The iPad goes International

The-iPad-goes-International

The iPad goes International it went on sale today in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. There were many pacing up and down wearing a groove in the floor between the office and the door to see if the courier guy has arrived with a package in his hot little hands.

Then once the iPad has arrived, there can be no more work done for the rest of the day as the rest of the day is a frenzy of unpacking, playing and extreme concentration on the Apple iPad device. What can it do? What apps can I buy that are the iPad HD application type. The iPhone apps will work OK but are nowhere near as nice as the full monty that you get with the iPad compatible. The screen is just so sexy that having sexy iPad apps running on it is just do die for.

I saw on Twitter that the people expecting the magic Apple package were posting tweets saying that they were pulling hair out with anticipation. So what were the first apps to put on the device? Evernote for the iPad, 1Password, The Marvel comic app, the iWork apps from Apple? What did you have to get first?

Seems there have been huge queues in Japan at the Apple Store in Tokyo. I wonder how Apple have allocated the iPads around the world. I expect the bigger markets traditionally for Apple will get the iPad in larger numbers, in any case there will be some disappointed people in many places. Wouldn’t it be terrible to be in the line to get an iPad and the last one goes to the person in front of you. I think a situation like that could end in tears.

European Parliament iPad for MP’s

European parliament iPad for MP's

The European parliament plans to give the iPad to its MP’s. They love a freebie in the European Parliament and it seems the technology department there have decided to give all 736 of the members an iPad. The HP notebooks that they had didn’t go down too well for them and there could be a few advantages for the bureau that run the tech department in the Euro Union Parliament as well as for the MP’s. The iPad is a much better device and save the techs from the support problems that are created with viruses that plagues the Windows powered netbooks they had before. Could save money for the government body.

The European parliament’s bureau, its administrative office, has earmarked £4.3m for an “IT mobility project”. With much of the software being delivered via the internet, services deployment and set up will be taken care of easier. I do like the idea that the politicians do have some decent hardware and software to work with, and it will be nice that they can play a game or two if they get bored in the middle of some long speeches by the other members.

Klaus Welle

The parliament’s German secretary-general, Klaus Welle who is known as an enthusiast for the iPhone, already a popular Apple product. Marta Andreasen, the UKIP member who sits on the budget committee, said: “We were told the iPads would actually cut costs as they are not expensive and that we would be able to stay connected while outside the office or on holidays, but many of the older MEPs don’t even know how to use the internet properly. “I am against that because it seems completely unnecessary, especially when European taxpayers are facing such difficult times.”

Phill McCavity wrote: I’m glad, on the eve of huge cuts to British spending, that we can find grace to subsidise the perks of the worthless parasites.

A parliament spokeswoman denied that there were plans to obtain iPads for MEPs in the “immediate future” and said she was not familiar with the bureau initiative.

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Apple No Cash Policy for the iPad

Apple No Cash Policy

Crazy or what? Apple have been cancelling orders from companies that will send the device overseas, now they are turning people away if the want to pay with cash. Is that a way to run a business. If I had something to sell and a buyer was waving wads of cash at me, it would take long for me to grab the money with both hands.

Previously, new iPad buyers were forced to use a credit or debit card to buy the device, in an effort to stem the tide of extra units being purchased to sell on eBay or ship to friends overseas. Apple’s “no cash” policy is nothing new, having first been introduced in October, 2007 in an effort to limit buyers of the original iPhone.

The trouble with this sort of policy is that it paints a very negative light on Apple and the way they are treating people. I have seen this in other businesses too where rules which were there for a good reason initially were applied too rigidly, to the point of harming the business. Seems that there are to many of the ‘Jobs worth’ type of people following orders blindly. You know the sort “Oh sorry sir I cant do that for you, it’s more than my jobs’ worth !

This no cash policy impacted a woman that doesn’t have credit cards, so saved up the cash to by the iPad at the Palo Alto Apple Store. Some dope in the shop wouldn’t take the money and let her have an iPad. Apple then had to go back on the decision later after it had hit the news and the bad publicity had been generated and give her an iPad for free to buy back the good will of the media. At least something good came out of this, Diane Campbell now has her iPad. What happened to the idea that the customer is always right mentality that used to prevail.

iPad a game changer

The hype is still there with many saying that the magical iPad is a game changer device. But is the iPad a computer or device. The way that it has been noted how people are using the iPad it certainly is in the realm of changing the landscape of the computing world. No one expected it to be so firmly presented as a device that is different from computers and mobile phone type devices, ending up in the space in between the two.

People are using the device in so many different ways, mainly as a way of consuming media, whether it be comics, newspapers, magazines, films, TV and video of the traditional media, to the new ways of presenting media as you find on web sites and also in some game changing iPad media applications. It seems that the advertisers and the web masters have already noticed that there has been a surge of traffic to their sites and their content by iPad users.

Steve Jobs and his attempts to squash Flash and bring in the rise of HTML5 to give the best viewing and computer using experience seems to be gaining ground. Programmers are clever people, surely they can easily made a change to newer more robust technologies rather than cling to the past. We will be able to see web sites that are still feature rich but work well with the touch interface. The Touch interface is the future and surely the great and the good of the computer business world will not want to be left behind by changing technologies

How are you going to react to the new wave of computing? Are you going to embrace the ingenious iPad and use one to devour online content and also the content that in the past was best in the traditional media outlets? What I would like to see is the demolition of the text book market so that kids can carry all of their text books in one device. Imagine how up to date the information will be and what that will mean to the education system and learning strategies in schools. It could almost make you want to go back to education again.

Comments or questions are welcome.

iPad Available Internationally and there are prices announced

I see on the UK Apple Website and the Spanish web site that the International iPad prices are there for the iPad and at long last we have the iPad available internationally. The prices of the iPad in Britain are from £429 for the lowest priced model to £699 for the highest price model of the iPad and various prices in between. In Spain the iPad is coming in at €479 for 16 GB wifi only and topping out at €779 for the 64GB model with 3GS

We still have to wait until the 28th before they will be available in the hands of the punters but at least people will not have to resort to options like BundleBox to be able to get the iPad sooner rather than later. At least the iPad is coming in both wifi only and wifi with 3G flavours at the same time and is not staggered.

I like the look of the 32GB model for my wife to use in her professional capacity as a teacher. I was surprised to see that there are no educational discounts for the iPad. I wonder how long it will be be before there will be refurb models available? The currency conversion with the dollar to English pound looks OK, considering how Apple have done it in the past.

The 3G model has a £100 price difference to get the full GPS instead of the assisted GPS and the 3G receiver, for me I have a MiFi now and will be looking at using iPad with the MiFi. I did check out the prices of the iPad deal with Orange and I am not terribly impressed with the offering of €3.50 per day or €35 per month.

It does say “Navigate the internet without limits of megabytes and without compromise BUT when you look closer then there are limits. On the daily price you get 250MB and then the speed drops right off. With the monthly price you get 2GB and then again the velocity drops a crawl. Not quite what I would expect of no limits.

1 Million iPads have been sold

Apple went the past the target of 1 million units sold of the iPad after less than one month on the market and only selling in one country. Just think how many they might have sold if they could have put out internationally too. The million sales milestone was reached quicker than with the iPhone which took nearly three months to do the same. Apple managed to get out 300k of them on day one.

So what will the statistics going to look like next month when Apple decide to let the rest of the world in on the secret. It could even bump up the Apple stock market price too. It won’t be too long before the iPad out sells the iPhone perhaps which has about a 44 million unit head start. We can expect to see more information about the sales figures when Apple have its Worldwide Developers Conference scheduled to take place in San Francisco in early June, when Apple is also widely expected to introduce its next generation iPhone and an update to its operating system. Well we know there will be more information about the OS 4 but know one really knows about the iPhone update, despite the rumours.

The WiFi problem with the iPad

It seems that there have been a number of people complaining about the wifi connectivity on the iPad. Having good wifi is pretty important and so far Apple are not really addressing the issue. It has taken Princeton University is jumping in with a possible explanation for the problem. Now they reckon that the problem is caused by the operating system rather than it being hardware related.
The network guys at Princeton found that the connection issue comes up when the iPad fails to renew its DHCP lease – a process which would renew its IP address with the router is is connecting to and then continues to try as use the same IP. The router might block what it thinks is a lapsed IP, or it may have assigned that address to another wireless client. The sometimes the iPad does’t refresh its DHCP even when a full connection isn’t being made, leaving the user unable to get online.
Workarounds include performing a full power cycle (i.e. not just locking the iPad but fully shutting it down and rebooting it) and turning the wireless off and then on again in the iPad’s settings. Moving outside the WiFi router’s range and then back into it again has also been shown to help on some occasions. Too me it all seems to be a bit hit and miss and we will have to hope that Apple will come up with a good solution to the problem soon..