Apple today announced that its magical and revolutionary iPad will be available in the US on Saturday, April 3, for Wi-Fi models and in late April for Wi-Fi + 3G models. In addition, all models of iPad will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April. Beginning a week from today, March 12, US customers can pre-order both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G models from Apple’s online store or reserve a Wi-Fi model to pick up on Saturday, April 3, at an Apple retail store.

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

Direct link via YouTube here.

The Examiner’s Daryl Deino has confirmed with an “Apple Store manager in Southern California who wishes not to be named” that “The actual release date hasn’t been set, but March 26 is very likely. [Apple store employess will begin training on March 10].”

Additionally, the same source says, “The 3G versions won’t be available until April or May. Commercials will start airing on March 15 (and) e-book capabilities will be emphasized. People who camp out for the iPad lauch will receive a ’special gift.’”

Full article 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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“Alan Kay is one the greatest minds in the history of computing,” Jesus Diaz reports for Gizmodo. “He worked in the 70s at the legendary Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where he said that ‘the best way to predict the future is to invent it!’ He did precisely that.”

“His Dynabook design was the first laptop and tablet concept ever. And his idea of always-connected mobile computing is exactly what we have today,” Diaz reports. “Not only he came up with these ideas out of nowhere, but he was also responsible for the overlapping windowing graphical user interface of the Alto.”

“Lately, however, Kay doesn’t seem to love the windowing GUI concept as much as he did back in the 80s, when the Macintosh came out,” Diaz reports. “This is what he said to Om Malik in a recent interview, before the iPad was introduced:”
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“Some interesting information has come to light… that may indicate a future direction of Apple’s iPhone OS products,” Chauncey Dupree reports for 9 to 5 Mac.

Dupree points to “some pretty definitive evidence that future iPhones and iPads will have video chatting capability… Icons were found in the 3.2 SDK which seem to indicate that there will be video calling on a future iPxxx device.”

Also, Dupress reports, “Hidden in some of the underlying iPad telephony apps are some VideoChat strings that are equally, if not more, telling evidence of future VideoChatting capabilities… Also, we’ve found some references to ‘iChat.’”

Full article, with screenshots, here.

Source: MacDailyNews

“Apple’s new iPad is being criticized for lacking the capacity to render interactive content built using Adobe’s Flash platform, but the company shows no sign of reversing course,” Daniel Eran Dilger reports for AppleInsider.

“Since the iPhone debuted in 2007 without any support for Flash, Adobe has begun a revitalized campaign to breathe interest in Flash,” Dilger reports. “This includes the announcement of a new series of Flash 10.1 runtimes for Windows Mobile, Nokia S60/Symbian, Palm WebOS, and Android phones (but not RIM’s Blackberry). This suggests not having Flash will be a problem for the iPad.”

Dilger reports, “[However], Adobe’s arguments for Flash are difficult to support in the mobile realm. The iPhone has been wildly popular since its debut despite its lack of support for Flash. Apple’s smartphone dramatically raised the bar for what customers expected in a mobile web browser. By doing this without Flash, Apple essentially redefined what the web should look like, at least on a mobile device.”
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