Apple Apps and Stores

A drawback of this design, though, is poor discoverability. With no scroll bars to indicate there is more content outside the current view, there's no cue to drag and Bluetooth scroll! We see this time after time, in both Apple and third-party apps, and it's a little uncomfortable in contrast with the original Mac's crystal-clear interface design. Still, this is nearly the only misstep we've seen; overall the iPad draws on its iPhone heritage effectively. Sheer speed and responsiveness make the iPad a joy to use. Unlike the original iphone car dock iPhone,ipad dock there is never any lag in switching from app to app, even though most of them must quit and start (tasks which typically take a while on Mac and Windows). All the apps are designed to work in portrait or landscape orientation, and again unlike iPhone, there's no lag when you turn the screen on its side, or upside down. You turn the iPad, wii charge station and the screen follows immediately. Any side is up! But you can also lock the screen to one orientation, with the switch on the side of the device, so turning it physically doesn't reorient the graphics automatically. Home and Preferences The iPad's home ,ipad keyboard screen is its application launcher and organizer. Whatever you're doing, you can always press the Home button (below, next to, above) the display to return here. A Leopard-style "Dock" sits at the bottom, holding up to six icons; above it is a four-by-five grid of icons. An attractive background image can be replaced with any picture you want. As you add more apps and Safari shortcut icons, the iPad adds more home screens to the right. Just flick left and right to traverse them. The iPad allows up to 11 home screens, for a total of 220 apps and/or web shortcuts, before you run out of space. A few users have found you can exceed this limit; you can't see the extra icons but you can find them in Spotlight. Spotlight is ipad stylus a search utility built into the Home screen — just flick left from your first home screen and start typing. The iPad searches your apps, email, notes, contacts, calendars, podcasts, music and videos, and shows results as you type. Unfortunately, third-party apps don't work with Spotlight (the way they do on Mac Spotlight). Spotlight searches all the built-in apps, but not ones from the App Store spotlight.thumb The iPad's locked screen adds a new control missing from iPhone and iPod touch: a small icon of a flower in a frame. Touch it to start a slideshow, turning your iPad into a digital photo frame. By default it shuffles through all your photos, but in Settings you can select specific photo albums, Faces or Events to use. From the lock screen, you also can double-press the home button to bring up iPod playback and volume controls and even change the audio output (e.g., from speakers to bluetooth headphones). Apple's Settings app configures a variety of system-wide options and app-specific options, including mail accounts, Safari settings, backgrounds and screen brightness, and more. Apple's original iPhone model put settings for all apps here, but then Apple ipad keyboard case muddied the waters by having some apps (mostly the small ones, like Stocks and Weather) put their settings in their own app instead. Third party apps were divided, with some adhering to Apple's recommendation to use the Settings app and others handling settings inside the app. Apple, too, seems to be migrating settings inside apps. Yet some third-party apps still use the Settings App. As a result, figuring out where to change an app's behavior is its own challenge. Apple should just kick the few remaining apps out of Settings, including their own, and have it simply manage the iPad itself. Apple Accessories Apple includes ipad charger a USB-dock cable and AC adapter for that cable in the iPad box. Apple offers several optional accessories for the iPad, as well, including an iPad Dock, a VGA cable, a case, a Keyboard Dock (combining a dock with an attached keyboard), and a Camera Connector Kit. The $29 iPad Dock is small but solid, wide and deep enough to provide a stable base for the iPad, but the iPod must be positioned in portrait orientation – it doesn't work in landscape orientation. A 30-pin dock port on the rear connects with Apple's cable, so you can charge or sync while docked, and a stereo mini-jack provides line-level audio output. Unlike the Apple Universal Dock, however, it offers no infrared sensor for Apple's remote control. Apple's $29 VGA adapter enables some iPad apps to send graphics to many monitors and projectors at 1024x768 (XGA) ipad case resolution. Although promoted for use with Keynote, we also found it provided great video quality for movies, TV shows, and even YouTube. The $39 iPad Case provides protection from scuffs and scratches and folds back to either stand iPad up on its long edge for watching videos or prop it up at an angle suitable for typing on the virtual keyboard. We found it a little wobbly in the upright orientation. The case is made of some matte black, faintly textured material that provides a better grip than the iPad's aluminum back. Though clearly of high precision manufacture, it somehow still feels cheap. Amazon's $29 Kindle case, by contrast, provides much more protection and is made of real leather but weighs only a few ounces and adds little bulk. Nor does the Apple iPad Case work with the Apple iPad Dock — unless you trim the case with a knife! We expected a little more for something with Apple's logo on it. At least this lesson only cost us $39 plus sales tax plus expedited shipping charges. Apple iPad Case in typing position: Apple iPad Case in watching position: The rear tab is annoying to insert: case-typing.thumb case-watching.thumb case-tab.thumb Apple's $69 Keyboard Dock ipad dock arrived on our doorstep just before this review went to publication. It looks much like the Apple Wireless Keyboard but has several iPad-specific shortcut keys: The top left key opens the Home screen; the next key goes directly to Spotlight. Brightness controls are next, then a slideshow key that activates the Lock screen's photo mode! Next is a key to show or hide the on-screen virtual keyboard. The center key is unused. A set of iTunes playback and volume controls are next, like on Apple's more recent Macbooks and compact keyboards. connection kit Finally, the top-right key puts the iPad to sleep, or wakes it up and bypasses the lock screen. The Keyboard Dock seems meant to live on a table or desk; its vertical support for an iPad adds more bulk than is convenient for other purposes. Highly mobile users may prefer Apple's more compact wireless keyboard, despite its lack of iPad shortcut keys. Keyboard Dock in use: Viewed from behind: keydock-frontside.thumb keydock-rear.thumb The $29 Camera Connection Kit is not yet available; Apple says it is coming in "Late April". Apple Apps and Stores Apps from Apple for the iPad can be roughly divided into three categories: entertainment, productivity, and stores for buying content and more apps. All combine utility, usability and pleasurable (even whimsical) design effectively. Entertainment iPod "iPod" (a hardware ancestor of the iPad) is the name Apple gave ipad dock oem the iPad's app for playing music, audiobooks, and podcasts. As recreated virtually for the iPad, "iPod" looks like iTunes on a Mac or PC: content sources and playlists are on the left, content on the right, with big play/pause and forward/back buttons and a finger-friendly volume slider at the top. Also like iTunes, the album art of the currently playing song is shown at lower left. However, that's about as far as the iTunes similarities go. There's no CoverFlow, no Internet Radio, no iTunes library sharing, no AirTunes, no music visualizers. But, unlike its iPhone and iPod Touch siblings, you can create new playlists on this iPad iPod. Tap the + button at lower right, enter a name for your new playlist, and start adding songs. (iPhone/iPod Touch users will realize this is essentially "On The Go" playlist creation optimized for a larger screen.) Of course, ipad keyboards Genius Mixes and Genius Playlists are available too. If there's not enough space on the iPad for your entire media library, iTunes 9.1 on your companion computer offers to fill it with a selection of your music while the iPad is connected. While earlier versions of iTunes would do this (for iPods and iPhones) by creating a new playlist and using that as the source, iTunes 9.1 instead just adds music to the iPad until it's full. (After syncing your other media and apps.) It leaves a couple hundred megabytes of free space to ensure that there is still room to add a few apps, download mail, etc. If storage is at a premium, iTunes 9.1 has an option to convert your music to 128-Kbps AAC on the way to the iPad, saving space. (This is half the size of iTunes Plus and Amazon MP3 downloads, while retaining much of the audio quality.)