Apple iPad will pre-orders begin in the U.S. on Friday, March 12 at 5:30am PST / 8:30am EST at Apple Store online here.

Apple tonight debuted the company’s first iPad commercial during Academy Awards broadcast.

Direct link via YouTube here.

The reason that Apple is so secretive about their new “A4″ processor that powers iPad, despite habit, it that the “A4 just isn’t anything to write home about,” Jon Stokes reports for Ars Technica.

“The A4 is a 1GHz custom SoC with a single Cortex A8 core and a PowerVR SGX GPU,” Stokes reports. “The fact that A4 uses a single A8 core hasn’t been made public, but I’ve heard from multiple sources who are certain for different reasons that this is indeed the case. (I wish I could be more specific, but I can’t.)”
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“Here’s a few questions bouncing around the IT world about the iPad, followed by my best attempt to answer them,” John C. Welch reports for Computerworld.

“Will the iPad support Exchange? That was certainly the first thing I asked when I spoke with my sources at Apple: Will the iPad have the same support for Exchange, VPNs, remote wipe, and so forth that the iPhone enjoys. The answer from my man in Cupertino? ‘Yes, as per the iPhone’ was the reply,” Welch reports. “This should surprise no one, as there was no logical reason whatsoever for Apple to cripple those features in the iPad and the iPad alone when it shares the OS with Apple’s other mobile handhelds.”

So, we can expect to find the following in the iPad:
• Exchange ActiveSync support, including remote wipe
• The same level of VPN support as the iPhone
• The “Find my iPhone” feature
• The same support for policy configurations as the iPhone
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“Apple’s new iPad is being criticized for lacking the capacity to run multiple third party applications at once, but the company has a variety of options to pursue in addressing the issue,” Daniel Eran Dilger reports for AppleInsider.

“The iPad’s iPhone OS arbitrarily limits third party apps from running in the background after the user closes the app. But this isn’t because the iPhone OS ‘can’t multitask,’ as the iPhone OS uses the same preemptively multitasking Mach/BSD kernel as Apple’s desktop Mac OS X,” Dilger reports. “The iPhone OS is constantly running system processes that listen to the mobile network for incoming calls and texts, it runs an iPod process for playing back music all the time, it watches for background notifications being sent to idle apps, and there’s a variety of other things always going on. This is the definition of multitasking.”

Dilger reports, “The iPhone OS inside the iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad is not only capable of this style of preemptive multitasking, but also employs multiprocessing, which allows different tasks to run concurrently on different processor cores… Apple’s secretive A4 processor in the iPad is actually a System on a Chip that incorporates multiple processor cores, each of which can handle simultaneous tasks.”

Dilger reports, “The final release of the iPad will undoubtedly introduce additional features that weren’t included in the initial presentation, just as the iPhone was released with features that weren’t announced at its original introduction… Developers are already privy to a variety of iPad features that have not yet been publicly advertised by Apple.”

Much more in the full article here.

Source: MacDailyNews

“Since Apple unveiled its iPad, custom electronics professionals have had questions, especially to what could be a potentially major application of the new device,” Tom LeBlanc reports for Electronic Home.

“‘When we look back on this two years from now, we’re going to say this was a watershed event, not just for Savant but for the industry in general,’ says Savant president Jim Carroll. He says consumers will see the iPad as having ‘the same or similar touch hardware’ to other control offerings,” LeBlanc reports. “‘This is a fundamentally different business model that we all have to adapt to,’ Carroll says. ‘I think Savant is in position No. 1 in terms of how we can apply it, how we can use it and how it fits into our total solution relative to the legacy guys.’”

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“The Apple iPad is not going to be the company’s next runaway best seller,” John C. Dvorak writes for MarketWatch. “Not if the industry can help it.”

Dvorak continues, “What is most galling to the tech industry is a company coming along within an existing sub-segment of the market, such as MP3 players, and showing up all the established manufacturers and then taking over the market. What is more galling is doing it without underhanded business practices designed to somehow lockout or screw the competitors. Apple has done it by shrewd marketing and the wise use of industrial design and stunning user interfaces.”

“In the process it has humiliated Sony Corp., Samsung, Motorola Inc., Nokia Corp., Microsoft Corp., Panasonic Corp., Ericsson, and dozens of other flat-footed companies in both the MP3 world and the smartphone arena,” Dvorak writes. “It went on to embarrass every single record label and music distributor with its iTunes, too.”

“It’s now trying to humiliate everyone and anyone who ever tried to push a tablet computer and I sense that this time the industry is not going to be taken to the woodshed any more for the Apple spanking,” Dvorak writes.

Dvorak continues, “This scenario comes to mind because on Monday, at the Mobile World Conference and CEO junket in Barcelona, Intel and Nokia are expected to make a partnership announcement. Everyone assumes it’s headed in the direction of more mobile computers from Nokia… Nokia is now fooling around with Netbooks and could easily develop an e-reader or iPad-like device with Intel.”

Full article – Think Before You Click™ – here.

Source: MacDailyNews