST
While many Twitter users are retweeting without complaint, others are pointing out that this campaign seems like a crass marketing opportunity for Bing. Comedian Michael Ian Black, who has nearly 1.6 million Twitter followers, graphically responded to the campaign with this tweet: “Hey @bing, stop using a tragedy as a fucking marketing opportunity.” Searching for “@Bing” on Twitter at the time of this post reveals plenty of other users who aren’t taking too kindly to Microsoft’s campaign. This backlash shows us that as useful as social media is for inspiring activism, it must be carefully deployed so as not to seem like a craven publicity stunt. Most recently, we saw a similar backlash to Kenneth Cole’s tweet about Cairo amid Egypt’s recent protests, in which the fashion label plugged its spring collection. I can’t imagine how Microsoft didn’t see this coming. It would have received plenty of good will by simply donating $100,000 to help out quake victims. This campaign, on the other hand, seems like a forced attempt to get people talking about Bing, and ultimately to get it trending on Twitter. Now people are indeed talking about Bing, but Microsoft likely won’t appreciate what they’re saying. Update: the Bing folks have now apologized and will donate the full $100,000 amount to help the quake victims. Tweet image via Ethan Maffey
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The iPad 2 is far outrunning its rivals in terms of worldwide awareness, according to Google Trends. As you can see from the chart below, people are Googling the iPad 2 far more than they are the Motorola Xoom or the Samsung Galaxy Tab. The same holds true for rivals such as the Amazon Kindle, the HP TouchPad, and the RIM PlayBook.
Google Trends isn’t a perfect measure of how well a product will sell. But it does show that people are searching for information about the iPad 2 far more than they are the rival products in the past 30 days.
Awareness of other tablets may change once they hit the market. The Motorola Xoom is the only contemporary tablet on the market, but at $829 it has disadvantages compared to Apple’s $499 to $829 prices across multiple models with varying memory sizes.
During the fourth quarter, 
Forrester Research predicted that Apple’s Android rivals would falter in the market because of “
In any given scene, there is far more graphical detail, lighting, and shadows on the iPad 2 version. Jagged lines that appeared in the earlier version no longer appear in the iPad 2 version. That could be enough to make graphics aficionados fall in love with the iPad 2, but it might be a subtle difference for less-picky users. AnandTech’s older and newer images are shown at the bottom of this story, so you can see the subtle improvements for yourself.
The A5 includes a PowerVR SGX 543MP2 graphics core from Imagination Technologies. Based on reviewing the architecture, the graphics core has more than twice the compute horsepower of the PowerVR SGX 535 used in Apple’s A4 chip. On top of that, there are four times as many pipelines, or processing paths. And as the chart on the right shows, the A5’s texture filtering performance is better as well, about three times better than the original iPad and significantly faster than the Motorola Xoom.
We wrote yesterday about how easy it is to 
The top two editors of the huge gadget site Engadget are leaving AOL.
Japan’s network infrastructure has stayed largely intact despite the huge earthquakes and tsunami which 
As consumers buy their 
iMovie is likely to be another hot app for the iPad 2 (and the original iPad) that could keep Apple die-hard fans happy, even as the Android tablet competitors come out of the woodwork this year. The iMovie app is something only Apple will have.
With the iMovie Precision Editor, you can make edits right in the timeline of the video without having to worry about whether you’ve got the exact section you want. You can drag and drop to add or delete audio clips, add background songs, or loop a musical segment. You can edit the audio wave forms to make the sound softer or louder. You can also add voice-over narration to the soundtrack by recording audio using the iPad’s microphone. There are 50 different sound effects to add.
As consumers buy their 
GarageBand is one of the killer apps for the iPad 2 (and the original iPad) that could keep the demand for Apple’s tablet strong even in the face of new competition from Android devices.
You can even get the effect of holding down a key by tapping the equivalent of a “sustain pedal.” The sound lasts much longer than if you just tap the screen once. You can change the octaves of the piano to get different sounds. The rock organ has draw bars that let you alter the tone of the music as you play it.
Here’s a great example of how a seemingly noble social media donation campaign can go awry: Microsoft tweeted two hours ago on | You are subscribed to email updates from VentureBeat To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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