We’re now looking at nearly 2 years since the launch of the original iPad and though the device retains some of the magic, those of us there at the beginning are no longer in awe of the fantastic design that has made so many millions for Apple and changed the way we work and play.

It now seems fairly natural to be walking around with a slim glass-and-aluminium device that’s more powerful than mainstream PCs of just a few years ago – so the only questions is – WHICH tablet should we be carrying?

I recently got my hands on a 7” Android tablet running “Gingerbread” – or Android 2.3.  Since then we’ve seen “Honeycomb” and finally “Ice Cream Sandwich” but most of the cheaper tablets are running 2.3 or lower.

To be honest I would not waste my time with anything LESS than version 2.3 is it’s fore-runners were never designed for tablet use.

Until now I’ve avoided Android tablets altogether for a number of reasons including the absolutely useless “resistive” displays that many of the cheaper ones employ. These are of the old-fashioned variety you have to press on to get any response and they are deeply unsatisfying to use. One of the iPad’s best features is the utterly responsive “capacitive” display which requires no finger pressure AT ALL to work – and so that for me is the minimum I’m prepared to look at.

The Yuandao N12 Fast Tab is one of dozens of 7” tablets out there that runs Android 2.3 and on the surface of it, it’s a mini-iPad..  the 7” format means it fits comfortably into a big hand and you’d expect that to be a big plus compared to the iPad’s rather larger format. In fact there is little apparent difference in weight.

So, in 2012 how to Android and Apple stack up?

The N12 is CHEAP – I’ve seen it at £100 including VAT in the UK so it’s not in the same league as iPad price-wise or feature-wise.

Let’s look at the pluses and minuses of this particular tablet – which is not untypical of the far-eastern offerings available right now..

Minus

• Battery life –claimed to be 20 hours standby and 5 hours video – yes, if you are lucky, more like it 4 hours of use. The iPad has never run out on standby in the time I’ve had it and gets around 10 hours of video NO PROBLEM.
• Microsoft Exchange – The M12 cannot handle any but the simplest of Exchange setups – if the setup won’t work with email and password, there seems to be no way to get into manual setup – this is a MAJOR omission for corporate use.
• Display – fast and responsive but ultimately at 800*480 pixels it’s an overgrown phone and the pixilation is obvious, even watching movies.
• WIFI – the WIFI is very insensitive, picking up less signal than many phones and dropping out occasionally.
• Limited memory – a common Android problem, although the unit has 8GB internally with access to an external memory stick, it seems that even though you can move Apps into this larger space, there is an internal CORE of 512MB RAM (this is a common limit – see specs – APPLE do NOT have such a limit) and even Apps in external memory use up SOME of this 512MB RAM which soon gets eaten up – putting a limit on how many Apps you can install – this is really unacceptable but somehow manages to escape most reviews.
• Speed – not quite fast enough to make good use of Flash – one of the so-called Apple-killer features, the Flash performance is poor.
• Finish – the unit has a nice Aluminium finish which unfortunately has sharp edges – after repeated handling while, say, watching a movie, tends to get annoying. This sharp edging appears to be common among the Chinese offerings
• Reliability – the hardware seems reliable enough but Gingerbread is chocker full of bugs – the language control means that some menu items come up in Chinese no matter what you do and installations can easily be messed up.
• The Android market has some gaping holes compared to Apple, the latter having an excellent PDF reader (GoodReader) and several other business tools missing from Android market.
• Front-only camera which is poor quality and not that reliable – only sometimes works with Skype. No back camera.
• No Bluetooth – yes you heard it  – no Bluetooth (the iPhone 4 and iPad2 reliably handle 2 simultaneous Bluetooth connections – in my car for example the phone is Bluetooth hands-free but also talks to a separate Bluetooth unit to play audio through the car stereo – something the old 3GS could not quite tackle)
• No sign of upgrades available – website is in Chinese, very little English discussion on the web.
• Large border area around the screen.
• 16:9 wide format

Plus

• The 7” format would fit into a large coat pocket and just feels nice
• The screen is bright and responsive
• The Android market has come a long way and although still full of rubbish, there are some hidden gems in there – many of which are free.
• External memory means no limit to movies you can store on the device.
• USB means external keyboard is easy to implement (though Bluetooth would be more convenient)

Summary

Based on the above – for me the ideal would be a 7” tablet with little border area i.e. mostly screen, running a later version of Android which properly handled Microsoft Exchange, on a tablet with at least 1024 pixels wide, rounded corners, 6-10 hour battery life, Bluetooth, sensitive WIFI, at least 1Gb internal working RAM, preferably more.

With current improvements to the Android Market, there is definitely a place for these devices. If you look at the likes of the Samsung S2 phone – slim, incredibly light, super display – think of one of those stretched to 7” or so and I reckon there is definitely a place for such a device provided the price is right (i.e. WELL under the cost of an iPad) – as yet it does not seem to exist, the NOTE being the nearest but still too small.

For now, the iPad is still streets ahead of Android…maybe they’ll keep that lead, maybe not. There is something quite nice about the smaller form factor and lower cost of the Android devices – opens up all kinds of possibilities if only the quality bar was raised…

Unlike previous models, iPhone 4 has a reasonable camera on it – and iPhone 4s even better. Yet time and time again I see people churning our terrible photos and videos using these devices.

The following are just a few tips to ensure you get the best from your iPhone.

Firstly – the deal-breakers:

Lighting – if you know the lighting will be poor, forget it. The iPhones are awful at handling low light, often resulting in blurring and grainy images.

Sound – ever stood in a church or large school hall – that kind of hollow sound (which is related to echo but faster) – the internal microphone in the iPhone suffers from such effects at just a few feet from the mic (like most phones). Get a plug-in external mic – preferably with a long lead. Maplins do a great lapel-mic (though I had to change the plug to make it fit the iPhone  – I’m sure an adaptor is available).

Tripod – no matter how hard you try, holding iPhone by hand is not going to work well – you can remove shake in software but it doesn’t hold a candle to starting off with the phone mounted on a rock-solid surface such as a decent tripod. Look up eBay for suitable clamps. There’s a tripod here but I would not recommend sticking the zoom lens on – pictures look awful..

Dirt and Grease – the big let-down here is the lens – the slightest bit of grease, finger-print, dirt on the lens will ruin the quality because of its tiny size. Don’t even consider taking a video or pictures unless the lens is spotlessly cleaned with a soft, dry cloth (commonly known as an unused handkerchief).

Duration – you should always use the best quality settings to get high quality you need lots of memory – stick with videos segments of a few minutes each if possible or you’re going to spend all day getting the material onto your PC.

Here then is how I have managed to produce half-decent quality video, given decent lighting. I use an iPhone 4.

I purchased a tie-clip microphone from Maplins for under £20 – and this plugs into the iPhone (effectively preventing the speaker working while it is plugged in). The lead is 3 metres long, suitable for interviews. I had to change the plug for the iPhone).

The App I use is called Filmic Pro and It will take video at the highest quality (1280px * 720px, 24 frames/second) at 16:9 format – this ensures a quite reasonable image with no unpredictable changes occurring. Automatic sound level control is turned off.

The image below shows the controls – the one below that shows what they are for. Essentially you make sure the brilliance and focus are right, start the recording, set all 3 controls to ON… and start your video.

And below, the help screen.

The controls are easy – “focus lock” will stop the focus changing if someone walks past the camera. Modern low-cost autofocus systems work the wrong way – if they are just out of focus they go WAY out of focus – then work their way back toward sharp focus. “Exposure lock” stops the camera dimming if light levels change which they do all the time in any moving scene. “White balance” takes a little more thought – the camera wants to compensate for too much of any one colour – to get professional results you have to make sure the imagery looks right at the start – then use the control to LEAVE It that way.

Essentially you then make your recording – then using the normal iPhone lead to your PC, offload the file to the PC – doing this wirelessly might not be a good idea when the file is large. Incidentally the iPhone is probably not your best choice for long meetings or interviews – you will run out of memory – don’t be tempted to chose a lower quality setting. In a test I took a 2 minute video and the file was over 200MB long. So this approach is best for short interviews of a few minutes – or multiple scenes take at different locations.

The App is set to record at the highest setting, 24fps, 16:9 format.. and it outputs MOV files which you can then import into an editor.

Some more setting screenshots..

That’s it, if you want more information, let me know.

I can’t tell you how many photos I’ve seen taken on mobile phones that are WAY below their potential – purely and simply because people are not thinking. CLEAN THE LENS. Mobile phone camera lenses are TINY – the working area is extremely small – and so it doesn’t take much of a smudge or spec of dirt to ruin the image – especially in high-contrast shots. If your pictures look “hazy” there’s a good chance there’s a fingerprint or a load of dust in the back of the phone where the lens is.

Clean the lens before you take any photo. This simple, even trivial trick could dramatically improve your mobile photos.

Other tricks:

Another failing with mobile phones is bad lighting – they just are not that sensitive partly because of the lens size – small lens – not much light – it’s not rocket science. Get the best light you can for your photo. The lower the light level, the more grain and blurring you’ll see – it’s that simple.  It takes a very expensive camera to match our eyes for light sensitivity.

Avoid pointing into sunlight – the glare is likely to make even the slightest mark on the lens result  in bad pictures – and the cameras generally can’t handle the wide range of light levels anyway.

Enjoy taking your photos.

The subject of panoramas has always fascinated me – as a kid (I’m now 58) my dad bought me a Pentax camera for Christmas and that was the start of a very long hobby lasting years and taking in DIY film developing, joining a local photo club and generally exploring photography – hell, I even made a pinhole camera and made up large sheets of photopaper from the silver chemicals – try asking for silver halides in Boots today and see what advice you get. I can even remember some of the names of the nasty chemicals which if requested now might land one in a jail for terrorists.

Still, that’s all history and we do this stuff digitally now. I’ve had various cameras over the years from the full-on multi-lens jobs – to using the iPhone – quite an extreme range.

Why would I even class the iPhone as a “camera”? Well, one over-riding reason for looking to take pictures with your phone – is convenience – it simply isn’t convenient to wander all over the place with a large block of aluminium strapped to your neck – especially when it’s hot unless you’re a REAL enthusiast – I find myself doing this less and less – and so without realising it my “proper” camera has been relegated to the background over the last year and I find myself more and more inclined to making the best out of the iPhone.

I should clarify I’m talking about iPhone 4, the earlier models were basically naff as cameras. I’d like to discuss the iPhone 4s but my contract says I’m stuck with the current model for many months yet…

I travel – and my wife Maureen and I have a little place in Spain which we use as often as possible – I love scenery – always have and Spain has it by the boatload – but I think you’ll agree, breath-taking scenes look great to the human eye but once you get them on camera they are often usually a disappointment – normal photos just cannot capture the awe of nature – well, most of the time anyway (Life on Earth/Frozen Planet etc excluded – as Attenborough’s stuff is just, well, stunning).

I think there’s a reason we’re all moving to widescreen TV. Humans tend to look left and right, not up and down – no doubt that’s why the ridiculously wide screen cinema format is so popular. It just “feels right” – and panoramic photos take us one step nearer to capturing the excitement of reality.

Of course – one can go all the way and take 360 degree panoramas – they are just STUNNING – but not cheap to do – take a look at these…amazing.  Better, given special lenses, it’s possible to take all-round VIDEO that lets you turn around and look at different angles in live video… all of this will be common-place some day as now doubt will 3d (I’m just waiting for Apple to realise the potential for putting 2 cameras on the back of an iPhone and record everything in 3d). I prefer something I can stick in a blog.

For now –and for general purpose – I’ve spent some time looking at Apps for the iPhone together where appropriate with some PC-based man-power to help make better pictures.

If you want to experiment at making your own panoramas on the iPhone, I suggest you go grab the free Microsoft Photosynth and get out into the sunshine to have a play. Forget the fact it’s free – it’s brilliant. Look at the link I’ve sent on your PC – you’ll see lots of demos. The APP on the iPhone works a treat and creates pretty much seamless joins of separate images – even helping you to take them in succession.  It’s probably the best App to do the job.

What’s missing right now is a package that combines HDR and Panoramas – what do I mean by HDR? Well, the iPhone has HDR (high dynamic range) facilities – but they’re rubbish – the best I can suggest is that you get hold of the iPhone iCameraHDR app to see what I’m talking about.  Imagine taking a picture of scenery straight into the sun – it just doesn’t work – you get a white sun with no detail, or, if the camera is capable of stopping down, you get almost no detail in the scenery as the aperture has stopped down so much there’s not enough light coming in… you can’t have it all. Take a shot indoors with no special lighting – looking out of the window into bright light – you can have detail INSIDE the house or OUTSIDE – you can’t have both. The idea of the HDR apps is to take 2 or 3 different pictures, at different exposures and “merge” them together to try to get the best out of each.  It “kind of” works and the software can make the difference between a beautiful result or something that looks artificial and, well, crap.  How do we get around it as human beings with our own eyes?  Well, it’s not simple but our eyes do several things – as you look around a scene – your eyes adjust constantly – in a static photo that can’t happen – the whole thing has to be captured at once. Also the sensitivity of any part of your eye can change almost instantly – not as a whole – but individual parts (try staring at a coloured spotlight for a while and move away.. you’ll see the opposite colour because your eyes can de-sensitise even at the individual colour level). Again, cameras can’t do that – and to be honest the result if they could, might look a mess.

So one way around this is to use an HDR App to take several HDR pictures and then use software to stitch these together. It all gets a bit too much… and for PC editing there REALLY is not a lot out there to chose from – many packages are open source and frankly more hard work for less result.   But I have found ONE package, sadly the developers are not working hard on this – but it’s out there and available – Serif PanoramaPlus.  I’ve given you a YouTube link to their latest version but to be honest PanoramaPlus 3 is good enough if you can get it for under a tenner and there’s very little difference. Essentially what this package does is let you drag and drop any number of overlapping images into an area on the PC screen – press a button and…. you get your seamless panorama – and you know what – it just WORKS –  unless you’re really bad with a camera, no colour variation –it just produces absolutely excellent panoramas.

But here’s the thing – many panoramas suffer if there is movement because as the images overlap, which they must, if things move in those overlaps – you get a MESS… of course this can be fun – take 4 overlapping photos of a scene and have someone move to each of the areas before you take the shot. You can have all sorts of fun with this – the same person appearing several times in the shot.. but for some scenery it would be nice to think there is an easier way – and there is.  Take a video on your iPhone, grab some overlapping stills – bang them into PanoramaPlus – and there’s your panorama. It works well as long as there is no blurring of the stills in the video. Here’s an example..

The image above was taken in Spain – and covers over 180 degrees. I took a pan of the area with the iPhone  – and brought that image into my PC. I then used PicPICK to grab 4 stills from the video – and then dropped them into PanoramaPlus. All the panoramas BEFORE this (in this blog entry) were put together from stills. The PanoramaPlus is supposed to work with videos directly but it’ll not do iPhone videos hence the screen grabber. Any other method of grabbing stills will work just as well.

What about resolution you may ask?  If I told you that the original of that image you see above is nearly 6,000 pixels wide – is that high enough resolution? And yes, that was done with the iPhone 4 standard video camera.

That little outcrop of white buildings over to the left.. here there are at the original resolution. Not too shabby…

Here (below) is a screenshot of the PanoramaPlus software in action. Incidentally not only can you fire a bunch of left-right overlapping images – but up-down as well.  Standing in front of some great architecture, FAR too close to get the whole lot in one photo? No problem, take a bunch of overlapping photos and fire the lot in any order at this software and it will do the business for you. As you can imagine this is FAR, FAR more than simply overlapping some photos – the images have to be matched for colour and brightness and the software has to warp each image to make them “fit” as a whole – and somehow it DOES – usually in seconds, automatically, no intervention, no problem. I’ve taken 15 or more images of something and fired them into PanoramaPlus and it’s turned out a respectable result.

The software is DEAD easy to use and you have all sorts of control over the output – you can even generate panoramas ready to drop into a web page.  Check out the links I’ve given you and have fun experimenting. And yes, it’s CHEAP.

Here are a couple of other panoramas I made last year with this software (but using a standard SLR camera as I didn’t have the iPhone 4 at the time). Try clicking on these images to see higher-resolution versions….

Enjoy experimenting.

What seems like only months ago I purchased an Apple TV2 box and I’ve never looked back. The Apple TV2 box is a tiny, simple black box that allows you to stream music, pictures and video from your iTunes-equipped PC to the TV, either wirelessly (if you have fast wireless) or via a network cable.

Ok it’s not perfect, videos have to be in Apple format but it works reliably and the quality is superb. A couple of months ago I managed to jailbreak the unit and this was great, allowing the use of non-Apple format videos and indeed breaking free of the need to have a PC operating iTunes – but it came at a cost. Once you jailbreak an iOS4.2 unit you can’t then upgrade to iOS5 without losing the Jailbreak… why is that an issue? Well there are some features of iOS5 that are really good – like piping video etc from your iPhone or iPad to the TV wirelessly.

And so when some time ago the jailbreak failed (as happens – the software is written with the best will in the world by amateurs) I decided to re-flash the phone to iOS5. All was well, I lost my jailbreak stuff but I was back on the official operating system with the benefits that brings (like a guarantee for example!!)

All was well until yesterday, the unit was operating perfectly for ages, but I’m in the middle of upgrading my home network to 802.11n and the wired network to gigabit speeds and in the process I decided to try the AppleTV2 on wireless – I have to say I was surprised at how well it worked… but I had a nagging feeling that running too many things on the wireless at once might affect the smoothness of video and plugged the wired network back into the unit. WELL, that was the end of that, for reasons well beyond me it killed the Apple TV2 unit stone dead. As I’d recently installed iOS5 it certainly wasn’t software that caused the problem.

I’m not daft so I tried all the usual reset tricks before ringing support – nothing. I rang up the Apple store and instead of an Indian call centre (as you might expect with, say, Orange) I got a knowledgeable Irish fellow on the phone who checked the unit out with me and confirmed it was dead.

But don’t you just know it – the unit was 10 days our of warranty – I’d had it over a year… didn’t phase the chap AT ALL. “Don’t you worry sir, we’re not going to quibble about a few days” said he – and off he went for a reference number.  An hour or so later I found myself in the Apple store getting a full replacement unit complete with guarantee. Friendly, intelligent, helpful service – no wonder they’re winning the mobile battle!

And that’s it – I’m back in action, unfortunately it is no longer possible (easily) to Jailbreak Apple TV since the update to iOS5 so I’m stuck with converting videos to Apple format – HOWEVER – a couple of tools you might want to investigate make this very easy – HANDBRAKE and FREEMAKE VIDEO CONVERTER make light work of converting video to M4v format, suitable for Apple TV, iPhone and iPad.

So many in the industry were wondering what happened to the iPhone 5?  Apple have just launched the iPhone 4S – and looking at the specs – it won’t disappoint despite the rather lacklustre new name.   In the same way as the iPad 2 spruced up iPad, the A5 processor (the same one used in the iPad 2) is fitted to the new iPhone 4s – which means the already spiffy iPhone gets twice the processor power and up to 7 times the graphics power.  Better, they’ve improved the main camera with an 8mpx camera! 

Many of the other features are actually IOS features which means they’ll be available to existing iPhone customers when the IOS 5 release comes out – latest theories suggest the 12th of October and I’ve blocked the day out – 200 new features many of which are REALLY useful and this will be available for free to update existing iPhones and iPads.

Apple just seem to be doing everything right at the minute – they’ve now made their new MAC operating system downloadable and the price is something like $29 for the upgrade… meanwhile IOS updates remain free and the new phone will be at a lower price point – which means any advantage the Android models had in that area or indeed in superior performance just went out of the window.

So if you’re planning a new phone the choice is simple… black – or white – and if you already have an iPhone or iPad (or both) – it’s looking like the 12th is the day to watch. To check if the upgrade is available just plug your phone or iPad into your PC running iTunes and lookout for the upgrade message. This is probably the last time you’ll have to do this as the upgrade to IOS5 will mean no more need to sync with your PC.

All exciting stuff and I could write about this for hours – but it’s a lot simpler to just go to the APPLE website – they do a far better job. As anyone with an iPhone or iPad will tell you – we already have the best…and it’s about to get a lot better.

Some time ago, I took my (then) Apple iPhone 3GS and jailbroke it. Why? Because I could and because I was sick of Orange trying to charge £10 a month for letting me share the 3G connection with my laptop.

That’s all history now, Orange have been kicked into touch in favour of the vastly superior THREE company and I now share unlimited 3G with my various devices.. When I moved up to the iPhone 4 I really could not see the point of jailbreaking the phone – but the Apple TV2 is different.  One of the biggest uses for Apple TV is to watch movies and guess what – you’re stuck with iTunes on your PC and Apple format movies.

Neither of the above is a problem for me – but converting movies to Apple format is not something your average person has much time for (couple of hours per video)… and so I took the plunge and had the thing jailbroken using the latest Sn0wbreeze (yup, that is spelled correctly).

The process is easy enough and takes a matter of half an hour including setup but the results are spectacular. Now I can watch movies and listen to music in a variety of formats. Not only that but I also have access to a NetGear ReadyNas Duo, an inexpensive and rather neat network backup device which just happens to be able to stream to the Apple TV – which means no more need to leave a computer on to access movies, pictures and music on the Apple TV. Between the low cost of Apple TV2 (sub-£100) and the Duo ~(sub-£100 excluding disks) – and the nature of the Duo which means with 2 disks you have redundancy (both store identical content – so if one disk goes down you continue on as normal) I now have a reliable solution for handling media at home without using a PC and without lengthy media conversion to suit Apple. It just so happens that software is available for both iPad and iPhone to handle this scenario also.

So is it worth jailbreaking the Apple TV2?  Most definitely – but if it turns your box into a stone – you are of course on your own – follow the Sn0wbreeze instructions carefully.

Update – at the time of writing – Apple TV 2 on the latest software (IOS5) cannot be successfully and usefully jailbroken – which is a shame. Of you want to use jailbreaking – don’t upgrade!

The title of this blog is misleading as the two tablets are not in the same league – but this is no doubt how the press will play this for a while until we all get used to the idea that Amazon has finally decided to go into the colour tablet market.

Feel sorry for those who’ve just bought a Kindle as the price of the existing models is about to drop – considerably!

So – what IS the “Kindle Fire” and how does it stack up against existing models such as the iPad 2? 

Firstly price, you can’t beat the expected retail price of $199 or around £130 IF the display quality is up to it – and that we’ll only find out with time.

The Kindle Fire is a 7” (as against 9.7” for the iPad) display Android Tablet that comes fully set up for getting you to buy Amazon products (books, magazines, movies etc. – the latter being something the existing Kindle could never handle due to the slow screen speed). The resolution is lower than the iPad at 1024*600 as against 1024 * 768 but frankly this is not as important as screen quality – I’ve seen many 7” tablets with similar but watery displays that you just would not wish to own.

So what does it NOT do? The Kindle Fire has NO cameras, NO Bluetooth, NO HDMI, NO expandable storage and we don’t yet know how much memory it will come with though STORAGE-wise it will have 8Gbytes.

At 0.45” it is a little thicker than the iPad but then, being physically smaller, at 14.6 ounces it is refreshingly LIGHTER than the iPad 2’s 21.1 ounces  (sorry to give measurements in old-fashioned imperial, I’m getting the info from US sites as there’s not much on the UK front yet, given that the tablet has only just been announced).

Processor is at this time unspecified but will be dual-core and the claimed battery life is 8 hours though that does not say under what conditions. The unit DOES of course come with WIFI.

The format of the tablet is WIDE – ie cinema-style and so this is much better suited to movies than the iPad – though conversely way LESS suitable for book reading.

Release date, sometime around November – though the UK launch might take a little longer, who knows at this stage.

Will it do well – of COURSE it will do well, given the marketing punch of Amazon – it CAN’T FAIL.  Is it an iPad-killer? No, not a chance. It’s not even in the same league – however it might make those who’ve been put off by the limits of e-reader screen technology (and it’s lack of capacitive touch technology) finally take the leap away from reading paper.

For me, the main areas I’d be concerned about at this price would be screen quality, touch experience and battery life. We’ve no information on that yet.

Would I buy one? Well, NO, because I have an iPad – but if I didn’t? That would depend on a number of things – very tempting for movies for example for travelling – but is 8Gb going to be enough? No, not unless you only want to keep half a dozen movies on there – so that leaves the question – will the USB connection allow for external storage? Preliminary specs say NO but we’ll take that with a punch of salt.

The iPad has the fantastic Apple store – the Kindle is not going to have that – and the VAST bulk of APPS available on the Android market are of no great use to tablet owners – certainly Android has nothing to touch the likes of GoodReader and many of the other Apple-based tools – for streaming media, for doing work etc. –but then we’re not comparing like for like.

At the end of the day however it may be APPs that make or break this product – we’ll soon find out  – but not until AFTER the great Christmas rush – surely they can’t fail to sell millions this Christmas?

Well, not a lot really…  not the iPad as such – we’re all assuming we’ll get the operating system upgrade in the near future – but in APPS… one of my favourite Apps SPLASHTOP REMOTE has stopped working because they’ve messed up the PC end… other apps continue to run but nothing exciting, there hasn’t been a show-stopper new game for months unless you like RAGE HD which ok, is quite fun for a while. Incidentally Splashtop when it’s working is great as it allows you to view and control your PC remotely and it’s FAR better than Logmein, even allowing full speed video (Flash) playback in a local network.

I’ve also been playing with ISMESTORAGE – if you need to access information remotely this is one handy application. Microsoft now give away 25 gigabytes for free as part of their SKY DRIVE and ISMESTORAGE is one of the few iPad Apps that can make use of it – I’m hoping GOODREADER will get their act together and hook into this shortly.

Other than that very little to report, I still think the iPad(2) is the best tablet on the planet and they seem to have successfully headed off the only competitor (Samsung) – indeed, industry reports suggest that they’re not going to play with Samsung at all in the future (Samsung currently supply the A4 and A5 processors). Could really do with some new, original APPS around now…

Couple of updates for you.

Cheap WIFI on the Move

Firstly – how do you get cheap WIFI on the move? Well, on your IPAD or iPhone you could look at SKYPE WIFI – not to be confused with SKYPE which I might add works BRILLIANTLY on both the iPhone and a special version for the iPad – both of which are free – SKYPE WIFI lets you connect to WIFI outlets across the globe – a million of them apparently and pay through your SKYPE account BY THE MINUTE – now THAT’s more like it.

Movies on the Move

Stuck away from home and want to grab one of the many movies you have at home – some of which might not even be in iPad-compatible format?  Here’s the solution…   grab AVPLAYERHD for your iPad – set up the free FILEZILLA SERVER on your PC at home and Bob’s your uncle.  FILEZILLA implements an FTP (file transfer protocol) on your home computer which is then accessible by ACPLAYERHD to FTP the file straight to your iPad from anywhere in the world.The player will handle AVI and other formats of video that other packages – well, just can’t handle.

There’s a little bit of work getting FILEZILLA SERVER (not to be confused with the also free client) like getting it past your firewall – but the instructions are all there and basically you should have the whole thing running in 15 minutes tops.. Just be aware that if you’ve a switch at home sharing multiple PCS on your broadband – you need to tell the Firewall to point FTP access to the machine that FILEZILLA is working on. Once you’re up and running, other ideas will follow – serve up documents from your PC to GOODREADER (which has the same FTP client facilities)….. etc… sky is the limit…

Ok, you could use STREAMTOME for the movies – but then you get low quality. This way you set the download off – go get dinner or something and when you’re done – movies to go.

Oh, you need to know your external IP address, so a fixed address is nice or you can use one of those DYNDNS services like SERVEBEER.COM or others… usually free…   the basic idea is whatever you’re using – PC or whatever keeps telling them whatever IP address you have at the minute – and externally you use fred.servebeer.com or whatever and that returns the right address.  A fixed address without a fixed address, as it were.

Hoping this useful

Peter Scargill