Apple’s New Revolutionary Device - iPad

The best way to experience the web, email, photos and video. Hands down.

All of the built-in apps on iPad were designed from the ground up to take advantage of the large, Multi-Touch screen. And they’ll work in any orientation. So you can do things with these apps you can’t do on any other device.

Safari

The large Multi-Touch screen on iPad lets you see web pages as they were meant to be seen — one whole page at a time. With vibrant colour and sharp text. So whether you’re looking at a page in portrait or landscape, you can see everything at a size that’s actually readable. And with iPad, navigating through the web has never been easier or more intuitive. Because you use the most natural pointing device there is: your finger. You can scroll through a page just by flicking your finger up or down on the screen. Or pinch to zoom in or out on a photo. There’s also a thumbnail view that shows all your open pages in a grid, to let you quickly move from one page to the next.

Mail

See and touch your email in ways you never could before. In landscape, you get a split-screen view, showing both an opened email and the messages in your Inbox. To see the opened email by itself you just turn iPad to portrait, and the email automatically rotates and fills the screen. No matter which orientation you use, you can scroll through your mail, compose a new email using the large on-screen keyboard, or delete messages, with nothing more than a tap and a flick. If someone emails you a photo, you can see it right in the message. You can also save the photos in an email directly to the built-in Photos app. And iPad will work with all the popular email providers, including MobileMe, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Hotmail and AOL.

Photos

With its crisp, vibrant display and its unique software features, iPad is an extraordinary way to enjoy and share your photos. For example, the new Photos app displays the photos in an album as though they were in a stack. Just tap or pinch to open the stack, and the whole album opens up. Then you can flip through your pictures, zoom in or out, or watch a slideshow. You can even use your iPad as a beautiful digital photo frame while your iPad is docked or charging. And there are lots of ways to import photos: you can sync them from your computer, download them from an email, or import them directly from your camera using the Apple Camera Connection Kit.

Video

The large, high-resolution screen makes iPad perfect for watching any kind of video. You can also easily move between wide-screen and full-screen with a double-tap. And because it’s essentially one big screen, with no buttons or anything to distract you, the picture fills your line of sight. So you feel completely immersed in what you’re watching.

 

 

YouTube

The YouTube app organises videos so they’re really easy to see and navigate. To watch one, you just tap it. When you’re watching in landscape, the video will automatically play in full screen. And with its high-resolution display, the latest YouTube HD videos will look amazing on iPad.

 

 

 

iPod

With the iPod app, all your music is literally at your fingertips. You can browse by album, song, artist or genre, with a simple flick. To play a song just tap it, and the now playing screen will show the album art at full size. Then you can listen to your music with either the powerful built-in speaker, or with wired or Bluetooth wireless headphones.

 

 

and many more features.

The Price starts at US$499 for a 16GB (Wifi Enabled) iPad.

Source: here

Multimedia Sofa with an integrated computer

The latest upholstered sofa called the “Athena” features an integrated computer in it. You can use all functions like the home computer and can connect it with the multi-room systems to take care of media applications from email to watching TV from the comfort of a chair. The luxury though comes for an eye-popping price of approx. US$15,436, which seems like a bit over the top in these hard times. But, then this designer furniture is meant strictly for the elite of society.

Samsung Omnia

The Samsung Omnia has plenty of features and includes some interesting Samsung-developed enhancements. It does fall short when it comes to full finger input and the fact that the stylus is attached outside the body of the phone is also a little disappointing.

Since the launch of the iPhone, almost every other cellphone manufacturer has been trying to duplicate Apple’s success by giving their customers a product that works or looks similar to their ‘fruity’ competitor.

The Omnia is Samsung’s take on the booming touchscreen phone market, and while it is able to pull it off, there are still a few things that I’d like to see changed.

From a design point of view, the Omnia is a sexy device with a large 3.2-inch touch-sensitive display. Its specifications are not bad either and it features a 624MHz Marvell PXA312 processor with 128MB RAM and a 256MB ROM.

Impressively, the Omnia has an 8GB or 16GB flash drive for storage, depending on the model you opt for. While you can expand the memory further using a MicroSD card, you have to unfortunately remove the battery to access the memory card slot. An external memory slot would have been preferred, but with a minimum of 8GB, we don’t foresee this to be too big an issue.

The Samsung Omnia is powered by Windows Mobile 6.1, and we were pleased to see that they had developed a slightly modified version of the user interface to make it a lot easier to navigate the phone using finger gestures.

A stylus is included in the box, but the only way to attach it to the phone is via a mini-lanyard. After the first day of use, it became irritating and we reverted back to using finger taps to use the phone.

While Samsung had made an effort to make this an easy process, the problem is still largely the operating system, which was not really designed for finger input only. Many parts of the operating system require a stylus to effectively navigate it.

While this is not Samsung’s fault, this is a trend we have spotted on all Windows Mobile devices that take on the Apple iPhone market.

Impressively, the Omnia also sports a 5-megapixel camera and LED flash. While there is no optical zoom, the image quality is still rather impressive and for candid shots, it will certainly not disappoint.

Much like other devices in this market space, the Omnia puts up a good fight when it comes to multimedia playback. Samsung has even developed its own media player for this phone.

Their software, unlike Windows Media Player, is optimised for finger input and the audio and video quality was impressive to say the least.

Over the week or so that we used this device, we continually had mixed feelings about it. It does what it claims to do effortlessly, but the ‘external’ stylus and spotty finger input capabilities on some parts of the operating system left us a little disappointed.

While Samsung users or anyone wanting a touchscreen device will be happy with what the Omnia has to offer, slightly more advanced users might shy away from this device.

 

Technical Specifications:

General
2G Network GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
3G Network HSDPA 2100 HSDPA 850 / 1900 - American version
Announced 2008, June
Status Available. Released 2008, July

Size
Dimensions 112 x 56.9 x 12.5 mm
Weight 122 g

Display
Type TFT touchscreen, 256K colors (65K effective)
Size 240 x 400 pixels, 3.2 inches

- Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate
- Optical trackpad
- Handwriting recognition

Ringtones
Type Polyphonic, MP3
Customization Download
Vibration Yes

Memory
Phonebook Practically unlimited entries and fields, Photocall
Call records Practically unlimited
Card slot microSD (TransFlash), up to 16GB (verified)

- 128 MB RAM, 256 MB ROM
- 624MHz Marvell PXA312 processor
- 8 GB/16 GB internal memory

Data
GPRS Class 12 (4+1/3+2/2+3/1+4 slots), 32 - 48 kbps
HSCSD No
EDGE Class 12
3rG HSDPA, 7.2 Mbps
WLAN Wi-Fi 802.11b/g
Bluetooth Yes, v2.0 with A2DP
Infrared port No
USB Yes, v2.0

Features
OS Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional
Messaging SMS, EMS, MMS, Email, Instant Messaging
Browser WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML, RSS feeds
Games Yes + Java downloadable
Colors Modern Black
Camera 5 MP, 2592х1944 pixels, autofocus, image stabiliser, video, flash; secondary videocall camera

- Built-in GPS receiver with A-GPS support
- Java MIDP 2.0
- FM Radio with RDS
- Pocket Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, PDF viewer)
- MP3/AAC/AAC+/WMA/OGG/AMR player
- DivX/XviD/WMV/MP4 player
- TV Out
- Voice memo
- Built-in handsfree

Battery Standard battery, Li-Ion 1440 mAh
Stand-by Up to 500 h
Talk time Up to 5 h 50 min

Disclaimer. We can not guarantee that the information on this page is 100% correct